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Roger Chaffin

Title: Professor


Departmental Program: Perception, Action, Cognition

E-mail: roger.chaffin@uconn.edu

Storrs Office Phone: (860) 486-4100
Hartford Office Phone: (860) 570-5483

Department of Psychology
406 Babbidge Road, Unit 1020
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269-1020

Preferred Means of Contact: E-mail

Research Interests:

  • Music performance
  • Empirical analysis of musical interpretation
  • Expert memory
  • Memory representation

Undergraduate courses:

  • General Psychology I.
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psychology of Consciousness
  • History & Systems of Psychology

Graduate courses:

  • Psychology of Music (Special Topics)

Representative Publications:

  • Chaffin, R., Lemieux, A., & Chen, C. (2007). “It’s different each time I play”: Spontaneity in highly prepared musical performance. Music Perception, 24, 455-472. [PDF] *
  • Chaffin, R. (2007). Learning Clair de Lune: Retrieval practice and expert memorization. Music Perception, 24, 377-393. [PDF]
  • Chaffin, R. & Logan, T. (2006). Practicing perfection: How concert soloists prepare for performance. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 2, 113-130. [PDF] *
  • Ginsborg, J., Chaffin, R., Nicholson, G. (2006). Shared performance cues in singing and conducting: A content analysis of talk during practice. Music Psychology, 34, 167-194.
  • Chaffin, R., Imreh, G., & Crawford, M. (2002). Practicing perfection: Memory and piano performance. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates. (Available at orders@erlbaum.com) *
  • Chaffin, R. & Imreh, G. (2002). Practicing perfection: Piano performance as expert memory. Psychological Science, 13, 342-349. [PDF] *
  • Chaffin, R., Morris, R.K., & Seely, R.E. (2001). Learning new word meanings from context: A study of eye movements.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 225-235.
  • Chaffin, R. (1997). Associations to unfamiliar words: Learning the meanings of new words. Memory & Cognition, 25, 203-226.
  • Chaffin, R. (1992). The concept of a semantic relation. In A. Lehrer & E. Kittay, (Eds.). Frames, fields, and contrasts: New essays in semantic and lexical organization (253-288). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  • Chaffin, R., & Winston, M.E. (1991). Conceptions of parenthood. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 21, 1726-1757.
  • Chaffin, R. (1979). Knowledge of language and knowledge about the world: A reaction time study of invited and necessary inferences. Cognitive Science, 3, 55-80.

    *The performance of the Italian Concerto (Presto) by J.S. Bach by pianist Gabriela Imreh described in these reports can be downloaded  here.

Graduate study in Music Psychology:

Graduate study in music psychology is now available through either the Language and Cognition (http://web.uconn.edu/langcog/) or Ecological Psychology (http://ione.psy.uconn.edu/~cespaweb/) programs. These programs have provided training and leadership in the fields of language, perception, and action for many years and are now available to students who wish to apply the resources that they offer to the study of music cognition.