by Beth Fand Incollingo

When she looks back on her childhood, Tamra Bireta realizes her father must have been highly contagious.

Though he worked in construction and had never been to college, he was fascinated by science and managed to infect her with the same bug.

“You can be anything you want to be, as long as it’s a scientist,” he would jokingly tell his daughter.

So Bireta became one.

The first in her family to go to college and a straight-A student there and in graduate school, Bireta joined the psychology department at TCNJ in 2006. An assistant professor, the 31-year-old conducts research here on how memory changes with age, and why.

Her accomplishments have made her father proud.

“Most of the people he works with don’t have graduate degrees, but he likes to tell them I have a PhD,” Bireta said. “They think it’s pretty cool.”

Drawn to psychology since middle school but also to science and math, a wife and mother of three young girls who bikes to campus every day from her Ewing home, Bireta says she knew early on that the lab was the place for her.

Rather than working directly with patients, she wanted to study the intricacies of memory, laying the groundwork for techniques that will help maximize people’s ability to remember as they age.

At TCNJ, she’s making that contribution.

A model of memory

“There seems to be a stereotype of aging that all memory gets worse, and that doesn’t seem true,” Bireta said. “In specific situations you see declines, and we hope this would help people design interventions to prevent those declines. If we know which areas get worse or better, we can find areas where older adults are stronger and get strategies to take advantage of their strengths.”

And while her work doesn’t explore the reasons for dementia, Bireta added, “studying memory with healthy older adults gives a better idea of what is normal and what isn’t, and can help us understand what kinds of changes to expect and which might signal a problem.”

The study of memory involves examining factors that aid retention, the way memories are stored, how they’re retrieved and what causes memory failures, Bireta said. In her lab, with the help of TCNJ students and local volunteers over age 60, she tests theories put forth by experts in her field about which of those aspects change with age, and why.

Most recently, Bireta has been exploring the “associative deficit hypothesis” proposed by Moshe Naveh-Benjamin, which posits that older adults have more trouble than younger adults in making new associations—such as a mental connection between a face and a name.

“So far,” Bireta said, “the theory has been successful in predicting some of the results we’ve obtained.”

The kind of research Bireta conducts can be applied to real-world areas, such as marketing. The professor demonstrated that when, with student Brielle Simels ’08, she published a book chapter explaining that younger adults have a better memory for unusual product slogans than for more typical ones. Printed in the book Applied Memory, edited by Matthew Kelley, Bireta’s finding supported the idea that advertisers should make their ads stand out.

However, Bireta’s work has also shown that older adults don’t remember unusual information as well as their younger counterparts do.

“It would suggest that, if you were marketing a product towards older adults and tried to use (that strategy), you wouldn’t necessarily see the benefit you’d expect to see with younger adults,” Bireta said.

But the news isn’t all bad when it comes to memory in older adults, the researcher said.

“Some things get better,” she said. “General knowledge increases across the life span, and vocabulary gets a lot better. When we give a vocabulary test, older adults nearly double the scores of younger adults. With any kind of well-learned skills or procedures, like card games or quilting, there is some research suggesting it does get better—and that is a type of memory.”

Mentoring students

In her lab, Bireta is helped not only by student volunteers who act as subjects in her research, but also by students who aid her in conducting the studies. From freshman to seniors, the professor said, the students play an important contributing role.

“Undergraduates here can collaborate on research at a level normally reserved for graduate students, because we have no graduate students,” she said. “That moves up undergraduates into those roles, and prepares them well for graduate school.”

And many do go that route.

“Last week, one of my students, [senior] Kaitlin Reiman, found out she’d been accepted to a graduate program she was really excited about,” Bireta said, “and I don’t know who was more thrilled—her or me.”

Once her students have moved on, Bireta sometimes experiences another proud moment: an e-mail saying, “I’m using what you taught me now—I’m so glad you taught me that.”

It’s the professor’s dedication to her students, her accessibility, and support for their research that makes her so integral to their success, Reiman said.

“I know that I personally would not have decided to pursue graduate school or my chosen career path—to be a psychology professor—if it weren’t for Dr. Bireta ‘s encouragement, and I plan to model my own future classes after her engaging, informative and humorous style,” Reiman said. “She has really become a very important part of my undergraduate experience, and I very much look forward to a continued relationship with her post-graduation.”

Finding TCNJ

When Bireta first noticed an online posting for her job at TCNJ, she had never heard of the school. But she was “immediately impressed,” she said, “by the quality of the students, the statistics for entering freshmen, retention rates and how happy students are here.”

When Bireta read further and learned that the College wanted not strictly researchers, but faculty members who thoroughly enjoyed their time in the classroom, she was hooked.

“The times I had the opportunity to teach as a grad student, I just loved it,” she said, “and I wanted to be somewhere where they valued teaching and scholarship, so TCNJ was a really good fit for me.”

Originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, Bireta earned her Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Florida in 2001. She went on to earn her master’s degree in cognitive psychology at Purdue University, staying at the school to complete her doctorate in the same subject, with a minor in gerontology.

She chose Purdue because researchers there, including the three who would become her advisers—James S. Nairne, Ian Neath, and Aimee M. Surprenant—were doing work in an area of memory that interested her.

Socially, moving from Florida to West Lafayette, Indiana, where Purdue is located, was quite a change for Bireta. Strangers were surprisingly friendly there, she said, stopping to chat when they saw her Florida license plate and asking what she planned to do in Indiana.

“After a while I changed to conform to that,” she said, “so then I moved here to New Jersey and it was a major culture shock. I’d go to Home Depot and I’d be walking down the aisle and strike up a conversation, and people would look at me somewhat horrified that this stranger was talking to them. I realized that, in New Jersey culture, I was the one being strange.”

Cultural effects

Coincidentally, the same concept—that culture affects behavior—has long factored into Bireta’s work.

While some aspects of memory do deteriorate with age—the ability to concentrate on multiple ideas simultaneously, recalling the source of information, and remembering to do something at a certain time—it’s often a person’s expectations about aging that harm his memory the most, Bireta said.

“In other cultures,” she said, “people don’t have negative stereotypes of older adults (as losing their memory), and when you give the same tests there, their deficits are very mild compared to what you see here.”

Looking ahead, Bireta says she’s excited about studying a concept related to her current work: the idea that older adults can make new associations more successfully when the information is more emotional—such as the ability to remember which person in a group exhibited a certain facial expression.

Along the way, she says, she’ll continue to appreciate the role she’s playing in her chosen field. “Most people find that memory is just intrinsically interesting, so it’s rewarding to know that some of my work will contribute to that body of knowledge.”

Reprinted by permission of The Times of Trenton © 2010.