Wilma Koutstaal is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, where she was McKnight Presidential Fellow from 2007-2009. Her recent book, The Agile Mind, integrates the environmental, brain, and behavioral contributors to mental agility and innovative thinking, and was recognized with the 2012 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association. She has co-authored, with Jonathan Binks, Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change (Oxford University Press, published in October 2015). In February 2015, she was inducted as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her work on memory, cognition, and creativity. She received her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University, where she also completed a minor in Philosophy, and where she undertook her postdoctoral training. She has taught in Canada, England, and the United States.
Thinking and thinking-and-memory are at the core of Wilma Koutstaal’s experimental research and teaching in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. She is eager to cross-connect and expand our categories for how we construe, represent, and act in our worlds in flexibly and creatively adaptive ways. Her work on higher-level cognition underscores the importance of how and when we move between both varying levels of detail and varying degrees of cognitive control in our “idea landscapes.” Resolutely refusing to isolate mind and brain from the body and environment in which they are embedded, she has developed an integrative conceptual framework that recognizes the dynamic interplay of cognition with emotion, action, and perception.
Drawing upon diverse and convergent methodologies and patient populations, Wilma Koutstaal’s research has focused on the behavioral effects and the neural substrates of categorical or “gist-like” versus more specific mental representations — across the lifespan. Her work also emphasizes the critical importance of environmental cues in enabling us to aptly access and use what we know, and in promoting mental agility. Her research and collaborative projects derive inspiration and conceptual richness from aesthetics, computer science, the visual arts, ethics, and design.
Wilma Koutstaal: Minds-Brains-Environments 