Sara presented a poster on her project investigating individual differences in decision making and allocation of attention at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society in Montreal, Canada.
Thanks to our visiting graduate student, Martín, we have officially set up our co-registration station and are off and running collecting fixation-related potentials!
Congratulations to Anna Marie for winning the Best Poster Award at the USF Psychology Department’s Annual Research Exposition in 2019. Her poster was on her honors thesis, and was titled “Musicians experience less working memory interference than non-musicians by utilizing syntactic structure”.
Alex also presented a poster on his honors thesis studying top-down versus bottom-up processing, and Dimitri presented a poster on oral reading.
The EMaC Lab attended and presented at the 5th Annual Florida Psycholinguistics Meeting at the University of Miami. Psycholinguists and scholars from related fields around the state came together to share research and gain new perspectives on various topics and research techniques. Many of our undergraduates and our graduate students, Sara and Martin, presented fabulous posters at the conference.
Some logistical difficulties with our AirBnB led to us spending some lab bonding time at a local 24-hour laundromat… see below
Cassie presented about the word superiority effect (WSE).
Dimitri presented on oral and silent reading.
Alex presented on his honors thesis investigated top-down versus bottom-up processing while reading.
Our visiting graduate student, Martin, presented ERP data on individual difference in the perceptual and visual attention span during reading.
Early this month, several undergraduate research assistants from EMaC Lab presented at the Spring 2019 PURE hosted by the Office of Undergraduate Research at USF. Jamie presented preliminary results from her undergraduate honors thesis titled “Semantic Priming: Individual Differences in Automaticity”. Replicating earlier semantic priming studies and investigating the effects of individuals’ reading/language abilities. She found that readers with better comprehension (as assessed using the PIAT-R) showed less dual-task interference during a semantic categorization task, suggesting they identify the meanings of words more automatically.
Emily and Sara presented research posters at CUNY this year at University of Colorado Boulder. Find their posters and others from the session online at https://osf.io/view/CUNY2019/
Sara’s project titled “Frequency, predictability & lexical quality effects: individual differences in reading & proofreading” showed a reanalysis (Schotter et al., 2014) seeking to elucidate the patterns of individual differences within commonly seen effects like word frequency and sentence context. She further explored individuals sensitivity to orthotactic and phonotactic patterns of the English language.
Emily’s poster entitled “Enhanced peripheral lexical processing in deaf individuals: perceptually or linguistically driven?” is a collaboration with Dr. Amy Lieberman of Boston University. She presented preliminary results from three experiments of deaf signers’ peripheral processing abilities, demonstrating a sign superiority effect, whereby deaf signers are able to utilize lexical knowledge to facilitate processing of information under difficult tasks demands (i.e. when information is briefly presented at an extreme eccentricity in the periphery).
Congratulations to our graduating senior, Jamie! She just accepted an offer for graduate school in the Psychology Department at the University of Florida. She will be joining the “Brain, Cognition and Development Lab” under the direction of Dr. Lisa Scott. There she will study learning and brain development using a variety of measures including brain responses (ERPs), eye-movements, and behavioral responses.
Congratulations to Anna Marie on receiving the Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Grant for the 2019 Spring Semester to fund her honors thesis! Her project investigates whether the cognitive mechanisms shared between music and language processing rely on working memory resources necessary for syntactic processing. She will use a dual-task approach in which people read syntactically complex sentences while holding onto items in memory (words, musical phrases, or visual layouts of dots) and will compare performance between musicians and non-musicians.
Emily presented her poster entitled “Peripheral Attention and American Sign Language” at the WORLD conference in Spain last week. The conference focused on language and deafness and facilitated an open and honest discussion by researchers and clinicians of different perspectives. It was exciting to hear from panelists as they discussed the future of the field.
The EMaC Lab