Kristin McGatlin

Title: The effects of feedback on cognition: Friend or foe?

Abstract: Older adults often face stereotypes, especially about their memory and other cognitive abilities. They may internalize those negative beliefs (e.g., “senior moments”; “My memory just isn’t what it used to be”), ironically making them less likely to perform optimally in challenging situations and thus more vulnerable to failure. On the other hand, older adults often show resiliency in the form of the “age-related positivity effect” – an increased tendency for older adults to focus on positive, rather than negative information, compared to young adults (Carstensen & Mikels, 2005). The current research project will examine how different feedback conditions (neutral (no feedback), positive feedback to correct answers, negative feedback to errors) affects cognitive performance as well as subjective measures of motivation and related constructs in younger and older adults.

Eric Martell

Title: The Role of Social Factors on Syntactic Alignment

Abstract: Priming is the tendency to unconsciously repeat words, sentences, sounds, and concepts that we have encountered before (Dell, Burger, & Svec, 1997; Kubovy, 1977; Bock, 1986; Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Alignment is driven by priming and occurs during successful dialogue, that is when two parties have unconsciously constructed shared concepts at different linguistic levels, e.g. lexical or syntactical (Pickering & Garrod, 2004). A picture description task will help us understand if alignment, at the syntactic level, is malleable by social factors and will bring us closer to answering if alignment is a fully automatic process.

Madelyn Quirk

Title: Predicting the Pandemic: Everyone did it and no one was right: A Bayesian latent variable approach to misestimation and Covid-19

Abstract: Six months ago, Covid-19 reared its ugly head and seemed to stump science as we know it. Almost immediately, it felt like nobody knew anything but everybody had an opinion, a dangerous juxtaposition in the face of a public-health crisis. Why did some seem to believe that the virus would be gone in a week’s time, while others erred towards the opposite extreme? We had previously assessed individuals’ ability to predict the anticipated number of cumulative Covid-19 cases 3, 6, and 9 days out after being presented the cumulative number of confirmed cases at five previous dates in various presentation formats. People were very poor at this forecasting overall, but there was also a stark separation between those who overestimated and those who underestimated. So, we revisit the question of interest: What could possibly be driving this separation between the directions of misestimation? To then expand further, do the societal consequences of the two differ? My current model and the basis for this talk will explore the relationship among three latent variables of political conservatism, Covid-related social behavior, and misestimation in an effort to answer these critical questions in such unprecedented times.