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Former Staff

Dr. Alexander Soemer

Research scientist from 2016 to 2020

Short Biography

2001 – 2005 Undergraduate Engineering Degree, Stuttgart Media University, Stuttgart, Germany
2006 – 2010 PhD in Psychology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
2011 – 2013 Postdoctoral Fellow at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
2014 – 2015 JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

Research

Working memory and learning, learning with texts and pictures

Publications

Publications in Peer-reviewed Journals

Soemer, A. (2019). Task-unrelated thoughts and forgetting in working memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 106, 118-134.

Soemer, A. & Schiefele, U. (2019). Text difficulty, topic interest, and mind wandering during reading. Learning and Instruction, 61, 12-22.

Soemer, A. & Schiefele, U. (2018). Reading amount as a mediator between intrinsic reading motivation and reading competence in the in the early elementary grades. Learning and Individual Differences, 67, 1-11.

Chu, W.-H., Kao, C.-W., & Soemer, A. (2018). A longitudinal study of the development of Mandarin Chinese learners’ oral fluency. Journal of Chinese Language Teaching, 15, 21-47.

Soemer, A. & Schwan, S. (2016). Task-appropriate visualizations: Can the very same visualization format either promote or hinder learning depending on the task requirements? Journal of Educational Psychology, 108, 960-968.

Soemer, A. & Saito, S. (2016). Domain-specific processing in short-term serial order memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 88, 1-17.

Soemer, A. (2016). The multi-component model, attention and long-term memory in multimedia learning: A comment on Schweppe and Rummer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 28, 197-200.

Soemer, A. & Saito, S. (2015). Maintenance of auditory-nonverbal information in working memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 22, 1777-1783.

Tseng, S. C., Soemer, A. & Lee, T.-L. (2013). Tones of reduced T1-T4 Mandarin disyllables. International Journal for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing, 18, 81-106.

Soemer, A. & Schwan, S. (2012). Visual mnemonics for language learning: Static pictures versus animated morphs. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104, 565-579.
 

Conference Presentations

Soemer, A.  (2018). Working memory capacity and task-unrelated thoughts during learning from texts. Talk, 9th European Working Memory Symposium(EWOMS), Pavia, Italy, 29-31 August 2018.

Soemer, A. & Schiefele, U. (2017). Can working memory both promote and hinder mind wandering? Poster, 20th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP), Potsdam, Germany, 3-6 September 2017.

Soemer, A. (2017). The role of internally-generated interference in forgetting over unfilled retention intervals. Talk, 20th Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology(ESCOP), Potsdam, Germany, 3-6 September 2017.

Soemer, A. (2017). Can mind wandering account for time-related forgetting in working memory? Talk, 59th Conference of Experimental Psychologists(TeaP), Dresden, Germany, 26-29 March 2017.

Soemer, A. & Saito, S. (2016). Domain-specific interference in serial order memory. Talk, International Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Granada, Spain, 5-8 May 2016.

Soemer, A. & Chu, W.S. (2015). A longitudinal study of the development of Mandarin Chinese learners’ oral proficiency [in Chinese]. Talk, 20th International Conference of the Department of Chinese as a Second Language, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, 5 July 2015.