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December 2015
Friends and Alumni Support the Department
Norman H. Anderson Awards
For the fifth year, the Department of Psychology awarded Norman H. Anderson funds for domestic conference travel and research-related expenses. This past year thirty-four awards were made to graduate students and three to undergraduates. Students presenting their research at nine different conferences across the country including meetings for the Society for Research in Child Development, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Association for Psychological Science to name a few. Fourteen graduate students had the opportunity to pursue original lines of research in their labs. Some of the projects this past year included a study on the nature of pitch perception in individuals with and without absolute pitch, a study on whether certain experiences can enhance communication, an examination of how perspective-taking influences the link between moral evaluation and moral behavior, and a study on the motives underlying status seeking. We are excited to see the many publications that have come from this opportunity for graduate students to explore independent research programs.
Earl R. Franklin Fellows
Earl R. Franklin, an alumnus of the College, established a fellowship in 2006 that awards students in the Departments of Psychology and Comparative Human Development merit based funding to conduct summer research. The Psychology Department selected four Franklin Fellows for 2015. This summer George Abitante looked at whether an acute bout of aerobic exercise can enhance consolidation of participants’ learning to comprehend a synthetic speaker. The study did not find significant differences between the exercise and no exercise conditions, which raises important questions about what kinds of learning do and do not benefit from aerobic exercise. Sherry He's project looked at the effects of the Thirty Million Words intervention, an intervention that teaches parents of low socioeconomic status about the benefits of and strategies for increasing the quantity and quality of linguistic input they provide to their young children. The study asked whether the intervention increased parents’ use of math vocabulary – their use of spatial and number word – and is finding positive results. Evelina Sterina's research is examining the mechanisms that generate and sustain ultradian rhythms. Specifically, the work investigates whether the striatal dopamine system and the arcuate nucleus work as a neural network to modulate ultradian rhythms of activity. Finally, Nathan Vasquez is exploring the effects of group membership on recall of moral and conventional actions in young children. His results suggest that children believe that those who are more "like them" are more likely to behave in conventionally acceptable ways.
Hanavi-Montgomery Summer Fellowship
In 2011, Ron Hanavi and Lisa Montgomery made a generous gift to the Infant Learning and Development Lab to support summer research projects related to child development. The Hanavi-Montgomery Summer Fellowship awards a summer research stipend to one undergraduate each year to support a student's research in an area of interest without having the burden of needing to find additional summer employment. This year, the Hanavi-Montgomery Summer Fellowship supported third-year Emily Adler whose project looked at the relationship between motor experience and action anticipation in infants.
Starkey Duncan Alumni Lecture
This past Autumn marks the third annual Starkey Duncan Alumni Lecture. A generous gift from the Duncan family made it possible for us to invite Martha W. Alibali, who received her PhD from the Department in 1991 and is now a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to give a talk. In her talk, entitled Understanding Change in Mathematical Thinking: A Perception-Action Perspective, Dr. Alibali discussed how a focus on perception and action can enrich conceptions of mathematical thinking, learning, and instruction. Alibali considered the learners' perception of mathematics problems and how perceptual encoding guides problem-solving actions and strategy generation. She went on to consider the role of physical actions in mathematical thinking. Finally, she discussed how mathematics instruction guides learners' perceptions of mathematical problems and mathematical actions. Following the talk, the Dr. Alibali and lecture attendees gathered for a lively discussion and refreshments in the Social Sciences Tea Room.
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