NOTE: This is one in a series of articles on Brock’s 2023-24 Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship recipients. Read other stories in the series on The Brock News.

Lamis El-Sabaa chose Brock for two reasons.

One was the chance to work with graduate supervisor Karen Campbell, Associate Professor of Psychology and a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging.

But just as important to El-Sabaa was Brock’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI).

The Master of Arts in Psychology student says she was excited to receive the Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship, which aligns with both her research priorities and her advocacy work around EDI.

“It’s a scholarship that I genuinely am so proud of because I’m super passionate about how past experience informs research decisions being made right now,” says El-Sabaa. “I think it’s such a great idea to highlight people of different backgrounds to show how that plays into their research.”

El-Sabaa’s research interests stretch back to when her parents immigrated to Canada from the Middle East. They decided to teach her only English, reasoning that learning both English and their mother tongue of Arabic at the same time might cause delays in her overall learning.

As an undergraduate student at the University of Windsor, El-Sabaa set out to find out if their concerns were justified, undertaking thesis research to compare monolingual and bilingual students on cognitive performance in memory and reading comprehension.

She also took part in a separate project examining whether culture and ethnicity play a role during neuropsychological assessments of aging adults from diverse backgrounds.

“We wanted to know whether it’s fair to administer the same type of tests to everybody when there are differences in language and culture — whether the tests made references to culture that might cause somebody who was less familiar with that culture to perform worse,” says El-Sabaa.

All of these research experiences have fed into El-Sabaa’s current project in the Campbell Neurocognitive Aging Lab, where she is comparing the performance of younger adults and older adults on tasks in three cognitive areas:

• sustained attention
• response inhibition, or the ability to withhold a response
• implicit memory, which relates to how people unconsciously encode information for future retrieval

She says all three factors play a role in a person’s ability to recall target details.

“If you’re not paying attention, you can actually encode irrelevant information — so you might remember what someone wore or looked like, but when it comes to retrieving their name, it becomes difficult,” says El-Sabaa. “The name is intertwined with the irrelevant information.”

She adds that while many cultures revere the wisdom and experience of older adults, negative stereotypes related to aging in Western cultures can inhibit the performance of older adults on the tasks required for her study.

“Older adults are hyper-aware of the fact that as you age, you tend to decline in certain cognitive abilities, so they may try to act in a way that does not affirm that stereotype,” El-Sabaa says. “As a result, they monitor their performance very closely, often more closely than do younger adults, and this can create task-related interference.”

While her master’s research is focused on age differences rather than differences in ethnicity or language, El-Sabaa says that being aware of how culture and language affect tasks and testing make her more effective as a researcher.

“Keeping in mind that different cultures view aging differently can help inform the results that I get,” she says. “I can ask if it makes sense that a person who doesn’t speak English as a first language is performing this way, and it also helps me make sure that my measures can stand up to differences in ethnicity or culture going forward.”