Creating Scripts for the Michigan Neural Distinctiveness Project (MiND)
Faculty Mentor: Thad Polk
Student’s Track: Computation
The Michigan Neural Distinctiveness (MiND) Project investigates the structural, functional, and chemical changes that underlie behavioral impairments associated with healthy aging (e.g., declines in processing speed, working memory, sensory domains such as vision and motor skills).
This student’s project focused on studying white matter differences between older and younger adults. For the project, the student created scripts to pre-process and analyze multi-shell diffusion weighted images. This student pre-processed data, ran quality control checks, analyzed data, and visualized results. At the end of the semester, the results of the project were shared in a presentation to lab members.
The Cognitive Science of Mind Wandering
Faculty Mentor: Chandra Sripada
Student’s Track: Philosophy
The goal of this project is to understand how mind wandering reflects an individual's personal concerns. The student conducted a two-part process for research participants. In part one, the participant verbalizes spontaneous thoughts in isolation for thirty minutes. In part two, the participants complete an interview about their current personal concerns. The student also conducted an extensive literature review and created a coding scheme to analyze the transcripts.
Exploring the Correlation Between Types of Empathy and Types of Giving Behavior
Faculty Mentor: Stephanie Preston
Student’s Track: Decision
The goal of this project is to use Mark Davis’ Interpersonal Reactivity Index to examine subjects’ decision making in terms of altruistic giving to non-profit organizations, specifically how the cognitive mechanism of perspective taking impacts decisions to give to non-profit organizations. The student hypothesizes that higher scores on the perspective-taking subscale will correlate with greater willingness to give to a non-profit that does not align with an individual’s own political ideologies, higher scores on the empathic concern subscale will correlate with willingness to give, higher scores in the personal distress subscale will correlate with lower willingness to give, and higher scores on the fantasy scale will have no correlation with willingness to give. The student will analyze these correlations based on the results of a survey they created. At the end of the semester, the student plans to complete a paper that further investigates how the correlations between each subscale and giving behavior and will go into additional detail about the correlation between the perspective-taking subscale and partisanship, including an examination of partial perspective taking behaviors and how the process of distancing from the self, rather than the sharing of another's perspective can impact altruistic behavior when political differences are present.
Research Assistant in the Psycholinguistics Lab
Faculty Mentor: Julie Boland
Student’s Track: Language
This student is assisting with a research project in the psycholinguistics lab investigating L1 influence on collocation processing in intermediate Chinese speakers and near-native Chinese speakers, using English speakers with no Chinese knowledge as a control group. The student will support the project through creating a list of stimuli, running subjects in the lab, and analyzing data. At the end of the smeester, the student will present the progress made and their specific contributions.
