Fall Term Recap
January 12, 2021
First blog post here! I'm going to learn on the fly!
I'm hoping these blog posts will serve a couple purposes: first, I intend to use them to routinely celebrate my team's accomplishments, and second, to outline a short-term plan (~1 term at a time) for what we intend to accomplish next. This will hopefully serve to offer much-deserved publicity to my colleagues, and also let potential collaborators and volunteers know what we've been up to, and what we intend to do next!
I had the privilege of teaching a third-year undergraduate lab class — PSYO/NESC 3131: Research Methods in Attention. I taught it before (Winter 2019), but this was my first crack at fully online instruction. It's a really fun class, because I basically get to talk about all the things I'm most interested in. Also, it was a fun exercise to try to modify the structure that worked so well in a face-to-face modality in such a way that we'd still be successful in engaging the students. Having Colin McCormick (another Klein Lab member) as my TA again was a huge asset, and his experience in this role was irreplaceable. We even got two new undergraduate lab members from the class roster!
Back at it this term, reprising my role as instructor of 3131 again. I'm grateful for the chance to run the class again so soon, to try to improve upon some of the content and assignments that didn't work as smoothly as I would have liked, and to redeploy the ones that I thought were particularly successful! I also got appointed to teach PSYO 3082: Experimental Social Psychology, which will be a lot of fun. I'm excited to broaden my teaching capacities, and in particular see which aspects of the framework I've developed for 3131 are generally transferrable. In particular, I like to expose my students to Open Science theory and practice, so I'm excited to see how the preregistration exercises work in a different problem-space.
Two trainees I'm working with in the lab had a big Fall term! First, Kelsey MacDonald presented a poster at the Virtual/Online Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (Ray also did a talk, covering the paper we just had published at Cortex; outlined below). She's been working on a direct (albeit web-based version) replication of Chasteen and Pratt (1999), who showed that inhibition of return (IOR) interacts with word frequency effects on lexical decisions. She replicated the IOR effect on lexical decisions, but found no evidence of the interaction with word frequency. We're just putting the finishing touches on the paper, and hope to get it submitted in time for it to be reflected on her grad school applications (look out for her!). Kadie MacDonald (no relation) finished the design of her Honours thesis, which will follow up results recently reported in AP&P that showed phasic alerting improves temporal perceptual precision — basically, being aroused by an alerting signal improved people's ability to discriminate the temporal order of two rapidly-presented targets. However, Colin showed in his Honours thesis (also published in AP&P) that the arousal that comes from an alerting stimulus is independent from the preparedness that comes from a cue that is temporally predictive. So Kadie's project is going to apply Colin's alerting/arousal method to test whether it's arousal or preparedness (or both) that results in improved temporal decision-making. We're hoping to get the Registered Report submitted (to AP&P, of course) in the coming weeks! Another new recruit (Celia Briand) will be exploring whether a memory load will disrupt either of these two forms of temporal attention, and aims to also submit a Registered Report before the end of the Winter term!
I published a paper in a special issue at Cortex (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/cortex/special-issue/10F5CDBNWDH). In my paper (article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945220304238?casa_token=pkiTIhqqXLwAAAAA:pT6pVACC_6DpKU_UiFvvUrosx7stcIIuPQelUkx67ZEgVnUO4j5ZjyvrN3y7J_9vZ6MHSr1yFg; preprint: https://psyarxiv.com/s29f5), we applied drift diffusion modelling to some data from my Master's thesis. The modelling showed that the two forms of IOR each affect different aspects of the decision process. We also survey a great deal of the literature on IOR, and outline how our theory that there are two forms of IOR can explain a number of discordant patterns within, between, and across studies.
I also applied for a number of postdoctoral fellowships, and academic jobs (including my dream job — fingers crossed!). I was NOT prepared for how much work is involved in these applications. It's almost a full-time job to apply for jobs! Passing this bit of information along to future generations of trainees will be a necessity in my mentorship strategy... Fortunately, I had a teaching philosophy and dossier compiled already as a part of the Certificate in University Teaching and Learning (https://www.dal.ca/dept/clt/services/CUTL.html), but if I had to do that IN ADDITION to everything else, I'm not sure I would have managed. Luckily, I'm surrounded by wonderful people who are always gracious with their time and support. Decisions on several fellowships should come in the next few weeks, and jobs shortly thereafter, so hopefully by the time I make my Winter Term recap post I'll have good news to share!
Stay safe, and take care.
- RJ
I'm hoping these blog posts will serve a couple purposes: first, I intend to use them to routinely celebrate my team's accomplishments, and second, to outline a short-term plan (~1 term at a time) for what we intend to accomplish next. This will hopefully serve to offer much-deserved publicity to my colleagues, and also let potential collaborators and volunteers know what we've been up to, and what we intend to do next!
I had the privilege of teaching a third-year undergraduate lab class — PSYO/NESC 3131: Research Methods in Attention. I taught it before (Winter 2019), but this was my first crack at fully online instruction. It's a really fun class, because I basically get to talk about all the things I'm most interested in. Also, it was a fun exercise to try to modify the structure that worked so well in a face-to-face modality in such a way that we'd still be successful in engaging the students. Having Colin McCormick (another Klein Lab member) as my TA again was a huge asset, and his experience in this role was irreplaceable. We even got two new undergraduate lab members from the class roster!
Back at it this term, reprising my role as instructor of 3131 again. I'm grateful for the chance to run the class again so soon, to try to improve upon some of the content and assignments that didn't work as smoothly as I would have liked, and to redeploy the ones that I thought were particularly successful! I also got appointed to teach PSYO 3082: Experimental Social Psychology, which will be a lot of fun. I'm excited to broaden my teaching capacities, and in particular see which aspects of the framework I've developed for 3131 are generally transferrable. In particular, I like to expose my students to Open Science theory and practice, so I'm excited to see how the preregistration exercises work in a different problem-space.
Two trainees I'm working with in the lab had a big Fall term! First, Kelsey MacDonald presented a poster at the Virtual/Online Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (Ray also did a talk, covering the paper we just had published at Cortex; outlined below). She's been working on a direct (albeit web-based version) replication of Chasteen and Pratt (1999), who showed that inhibition of return (IOR) interacts with word frequency effects on lexical decisions. She replicated the IOR effect on lexical decisions, but found no evidence of the interaction with word frequency. We're just putting the finishing touches on the paper, and hope to get it submitted in time for it to be reflected on her grad school applications (look out for her!). Kadie MacDonald (no relation) finished the design of her Honours thesis, which will follow up results recently reported in AP&P that showed phasic alerting improves temporal perceptual precision — basically, being aroused by an alerting signal improved people's ability to discriminate the temporal order of two rapidly-presented targets. However, Colin showed in his Honours thesis (also published in AP&P) that the arousal that comes from an alerting stimulus is independent from the preparedness that comes from a cue that is temporally predictive. So Kadie's project is going to apply Colin's alerting/arousal method to test whether it's arousal or preparedness (or both) that results in improved temporal decision-making. We're hoping to get the Registered Report submitted (to AP&P, of course) in the coming weeks! Another new recruit (Celia Briand) will be exploring whether a memory load will disrupt either of these two forms of temporal attention, and aims to also submit a Registered Report before the end of the Winter term!
I published a paper in a special issue at Cortex (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/cortex/special-issue/10F5CDBNWDH). In my paper (article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945220304238?casa_token=pkiTIhqqXLwAAAAA:pT6pVACC_6DpKU_UiFvvUrosx7stcIIuPQelUkx67ZEgVnUO4j5ZjyvrN3y7J_9vZ6MHSr1yFg; preprint: https://psyarxiv.com/s29f5), we applied drift diffusion modelling to some data from my Master's thesis. The modelling showed that the two forms of IOR each affect different aspects of the decision process. We also survey a great deal of the literature on IOR, and outline how our theory that there are two forms of IOR can explain a number of discordant patterns within, between, and across studies.
I also applied for a number of postdoctoral fellowships, and academic jobs (including my dream job — fingers crossed!). I was NOT prepared for how much work is involved in these applications. It's almost a full-time job to apply for jobs! Passing this bit of information along to future generations of trainees will be a necessity in my mentorship strategy... Fortunately, I had a teaching philosophy and dossier compiled already as a part of the Certificate in University Teaching and Learning (https://www.dal.ca/dept/clt/services/CUTL.html), but if I had to do that IN ADDITION to everything else, I'm not sure I would have managed. Luckily, I'm surrounded by wonderful people who are always gracious with their time and support. Decisions on several fellowships should come in the next few weeks, and jobs shortly thereafter, so hopefully by the time I make my Winter Term recap post I'll have good news to share!
Stay safe, and take care.
- RJ
