Projects

Agent Based Modeling

Here's an example of the agent based modeling I do. This example is based off the Schelling segregation model. Click to view.

Epidemiology Narrative

Here's a class project where I reinterpreted influenza data from the CDC. Here's how I did it.

Honors Thesis

I also happen to be working on an honors thesis about focusing on children’s attitudes regarding the fluidity of race and children’s trust regarding biracial identity in an academic context as part of an Honors Thesis. I will attach a file of the paper below that you can download, as well as a PDF that you can visibly read when it is completed.

Research Papers

There are 3 research papers to date to look at. They completely detail my processes and implementation. The abstracts for each are written below!

Previous research demonstrates that spatial training improves one's proficiency in spatial tasks (Uttal et al., 2013). This correlational study investigates spatial activities and their influence on spatial tasks in0 desktop and immersive virtual reality. We hypothesized that increased video game and navigation experience would lead to increased performance on desktop and immersive virtual reality tasks. Participants navigated routes and indicated direction of objects, measured by pointing accuracy and way-finding efficiency in desktop and immersive VR tasks. Participants completed self-report questionnaires about previous spatial activity and video game experience. There was a significant correlation between participants with more navigation experience and pointing accuracy in immersive Virtual Reality; one gaming measure correlated marginally with immersive Virtual Reality way-finding efficiency, r(112) = -.19, p = 0.04. Increased gaming experience did not correlate with immersive Virtual Reality pointing error, but did correlate with desktop pointing error. Limitations about this study and implications of video game experience on these measures are discussed.

How important are eyewitness testimonies? We investigated the potential effect of authoritative eyewitness testimony, and the veracity of the testimony on juror decision-making. When our memory has discrepancies, we utilize a source-monitoring framework which suggests we confuse the source of our information between multiple sources. Here, 55 college-age participants saw a video of a car crash and read a testimony, relayed by an eyewitness differing in authority (police officer or bystander) and in testimony content (true or false relative to the facts in the video). Participants completed a 10-question-posttest, where they recalled details of the event. No significant effects were found for any manipulated condition on the posttest. There was a significant interaction between authoritative condition and perceived confidence in participant accuracy of their recall. These findings suggest that jurors do not factor in testimony when recalling detailed events, but do deliberate more when an authority figure is presented.

The Social Cognitive Development Lab runs miniature research questions based on findings from various papers on developmental psychology. I decided to spearhead a question of my own, based on paradigms in developmental psychology on the topic of children’s development in the belief of free will. I collected data from our adult lab participants (N= 13) and ran analyses in R. This was in a timeframe of one week!

All graphs are done in R.

This is an agent based model. The purpose of this model is to explore the emergence of fads as a function of varying levels of conformity and anticonformity using facial hair trends over time.

This is an agent based model of the Schelling segregation model. As long as individuals do not want to be the minority in their local neighborhood, the agents will have the desire to be in different local environments. So, after agents are allowed to move in accordance with their motivations, highly segregated neighborhoods do appear:

This is an agent based model. Compare strategies within the Monty Hall Problem. Agents will take turns playing the guessing game from the Monty Hall problem. The agent guessing strategy is plotted below.

This is the density and scatterplot for a confidence rating following a quiz for a cognitive psychology experiment.

This is a bar graph for the mean of judged responses for word pairs in a cognitive psychology experiment.

This is a bar graph for the number of responses for a question regarding perceived desire.