Everyone. My name is Suzanne Rose, and I'm going to be talking about my summer experience. So actually, a different experience from Elise and Claudia, I was returning home from being abroad, and I used these skills to help me in my research job. When I returned home, I used link funding for a six week internship at Gordon College, and I worked in the psychology lab. And that will be what this presentation is about, but I'll talk of a little bit about the perspective that I got from being abroad. 

So I was in Vietnam teaching math, life skills, and soccer to sixth and seventh grade students. And to see how excited they were and passionate they were about learning, it made me appreciate the resources we have here for education and the opportunities for research. So I went with a program called Coach for College, which was funded by the Weissman Center for Leadership here. And I had a really great experience, and I thought about this and I had this perspective when I came home. 

So I'm going to tell you a bit about the research that I did this past summer, and then also how it's helped me at Mount Holyoke since being back. So we were doing time perception studies, myself, a research assistant who is a recent graduate at Gordon College, and Dr. Hodges who's a professor at Gordon, and we were exploring two different time perception effects that appear in the research. The first is the magnitude effect, which states that larger numbers are perceived as lasting longer than smaller numbers. So for example, if a number 9 is projected a screen for a specific amount of time, and then the number three is also on the screen for the same amount of time, participants will think that the number 9 is lasting longer. And then a valence effect states that negative events are perceived as lasting longer than positive events, so this is like the saying, time flies when you're having fun. 

So the main project that I had to work on was how participants respond when there are magnitude and valance effects happening at the same time. So I actually worked, two Summers ago, with Dr. Hodges and another professor at Gordon, part time, and I was involved in some of this research. And we built off of the previous studies we worked on, and in the summer, I was able to work full time for him. And so we came up with a brand new study trying to identify these differences, and we came up with two different conditions. 

So we had a baseball condition, which stated that the participants were told that the number on the screen represented the amount of runs their team scored in the game. And then in the golf condition, the number represented the amount of strokes it took them to get the ball in the hole. So these two scenarios were created because of baseball. You want a higher number of runs for your team, and in golf, you want a few number of strokes, so in this context, in terms of magnitude, baseball was positive and golf was negative. 

So the way that we assessed time perception was a number would appear on the screen, and then participants would see it for a specific amount of time. Then the number would disappear, and this middle screen would appear. Participants would press the Y key to start their time estimation, and they were told to perceive the amount of time they saw the number. So they would press the Y key once to start their estimation, and then a second time to end their time estimation. Then a blank screen would appear, and this procedure would continue with various numbers throughout. 

So the way we have this set up was participants saw numbers 1 through 9 for differing time variations of 800-2400 milliseconds, and all of the numbers and all of the times are counterbalanced throughout the experiment and presented randomly to participants. And we were able to do this on the program super lab, which is a software that we able to design the studies on. And then participants were told to accurately assess the amount of time that they saw each stimulus. 

So these are some of the hypotheses we have. We think that magnitude will be less in the baseball condition compared to the golf condition. So what this means is, as the number increases in the base-- in the golf condition, so will the time of estimation or overestimation of the stimulus. But in the baseball condition, it will actually be an inverted magnitude effect because of the positive valance context. So we think that the positive or negative context will affect the way participants perceived numbers 

Where are we now? So right now, they're currently running-- they're running these studies at Gordon College, and I'm excited to see where these go. And as I mentioned before, two Summers ago, we created pilot studies to assess the ways that we wanted to further this project. 

So this is a picture of my sister up here. She came at the end of the summer to test out the work that I had been doing, both myself, and Gian also created a different study. And so she came in and ran the studies for us. 

Some of the transferable skills that I've learned. I did a lot of reviewing literature in the beginning of the research process, and then analyzing data from the pilot studies. I spent a lot of time in the first part of my summer analyzing the data and cleaning up the data on Excel and then working with SPSS. And then programming through super lab, I became a lot more comfortable with the software. And working collaboratively with a team was a really great experience, because I learned a lot from the mentors that I had there. 

This has also helped me continue research at Mount Holyoke and feel more comfortable in this field. Well, time perception is an area I had never studied before. I got a really great scope of what it's like to conduct research and all of the time and effort that goes into this work. And as I mentioned before, Dr. Hodges and Gian were great mentors for me, and gave me the confidence and the comfort level in being able to pursue independent research at Mount Holyoke. So right now, I'm working on a project looking at female athlete well-being with Professor Davis, and I don't think I would have pursued this opportunity if I didn't have this experience. 

So just for people who are thinking about research opportunities in the future, I just reached out to professors at colleges near my hometown, because I knew I wanted to be home for the second part of the summer. And I would encourage people to reach out to individuals that have a career path that they're interested in or in a geographic location that interests you. 

And the link funding is great, because it gives you an opportunity to have many different options, because you're not getting compensated from the institution that you're working at. And so I was lucky enough to have an abroad experience and then bring that prospective home with me and do research with a great group of people. 

So overall, I just want to thank the Link Fund. I want to thank Dr. Hodges and Gian for welcoming me to their team, and for all of you for being here. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE]