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, the American Psychological Society, and the Psychonomic Society, and a Fellow and Past-President of 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.

• Tan, P., Ensor, T., Hockley, W., Harrison, G., Wilson, D. (2020). In support of selective rehearsal: Double-item presentation in item-method directed forgetting. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27 (3), 529-535.
• Ensor, T.M., Guitard, D., Bireta, T.J., Hockley, W.E., & Surprenant, A.M. (2020). The list-length effect occurs in cued recall with the retroactive design but not the proactive design. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74 (1), 12-24.
• Montagliani, A., & Hockley, W.E. (2019). Item-based directed forgetting for categorized Lists: Forgetting of words that were not presented. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73 (3), 135-143.
• Ahmad, F.N., Tan, P., & Hockley, W.E. (2019). Directed forgetting for categorized pictures: Recognition memory for perceptual details versus gist. Memory. 27 (7). 894-903.
• Ensor, T.M., Bancroft, T.D., & Hockley, W.E. (2019). Listening to the picture-superiority effect: Evidence for the conceptual-distinctiveness account of picture superiority in recognition. Experimental Psychology, 66 (2), 134-153.
• Aßfalg, A., Bernstein, D.M., & Hockley, W.E. (2017). The Revelation Effect: A meta-analytic test of hypotheses. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24 (6), 1718-1741.
• Ahmad, F.N., & Hockley, W.E. (2017). Distinguishing familiarity from fluency for the compound word pair effect in associative recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70 (9), 1768-1791.
• Burgess, N., Hockley, W.E., & Hourihan, K.L. (2017). The effects of context on item-based directed forgetting: Evidence for “one-shot” context storage. Memory & Cognition, 45 (5), 745-754.
• Ahmad, F.N., Moscovitch, M., & Hockley, W.E. (2017). Effects of varying presentation time on long-term recognition memory for scenes: Verbatim and gist representations. Memory & Cognition, 45(3), 390-403.
• Hockley, W.E., Ahmad, F.N., & Nicholson, R. (2016). Intentional and incidental encoding of item and associative information in the directed forgetting procedure. Memory & Cognition, 44(2), 220-228.
• Curtis, E.T., Chubala, C.M., Spear, J., Jamieson, R. K., Hockley, W. E., & Crump, M.J.C. (2016). False recognition of instruction-set lures. Memory, 24 (1), 32-43.
• Ahmad, F.N., Fernandes, M., & Hockley, W.E. (2015). Improving associative memory in older adults with unitization. Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 22, 452-472.
• Bancroft, T.D., Hockley, W.E., & Servos, P. (2014). A shared short-term memory system for stimulus duration and stimulus frequency. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68, 236-241. [Special issue on Short-term Memory.]
• Ahmad, F.N., & Hockley, W.E. (2014). The role of familiarity in associative recognition of unitized compound word pairs. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67, 2301-2324.
• Bancroft, T.D., Hockley, W.E., & Farquhar, R. (2013). 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.
• Hockley, W.E., Bancroft, T.D., & Bryant, E. (2012). Associative and familiarity-based effects of environmental context on memory. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66, 81-89. [Special issue of the Festschrift for Douglas J.K. Mewhort]
• Vokey, J.R., & Hockley, W.E. (2012). Unmasking a shady mirror effect: Recognition of normal versus obscured faces. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 739-759.

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