Academic Bio
Krista Manley graduated with honors from Montana State University with a B.S. in Psychological Science in 2009. As an undergraduate at Montana State, she worked as a research assistant in Dr. Michelle Mead's Memory and Aging Lab.
She went on to receive her M.S. in Experimental Psychology from Montana State University in 2012 under the supervision of Dr. Richard Block. As a graduate student, she focused on the effects of intent to remember, distinctiveness, and attentional mechanisms on human memory.
Upon receiving her M.S., she continued to work at Montana State as an adjunct instructor and lab manager for Dr. Michelle Meade. During this time, she was able to collaborate on projects investigating memory errors with Dr. Meade and Dr. Keith Hutchison.
In the Fall of 2015, Krista joined the Memory, Law, and Education laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Jason Chan, and the Cognitive Psychology doctoral program at Iowa State University. In the Fall of 2016, she joined the Psychology and Law laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Gary Wells. She was co-advised by Dr. Jason Chan and Dr. Gary Wells and was an active member of the Psych-Law research group at Iowa State. She graduated with her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology in May of 2019. Currently, she is a postdoctoral fellow in the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana. There she continues her research in psych-law and educationally relevant areas.
Broadly, her research investigates human memory processes as applied to educational and eyewitness settings. Specific to education, she is interested in how repeated retrieval affects future learning as in the forward effect of testing or test-potentiated learning. This test-potentiated learning effect also applies to eyewitness memory. Therefore, she also investigates how repeated interviews might affect what an eyewitness remembers from the original event when they are exposed to subsequent misleading details. Further, her current work examines how various cognitive processes (i.e., metacognition and face processing) affect face recognition in an eyewitness setting.