21st National Conference on Undergraduate Research
Dominican University of California
April 12-14, 2007
Participating Psychology Senior Honors Students: Matthew Kardonsky, Jessica Peters, Timothy Shepard
Faculty mentors: Zsuzsa Kaldy, Lizabeth Roemer, Erik Blaser
Honors Seminar Instructor: Laurel Wainwright
Accompanying staff member: Joyce Morrissey, University Honors Program Coordinator
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Matthew Kardonsky, Psychology 9-MONTH-OLD INFANTS' VISUAL WORKING MEMORY TESTED WITH EQUALLY SALIENT OBJECTS Faculty Advisor: Zsuzsa Kaldy, Psychology Department |
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This study compared infants' visual working memory (VWM) for three object features: shape, luminance and color. The novel aspect of our study was a calibration phase – ‘Interdimensional Salience Mapping (ISM)'– that allowed us to generate a set of comparison objects whose salience difference from a common baseline object was equal. METHODS: General: Subjects' age ranged from 8;15 to 9;15. 14 infants participated in Experiment 1, 22 infants have participated in Experiment 2; data collection is ongoing. All stimuli were presented on a 21" LCD monitor. A video camera recorded infants' reactions. Experiment 1 (ISM): Salience for three feature changes was calibrated by pairing a baseline object (a yellow geometric figure) with another object that differs from the baseline either in shape, luminance or color (red saturation) in a preferential looking paradigm. The direction of infant's gaze (left/right) was coded. Data from 14 subjects yielded reliable psychometric functions of feature ‘intensity' versus preference. From these we determined the feature values that gave rise to a 67% preference over the baseline. Experiment 2 (VWM): We used the violation-of-expectation method. After 4 familiarization trials with the previously calibrated baseline and comparison pair, infants saw 3 test trials. During test trials one of the objects in the pair was occluded for 2 seconds, after which either the same object or the other object in the pair was revealed. Looking times were measured. RESULTS: Equally salient feature changes were successfully measured in Experiment 1. The data in Experiment 2 shows that 9-month-olds are able to maintain shape information in VWM. The luminance and the color test is currently ongoing, but based on earlier studies (Kaldy, et al., 2006; Woods & Wilcox, 2006), we predict that infants will fail to note the change in luminance, but not in color. DISCUSSION: Our main goal was to demonstrate an empirical method for achieving psychophysically comparable stimuli in infancy research. Our present and preliminary results are consistent with our “Ecological Memory" hypothesis, which predicts that more stable, definitive features of objects are better remembered. |
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Jessica Peters, Psychology THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MINDFULNESS AND IMPULSIVITY Faculty Advisor: Lizabeth Roemer, Psychology Department |
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| In recent years, advances in cognitive-behavioral therapy have been strongly influenced by the concept of mindfulness, a non-judgmental and present-oriented state of attention. Research has established the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions, such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), in treating disorders characterized by impulsivity including borderline personality disorder, eating disorders and substance use disorders, and impulsive behaviors such as suicide and deliberate self-harm (for a review on DBT, Robins & Chapman, 2004). While these clinical findings suggest a connection between increasing mindfulness and decreasing impulsivity, no previous research examines the direct relationship between the two constructs. To examine this potential connection, 300 participants from the University of Massachusetts Boston community will be recruited and given self-report measures of mindfulness and impulsivity. Mindfulness measures used will be the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer & Toney, 2006), which includes five subscales measuring nonreactivity, observing, acting with awareness, describing, and nonjudging, and the Mindfulness Awareness Attention Scale (MAAS; Brown & Ryan, 2003), a single-factor scale designed around a more narrow and attention-based definition of mindfulness. The impulsivity measure used will be the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11; Patton, Stanford & Barratt, 1995), which has three factors of motor impulsivity, attentional impulsivity and non-planning impulsivity. Negative correlations between the BIS-11 and both the MAAS and the FFMQ are expected, and these associations are expected to remain even after variance associated with general distress is partialled out. By examining which factors of mindfulness relate to impulsivity, these results may further the understanding of how mindfulness-based treatments function to reduce dysfunctional behaviors. |
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Timothy Shepard, Psychology—Poster Presentation ATTENTION AND OBJECT-BINDING: THE EFFECTS OF "OVERTRAINING" ON OBJECT-BINDING Faculty Advisor: Erik Blaser, Psychology Department |
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| Have you ever driven home on a familiar commute, lost in thought about the day's events, only to find yourself in your driveway without any recollection of the drive itself? Conventional wisdom says that object binding (the integration of colors, shapes, textures, etc. into objects) requires visual attention (Treisman & Gelade, 1980). If this were true, wouldn't lack of attention cause one to drive off the road in the aforementioned example? We hypothesize that through “overtraining" some visual processes may become automatic, and therefore no longer require the willful allocation of attention. In our experiment, observers make judgments about the brightness of moving dots. Specifically, they look for “plateaus" (sustained brightness for a 2 second duration) and judge whether the dots were getting lighter or darker before leveling out to a plateau. Performance on this task is measured along with the duration of the resulting ‘motion aftereffect' (illusory motion of a stationary object in the opposite direction of an inducing stimulus). Then, attention is distracted to an alternate two-back memory task that requires the observers to identify matches from a computer-generated list of spoken numbers. Performance should drop on the original task and the magnitude of the motion aftereffect should shrink. Observers will then “overtrain" on the original task until it becomes “automatic". Then, we will again distract attention to the alternate task but, critically, hypothesize that now there will be no drop in performance and no significant reduction in the motion aftereffect. This would be strong evidence that object-binding is taking place, even though attention is distracted to the alternate task, confounding the conventional wisdom that object-binding requires attention. Pilot data from a previous version of this experiment lends support to this hypothesis. |
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