Research Experience
I am passionate about researching ways to improve learning and memory.
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During my undergraduate and master's at the University of Delaware, I worked with Dr. Timothy Vickery on questions related to reinforcement learning and statistical learning.
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At University of Massachusetts Amherst, I began working with Dr. Rosie Cowell and Dr. David Huber researching the effectiveness of practice tests. Upon their departure from the university, I began working with Dr. Jeffrey Starns. My dissertation explores the potential benefit of drawing and tracing for visual long-term memory.
Feature Relevance in Reinforcement Learning
I completed an independent senior thesis looking at how varying irrelevant features (color and location) of objects impacts reinforcement learning performance. We found that the location of objects was tracked even when it was irrelevant to performance.
Senior Thesis
Working Memory
& Visual Statistical Learning
Master's Thesis
My master’s thesis explored the role of working memory in visual statistical learning. To explore this, I did a series of three experiments. In these experiments, I found a positive correlation between working memory and visual statistical learning abilities and found that adding additional working memory load impairs visual statistical learning performance.
Testing Effect for Novel, Abstract Objects
First Year Project
During my first year, I completed a series of 13 experiments looking at the testing effect for meaningless visual content. Surprisingly, we found no testing effect for this content which suggests that simply studying visual materials may be more beneficial than practice tests. This work was supported by a Graduate School Predissertation Grant and is currently in press at The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. A preprint is available on OSF.
Music & Small Group Discussions
Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
I had noticed anecdotally that students talked more during small group discussions if I played background music. To formally explore that idea, I did small group discussions with either no background music, lyrical music, or instrumental music. I then surveyed how comfortable the students felt in the discussions. While there were few numerical differences between the conditions, several students shared in the free-response questions that awkward silences prevented them from speaking.
Drawing & Tracing for Long-Term Memory
Dissertation
My dissertation is exploring the impact of drawing and tracing on subsequent visual long-term memory. Aim 1 tested whether describing or drawing was more beneficial for learning visual materials. Performance was considerably better for images that they described and drew compared to items that were studied, with a slight advantage of describing over drawing. Aims 2 and 3 will be completed this fall. Aim 2 will be conducted with younger and older adults and will explore how drawing and tracing impact the binding of object features. Aim 3 will explore how drawing and tracing impact memory precision.