Four psychology majors presented their research April 17 at the 35th annual Carolinas Psychology Conference hosted by Meredith College.
Katie Kielek ’10 and Elon College Fellow Jennifer Champ ’11 presented a talk, “The effect of pair repetition and encoding strategy on associative recognition,” which examined the relative benefits of two types of visualization strategies during encoding on later list discrimination and recognition for pairs of faces and occupations.
Kielek and Champ’s presentation was co-authored by their faculty research advisor, assistant professor Amy Overman.
Stephanie Robinson ’11 and Justin Sun ’10 presented a talk, “The effects of strategic encoding and practice on cued-recalled of word pairs,” which contrasted sentence formation and visual imagery as strategies for improving recall of semantically related and unrelated words. Robinson and Sun’s presentation was also co-authored Overman.
Determining what can be done to improve memory performance is an important topic in the memory and aging field and similar studies are being conducted at research universities in the US and other countries. The second stage of both of these projects will be conducted throughout next year.
Kielek, Champ, Robinson and Sun’s projects were supported by research grants from Elon’s Undergraduate Research Program and by Elon College Fellows.