Congratulations to CML undergraduate researchers Ceresa Munjak-Khoury, Evie Chen, and Veronica Lee for excellent presentations of their work at WashU’s Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium! We are also proud to give a shout-out to CML undergraduate researcher Jahnavi Nair for presenting her work from the Attention and Performance Lab with Dr. Richard Abrams. Great job, all!
Ceresa’s lightning talk highlighted her project studying how memories can be influenced by morality and priming. With CML graduate student Savannah Born, Ceresa’s work investigated participants’ perceptions of the morality of two morally-ambiguous characters in a short film, and how these morality judgements colored participants’ memory for the events in the film.
Evie shared findings from her project on the tradeoff between memory generalization and memory specificity in an indirect association paradigm. She worked with CML graduate student Rayna Tang to understand how different types of memory give rise to generalization, and whether linking information together prioritizes generalization at a cost to memory specificity.
Veronica’s project investigated how bilingual participants process and recall stories in Spanish and in English, and how memory is affected by changing language between learning and remembering. In Veronica’s paradigm, short stories were learned and recalled either in the same language (English-English or Spanish-Spanish) or in different languages (English-Spanish or Spanish-English). She then compared the semantic similarity of stories across encoding and recall conditions to understand how language congruency affected memory.
