Ricardo Tamayo

Born 1973 in Bogotá/Colombia.

Ricardo Tamayo studied psychology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá (diploma 1997) and behavior science at the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico (MSc 2003). In 2008 he received his PhD in psychology from the Humboldt-Universität Berlin.

He is professor for psychology at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla/Colombia since 2009.

His research focuses on basic psychological processes such as learning, memory and consciousness. Tamayo’s fields of interest include the role of memory in personal identity formation, psychological processes separating a subject from its environment, and possibilities of studying conscious and unconscious processing of information.

His current work is concerned with models of human memory and learning, especially with interactions and dissociations between implicit knowledge (knowing how) and explicit knowledge (knowing that) and its application to understand emotions, sub-optimal decision making, and irrational behavior.

In 2001 Ricardo Tamayo was a visiting researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has been awarded scholarships from KAAD (Germany, 2003), the Jean Tinbergen Program of NUFFIC (Netherlands, 2001) and SRE (Mexico, 1998), among others.

Selected publications: Sources of dissociation in the forgetting patterns of implicit and explicit knowledge, doctoral thesis, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, 2008; Interference produces different forgetting rates for implicit and explicit knowledge, Experimental Psychology 54.4, together with P.A. Frensch, 2007; Interactions of contingencies, instructional accuracy, and instructional history in conditional discrimination, The Psychological Record 55.4, together with H. Martinez, 2005.