Dr. Dana Basnight Brown, Associate Professor of Psychology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences was recently named as an Associate Editor of the Memory and Cognition Journal, one of the flagship journals of the prestigious Psychonomic Society, the premier cognitive science society.

Speaking to CTW following the news, Dr. Basnight noted that the opportunity was an honour and that she was keen to take on the challenge, in addition to gaining more knowledge while fulfilling her role.

“The head of my former graduate program at the University at Albany, State University of New York noted that I was the first female alumnus from the program to hold this position. This distinction is a cause for celebration not only for myself, but the entire USIU-Africa community, who I hope will be inspired to continue boosting our research impact.

In addition to her prestigious editorial role, Dr. Basnight’ s abstract for an upcoming paper was selected for publication in the 50^th anniversary edition of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, which she hopes will increase the familiarity of those in the field with the work that she does at the University.

She has also published a paper in Nature Human Behaviour Journal, titled ‘To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply?’, which was collaboratively written by a team of researchers around the globe. The paper sought to find out how Oosterhof and Todorov's valence-dominance model could be replicated in other contexts and countries, other than the Western regions, where the model was primarily developed and tested.

“Nature has an extremely solid reputation for publishing cutting edge work, and this paper is something that we are extremely proud of. We collected data in over 40 countries, and out of the countries from Africa that participated in the study, USIU-Africa had the distinction of collecting the most data on the continent,” she said.

In addition to teaching, Dr. Basnight is also the Director of the Centre for Cognitive and Developmental Research at USIU-Africa. Her primary research focuses on the cognitive processes surrounding human memory and language, particularly within the domain of multilingualism. She has a strong interest in cross-cultural cognitive science and issues that have a global influence. As a result, her impact globally was recognized by being the 2014 recipient of the APA International Psychology.