Memory & Judgment Lab
Meet Our Team
Principal Investigator
Dr. Andrew M. Smith
Andrew is an Associate Professor in Quantitative Psychology at Iowa State University, where he is affiliated with both the Cognitive Psychology program and the Psychology and Law Research group.
He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Queen's University in Ontario. His research examines memory, judgment, and decision-making primarily in applied settings.
Second-Year Graduate Student
Taylor E. Tracy
Taylor is a Cognitive Psychology graduate student at Iowa State. She received her M.S. in Forensic Psychology from Arizona State University in 2025.
Her research interests focus on eyewitness identification, false memory, and forensic evaluations. Her thesis is about how lineup procedures can influence peoples' perceptions and metacognition.
First-Year Graduate Student
Madison M. Galloway
Maddy is a Cognitive Psychology graduate student at Iowa State. She received her B.A. in Psychology from University of Alaska-Anchorage in 2025.
Her research interests focus on eyewitness identification and signal detection theory. Her first-year project examines people's ability to discern between inaccurate and accurate lineup identifications.
First-Year Graduate Student
Veronica R. K. Seeling
Veronica is a Cognitive Psychology graduate student at Iowa State. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Southern Methodist University in 2024.
Her research interests focus on eyewitness identification, and false memory. Her first-year project examines how different variables can be used to understand and predict the accuracy of an individual's eyewitness identification.
Lab Alumni
Emeritus Faculty
Dr. Gary L. Wells
Gary Wells is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Iowa State University. He received his PhD in Social Psychology from the Ohio State University in 1977. His work has primarily focused on the reliability of eyewitness identification. He has also investigated how extraneous information can bias the conclusions of forensic examiners.
2024 Ph.D. Graduate
Dr. Nydia T. Ayala
Nydia is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) in New York, NY. She graduated from the Memory & Judgment Lab in Spring 2024. Her research focuses primarily on the importance of videorecording eyewitness identification procedures.
2026 Ph.D. Graduate
Dr. Rebecca C. Ying
Rebecca graduated from the Memory & Judgment Lab in Spring 2026. She is now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Kennesaw State University. Her research focuses on cognitive processes associated with memory, judgment, and decision making, particularly in the context of eyewitness identification and forensic face-matching.