Participants
Undergraduate Student Research Projects
A number of senior honors theses projects are being or have been conducted in the lab, and we are grateful to the college students who participated in these projects.
2016-2017 Academic Year
One Senior Honors Thesis research project was conducted in the lab. This study, conducted by Margaret (Rosie) Mahoney (Neuroscience), was an investigation of vowel digraph (two vowel letters that make one sound, like the ai in braid) processing. Subsequently, we conducted a study on the vowel team rule ("when two vowels go walking, the first does the talking"); see our Publications page for the version published in Psychophysiology.
2014-2015 Academic Year
One Senior Honors Thesis research project was conducted in the lab. This study, conducted by Ayesha Dholakia (Neuroscience), was an investigation of how ambiguous words (e.g., pen as in a writing instrument or as in an enclosure) are processed in context. Check our Publications page for the version published in Psychophysiology.
Summer 2014
Emily Jasinski '10 returned to the lab to conduct her Master's Thesis research for the Literacy program at St. Michael's College . Her study measured both the behavioral and neural effects of a summer reading tutoring program for first and second grade students struggling with reading. Her research was conducted in collaboration with the OWSU One Planet Program and was funded by the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation.
2013-2014 Academic Year
One Senior Honors Thesis research project was conducted in the lab. This study, conducted by Gabriela Meade (Cognitive Science), involved monolingual (English-only) and bilingual (Spanish-English) college students, and investigated the timing of word processing in these two groups. Check our Conference Presentations page for more information about this project. In addition, the results of this study, collapsed across the two groups, have been published in the Journal of Neurolingusitics - check our Publications page.
2009-2010 Academic Year
One Senior Honors Thesis research project was conducted in the lab. This study, conducted by Emily Jasinski (Psychology), involved college students and investigated neural processing during basic arithmetic problem solving. Check our Conference Presentations page for more information about this project, and our Publications page for the version published in Psychophysiology.
2008-2009 Academic Year
Three Senior Honors Thesis research projects were conducted in the lab. One, a study conducted by Elyse George (Neuroscience), compared auditory and visual memory in college students with extensive musical training and college students with little musical training. Data from this study were presented at the 2009 meeting of the Psychonomic Society and the 2010 meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. An article based on the findings from this study is published in Neuropsychologia. A second study, conducted by Natalie Berger (Psychology), involved fluent texters and compared the neural processing of English and texted sentences; this study is published in Brain and Language. The third thesis study, conducted by Allie Landers (Psychology), concerned morphemes, the smallest pieces of language that carry meaning. College student participants in this study were asked to make decisions about whether stimuli (some composed of morphemes and some not) were real words or not. A study that built on these initial findings was published in Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, and we are currently conducting further analyses of the behavioral data; this analysis is now published in the Journal of Reading Research. Check our Conference Presentations page for more information about these projects and our Publications page for the published versions.
2007-2008 Academic Year
One Senior Honors Thesis research project was conducted in the lab. This study, conducted by Priya Mitra (Psychology), compared the neural processing of single real letters and made-up letter-like stimuli. This study was presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in 2008 and has been published in Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience (see our Conference Presentations and Publications pages for more information).
