ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
ASSOCIATE CHAIR
PHD PROGRAM COORDINATOR
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, LOWELL
Dr. Giovanna Del Sordo
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Giovanna successfully defended her dissertation on 31 Oct 2024! She is interested in inter-individual differences in cognitive effort and how it relates to different performances in human attention, memory, and other higher cognitive processes tasks using pupillometry.
TEACHING INTERESTS and FUTURE GOALS
Giovanna became really passionate about applied statistics through her master’s and position as a statistician. She is interested in teaching good practices in statistical analysis that can be used in the psychological sciences.
In the future, she is interested in joining the European Union’s administration as a researcher and/or statistician.
Outside of school and research, Giovanna loves to go hiking in remote places and to read as many books as is humanly possible.
CURRENT RESEARCH
What makes a person perform higher on a given task or test compared to another? One of the many possible explanations can be linked to the amount of cognitive effort one might be able to exert on a task (“how hard are you trying?”). Research shows that cognitive effort can be mediated by a range of factors, such as motivation, personality, cognitive abilities etc. Giovanna would like to focus on identifying these individual differences.