Faculty Advisor 

Dr. Kristy Boyce 

Summary

The modern political landscape promotes extreme values. This raises the issue of information processing and misinformation in pursuit of a tailored narrative. Here, we demonstrate how political polarization impacts on ingroup favoritism and outgroup degradation using a neutral statement on cursive writing in education shown to all participants. The study uses speaker manipulation to assess how a match or mismatch of political ideology affects agreement and support of the proposed statement.  Our findings suggest that…. data analysis is ongoing. Study limitations and future research implications are discussed.    

Faculty Advisors

Dr. Kristen Hoskinson
Dr. Ruchika Prakesh  

Summary

Moderate to complex congenital heart disease (mcCHD) can impact the development of the central nervous system, reflected in deficits in neurocognitive abilities. This could be due to changes in brain development, and such is linked with poor physical health and underperformance. One skill vulnerable to neurocognitive deficit is theory of mind: an individual’s ability to understand other individuals by ascribing mental states to them. Theory of mind deficits threaten children’s success in establishing and maintaining social relationships, which can have adverse effects on their personal lives, especially as social nuance becomes more complicated during adolescence. Although extensive research has been conducted on attention and executive functioning deficits in this population, little has been done specifically examining theory of mind. Therefore, this study aims to find the link between mcCHD and theory of mind in children and adolescents.

The present study includes 20 youth with mcCHD (Mage = 11.78, Male = 12) and 20 healthy controls (HC: Mage = 12.27, Male = 15). All participants completed the Coding and Symbol Search subtests of the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth Edition (WISC-V) to measure processing speed, and all youth with mcCHD and 12 HC also completed the Vocabulary and Symbol Search subtests of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence-Second Edition (WASI-II) as a screener for overall cognitive function - Theory of mind was assessed using the Jack and Jill paradigm. Group differences were quantified via independent samples T-tests or chi square analyses, as appropriate, and correlations quantified using bivariate Pearson statistics. Given the pilot sample size, both statistical significance and effect size were examined.

We found significant differences in theory of mind performance between the CHD and the HC groups (t = .002, d = 1.022), as well as poorer performance on the Symbol Search subtest (t = .027, d = 0.631) and overall Processing Speed Index (t = .045, d = .657) on the WISC-V. Theory of mind performance, but not performance on control conditions of the Jack and Jill paradigm, were strongly associated with processing speed (rs = .435). 

Our results suggest that core neurocognitive deficits found in youth with mcCHD extend to aspects of social cognition as well, specifically theory of mind. There is existing literature that discusses the link between multifocal white matter pathology (a typical neuroanatomical finding in mcCHD) and processing speed, and it is possible that impacted theory of mind is a concerning downstream functional implication. If a child with mcCHD cannot accurately assess theory of mind under a time constraint and adequately interpret the feelings and perspectives of their peer group, psychosocial consequence may ensue, thus increasing the social strain and difficulties this population faces. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan  

Summary

From a social cognitive theory perspective, children learn gender attitudes from their environments as they observe gender being modeled towards or around them (Bussey & Bandura, 1999; Halpern & Perry-Jenkins, 2015). Chronic accessibility models within this framework add that repeated exposure to gender schemas increases the accessibility of these schemas, which persistently influence behavior. The majority of existing research on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes centers parents as primary formative influences on their children's gender attitudes. Children are thought to internalize the implicit gendered expectations of their parents (Bem, 1985). However, children’s gender attitudes are also shaped by factors outside of the family, including media exposure (Ward & Grower, 2020). Children’s gender flexibility is a measure of how appropriate children perceive activities, occupations, or behaviors to be across genders (Bigler et al., 1992). The current study investigates how parental gender attitudes affect children’s gender flexibility, and whether children’s media use moderates this relationship. Understanding the full range of formative influences on children’s gender flexibility in the modern age is necessary for building a more egalitarian society.

Participants were drawn from a long-term longitudinal study of 182 dual-earner couples who had their first child between 2008 and 2009. The data used in this study were contributed by mothers, fathers, and children at a follow-up assessment that took place when children were 7.5 years old (n = 100). Parents reported on their gender attitudes, including ambivalent sexism, progressive beliefs about parental roles, and gender essentialism. Parents also reported on children’s media use. Children completed a researcher-assisted survey to assess their gender flexibility.

Data collection is complete, and preliminary data analysis has been conducted. Preliminary correlation analyses indicate that fathers’, but not mothers’, gender attitudes are significantly associated with children's gender flexibility. When fathers reported higher benevolent sexism (r = -.23), stronger gender essentialism (r = -.22), and weaker progressive beliefs (r = .23), children exhibited lower gender flexibility (all p < .05). Regression analysis will be used to test moderation by media use.

Preliminary results suggest that fathers’ gender attitudes may be especially formative for children’s gender flexibility. If expected results are borne out, this research will contribute to understanding family and media influences on children’s attitudes about gender.

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Brittany Shoots-Reinhard

Summary

Previous research has found that jury decision-making can be influenced by biases, such as motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognition, in which individuals unconsciously interpret evidence in ways that affirm their group identity (Sood, 2012; Kahan, 2015). While there is extensive research on jury decision-making and the examination of various biases, there is meager research that explores the influence of a politically polarized trial scenario (e.g., Devine et al., 2001). Therefore, the present study aims to explore the role of political polarization in jury decision-making by examining how motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognition can influence jurors’ interpretation of guilt in a mock trial scenario involving the topic of abortion. We hypothesized that mock jurors would rate the defendant who is part of their political outgroup with a higher percentage likelihood of guilt than the defendant who is part of their political ingroup.

The mock trial scenario describes a physical altercation between a “pro-life” demonstrator outside of an abortion clinic and a “pro-choice” patient receiving care, in which both parties sustain a similar degree of injuries. We suspect that jurors will feel more sympathetic to the perceived “victim” that would stereotypically align with their political ideological ingroup. We believe that this identity-protective cognition will impact jurors’ judgments of guilt. Evidence from the eyewitness testimony describes that two of the five witnesses saw either the demonstrator or the patient instigate the attack. To assess motivated reasoning, we utilized the ratio of 2:5 eyewitnesses as ambiguous evidence, suspecting that mock jurors would find the evidence to be either weak or strong. Thus, jurors would ignore or attend to the evidence, contingent on whether the defendant is part of their political ingroup or outgroup. 

Participants, of whom currently 95 undergraduate students were recruited from Ohio State’s Research Experience Program (REP), were randomly assigned to one of four conditions of the trial scenario. Each trial scenario manipulated who the defendant is, either the demonstrator or the patient, and what the anecdotal evidence from the eyewitness testimony suggests.

In confirmation of our hypothesis, we found that participants gave higher guilt judgments when the defendant was part of their political outgroup than when the defendant was part of their political ingroup. This finding supports prior research on motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognition in jury decision-making (Kahan, 2015). It is suggestive that participants were unconsciously motivated to protect the defendant with their same political identity to affirm the status of their group membership. Our goal is to highlight the importance of conducting research between the fields of psychology and law, so that we may utilize our findings to inform and promote a just society.

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Duane Wegener

Summary

The continued influence effect (CIE) of misinformation explains how people continue to believe or be influenced by  is information, even after learning that it is false. Traditional approaches in misinformation research focus on the cognitive aspects, however, it is still unclear how attitudes may play a role, especially when the misinformation aligns with their prior attitudes. Some newer research has focused more on potential motivational aspects of the CIE and the impacts ones’ prior attitudes may have on their acceptance or rejection of misinformation. The present study combines cognitive and motivational approaches to further explore whether discomfort motivates source attributions that lead to continued belief in misinformation. This study tested the prediction that when participants were presented with attitude-consistent misinformation that was later corrected, they would experience psychological discomfort and be more likely to attribute the message to a highly credible source so as to eliminate the discomfort and justify continued belief. I predicted a mediation pattern linking attitude-misinformation consistency to continued belief, through discomfort and source perceptions. Findings replicated prior research, with attitude-misinformation consistency predicting endorsement, directly and indirectly through discomfort. However, discomfort does not mediate the relation between attitude-misinformation consistency and source perception. While attitudes do affect source perception, discomfort doesn’t explain the relation. These findings suggest there may be some other motivational or cognitive aspects producing the effect because source perceptions do not appear to be motivated.

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Matthew Southward

Summary 

This poster is a secondary analysis of a study examining the effectiveness of skill training using the cognitive module of the Unified Protocol (UP), a treatment which targets underlying core emotion dysregulation (Barlow and Sauer-Zavala, 2017). Previous work examining the effects of racial and ethnic background on therapeutic process and outcome variables demonstrated effects on the reduction of anxiety wherein White participants demonstrated marginally steeper rates of reduction in anxiety symptoms compared to non-white participants. However, this difference was not considered statistically significant (Southward et. al, 2025). Notably, the same analysis found that White participants reported significantly steeper slopes on task agreement and skill usage. The goal of this secondary analysis was to analyze whether variables related to skill use could explain some of the illustrated discrepancies in treatment outcome across racial and ethnic groups. 

Participants were 257 adults aged 20.3 to 78.9 years (M = 41.3, SD = 13.9). The composition of the sample was 75.5% White and 24.5% non-White; 78.6% women. Participants completed 2-weeks of ecological momentary assessment (EMA) before they were taught a series of skills associated with cognitive-behavioral therapy. Participants were then asked to spend an additional two weeks utilizing these skills and completing additional EMA before a follow-up battery of self-report assessments assessing the effectiveness of this skill training.

In order to examine the impact of racial/ethnic identity across various dimensions of skill use we conducted a one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Preliminary assumption testing ensured the data were appropriately distributed for the MANOVA: we conducted a Box’s M test and the result was nonsignificant, indicating that the homogeneity of covariance was acceptable. Given the unbalanced sample (75% white), Pillai’s trace was selected as the outcome statistic due to its added robustness. Results indicated no significant racial or ethnic differences in participants’ frequency of skill use or comfort using the skills across behavioral, cognitive, and mindfulness skills, Pillai’s Trace = 0.011, F(3, 253) = .96, p = .41. 

These results suggest that neither frequency nor quality of coping skill application is significantly different depending on race. Regardless of racial/ethnic background, participants performed roughly the same in all three domains. This finding lays the groundwork for future research investigating other possible explanations for the difference in treatment outcome across racial and ethnic groups. These alternative explanations range from weak therapeutic alliances to environmental factors such as structural and community barriers (Southward et. al, 2025). Additionally, this secondary analysis encourages additional research with a sample that is more representative of race/ethnic identity and gender.

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Vladimir Sloutsky

Summary

The Semantic Project is an ongoing longitudinal study within Ohio State’s Cognitive Development Lab. The semantic study team synthesized previous research into two operational hypotheses regarding word encoding and comprehension: 1) exposure to statistical regularities in which words co-occur plays a big role in the development of semantic links and 2) development of semantically organized word knowledge plays a big role in comprehension. I collected data for a pilot study with 4–6-year-olds to test the overall project design. The study used a previously developed task to assess the impacts of word co-occurrence on semantic development. I worked with the study team to recruit the 127 children participating in the pilot study. Each of these children attended three appointments, which included an exposure phase and a testing phase. The exposure phase introduces pseudowords to participants through stories while the testing phase consists of choice tasks evaluating the participants’ understanding of the pseudowords. This study found that 4-6 year olds improve their formation of connections between words and of interconnected knowledge across different experiences using regularities in language. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Devon Carter

Summary

Mentoring is one of the most popular and widely accepted ways to promote positive youth development, serving millions of youths in the United States every year. Evaluations of mentoring programs typically find mixed effects, with some outcomes improving and others showing no benefit. There is empirical support for that strong positive relationship, typically referred to as "developmental mentoring, is associated with good outcomes. Research also supports mentoring that focuses on goal attainment or skill development, which has been called "instrumental" mentoring. Based on analysis of data from a large, controlled study of mentoring, Lyons and colleagues (2019) proposed that there is a "sweet spot" in mentoring where the experiences of developmental and instrumental mentoring combine to explain which youths benefit most. This paper reviews data on middle and high school positive youth development programs to identify best practices in mentoring through the lens of the sweet spot concept. Our review suggests that best practices in mentoring provide sequential development of critical social-emotional, academic, and career skills within the context of an enduring, supportive, culturally responsive relationship that fosters positive academic and community engagement. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan

Summary

Attachment theory posits that the lifelong bond between a parent and child is the result of an evolved tendency for children to seek comfort from their parents, and for parents to protect their children (Bowlby, 1969). Parental emotional availability is related to attachment theory, and is defined as a parent’s ability to respond to their child’s emotional needs (Biringen et al., 2014). Past research indicates that a parent's level of emotional availability impacts the earlier developmental stages of a child, yet limited research has examined the role of parental emotional availability during the emerging adulthood stage (i.e., individuals aged 18-25 years). Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine how current and past levels of parental emotional availability impacts the psychological well-being of emerging adults. 

356 participants between the ages of 18-25 completed the study, which consisted of a brief online survey that asked participants to indicate the levels of emotional availability their parents expressed in their childhood and in the previous year, along with several aspects of psychological well-being such as emotion regulation abilities, relationship attachment, anxiety, depression, and substance use.  

Paired samples t-tests, correlations, and Williams tests were computed. The results of the t-tests found that current father emotional availability was higher than past father emotional availability, past mother emotional availability was higher than past father emotional availability, and current mother emotional availability was higher than current father emotional availability. Furthermore, the correlations suggested that past and current levels of mother and father emotional availability were significantly associated with almost every psychological well-being measure, with the exception of some of the substance abuse measures. Finally, the Williams test was used to determine if past emotional availability had stronger associations with the well-being measures. There was no difference between past mother emotional availability and current mother emotional availability. For fathers, past father emotional availability had a stronger association with anxiety, alcohol use, and drug use compared to current father emotional availability. 

The results of this study could potentially inform therapeutic interventions for individuals who have experienced low parental emotional availability in critical periods of their life. Additionally, the results of this study could be used in parenting programs to educate parents on the importance of emotional availability, and to showcase that emotionally available parenting is imperative for successful child development. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Kentaro Fujita

Summary

Underrepresented minority (URM) individuals rely on subtle environmental signals to infer if their identities will be valued or marginalized in organizational settings. Current research on identity-safety cues suggests that symbolic signals shape expectations of whether their identity is the attribution model. We argue that one way to test the effectiveness of identity-safety cues may be dependent on the observable effort invested by an ally (e.g., a coworker) in displaying an allyship cue. We predict that cues involving greater observable effort are more diagnostic of a coworker's underlying intentions, allowing URM individuals to more confidently infer genuine allyship rather than performative concern. In the present study, we examine whether diagnosticity, as represented in this study by the level of effort invested, of an identity safety cue (e.g., “You Belong” banner) influences URM individuals’ sense of belonging, social identity threat concerns and perceived allyship. 
Black and Latine participants were randomly assigned to view either high-effort or low-effort cues. Participants then reported a sense of belonging, social identity threat concerns, and perceived allyship. We found that cues displaying high (vs. low) effort led participants to perceive their coworker as a stronger ally. This was associated with increased feelings of sense of belonging and identity threat. This study provides initial evidence in identifying when allyship cues successfully communicate genuine allyship sincerity within organizational relationships. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Vladimir Sloutsky

Summary

Children acquiring language must learn a variety of words mapping on to different kinds of concepts. Previous word learning accounts focus on how children acquire words for entities (i.e., nouns) and events (i.e., verbs). Often underrepresented are words for properties (i.e., adjectives). While evidence suggests children struggle to link properties to adjectives when explicit rule-based learning mechanisms are employed; the acquisition of adjectives using statistical learning has not yet been explored. Therefore, this study investigated 4-6-year-olds and adults’ ability to extend and remember a novel adjective across basic-level categories without the explicit explanation of its property. All participants were trained with four familiar nouns, each paired with a novel adjective, across four distinct categories. After training, participants completed an intuition task and two memory tasks. Results indicated age-related improvements in adjective learning; younger children showed limited memory, but some ability to extend novel adjectives, whereas older children and adults demonstrated both successful generalization and reliable recall of adjective property mappings. All participants exhibited savings in memory for trained adjectives, suggesting evidence of facilitation when learning associations between adjective-noun pairings. These results suggest that young children can acquire meanings through implicit statistical learning before explicit memory systems have fully developed. As children mature, explicit memory appears to support stronger consolidation of these mappings, indicating a developmental shift in how semantic knowledge is stabilized over time.

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Dan Parker

Summary

Understanding how people interpret structurally ambiguous sentences provides important insight into the cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension. One well-studied example involves relative clause attachment ambiguity, in which a relative clause may plausibly modify one of two preceding noun phrases. During real-time comprehension, readers and listeners must rapidly determine which noun phrase the clause refers to, often before all relevant information is available. Psycholinguistic research suggests that individuals rely not only on syntactic structure but also on semantic and contextual cues to resolve such ambiguities. Constraint-based models of sentence processing propose that multiple sources of information, including syntactic structure, semantic relationships, and prior linguistic experience, are integrated simultaneously during comprehension (MacDonald et al., 1994). However, the role of semantic distinctiveness between potential attachment sites remains relatively understudied.

The present study examines whether semantic distinctiveness between two noun phrases influences how comprehenders resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities. In particular, the study investigates whether distinctiveness plays a stronger role in situations where syntactic cues alone provide limited guidance. Fifty participants completed an online experiment in which they read sentences containing complex noun phrases followed by relative clauses. Sentences were presented in three structural conditions: biased reversible, nonreversible, and symmetrical constructions. In the biased reversible condition, semantic constraints strongly favored one noun phrase over the other. The nonreversible sentences contained a noun that was clearly the subject and another clearly the object. The symmetrical condition contained noun phrases with similar structural and semantic properties, creating greater uncertainty about the intended attachment. Semantic distinctiveness was manipulated by varying the semantic similarity between the two noun phrases, producing high- and low-distinctiveness versions of each item. 

Participants indicated their preferred interpretation of each sentence and provided an acceptability rating. Interpretation responses were analyzed using mixed-effects logistic regression with sentence type and semantic distinctiveness as predictors and random intercepts for participants and items. The analysis revealed a significant interaction between sentence type and semantic distinctiveness (β = 4.42, p < .001). Follow-up analyses showed a strong effect of distinctiveness specifically in the symmetrical condition (β = 7.30, p < .001). These findings suggest that when syntactic cues provide limited guidance, comprehenders rely more heavily on semantic relationships between potential referents, highlighting the role of semantic information in cognitive processes that support ambiguity resolution during language comprehension. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Ruchika Prakash

Summary

Researchers often concatenate data across multiple runs of a cognitive task to estimate overall performance in behavioral and neural metrics. However, given state-dependent fluctuations across runs, such as fatigue, assuming performance stability may be problematic. We examined neural differences across runs of the N-Back and GradCPT task. 

We conducted secondary analysis of neuroimaging data collected during a mindfulness randomized controlled trial (HealthyAgers; Clinical Trials #NCT03626532). The neural metric of entropy was measured by the diversity of nodal participation in overlapping edge communities. Using FDR-corrected linear mixed models, we examined the fixed effect of run number (run 1 vs 2), with participant intercepts as random effects, on entropy at whole brain and network levels.

For the GradCPT task, there was a significant main effect of run on entropy values at the whole brain level (β = 0.008, p = 70.02), Default Mode Network (β = 0.008, p = 0.03), Dorsal Attention Network (β = 0.012, p = 0.02) and Limbic Network (β = 0.013, p = 0.02), such that entropy increased from run1 to run2. For N-back, there was a significant main effect of run on Salience/Ventral Attention Network entropy (β = -0.01, p = 0.03). There were no significant behavioral differences between runs.  

Our results provide preliminary evidence that neural specialization changes can appear between runs without apparent behavioral differences. As a future consideration, researchers should examine behavioral and neural data prior to concatenation, to further parse the differential effect of the runs. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Mark Pitt 

Summary

This study was conducted with the aim of establishing a correlation between language and cognitive processing. Cognitive processing is an important aspect of navigating our environment. We are often tasked with either selecting— working with a piece of information— or inhibiting— ignoring a piece of information— to complete basic tasks. The process of suppressing unnecessary information to better focus on a target is called Cognitive Inhibition (CI). In this study, we looked at whether language abilities — monolingualism vs bilingualism— has an impact on the levels of CI someone has. To test this, 18 participants were recruited (9 monolinguals; 9 bilinguals) and they completed a search task to measure their levels of CI. The search task measured the reaction time of participants in finding a given target as an indicator of their CI levels. From this experiment, we found that bilinguals, on average, had a lower reaction time which is an indicator of higher CI levels. Our experiment was successful in showing a correlation between languages and CI; specifically, that bilinguals showed higher CI than monolinguals. Our results provide additional evidence of the bilingual advantage by highlighting their higher levels of CI for more efficient cognitive processing. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Jennifer Cheavens

Summary

Black Americans seek out mental health services at low rates for depressive symptoms. Researchers have examined the association between cultural mistrust, intentions to seek help, and negative perceptions of treatment as a potential explanation for these low treatment seeking rates. However, few researchers have examined the association between cultural mistrust and help seeking intentions from specific sources of help. The role of cultural mistrust might be specifically related to which source of help (i.e., informal or formal sources of care) Black Americans have intentions to seek help from for their mental health problems. Thus, in this present study we examined the relationship between cultural mistrust and help seeking intentions from formal and informal sources among Black Americans who self-identify as depressed. The data analyzed in the current study were obtained from a previous data collection effort where researchers measured help seeking intentions (GHSQ) and cultural mistrust (CMI) in Black Americans. A multiple regression analysis revealed that cultural mistrust did not linearly predict greater intentions to seek help from informal sources but did significantly predict greater intentions to seek help from formal sources. Additionally, previous treatment experience did not moderate the relationship between cultural mistrust and formal help seeking intentions. This suggests that the positive relationship between cultural mistrust and formal help seeking intentions does not change whether or not an individual has previously sought treatment.  Future researchers can examine what factors other than cultural mistrust may be associated with low mental health treatment seeking rates of Black Americans. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Mark Pitt

Summary

Learning more about how point of view affects memory of events in a story could have implications for reception of news or other important stories that people encounter. This study will also reveal more about the bounds of self-reference. If point of view can enact self-reference, that would suggest a more flexible schema of the self, suggesting broader capacity for empathy and social cognition.  

Memory research has shown that information that relates to oneself is better remembered than information related to others, which is a phenomenon called the self-reference effect. It has also been shown that first-person point of view in narratives (e.g. stories told from one character’s perspective using first-person pronouns, ‘I’ ‘Me’ ‘My’) produces increased the degree to which readers felt they could relate to the character (Salem et al., 2017). The current study aims to answer the questions: How does first-person perspective influence the reader’s ability to encode information compared to third person? And does it enact the self-reference effect that causes readers to have enhanced encoding for personally relevant information?  

Researchers, assisted by Google Gemini, wrote a short fictional story of 819 words. This story was then rewritten in two other genres (adventure, gothic, western) and in both first- and third-person, resulting in six versions of the story. College student participants will read one of these versions in first-person or third-person. After a two-minute distractor task, they will answer twenty-four multiple choice questions asking about events and details from the story. Sixteen of the questions are about the protagonist, who narrates the first-person version or is the main character of the third-person version. The rest of the questions are about the other characters or details. 

We collected data from 47 participants with 24 in the first-person group and 23 in the third-person group. Data will be analyzed using Excel and JASP. Results showed that the first-person group had a significantly higher average proportion of correct responses for protagonist-related questions than the third-person group. This supports the hypothesis that first-person perspective would promote the self-reference effect. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Brian Siefke

Summary

Our work will analyze the underlying mechanisms behind word rotation and object rotation.  Previous studies involving word rotation has mainly involves reflection tasks and not much on rotating the words itself.  Furthermore, there is still ongoing debates about whether the two mechanisms are the same or separate, our results could add upon the evidences for this debate.  Finally, other mental rotation tasks has not incorporated both word stimulus and object stimulus within the same trial simultaneously.  Our work would be able to analyze and fill in the gap for each of these issues. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Brynn Sherman

Summary

The present study examined the relationship between BIG 5 personality traits (primary focus on neuroticism predicting local bias) and attentional breadth as measured by performance on a Navon task. Attentional breadth reflects the extent to which individuals prioritize global versus local visual information. Participants completed computerized versions of the MINI-IPIP personality assessment and Navon task. Reaction times collected from the Navon task, based on local and global stimuli, were used to compute attentional breadth scores. Correlational analyses revealed significant positive associations between attentional breadth and Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Extraversion. These findings suggest that higher levels of these traits were associated with greater local processing bias. Multiple linear regression analyses contradicted this, indicating that, when controlling for shared variance among traits, none of the individual personality traits significantly predicted attentional breadth. The overall multiple regression model was significant explaining 28.6% of the variance. These findings suggest that while personality traits are related to attentional breadth (specifically local biases) at a standard level, their unique contributions are limited due to covariance among personality traits. Neuroticism was not found to independently predict local bias, indicating a contradiction to expectations. Overall, the results lacked significance, failed to reject the null hypothesis, and highlighted the importance of shared variance among personality traits when examining cognitive processing differences. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Brian Siefke

Summary

This study examines whether contextual priming facilitates an increase in both the speed and accuracy of lexical retrieval from long-term memory. Building on the foundational work on the Lexical Decision Task (LDT) by David E. Meyer and Roger W. Schvaneveldt in their 1971 study, a four-block LDT was implemented using PsyToolKit. We varied levels of semantic relatedness and contextual priming across trials. Prior research demonstrates significant effects of word-relatedness on lexical access; however, comparatively less work has examined contextual priming across both visual and auditory methods within the LDT framework. It is hypothesized that greater contextual priming will lead to faster and more accurate lexical decisions. Participants were recruited by the experimenters; the experiment was conducted in person. Data collection is ongoing, and results will evaluate the extent to which contextual cues enhance retrieval speed and accuracy.

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Sami Yousif

Summary

Suppose you return to a place you have not visited in many years and try to navigate to a favorite restaurant. You do not remember its exact location, but you are confident you can find it. Yet once you begin, you realize that much has changed: restaurants have closed or opened, new parks have been established, and even street names differ. The landmarks you once relied on are no longer reliable. How do you find your way? Some theories propose that cognitive maps integrate multiple sources of spatial information into a kind of ‘cognitive collage’, so that, when one source of information fails, there are other available cues. Empirical evidence for such ideas remains limited, however. Here, we provide some. Participants completed a spatial memory task in which they remembered the location of a dot relative to both a landmark and a boundary. In Experiment 1, both cues were present during encoding, but at retrieval participants saw either the landmark, the boundary, or both. Error patterns differed across conditions, with the lowest overall error when both cues were available, perhaps suggesting that locations were encoded relative to both. In addition, we found different characteristic patterns of errors in each condition (e.g., participants were biased toward the landmark when it was present at retrieval, but not otherwise). In Experiments 2 and 3, the task was identical except that retrieval trials were weighted toward the landmark condition (Experiment 2) or the boundary condition (Experiment 3) on 80% of trials (with 10% for each alternative). Memory improved for the high-probability cue and worsened for the others, indicating that encoding flexibly prioritizes the most reliable environmental cues. Together, these results suggest that spatial information may be encoded with respect to multiple reference frames simultaneously, supporting the idea that redundant representations can benefit memory when otherwise reliable cues are disrupted. 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Brittany Shoots-Reinhard

Summary

We apply numeracy (i.e., shopping, budgeting, solving common problems) and decision-making abilities every day. Although prior research has demonstrated the importance of numeracy for everyday decision-making, less is known about how individual differences in personality-related thinking styles interact with numerical ability to influence decision quality. Previous studies have shown significant associations among numeracy, personality, and decision-making, but in this study, we aim to investigate the impact of the interaction between personality and numeracy on decision-making ability. We hypothesized that (1) actively open-minded thinking and Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability) would each be positively associated with decision-making performance. would be positively associated with decision-making performance, (2) numeracy would be positively associated with decision-making performance, and (3) there would be an interaction effect between actively open-minded thinking and numeracy, such that the association between numeracy and decision-making would vary across levels of thinking style. 

Undergraduate students at The Ohio State University (N = 442) completed an online survey, which was designed for this study, and included the Actively Open-Minded Thinking scale (AOT), the Big Five, the adaptive Numeric Understanding Measures (NUMs), and four subtests of the Adult Decision-Making Competence (A-DMC) battery. Multiple linear regression analyses were conducted to examine the main effects of actively open-minded thinking and numeracy, as well as their interaction, on overall decision-making performance and specific subcomponents. 

We did not find the hypothesized interaction effect between actively open-minded thinking and numeracy when predicting decision-making. Although no significant interaction effect was observed, the results indicated strong main effects of numeracy and a significant main effect of conscientiousness on decision-making performance. A follow-up study will explore additional factors that may moderate this relationship.

Findings from this study may improve understanding of how cognitive ability and personality-related thinking styles jointly shape real-world decision-making and may inform educational and training interventions to enhance decision quality 

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Steve Petrill

Summary

Although early arithmetic and reading comprehension frequently show parallel developmental trajectories, the mechanisms that drive their co-development remain contested. Prior work suggests that domain-general cognitive resources contribute to shared development across literacy and numeracy, whereas domain-specific skills may explain divergence between the two domains. In this multi-wave longitudinal study of 397 twins, which allows us to examine the developmental processes while accounting for shared familial influences, we examine whether executive functions, such as working memory, account for domain-general skills whereas verbal memory, vocabulary, math calculation skills, and numeric estimation account for domain-specific skills. Specifically, we focused on verbal memory and vocabulary as language-related predictors of reading comprehension, and math calculation and numeric estimation as numeracy-related predictors of arithmetic performance. Using correlational analysis and multiple regression, we test three hypotheses.  First, we predict that verbal memory and vocabulary will account for variance in reading independent of math skills. Second, we predict that calculation skills and numeric estimation will explain unique variance in math independent of reading skills. Finally, we predict that working memory will explain a meaningful portion of the overlapping variance between reading and math skills. By integrating cognitive measures with math and reading outcomes, this study aims to clarify how cognitive resources shape literacy–numeracy co-development. Preliminary findings suggest that language-related cognitive skills are more strongly associated with reading outcomes, whereas numeracy-related skills uniquely contribute to mathematical performance, consistent with both domain-general and domain-specific accounts of literacy–numeracy development.