Professor Carlston is the 2010-2011 President of the Midwestern Psychological Association, past editor of the journal of Social Cognition, and current organizer of the Annual Invitational Duck Conference on Social Cognition.
Professor Carlston has primary research interests in person perception, impression formation and social cognition. The current focus of this work is on the origin, organization and use of different kinds of mental representations of people and events. Representative issues include the factors affecting spontaneous trait inference and categorization and reliance on self-referent vs. other-referent information in impressions of the self or of others.