Annual Meeting Daily Recap: Saturday

SYMPOSIUM III: Attention Control in the Wild
Summary by Alyssa Asmar

The selective impact of sleep deprivation on attention control.

As much as we all love the Psychonomic Society annual meeting, attending often leaves us with a lack of sleep – whether it’s from jet lag, staying out too late at the student social, or maybe deciding to give up a few precious hours of sleep to attend Jogonomics in the morning. Could our sleep deprivation be the reason why we might find ourselves zoning out for a moment in a talk when we don’t mean to?

Dr. Kimberly Fenn’s work, presented at the Attention Control in the Wild symposium, suggests that’s a likely possibility. Sleep deprivation has well-documented cognitive consequences, particularly for visual attention. Its influence on higher-order cognitive functions, however, is more complicated. Results in this area tend to be mixed, with some studies showing strong deficits after sleep deprivation and others showing no effects at all, even when using the same tasks within the same lab.

These mixed findings are likely due to factors like low power or a lack of baseline measures. In her talk, Fenn discussed her work that aimed to account for some of these issues to understand two main questions: 1) Does sleep deprivation impact attention control broadly? 2) Are the effects of sleep deprivation universal across different aspects of attention control, or do they differ depending on the aspect?

To test these questions, participants came to the lab in the evening to complete several cognitive tasks. After that, they were randomly assigned to either go home to sleep (sleep group) or stay up all night in the lab (sleep deprivation group). Then, in the morning, both groups completed the cognitive tasks again.

The cognitive tasks included two that measured sustained visual attention and three that measured higher-order aspects of attention control that require greater executive functioning, including inhibition, task switching, and updating working memory. The researchers also had participants complete a multitasking task and a problem-solving/fluid intelligence task.  

Across two studies, Fenn observed largely the same results. For the sustained attention tasks, the sleep-deprived group showed a significant drop in performance from completing the task after a night of no sleep to when they originally completed it in the evening. In contrast, the sleep group’s scores remained consistent across both time points.

For the higher-order tasks, the sleep group improved their performance overnight, while the sleep deprivation group’s performance remained largely unchanged. This result was consistent across all higher-order tasks, except for the inhibitory control task in study 1, where no difference was observed between the groups. Finally, for the problem-solving and multitasking measures, a smaller, but still significant effect of sleep deprivation on task performance was observed.

These findings indicate that sleep deprivation broadly impairs attention control, but it may have a stronger effect on sustained attention than on other aspects of control. Fenn’s next steps with these data are to examine whether sleep-deprivation-driven impairments in attention control, partially or fully, mediate impairments in higher-order cognitive tasks.  I’m excited to hear about these results in the future! 

Lunchtime Workshop: Keeping Your Options Open: Alternative Non-Academic Career Paths
Summary by: Raunak Pillai

For the second year in a row, the Psychonomic Society’s Graduate Student and Postdoc Committee hosted a lunchtime workshop to help early-career Psychonomes learn about possible career opportunities outside academia. This year, student and postdoc trainees heard from some familiar voices from returning panel members Alex Burgoyne, Aubrey Lau, and Rachel Ostrand, along with new panelists Adam Bigs, Andrew Gordon, and Anna Madison.

In addition, this year marked the first time the committee organized a free-form meet-and-greet for trainees to chat with panel members after the session. The event was a resounding success with rich conversations—we had to practically pull our panelists away from the trainees to get a group photo at the end!

Read on for some of the main insights from the panelists.

Question: What part of your (graduate or postdoc) training has helped you the most in your current position?
Graduate and postdoctoral training often require you to be flexible and learn new skills. This flexibility can be crucial when making the leap to industry. In addition, research design and quantitative methods training are often useful in industry roles.

Question: What has been or was the biggest benefit and challenge when transitioning from academia to industry?
While research in academia is often disseminated through academic papers, the panelists noted that research in industry can be communicated more broadly, leading to direct, applied outcomes. The panelists also noted that industry roles offer more flexibility in location and job stability.

Question: Could you share some of the key factors that influenced your decision to pursue an industry job, or to move from academia to industry?
Many of the panelists sought an industry role for personal reasons, such as allowing for greater flexibility in where they lived. They also cited professional reasons, such as a desire for their work to have a tangible and practical impact.

Question: Could you walk us through your timeline for going from academia to industry?
Panelists made the leap to industry at various points in their careers, from graduate school to postdoc training, and even after receiving faculty offers. Timelines vary widely, but industry roles have some similarities with research-based academic positions, allowing many to seamlessly transition to their new roles.

Question: How would you prepare for industry if you are currently a graduate student or postdoc and thinking about applying in the near future?
Internships can be a key stepping stone in transitioning to non-academic roles. In addition, networking (such as through the meet-and-greet we hosted this year) can help you gain insight into relevant roles and career trajectories. Requesting informational meetings with contacts in the field you are entering can help you build personal connections you can draw on when securing industry roles.

Poster Session IV
Summary by: Heather Hill

This morning, I dropped in on a talk session about language research. Language research always has a special place in my heart as it was one of the shared topics of interest I had with my mentor, Dr. Stan Kuczaj. While I may have been more curious about dolphin communication than about human language, language fascinates me, and I often discuss it in my comparative psychology, cognition, and general psychology courses.

Two talks that caught my interest were the data blitz by two graduate students, Claire Guang and Mary Avery. Claire’s talk was about bilinguals’ use of words when discussing emotionally aversive topics. Across two experiments using slightly different paradigms (forced choice and free response) and embarrassing topics (farts and belches vs sexually oriented topics), bilinguals chose to use their foreign language to discuss these aversive topics. Claire interpreted this strategy as an effort to distance oneself from an emotional experience, which may, in turn, facilitate emotional regulation.

Mary continued the theme of emotion-based words and their impact on attention and lexical decision-making. Her series of studies investigated lexical decisions when word valence was manipulated (neutral, anger, fear, disgust, and happiness). Her findings showed that participants took longer to process disgust and responded faster to congruent than to incongruent trials in attentional bias tasks. She concluded that an early attention bias may lead one to process the “disgusting” stimulus as a threat, which is then evaluated for a little longer than a fearful or angry stimulus, as one may be thinking about the possibility of contamination or illness.

Lunchtime Workshop: Funding at the U.S. National Science Foundation
Summary by: Samantha Cruz 

The talk featured two experts, including a former program officer at the U.S. National Science Foundation.

These experts focused their informational talk on navigating the current grant and funding process at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Across the federal landscape, we have seen modifications, cuts, and budget adjustments that affect academics, especially in the sciences. The NSF has also suffered an employee cut of about 25-50% while the person-power needed to meet the demand remains the same.

The presenters led the audience through a very realistic, step-by-step process to increase the likelihood of obtaining NSF funding. They used the NSF website itself instead of a traditional slide deck and led people to find useful documents and information. It was stated and emphasized multiple times that the requesters of funding should focus on current policies and not on past or anticipatory versions of the same. One major item to consider is changes in funding priorities. The overall takeaway: be adaptive to achieve your goals.

Poster Session V
Summary by: Samantha Cruz

The poster reception took place on this fine evening. Those final presenters were able to give their hard work and effort the well-deserved spotlight, finally.

Various Psychonomic Society attendees were seen walking around and stopping at different posters with a drink in hand, hopefully easing the tension or nervousness some of the speakers might have felt. If adult beverages can help you speak a language more fluidly, can they make you speak cognitive psychology more easily? Who knows, maybe that’s someone's next big discovery.

 All sorts of psychological conversations were taking place, and people seemed to be enjoying themselves—all good signs for a final poster session nightcap.

The final poster session has concluded, and all is well. We can now start getting ready to do it again next year.

Annual Meeting Daily Recap: Friday

Symposium I: How can Cognitive Psychologists Ease the Spread of Misinformation and Boost the Spread of Accurate Information in Education?
Summary by: Alyssa Asmar

You’ve probably heard of “growth mindset,” and perhaps you even believe in the concept, as I did before attending Alexander Burgoyne’s talk yesterday. It’s a construct that has been widely disseminated across the educational psychology literature and has been largely monetized through the sale of related self-help books, school interventions, and curriculum supplements. A growth mindset is the belief that attributes, like intelligence, are malleable and can be improved with effort, whereas a fixed mindset is the belief that your attributes are stable.

Early in graduate school, Burgoyne became interested in the growth mindset and decided to test it in a context he knew well: learning to play the piano. He recruited complete novices and asked them to learn a simple song. He found that a growth mindset didn’t predict piano skill acquisition, leading him to question the theory of growth mindsets.

With his colleagues, he eventually set out to test the six core premises of mindset theory, including claims such as “people with fixed mindsets believe that talent alone creates success” and “people with growth mindsets are more resilient after failure.” The researchers found that most of the relationships were not significant, and the strongest relationship they found was in the wrong direction, where participants with a fixed mindset performed better on a test after they had experienced failure, compared to those with a growth mindset.

Since those theoretical claims weren’t supported, their research team wanted to see whether anything else might not hold up. They ran an impressive meta-analysis with a sample size of almost 100,000 students and 96 different effects and found a statistically significant effect of mindset interventions on academic achievement. Interestingly, after the researchers accounted for publication bias, the effect came closer to zero and was no longer statistically significant.

On top of that, they realized that many of the interventions were missing really important ingredients to a good study, such as a control group or a manipulation check. Others had no random assignment, or teachers weren’t blinded to conditions. Burgoyne separated out these poor-quality studies and looked specifically at the studies that were well-controlled. They found that across high-quality studies, there was no effect at all, meaning that even in highly controlled studies, growth mindset interventions did not predict improved academic achievement.

Even more concerning, Burgoyne reported that studies authored by researchers with potential financial conflicts of interest were more than twice as likely to publish positive effects. This is in stark contrast to researchers without financial incentives, whose effects were not significant and actually trended negative.

Burgoyne emphasized that mindset theory has evolved and taken many forms over the years, with different mechanisms, moderators, and interpretations making it difficult to make broad claims about its impact.

Growth mindset theory also does not consider systemic and individual barriers, which can lead to self-blame or unfair judgment of others when failures occur. For example, if someone struggles, the theory may suggest that they didn’t believe in their ability to improve or didn’t persist enough, rather than acknowledging external challenges.

Overall, while a growth mindset may seem intuitively appealing, Burgoyne’s research reminds us to approach its claims cautiously, questioning both the quality of the evidence and the potential influences driving its widespread promotion.

Lunchtime Workshop: Science Outreach and Advocacy
Summary by: Alyssa Asmar

As cognitive scientists, we’re trained to do many things, but communicating our research to non-scientists often isn’t one of them. If you couldn’t make it to the science outreach and advocacy workshop yesterday, I’m hoping to put some of the communication skills I learned into practice by sharing a few suggestions for communicating your own science to public audiences.

Dr. Paula Croxson opened the workshop by emphasizing the first essential step in effective science communication: clearly defining your communication goal. Articulating your goal helps ensure that the information you share actually serves its intended purpose. We should think not just about what we want people to learn, but why. I used to think of science outreach goals as simply informing or educating the public, but Dr. Croxson highlighted a much broader range of possibilities, including shaping science policies and building trust.

She also discussed the importance of considering your audience. Often, scientists want to think of their audience as the “general public,” but as Dr. Croxson noted, there’s no such thing. The easiest way to internalize this is to think about yourself. You’re not a generic member of “the public,” but rather a person with unique identities, interests, politics, and communities. Your audience is no different.

It’s not enough to give people information you want them to know. You really need to think about who you’re giving that information to, why, and how they will interpret it. The more specific you can be about your audience, the better.

Once you have your audience in mind, the next step is to communicate in language they can easily understand. That means avoiding jargon! Dr. Özge Fischer-Baum walked us through why jargon can be a barrier and led us in practicing how to articulate complex scientific concepts in plain, accessible language.

Since you’re all cognitive scientists, I can get away with the jargon-y phrase “cognitive load” – and jargon imposes exactly that: an unnecessary cognitive load on your audience. It makes your message harder to follow and your work more effortful to understand. When your communication is clear, your credibility and influence grow. Translating science for the public doesn’t necessarily mean dumbing it down; it means conveying your ideas precisely, using language that resonates with the people you’re trying to reach.

Dr. Fischer-Baum had us practice modifying jargon by translating scientific terms into more intuitive phrases. For example, instead of saying “latent variable,” you might say “hidden factor,” and instead of “longitudinal study,” you could say “study over time.” It’s a fun and surprisingly challenging exercise, and a useful one to try with the terms you use most frequently in your own research.

By taking the time to clarify your goals, understand your audience, and choose clear language, you can make your scientific research not only more accessible but also more impactful!

Lunchtime Workshop: Encouraging Future Scientists: Supporting Undergraduates at Psychonomics
Summary by: Raunak Pillai

Undergraduate students play a crucial role in psychological research. In recognition of these contributions, a group of Psychonomes has been running an annual lunchtime workshop to help undergraduate students get the most out of their conference experience and become part of the Psychonomics community. This year, undergrad Psychonomes heard a presentation from:

Jessica M. Karanian, Associate Professor at Fairfield University
Jackson S. Colvett, Assistant Professor at Berry College

Followed by some words from panelists:
Mauricio Rodriguez, Doctoral Student at SUNY Albany
Channing Hambric, Postdoctoral Researcher at Bowdoin College
Jessica Udry, Assistant Professor at East Texas A&M
Zohara Assadipour, Doctoral Student at Iowa State

The session began with an overview of conference basics for undergrads. Jackson Colvett discussed the main types of sessions at Psychonomics. Symposia are packages of talks that all touch on a key theme and mark an important direction for the future of cognitive psychological research. Individual talks represent significant experimental contributions from faculty or, sometimes, graduate student trainees. Poster sessions offer a chance for free-form discussion regarding various ongoing projects. Finally, special events—such as the student social—offer more opportunities for conference attendees to meet and keep the conversation going.

Next, Jessica Karanian offered some practical tips for navigating conferences. For instance, during poster sessions, it can be overwhelming to decide which posters to stop by to chat. So, you can breeze through the halls early on and skim the titles and topics while the poster hall is empty (or browse the conference program/app). Then, you can go back and ask questions for the posters that most interest you. If you’re presenting a poster, try to use nonverbal cues to estimate how much interest and knowledge the person you’re talking to has, and tailor the length and detail of your poster presentation based on that. In addition, if you’re interested in networking, consider emailing graduate students in labs working on topics you are interested in to see if they might have time for a quick coffee during the conference.

After this overview, we heard from panelists who answered a series of questions about being an undergraduate at Psychonomics and continuing to graduate school. Read on for some highlights.

Question: What did you do in college to prepare you for getting you to where you are today?
The panelists' answers varied widely on this—some focused heavily on research, while others explored a variety of career options and trajectories to determine what was right for them. The key advice is to develop skills and knowledge that you think you can return to later in your career.

Question: How did you prepare for graduate school interviews?
Panelists suggested reading up on the lab you are planning to work with: what are the main projects the lab is currently working on, and what topics are they pursuing? Be wary of just focusing on the most well-known paper by your prospective advisor—sometimes they are no longer pursuing that line of research, so focus on what they have been doing recently.

Question: Did you take a gap year?
Some panelists did, using the time to gain research experience and develop new skills, while others didn’t and went straight through to grad school. There’s not just one path, it’s all about finding what is right for you and the stage you are at.

Question: What skills helped you in grad school, and were these the same skills you found most helpful in undergrad?
There are a number of skills that are useful in graduate school. Fortunately, you can get a head start on many of these skills in undergrad. For instance, you can learn statistics by taking classes and workshops, learn about how to review the literature and develop research questions by pursuing an honors thesis or independent research, or learn project management and time management through internships or leadership roles in extracurriculars. Above all, self-initiative is a key skill you’ll need, so try to find ways to teach yourself new skills and knowledge, you’ll be doing a lot of that in grad school!

Navigating conferences for the first time as an undergraduate can be daunting. So major thanks to the panelists and organizers for sharing their insights to make this process easier!

Poster Session II
Summary by: Heather Manitzas Hill

I had the privilege of meeting with other presenters and presenting my own poster during the lunch-time poster session on Friday. While our little animal corner of posters did not bring swarms of Psychonomes, we had a lovely time sharing our findings of college students who conditioned fish, pigeons that try to perceive structure from motion, while other pigeons perceiving motion may be affected by auditory stimuli (Pictures below). When we weren’t chatting with each other, we took a few minutes to wander up and down the aisles of posters grouped by various categories.

During this poster session, many winners of the student travel award were present. As described during the opening remarks, the Psychonomic Society added some additional funds to help students attend the conference this year. As part of the committee to help make program decisions, I was glad to see so many recipients of these awards. It was clear this new generation of scientists in the making was using the opportunity to attend this meeting to their advantage. And, even more importantly, their work was recognized, with many attendees eagerly stopping to engage in conversation with them.

I also had some fun stopping by a few other posters, including one from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, by Alexis Richmond & Veronica Yan, in which students at UT recognize that cumulative quizzing is an effective practice but not one they appreciate. In fact, students reading a syllabus that indicated cumulative quizzes occurred in the class were less likely to take the class, rated the professor as cold, thought the class was hard, and among many other negative perceptions. It is interesting that, as humans, we know what is good for us, yet we still want the not-so-good stuff.

Symposium II: Artificial Intelligence and Human Memory: Advancing Theoretical and Practical Insights
Summary by: Raunak Pillai

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have had profound impacts on society in recent years. In addition to its practical impact, AI can serve as a research tool, and the talks in this symposium highlighted how it can be used to understand human memory better.

Ian Dobbins begins by presenting work using natural language processing techniques to examine why correctly rejecting an item on a memory test with high (versus low) confidence predicts a greater likelihood of rejecting the item again on a second memory test. His team used Bag-of-Words analysis and prompts to GPT to assess people’s explanations for their memory judgements. Results from these analyses converged on the prediction that high-confidence correct rejections were supported by subjective assessments that items were distinctive and thus should have been remembered if they were seen. That is, for certain items, people essentially think “I would have remembered if I saw this,” leading to high-confidence correct rejections that are stable over time.

Next, Jesse Grabman brings us to the world of eyewitness memory. When giving reports, people can express their confidence using language—“I’m pretty sure I saw him there.” Grabman reports an experiment examining what we might find if we look at these verbal reports. Using a machine learning approach, his team predicted the accuracy of people’s eyewitness reports from the words they used to describe their confidence. Intriguingly, his team finds that using people’s verbal confidence descriptions allowed them to predict better how accurate people’s confidence ratings were, above and beyond the numeric confidence ratings.

Next, Travis Seale-Carlisle zoomed out to examine the implications of different model types for studying memory. Seale-Carlisle notes the distinction between black box models, whose model parameters are impossible to explain, and glass box models, whose parameters can be picked apart and interpreted meaningfully. It is commonly assumed that black-box models are simply more effective and efficient than comparable glass-box models. But in predicting eyewitness memory data, glass-box models did just as well, if not better, than black-box models. He concludes that glass box models should be preferred because they offer interpretability in high-stakes legal contexts without sacrificing accuracy or predictive validity.

Nydia Ayala then continued discussing the use of language to examine confidence in eyewitness memory. One common concern with eyewitness memory is that people may make relative decisions, testing whether the target is closer to one’s memory than other targets, rather than absolute decisions, testing whether the target actually matches one’s memory. Corroborating these concerns, Ayala presents natural language analyses showing that language consistent with relative (rather than absolute) decisions is more likely to be accurate.

Rachel Greenspan switches gears from eyewitness memory to facial perception. A common psychological finding in face perception is the cross-race effect—people are better at remembering faces of their own race than those of another. Greenspan presents some data from a new experiment, finding that this effect also holds for AI-generated White and Black faces. White participants are better able to correctly remember White faces, and Black participants are better able to correctly remember Black faces. Intriguingly, her team also finds that false alarm rates are extremely high for AI-generated Black participants, regardless of race, suggesting that the AI models are likely undertrained on Black faces and may be less likely to generate unique Black faces compared to White ones.

Finally, Chad Dodson concludes the symposium by returning to the running theme of AI and eyewitness memory. An important task for the legal system is to examine when people’s eyewitness testimony is accurate versus when it is not. Dodson presents a study asking people to assess the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Critically, some participants also received information on whether an AI classification system deemed the judgment accurate. The key finding was that people were better at discerning accurate from inaccurate identification when they received information about the AI’s classification.

Overall, this symposium highlighted several ways in which the study of human memory is advancing through novel AI techniques, enabling the generation of new kinds of stimuli, stronger tests of hypotheses, and practical insights for applying psychological research to real-world problems.

Student Social
Summary by: Samantha Cruz

The fun, food-filled event was held at the Appaloosa Grill in the heart of downtown Denver, within walking distance of the Conference. Both aspects were truly appreciated by the Graduate Attendees themselves. The event featured one free drink per attendee and a buffet bar with plenty of hors d'oeuvres and other nibbles.

This year's attendees enjoyed a spacious environment with a variety of socializing opportunities, including long tables, standing tables, booth areas, and club chairs, with plenty of space to set down your drink and chat. Many conference attendees appreciated the space component.

As in previous years, this event continues to provide the perfect opportunity for psychology graduate students to blow off steam after days filled with learning, presentations, and workshops. Some say it's an event they look forward to mingling, networking, and making new friends who actually understand what they study. Others use it as an opportunity to gather with friends they don’t get to see often, and others use it as an opportunity for a culinary experience.

Spin it any way you want, the fact is this social gathering is enjoyable and appreciated by the attendees, and as one Raunak Pillai put it, “This is THE single best Psychonomic social event of 2025.”