Vanessa Simmering is an outside-the-box thinker according to her faculty mentor at Iowa.

That approach to academia served Simmering well during her UI career, culminating with earning her doctorate in psychology in 2008.

“She was the best possible student. We spent our time talking about big ideas and concepts,” said John Spencer, professor of psychology and Simmering’s mentor. “I could say, ‘Go do it.’ She had the skills and rigor to do it well. I get to talk about all the fun stuff, and she goes and makes it happen.”

Simmering was recognized for her impactful research not only by her mentor, but also by others at Iowa and at the national level.

She won the Graduate College’s D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize in social sciences for her dissertation titled, “Developing a Magic Number: The Dynamic Field Theory Reveals Why Visual Working Memory Capacity Estimates Differ Across Tasks and Development.”

Simmering also was a runner-up for the Council of Graduate Schools/University Microfilms International Distinguished Dissertation Award. She is the UI’s 12th finalist for the award. The UI has five winners – more than any institution in the country.

“The work of her thesis shows how changes in working memory capacity are linked to long-term learning,” Spencer said. “For a long time, people thought you only have two slots for memories. Maybe it’s a genetic thing, maybe it’s something about your neurobiology.

“Her work shows how many things you can hold in your memory are deeply connected to your knowledge in that area. Does that carry over? It’s carries over to the extent that that knowledge connects to other things.”

Simmering, now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, spent some of her graduate work developing a neurocomputational model of understanding how the brain might represent where objects are relative to other objects and thinking about how that influences your recollection of the location.

Her dissertation took a similar model and applied it to visual memory capacity – work she is continuing at Wisconsin. She is examining how memory of object features change during early development, specifically whether there are changes in the number of items that children (ages 2-6) can remember, and the precision of their memory representations.

Simmering has recently been awarded a two-year federal grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to test predictions derived from the computational modeling and behavioral experiments in her dissertation. The two studies proposed in the grant will test whether increases in capacity result from developmental changes in how individual items are represented, specifically, whether memory for colors becomes more precise during early childhood.

“Because I was able to account for not only developmental change in capacity but also differences across different ways of measuring capacity within a single modeling framework, I’ve taken that model and generated new predictions about how children should remember visual features and how that should change over development,” Simmering said.

Simmering is particularly interested in whether developmental changes in visual cognition parallel changes in spatial cognition during early childhood. With this data in hand, she plans to study ways in which children’s experiences may, over time, affect their development of visual memory.

Simmering anticipates her findings will have implications for our understanding of the role of experience in early childhood development, which would further efforts to establish benchmarks for normal development. Such information not only helps shape future studies, but has immediate value in providing solid data upon which to base tests that measure development in children. Her contributions could also point to possible therapies and interventions for children with developmental delays.