Lab Director
Dr. Darya L. Zabelina, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Arkansas. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Northwestern University in 2015, and was a Research Associate at the University of Colorado Boulder 2015-2017. Dr. Zabelina’s work focuses on understanding creative cognition, imagination, and other related processes, and now these processes are linked with more traditional subfields of cognitive psychology, such as attention and executive functions. In her work, she uses a variety of approaches, including behavioral, electrophysiological (EEG and ERP), and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) techniques. She has also done work on mind-wandering, mindfulness, problem solving, and the influence of mobile technology on creativity. Dr. Zabelina is the director of the Mechanisms of Creative Cognition and Attention (MoCCA) laboratory, where the long-term objective is to create a theoretical foundation upon which to develop methods to enhance creative thinking and problem-solving abilities.
The fruits of Dr. Zabelina’s work have appeared in Psychological Science, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, NeuroImage, Translational Issues in Psychological Science, and Memory in Cognition (2016 Best Paper of the Year Award), among others. Dr. Zabelina’s work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation (including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship), National Institute of Health, American Psychological Association, Office of Naval Research, Mind & Life Institute, and the Australian Government (Endeavour Research Fellowship). She serves on editorial review boards for the journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, and the Creativity Research Journal. In 2019 Dr. Zabelina was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. She is the 2021 recipient of the APA Division 10 Daniel E. Berlyne Award for outstanding research by a junior scholar, and the Mesa Education and Research Foundation Award for Excellence in Research, given internationally for outstanding research on intelligence, intellectual giftedness, and related fields.
Email: dlzabeli@uark.edu