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PSELL | Students present research | Faculty Research Interests | Summer Research Links
PSELL = Psychology Student Experiential Learning Lab
Documents are available in PDF or MS-Word (.doc) format. Word documents are best viewed with Explorer! You will need Acrobat to read PDF.
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| Zlatena Theodore '10, Direct and Indirect Memory Influences on Recognition and Word-stem Completion Tests | Mike Inman '09 and Paul Kramer '09, The Jumbling Effect: How Schematic Representations Mediate Change Blindness | Anna Harrington '10, Illness Perceptions among Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus: A Comparison of Perceptions among Individuals with Fibromyalgia Syndrome and Rheumatoid Arthritis |
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| Kevin Potter '09, Our Memory of Memory: The Relation between Self-Report and Experimental Methods | Rebecca N, van den Honert '09, Generation of fukutin expression vector to facilitate study of congenital muscular dystrophy | Valerie Stimac '09, Child and Adult Gender Categorization: An Eye Tracking Study |
Ann Ellis: (updated for Summer 2008)
My research program explores the development of attention, categorization, and
memory in young children. I hope to clarify how children attend to and learn to
distinguish social objects (e.g. dad vs. not-dad) and physical objects (e.g. car vs.
dog). I primarily work with children who are under the age of 2, but occasionally
I have ventured into research with older participants. My students and I use a
variety of methodologies, such as habituation, object handling, and eye tracking,
to present children with opportunities to group and respond to toys and objects
in different ways. We record participants’ behavior with the objects and assess
other skill development, such as language and motor abilities, to explore how
such development is related to attention, categorization, and memory.
Janet Gibson: (updated for Summer 2008)
I asked the dean to fund up to 5 students to work on 3 projects. Depending on the skills and ability of students these may be PSY 399 directed summer research or a PSY 499 MAP. All projects require a literature review, data collection/analyses, and research paper. A poster is also created for Family Weekend that students present in the fall.
Students may be working with another student on the same project or working alone. All students will be working with me but must also must be able to work independently. My students will meet as a group once a week to discuss their projects. The goals of these projects are to strengthen research skills, enrich knowledge in a particular area, and enjoy doing research in our new lab facilities.
Project 1: Studying cognition with the eye tracker equipment that the department received this year. Students will carry out a study that tests a hypothesis in attention or memory with location of gaze or duration of gaze as dependent measures. Depending on the project, we may use E-prime to run the experiment and collect behavioral responses to compare with the eye data. Students will be learning equipment and software upfront and testing undergraduate volunteers.
Project 2: Studying memory by experimental method and self-report quesitonnaires in adults over age 30. Students will work with data that we have collected in the past several years as well as recruit and test more participants to test over the summer. We are looking for patterns across free recall, cued recall, recognition, and prospective memory with a set of cognitive questionnaires. Prior research indicates that self-report is a poor predictor of memory performance; we are searching the data from 209 questions from over 150 respondents o determine if a questionnaire or set of questions refutes that finding. Knowledge of multiple regression or factor analysis a plus, but not required.
Project 3: Studying implicit memory. I am interested in the influence of implicit memory on explicit memory as well as the role of sound processing in visual word stem completion. This project involves recruiting and testing college students who are around in the summer, preparing materials, scoring tasks and entering the data into a large data set in addition to the usual data analysis to determine what we found. Students may learn how to program in E-Prime, as we may do the testing on computer or with paper and pencil materials.
David Lopatto:
David Lopatto maintains diverse research interests in learning. He is lead analyst on the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) survey funded by HHMI. He also directs the SUREay (academic year) survey project and in collaboration with partner institutions serves as lead analyst on the Classroom Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) survey project. He is the author of Survey of Undergraduate Research Experiences (SURE): First Findings (Cell Biology Education, 2004). Professor Lopatto has served as a consultant on assessment projects concerning the impact of undergraduate research experiences on learning, attitude, and career choice. With the assistance of talented students, Prof. Lopatto has maintained an ongoing summer research program extending his interest in learning to include mixed design quantitative/qualitative investigations of epistemological development and career choice. For more information please visit these links:
http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/cila/home.cfm?news_id=1737
http://www.pkal.org/people/index.cfm?person=1296
http://www.cur.org/Quarterly/mar03/essentialUR.pdf#search=%22David%20Lopatto%22
http://www.grinnell.edu/academic/psychology/faculty/dl/sure&cure/
http://web.grinnell.edu/science/ROLE/
Asani Seawell: (updated for Summer 2008)
Previous research has suggested that negative psychosocial outcomes, such as
depression, anxiety, and poor relationship quality are common among women with
chronic illnesses. Whereas poor psychosocial outcomes are common, they are not
inevitable aspects of disease. Women may adopt positive strategies in order to adjust
to illness, like maintaining hope, that buffer the negative aspects of disease. My
summer research seeks to investigate relationships between positive psychological
variables (i.e., satisfaction, hope, and forgiveness) and relationship quality among
women with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) or osteoarthritis (OA), and among
a healthy college population. Students will be involved in the recruitment of
participants, as well as data collection and entry for the OA and college samples.
Data for the SLE sample has been completed; hence, students will be involved in
the entry and analysis of this data.
Students who have taken Mathematics/Social Studies 115 or Mathematics 209,
who have an interest in health psychology, and/or experience in working with
medical populations are strongly encouraged to speak with me regarding a summer
research position.
Laura Sinnett: (updated for Summer 2008)
I have requested funds to work with up to four MAP students on four different projects. At least two students will need to be already trained in my lab in order to successfully complete the summer's projects.
The general goal of my current research program is to document the dynamic
functioning of personality across different social situations. Specifically, I am
interested in the extent to which personality traits wax and wane across time, in
predicting these changes in personality on the basis of situational features, in using
other personality traits to establish the boundaries of these effects, and finally, in
exploring mechanisms that can account for these changes. Work this summer will
be centered around gathering data from two experiments focused on predicting
personality dynamics and another experiment focused on testing accessibility as a
potential mechanism. We will also test these ideas in previously collected data.
Actual activities will include running participants, entering and analyzing data, weekly
group meetings, consistent engagement with the empirical literature, and writing a
paper and poster presentation. Required skills include working well with others on
collaborative projects, moderate familiarity and skill with statistics and statistical
packages, and attention to detail. Familiarity with personality and social psychology
is also a plus.
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