Department: Psychology

 Areas of expertise:

• Cognitive processes involved in reading and language
• Readers’ comprehension and memory for text
• Discourse processing and digital communication (e.g., text messaging) 

Upadhyay teaches: 

• PSYC 380: Cognitive Psychology – an upper-level core psychology major course on the scientific study of the mind and mental processing (e.g., attention, memory, language). 
• PSYC 497: Capstone Seminar: Psychology of Language – an entryway to the science of psycholinguistics, the psychological study of how people use and comprehend language.
• PSYC 400: Attention & Mindfulness – an upper-level psychology major course on understanding how attention, distraction, and the recovery of human intention works in our day to day lives. 

Upadhyay’s research focuses on understanding the cognitive processes that inform reading. Discourse processing—or text and narrative comprehension—involves more than simply understanding the individual words on a page. Our mental representations for what we read build from the smallest units of language to the broadest higher-order representations, and include word and sentence level comprehension, memory, attention and social and pragmatic information. 

Upadhyay earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and English at Kent State University, a master's degree in psychology at Binghamton University and a doctorate in cognitive psychology at Binghamton University.

Media contact: Eric Gorton, gortonej@jmu.edu.