Robin Rico-Sotelo is a graduating senior with a Neuroscience and Hispanic Literatures and Cultures double major as well as an Educational Studies minor. He hopes to utilize his research findings to develop more accessible learning strategies for neurodivergent students.
Shayna McCarthy is a Junior Psychology major at Wesleyan. She is interested in continuing to learn about the human mind and how it affects how people interact with one another. Outside of school she is a part of the Women’s Crew team and works in producing digital design.
Grace Devanny
Grace Devanny is a Senior Psychology and Neuroscience and Behavior double major at Wesleyan. Outside of her courses, she is a member of the Women’s Track and Field team and Soccer team. She hopes to take her experience in both Professor Kim’s Memory, Cognition, and Self lab and Professor Juhasz’s Eye Movement and Reading lab to learn more about the intricacies and mysteries of the brain.
Augusta Claire Burhans
Augusta Claire Burhans is a senior Psychology major with a minor in African Studies. She is interested in studying psychopathology as well as self-biases in attention, memory, and perception. After Wesleyan, she hopes to pursue either a further degree in clinical psychology or a joint degree in law and psychology. Outside of the lab, she runs for the Wesleyan Women’s Track and Field team and enjoys traveling.
Nina Eyres
Nina Eyres is a senior Psychology and Science in Society double major. She is especially interested in how one’s individualized biases and experiences can give rise to the manipulation of certain memories as a function of time. After her time at Wesleyan, Nina is interested in obtaining a law degree in a field that employs research in cognitive psychology. Away from the lab, she can be found hiking, playing club soccer, and bragging about her dog back home.
Abstract: Psychological distance (i.e., the distance of a stimulus from a person’s direct experience) is suggested to alter the way people construe a stimulus, with a more detail-oriented, concrete construal for a psychologically proximal stimulus vs. a more global, abstract construal for a psychologically distal stimulus. In our previous study, manipulating psychological distance at encoding led to a verbatim memory advantage (i.e., better memory for exact visual details) vs. a gist memory advantage (i.e., better memory for global meaning) for psychologically proximal vs. distal stimuli, respectively. In the present study, we investigated whether the impact of psychological distance on memory operates mainly at memory encoding or at retrieval, by manipulating psychological distance after encoding but prior to retrieval. During encoding, participants judged the size of everyday objects. They then wrote about their life tomorrow or one year into the future. They then completed a Behavioral Identification Form in which they indicated their preference for abstract vs. concrete descriptions of behaviors. Finally, in a surprise recognition test, participants indicated whether shown objects were exactly the same as the ones they had seen before, similar, or new. Replicating our previous findings, psychological distance affected memory specificity, by producing a verbatim vs. gist memory advantage for objects retrieved in a psychologically proximal vs. distal mindset, respectively. The present findings suggest that the effects of psychological distance on memory mainly operate at retrieval, affecting the relative accessibility of different aspects of information already stored in memory.
