“We’re Talkin’ Here!”
Author: Wesley Vaught | Majors: Biology & Biochemistry | Semester: Fall 2022
In a technological world, almost everyone uses two types of media simultaneously. For example, every time students are writing an essay while watching a movie or listening to music, they are media multitasking. A significant contribution research revolving around multitasking has been attention and cognitive control research. This is the ability of a person to control where their attention is placed and how that attention is used – to plan actions or to react to the environment. Our research focused on if participants who reported high frequency of media multitasking had a difficulty in a task that measures a person’s ability to control their responses through proactive control and reactive control. Spoiler alert! The two neural markers (the N2 and P3 components of event-related potentials) used in the analysis showed there was not a significant difference between people who media multitask more frequently and those who media multitask less frequently. This is the research that Morgan Middlebrooks and I took to New York City at the annual conference of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT).
My name is Wesley Vaught, and I am a senior biology and biochemistry student with minors in medial humanities and psychology. We took this trip because our lab had not been to an in-person conference since before COVID-19, and this conference typically lacks neuro-centric research that our lab is often known for. Diversifying both our and the conferences portfolio, the lab decided taking two posters to the conference – one by another graduate student, Hannah Hamrick and one by Morgan Middlebrooks and me. As this was my first conference, it was a special trip because I got to experience a lot of “firsts” in the realm of being a researcher – meeting colleagues from across the country and internationally, supporting my fellow CODA (my lab) Cats, and getting feedback from beginners and experts in the field. While we received overwhelming positive feedback, the constructive feedback was helpful too. For example, a professor noted that our statistical model might be strengthened by analyzing the data with an updated regression model that many biological markers often follow.
Morgan and I talked to many of the folks waling around, and this casual presentation style – presenting amidst a cocktail hour – was beneficial to me because it allowed me to get my “research talk” legs. It was a great introduction into talking about research in front of all levels of people in our field. I see this experience helping me immediately as my thesis defense is coming up Fall 2023 as well as future conferences and research talks. The future of our lab is bright. We have an EEG study and an eye tracking study currently collecting data, and I have begun writing the manuscript for my first first-author publication. The study I am writing for examined the associations of the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) and an ERP component called the late positive potential (LPP). In addition, we have many projects in the works that we have yet to begin; however, if you would like to keep in contact with what CODA is doing, our website is https://judahlab.uark.edu/