{"id":70456,"date":"2021-02-08T15:07:30","date_gmt":"2021-02-08T20:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=70456"},"modified":"2021-02-09T15:36:42","modified_gmt":"2021-02-09T20:36:42","slug":"memory-research-shifted-online-seeks-child-participants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2021\/02\/memory-research-shifted-online-seeks-child-participants\/","title":{"rendered":"Memory research shifted online seeks child participants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around this time last year, Brock’s Developing Memory and Cognition Lab<\/a> regularly echoed with the questions and giggles of very young research participants.<\/p>\n

Lab Director and Associate Professor of Psychology Caitlin Mahy, along with PhD student Tessa Mazachowsky, had just released The Children\u2019s Future-Thinking Questionnaire<\/a> and accompanying research confirming that parents are generally accurate when assessing their children\u2019s future-oriented cognitive abilities.<\/p>\n

This finding has served Mahy well one year later, as she and her student research team have sought out ways to adapt to a new online research environment while continuing to study prospective memory and cognitive development in children.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the limitations of just asking parents to report on children is you have to take a leap of faith that parents really do accurately report on children\u2019s behaviour,\u201d Mahy says. \u201cWe know from our work on the Children\u2019s Future-Thinking Questionnaire that parents are actually pretty accurate in assessing their children\u2019s behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n

With this in mind, Mahy and her students have undertaken several new studies adapted to research tasks that can be conducted virtually. But while some research methods, such as conducting surveys, are relatively easy to administer remotely, asking a three-year-old to focus on a memory task while sitting in her playroom holding a smartphone can be a challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we really take for granted the amount of focus children have and how much we can redirect children\u2019s attention when we\u2019re working face-to-face with them in the lab, so that\u2019s been one challenge \u2014 kids are in their home environments and are highly distractible,\u201d Mahy says. \u201cWe\u2019ve also had challenges with kids being on cell phones or tablets and running all around the house while trying to participate in a study.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mahy says that while the quality of data collected in this way isn\u2019t quite the same as the data collected in a lab, it is still possible to explore many interesting avenues of research.<\/p>\n

Her lab is currently seeking participants for two fully online studies. In the first, three- and four-year-olds complete tasks to help the researchers examine why children are forgetful, and in another, four- and six-year-olds perform tasks that will help show if visual reminders or verbal reminders are more effective.<\/p>\n

Any parents interested in having their child participate in an online study is invited to contact the lab<\/a> for more details.<\/p>\n

Mahy acknowledges that shifting to virtual studies has been \u201cquite a change,\u201d noting that some of her students have had to change gears in order to comply with public health guidelines.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of my master\u2019s students, Samantha Moeller, wanted to look at children\u2019s false memory in the lab, so our plan was to bring in children of different ages and compare the development of false memory,\u201d Mahy says. \u201cBecause of some of the tasks involved, it really needed face-to-face interaction, so we couldn\u2019t adapt that project to the virtual or online format.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a result, the team refocused on another project looking at how adults perceive forgetful children, still broadly in the area of children\u2019s memory but very different from the original plan.<\/p>\n

Mahy also embarked on a project outside of her typical area of developmental research, teaming up with honours student Estera Houshang Tehrani and Assistant Professor William Hall in Psychology to study how forgetfulness in men and women is perceived.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s kind of nice, actually \u2014 maybe one of the silver linings of the pandemic \u2014 is that this is not typically a study I would have thought about for an honours student in my lab,\u201d Mahy says. \u201cIt is much more in the area of social cognition, so it\u2019s really an interdisciplinary study.\u201d<\/p>\n

By designing vignettes showing fictional men and women forgetting at work or at home, and forgetting things that affect others or only themselves, and then asking participants to assess various traits of the individuals based on what they have read, the team hope to identify some of the factors that can affect how we are seen by others.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re really interested to know whether men and women are judged differently,\u201d says Mahy, who hopes to share some preliminary findings from the study when she speaks at the next meeting of Women in Leadership<\/a> on Feb. 11.<\/p>\n

Mahy will also engage with her field more expansively during her new three-year appointment as an Associate Editor for Cognitive Development<\/a>, a journal focused on the emergence of children\u2019s cognitive abilities in early childhood and development across the adolescent years. She has previously served on the editorial board and has published her own work there in the past, so the new role is an exciting opportunity.<\/p>\n

She says she looks forward not only to refining her editorial skills, but also to reading on a broad range of subjects within the field and learning about the most recent research findings ahead of publication.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s really exciting to see what\u2019s actually happening now, potentially a year before something\u2019s published,\u201d says Mahy. \u201cIt\u2019s a great way to keep up to date in the field and see what\u2019s coming down the pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around this time last year, Brock’s Developing Memory and Cognition Lab regularly echoed with the questions and giggles of very young research participants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":70457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,188,55,1,4,5,38],"tags":[3437,5227,703,9963,522,29,9962,9762,9961],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70458,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70456\/revisions\/70458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}