Alexis Chambers
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience , PSY
Alexis Chambers received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Notre Dame in 2015. She joined North Central College in the fall of 2015. Her research program uses behavioral and cognitive neuroscientific (EEG) methods to study how sleep and emotion influence memory consolidation, the process that stabilizes new memories over the days, months, and years after learning. This research emphasizes memory for positive emotional events and the role of induced emotional states during this process.
Dr. Chambers also serves as the faculty advisor for Psi Chi, the international honor society in psychology.
Selected Scholarship
Chambers, A. M. (2017). The role of sleep in cognitive processing: Focusing on memory consolidation. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1433.
Chambers, A. M. & Payne, J. D. (2015). The memory function of sleep: How the sleeping brain promotes learning. In A. Duarte, M. Barense, & D. R. Addis (Eds.), The WileyBlackwell Handbook on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. (Peer-reviewed)
Chambers, A. M. & Payne, J. D. (2014). Laugh yourself to sleep: Memory consolidation for humorous information. Experimental Brain Research, 232(5), 1415-1427. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-013-3779-7.
Chambers, A. M. & Payne, J. D. (2013). If you’re happy and you know it, get some zzz’s!: The effect of sleep on the consolidation of positive emotional memories. Poster presented at the 2013 meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, Baltimore, MD.
Payne, J. D., Chambers, A. M., & Kensinger, E. A. (2012). Sleep promotes lasting changes in selective memory for emotional scenes. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6(108). DOI: 10.3389/fnint.2012.00108.
Courses Taught
NSC 100: Introduction to Neuroscience
PSY 490: Sleep
PSY 345: Cognitive Psychology
PSY 293: Careers in Psychology
PSY 255: Research Design and Experimentation
PSY 250: Statistics