Meet our lab!
Graduate Students & Postdoctoral Researchers
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Directors
Dr. Peter Pfordresher is a full professor in the Department of Psychology. His many years as a practicing musician provided the basis for his research interest in the cognitive bases of musical communication as it occurs during performance. The main question motivating his research concerns the way in which people retrieve complex event sequences in real time, whether in the course of perceiving or producing these sequences.
Dr. Pfordresher currently serves as President of the Society for Music Perception and cognition (2023-2024) as an associate editor for the journal Music Perception, and as a consulting editor for Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. His books include Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance (2nd edition, 2018, with Siu-Lan Tan and Rom Harré) and Sound and Action in Music Performance (2019).
You can read his vita here. Also see Dr. Pforsresher’s faculty web page on the psychology department website.
Dr. Tim Pruitt is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology at UB, where he was previously a former PhD student and postdoctoral research associate in APAL.
His research focuses on processes related to human vocalization within speech and song domains, with specific projects having explored the role of mental imagery, intention, and emotion in these contexts.
Dr. Pruitt has a keen interest in psychophysiology and its application within cognitive science research. As such, he has incorporated surface electromyography (sEMG) to measure orofacial and laryngeal muscle activity during musically related tasks, such as the mental rehearsal and vocal imitation of sounds.
You can read his vita here. Also see Dr. Pruitt’s faculty web page on the psychology department website.