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Lillian Park
Project Description Lillian will be researching the phenomenon of false recall, in which a person confidently remembers something that did not occur. False memory has been a vexing problem in psychological theory and its clinical and forensic applications. A new paradigm suggests that people spontaneously generate associatively or thematically related material while they encode memories, and later confuse these self-generated items with what actually happened. For her Senior Honors Thesis in Psychology, Lillian proposes to advance the state of knowledge in the field by studying this spontaneous associative process in the laboratory, using human subjects. Her experiments will help her to synthesize several differing explanations for the phenomenon of false recall and to produce a concrete model of the cognitive processes involved. Her research into the way memory operates will have implications in many areas including eye-witness testimony.
Scholar's Photo
Scholar's Journal Naively, when I started this project, I thought 40 subjects = 40 hours. My mentor felt sorry for me, so we agreed for the sake of sanity not to throw out much of the data that we would have had to disqualify if we had been as rigorous in standards as we had initially intended. Had we kept to our original expectations, I would have needed to test 80 plus subjects to have 40 usable sets of results. A few problems that I've run across are subjects who take the test out of order, those who don't understand what's going on and never enlighten me about it until after they're done, those that never paid attention to the directions and do their own little thing on my time, and so forth. Then there are all those wonderful moments when I was playing "Waiting for Godot," because some people never kept their appointment times and never bothered to call to cancel. I have spoken about my woes to other researchers, and they all say the same exact thing: "Yeah, that's the type of thing that no one ever talks about in research." I love the frustrations, the work, and the wonderful joys that I will experience when the experiment works out. I'm especially looking forward to the moment when I reach statistical significance, which is a wonderful thing--provided it's the significance you were looking for. Lillian Park What we learn in class are supposed to be tools we will use for the rest of our lives. So far, my classes have armed me with a flathead screwdriver, when what I really need is a phillips. So, I'm doing a lot of studying on my own. I've learned how to do different statistical tests (e.g. two-way anova, chi-squared) on my data. I use statistics to see if the difference I get between two different manipulations is or is not due to chance. Stats says my data is not due to chance, which is something I'm very happy about. I used to think that running subjects was just about one of the dullest thing about research. Now, I happen to love it. With classes and other responsibilities starting up again, the running of subjects gives me a chance to sit and relax and not feel guilty for not working. I purposely try to cram as many subjects as I can, not only for efficiency's sake but to give me a small breather in my life Berkeley, CA The first experiment has gone off with very few problems. Yes, I complained (a lot) in my previous entries. I now realize that the problems I faced then are nothing compared to the problem I face now. I started on the second experiment in October. I ran about 2/3 of the experiment and looked at the data, but got no results. I talked it over with my mentor, Dr. Kihlstrom, and we decided to change how we presented the information. (I can't go into further details because readers might be my potential subjects.) I fiddled with the programming for a couple weeks including some very late night sessions yelling at the computer and some very frantic e-mails to a grad student at Yale, who was the only person I knew who knew how to program in RSVP, the computer language I was using. I ran just a little fewer than 20 subjects (I need 40 total) and did the preliminary analysis of the data over winter break. I got -- just a little more than nothing. I haven't spoken to my mentor yet, but I have a hunch that I'll need to change how we present the information again. And so goes the life of a researcher. Berkeley, CA |
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