Our Research

Melissa Materia - Psych Science Masters Candidate

The value of concussion baseline assessments is dependent upon athletes giving their best effort. If an athlete fakes poor performance or “sandbags” a future injury may go undetected. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to determine if the SportGait concussion baseline assessment detects differences between participants instructed to sandbag and those who are not. Furthermore, I examined whether participants’ cognitive control is related to their ability to fake poor performance on SportGait. Forty-four participants completed two cognitive control tasks, were randomly assigned to “sandbag” or do their best and completed the SportGait baseline concussion assessment. Results revealed that “sandbagging” participants endorsed more concussion symptoms, made more errors on the CPT-3, and demonstrated lower stride power in their gait. However, cognitive control did not predict sandbagging performance. Together these results indicate that SportGait detects sandbagging, but additional investigation of factors like the impact of coaching on faking behaviors is needed.

Jacob Robbins - Psych Science Masters Candidate

Mia Melone - Departmental Honors Candidate

This study examined the influences of individuals’ cognitive intrinsic motivation and the presence or absence of feedback on a cognitive task that encouraged reactive cognitive control. I hypothesized that the presence of feedback would facilitate faster and more accurate responses. I also hypothesized that participants with greater cognitive intrinsic motivation and therefore a more positive disposition towards exerting cognitive effort, would perform better overall and be less impacted by feedback and reward. Sixty-six individuals completed the Need for Cognition questionnaire (Cacioppo & Petty, 1984) to measure cognitive intrinsic motivation and were randomly assigned to either a rewarded-feedback or informative-feedback Stroop task. My findings support my first hypothesis indicating a role of feedback in reactive cognitive control. Moreover, cognitive intrinsic motivation influenced aspects of cognitive control and cognitive effort.

Hear about our project at SEPA 2022 or click here to learn more!

Facebook is a virtual hotbed for social comparison. People post information about their relationships on Facebook, making it available for other users to compare. However, the content they share represents the most positive characteristics of those relationships, thereby presenting an inflated, or idealized view of normal romantic bonds. Those with low self-esteem and high self-esteem viewed relationship content equally on a Facebook profile but those with low self-esteem evaluated their own relationships more negatively after being exposed to idealized relationship portrayals on Facebook. In other words, we found that those low in self-esteem assessed the social comparison content differently.

Slips of action are cognitive errors that occur during routine tasks in everyday life (Clark, Parakh, Smilek, & Roy, 2012). Minimizing everyday errors involves executive functions including cognitive control, attention, inhibition, and task switching. The Slip Induction Task (SIT) involves participants learning a sequence of movements until they become routine. Upon the sequence becoming well learned, participants complete several more trials which occasionally include sporadic deviations from that previously learned routine sequence. In this way, participants must sometimes inhibit a routine, prepotent response. The SIT has been found to induce slips of action in healthy younger adults (Clark et al., 2012), healthy older adults, and older adults with a history of mild brain injury (Clark, Ozen, Fernandes, & Roy, 2010).