I received my Honours BA in Psychology from Queen’s University in Kingston, and my MA and PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Toronto.

Prior to joining Laurier in 1989, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and the University of Toronto, and a research associate at the University of Toronto.

I am a fellow of the American Psychological Association and a member of the American Psychological Society, the Psychonomic Society and the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science.

My research program has focused on issues related to human memory and attention. I am interested in incidental and intentional memory for individual events (item information) and relations between events (associative information), and the contributions of familiarity and recollection to memory performance. Recent studies include distinguishing between decision-based and memory-based influences on recognition decisions, the effects of environmental context on memory retrieval, intentional forgetting and memory for different types of stimuli such as faces and scenes.

I have research assistantship opportunities for undergraduate students interested in conducting research on attention and memory. Please contact me for more information.

I am willing to supervise undergraduate honours thesis students interested in cognitive psychology.

• Ahmad, F.N., & Hockley, W.E. “The role of familiarity in associative recognition of unitized compound word pairs.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. (In press).
• Bancroft, T.D., Hockley, W.E., & Servos, P. “Does stimulus complexity determine whether working memory storage relies on prefrontal or sensory cortex?” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. (In press).
• Bancroft, T.D., Hockley, W.E., & Farquhar, R. “The longer we have to forget the more we remember: The ironic effect of post-cue duration in item-based directed forgetting.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39, 691-699. (2013).
• Hockley, W.E., Bancroft, T.D., & Bryant, E. “Associative and familiarity-based effects of environmental context on memory.” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 81-89. (2012).
• Vokey, J.R., & Hockley, W.E. “Unmasking a shady mirror effect: Recognition of normal versus obscured faces.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 739-759. (2012).
• Hockley, W.E. “The effects of environmental context on recognition memory and claims of remembering.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 1412-1429. (2008).

• Laurier researchers receive $1.8 million in funding from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council