PSYC: Student conference presenters
Wed. Apr. 24, 2019
The Department of Psychology's Prairie Undergraduate Research Conference provides undergraduate students of psychology an opportunity to present research conducted as part of their Honours thesis or independent-study projects in a friendly, professional environment. This year’s Conference will take place on Friday, May 3, 2019.
Here we introduce you to Karmen Britton and Bronson King, two of the students who will be taking advantage of the opportunity to present at this year's conference.
Karmen Britton
Karmen Britton is finishing up her four-year Honours degree in biopsychology and will be graduating in June 2018.
Thesis summary: Probability matching is a decisional bias in which individuals making a series of binary choices match their responses to perceived probabilities of reward. For example, if the probability of a reward is .70 for making Response 1, and probability of the reward is .30 for Response 2, they often choose Response 1 about 70% of the time and Response 2 about 30% of the time. Probability maximizing on the other hand would be choosing the 70% outcome 100% of the time. In this experiment, subjects were presented with a binary choice task in which there were known probabilities associated with the options. 70% for option A and 30% for option B. Subjects were competing for tickets against an artificially intelligent computer program. In this 2x3 factorial design we used factors of reward (a $500 grand prize) and feedback of scores to manipulate which decisional strategy was utilized.
Bronson King
Bronson King is in the final year of an Honours degree majoring in psychology and minoring in French. He plans to take one more course over the spring session and to graduate in October.
Thesis summary: My thesis is based in cognitive neuroscience. I am investigating the individual and combined effects of emotion and implied movement on word recognition. I am measuring people's reaction times while they are completing a language task known as lexical-decision. While participants are completing this task, I am also looking at their brain waves using an electrophysiological measure known as event-related potentials (ERPs).
The Department encourages students who may be doing an Honours thesis in the future to attend the conference to get a sense of what's involved. There's a registration fee of $20 for non-presenters, but there's no cost to attend if you're presenting a poster or giving a talk.
Dr. Mark Howe
Director of the Centre for Memory and Law
Department of Psychology, City, University of London
"The Aging of Episodic Memory: Reconsolidation and Priming Effects"
1:30-2:30
Eckardt-Gramatté Hall
Everyone is welcome to attend this free Keynote Address.