Anne Cleary (psychologist)
Anne M. Cleary is an American cognitive psychologist and professor of psychology at Colorado State University. She is best known for her research on memory, familiarity-based recognition, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of déjà vu.
Early life and education
Cleary received her Ph.D. in psychology from Case Western Reserve University in 2001.
Her doctoral work focused on recognition memory processes, particularly the dissociation between recollection and familiarity.
Career
Cleary joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Colorado State University, where she directs the Human Memory Laboratory. Her research explores the cognitive basis of familiarity, metamemory, and déjà vu experiences.
She has conducted numerous experimental studies using visual scenes and virtual reality to induce feelings of familiarity without explicit recollection.
Research
Recognition memory and familiarity
A central theme of Cleary’s research is the distinction between recognition accompanied by recollection and recognition driven only by familiarity cues. Her work has shown that individuals can experience strong feelings of knowing even when they cannot explicitly recall the source of the familiarity.
Déjà vu
Cleary is widely known for her experimental research on déjà vu. She has demonstrated that déjà vu can occur when a new environment spatially resembles a previously encountered environment that an individual does not consciously remember. In virtual-reality paradigms, participants were more likely to report déjà vu when the spatial layout of a scene overlapped with an unrecalled earlier scene.
Illusion of prediction
In a 2018 article published in Psychological Science, Cleary and Alexander B. Claxton reported that déjà vu often produces a subjective “feeling of prediction,” but individuals’ actual predictions of upcoming events do not exceed chance. This suggests that the predictive feeling is metacognitive and illusory.
Selected works
Impact
Cleary’s work has helped establish modern cognitive explanations for déjà vu, shifting the interpretation of the experience from paranormal explanations toward empirically supported memory processes. Her studies using virtual reality are widely cited in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind.
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