Join as a graduate student
I (Dr. Ramey) am accepting applications for PhD students. Please feel free to send me an inquiry email before then if you’d like to.
PhD students can opt to use just behavioral methods, just eyetracking, or both. Applicants with programming experience or a strong motivation to learn programming are preferred (I can mentor students on R, Python, MATLAB, jsPsych, and/or Julia). Please see the Research page for more details on the types of topics we investigate.
About our PhD program:
The University of Arkansas is an R1 university located in Fayetteville, which is situated in the beautiful Ozark mountains and consistently ranked near the top of US News and World Reports’ best cities to live. The Psychological Science department PhD program provides stipends and tuition for all students. The department is also supported by the Howells endowment, which gives graduate students additional funding via travel funds, fellowships to supplement stipends, and internal research grants. The department is highly collaborative–students are often co-mentored, so if you are interested in that, feel free to reach out.
About my mentoring philosophy:
A priority of mine is giving my students intellectual freedom to pursue what they’re interested in. I also love personally doing every aspect of the research pipeline myself for my projects (and staying up to date on all the methods we use, like programming and eyetracking, so that I can be an effective mentor). This means that I don’t expect graduate students or postdocs to work on my projects, so you can instead pursue projects you personally find interesting. They just need to fit in one of the lab topics so I can effectively mentor you in it. You will have the opportunity to get involved in my projects–for example, I often give students the opportunity to provide comments and edits on my papers for authorship if they’d like to–but I don’t require or expect it.
Join as an undergraduate research assistant
We are accepting research assistants for next semester.
Please complete this application to apply to be a research assistant. (Note that you must use a UArk email address. If you don’t have one, contact Dr. Ramey.)
If you would like to get course credit, you need to apply before the third day of classes due to University credit signup deadlines. However, you can start volunteering at any time (and then get credit the next semester).
The experience gained as a research assistant in the MEM lab will transfer particularly well to careers in medicine (such as optometry, neurology, radiology, general practice), research in psychology and other behavioral experimental areas (e.g., PhD programs, tech industry), UX work, and AI and computer vision.
Honors thesis students:
Being an honors thesis student in the lab requires having a clear, strong, self-motivated interest in the cognitive science of memory, or to a lesser extent, visual attention. (That is, understanding how memory itself works, rather than how other things like psychiatric illness predict memory.) We get many more honors thesis student applications than we have available spots, but students who are psychology majors and who start as an RA in the lab in their sophomore year or earlier will be prioritized.
Participate in our studies
Most of our studies recruit volunteer participants, primarily from the department participant pool.
We do also have paid studies on occasion.
If you would like to participate in our studies, on either a paid or volunteer basis, please contact Dr. Ramey (we will add a formal signup link here in the future). Note that for paid studies, we are primarily looking for participants ages 60 and up.