December 1, 2017

Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting

Jennifer McCabe

The Psychonomic Society held its annual meeting in Vancouver, B.C from November 9th to 12th, 2017. The Goucher Center for Psychology’s Attention and Perception Lab, led by Dr. Thomas Ghirardelli, had the opportunity to attend and present at the conference. 

The Psychonomic Society held its annual meeting in Vancouver, B.C from November 9th to 12th, 2017. The conference features presentations in experimental and cognitive psychology from around the world. The Goucher Center for Psychology’s Attention and Perception Lab, led by Dr. Thomas Ghirardelli, had the opportunity to attend and present at the conference. Current Goucher students who are on Dr. Ghiradelli’s research team, and were able to present research at this conference were Elia Goffi (’18), Soliana Goldrich (’18), Leigh Engelke (’18), Kathryn Monthie (’19), and Anne Werkheiser (’18). The research team gave a poster presentation entitled, “Do visually salient singletons capture attention in a grasping task?” Recent work in the lab has centered around the question of whether certain properties of attention, which were identified in research using two-dimensional computer tasks, operate similarly in a more real-world, three-dimensional setting.

Two Goucher alumni also attended and presented at the conference. Jessica Leffers (‘16), a former research team member in Dr. Ghirardelli’s lab who is now a graduate student studying cognition at Northeastern University, presented her work on “Relations between racial essentialism and facial recognition”. Blair Shevlin (‘13), who worked with Dr. Jennifer McCabe on her research team and who is now in a doctoral program at The Ohio State University, presented his work on “Cognitive abilities associated with changing perceptions of distracted-driving risk”.

Congratulations to our Goucher Psychology students past and present on their presentations!