Miri Besken
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology

Education

• Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology (2012), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• MA in Developmental Psychology (2005), Koç University
• BS in Psychology (2003), Middle East Technical University

Research

Dr. Besken’s research lies at the intersection of learning and memory and examines how people encode, evaluate, and remember information in everyday life. Although people encounter countless stimuli each day, they retain only a limited and imperfect portion of this information, and these mental traces shape how individuals understand themselves, construct their life stories, and decide what to attend to and learn next. To better understand these processes, Dr. Besken conducts behavioral research that investigates both the mechanisms that determine how information is encoded into memory and the metacognitive processes, known as metamemory, that guide people’s beliefs and decisions about their own memory. These beliefs and heuristics influence how individuals allocate their limited cognitive resources when learning new information and can sometimes produce systematic illusions about what will be remembered well. Another line of work examines how characteristics of information itself, such as novelty or conflict with existing knowledge, influence how deeply people encode it, helping explain why unusual or surprising information is often remembered differently from more routine experiences.

Selected Publications

Yavuz, F.,* & Besken, M. (in press). Beyond Encoding: How Do Different Retrieval Contexts Modulate the Effects of JOL-Reactivity on Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 

Kaya, S.**, Besken, M., Bal**, C., & İke, S.B.** (2023) Online dating through lies: the effects of lie fabrication for personal semantic information on predicted and actual memory performance. Memory, 31(4), 545-559.  

Ardıç, E.E.*, & Besken, M. (2023). Cooking through perceptual disfluencies: The effects of auditory and visual distortions on predicted and actual memory performance. Memory & Cognition, 51, 862–874.  

Besken, M. (2018). Generating Lies Produces Lower Memory Predictions and Higher Memory Performance Than Telling the Truth: Evidence for a Metacognitive Illusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(3), 465-484.  

Besken, M. (2016). Picture-Perfect Is Not Perfect for Metamemory: Testing the Perceptual Fluency Hypothesis With Degraded Images. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(9), 1417-1433.

*denotes graduate student author 

**denotes undergraduate student author