CV

Hanna Fechner studied Psychology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, and University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. She also has a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Statistical Data Science from the University of Bern and a Diplom in Communication in Social and Economic Contexts from the Berlin University of the Arts. During her studies of Psychology, she was involved as a research assistant in projects at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

She conducted her PhD research at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. She was a member of the Graduate School of the Max Planck International Research Network on Aging. In this research, she explored the cognitive foundations of decision-making strategies across the lifespan by combining behavioral and neuroimaging data with computational models in the cognitive architecture ACT-R.

After that, she became a postdoctoral researcher at the Cognitive Psychology Unit at the University of Zürich in the University Research Priority Program on Dynamics of Healthy Aging and at the Center for Economic Psychology, University of Basel, where she conducted empirical research projects and developed computational models for human memory and decision making, including the effects of aging and cognitive training. She has also been a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zürich, where she investigated memory and language processing in older adults by combining longitudinal behavioral data, cognitive modeling, and machine-learning techniques.

She taught courses for Bachelor and Master students of Psychology, Computational and Digital Linguistics on learning and memory, judgment and decision making, computational models of cognition, programming, data visualization, and statistics using R, and supervised empirical research projects. She professionalized her teaching skills with the Certificate of University Didactics and the Higher Education Certificate Supporting Learning from the University of Basel. Since February 2022, she is a lecturer and senior researcher at the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine at the University of Lucerne.

Research

My research is in the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. I am interested in understanding and improving human cognitive processing across the lifespan, particularly in the context of memory and decision making. One stream of my research focuses on the strategic potential of older adults to adapt to cognitive changes during normal aging (e.g., when searching in memory or when making decisions), determinants of differential trajectories, and the impact of interventions such as strategy instruction and cognitive training. The other stream of my research is dedicated to understanding and improving human judgment and decision making under risk and uncertainty by uncovering the application, cognitive foundations, and costs of different decision strategies in different application situations. I am also interested in the cognitive processes underlying risk perception and risk communication as a basis for informed decision making in the healthcare sector.

My main research tools are empirical studies, computational cognitive models (e.g., random walk models for response-time distributions and models embedded in the cognitive architecture ACT-R), and statistical models. In my postdoctoral research, Bayesian modeling techniques (using JAGS and Stan) and the enrichment of cognitive models with techniques from language-data processing (using large corpora like Wikipedia) became increasingly important.

In current and past research projects, I collaborate(d) with (in order of topicality): Prof. Lena Jäger (Digital Linguistics at Department of Computational Linguistics, University of Zürich), Prof. Jörg Rieskamp (Center for Economic Psychology, University of Basel), Prof. Klaus Oberauer (Cognitive Psychology Unit, University of Zürich), Prof. Florian Schmiedek (Cognitive Development Unit, Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt a. M., Germany), Dr. Henrik Singmann (Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL, UK), Prof. Peter Shepherdson (University of Akureyri, Iceland), Prof. Joachim Vandekerckhove (University of California, Irvine, CA, USA), Prof. Lael Schooler (University of Syracuse, NY, USA), Dr. Thorsten Pachur (Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany), Prof. Jelmer Borst and Dr. Katja Mehlhorn (Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen, The Netherlands), Dr. Kirsten Volz (Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, University of Tübingen, Germany).

Publications

Achievements