Eye Movement and Reading Laboratory

Live Poster Session: Zoom Link

Kate Babcock
Kate Babcock

Kate Babcock is senior Neuroscience and Behavior, Biology, and Science in Society triple major from Stratham, NH. She has worked in the Eye Movement and Reading Lab since the spring of her sophomore year. Outside of lab she enjoys spending time with her friends and siblings, working out, and reading.

Shakeel Jessa
Shakeel Jessa

Hi my name is Shakeel Jessa and I am a Senior (’21) Psychology and Government double major from Vancouver, British Columbia. I am a member of the Men’s crew team and an administrative assistant at the Office of International Student Affairs. I am deeply interested in understanding the human mind and how the interactions of people change their experiences. To this end I am very passionate about behavioural and social psychology as they open pathways to understanding how we as humans interact with the world around us.

Sarah Morgan
Sarah Morgan

Sarah Morgan is a junior Neuroscience and Behavior major, with minors in Chemistry and Dance. She started her work in the Eye Movement lab during the summer of 2020. She is from Livermore, California and also enjoys choreographing, dancing, playing music, and learning languages.

Wiralpach Nawabutsitthirat
Wiralpach Nawabutsitthirat

Wiralpach is a junior Psychology and Art Studio double major, with a minor in IDEAS. She is from New Haven, Connecticut. She joined the Eye Movement and Reading Lab in Fall 2020. Her hobbies include cooking, crocheting, and practicing kendo.

Chaltu Rashid
Chaltu Rashid

Chaltu Rashid is a Senior Psychology Major from Oakland, CA. She began working in the Eye Movement and Reading Lab in Fall 2019. Her hobbies include photography, drawing, and softball. After Wesleyan, Chaltu plans to pursue a career in Child Psychology.

Hely Rodriguez

Hely is from Phoenix, Arizona and is currently a master’s student in the NS&B graduate program at Wesleyan. His current research is on the relationships between self-reported ratings of emotional and non-emotional word norms that make up the lexical quality of words and how these qualities influence semantic processing within the context of problem solving and risky-decision making. Outside of school, Hely enjoys fresh air, playing, writing, and listening to music.

Abstract: In this experiment we aimed to determine if and how the lexical quality of words change over time. The two factors of lexical quality that were considered were age of acquisition (AoA) and familiarity (Fam). AoA is a rating that measures when a word is acquired and Fam measures how often a word is experienced. Participants were asked to rate words (selected from the English Lexicon Project and by the researchers) based on Fam and AoA on a 1-7 scale. Results indicated that the means and standard deviations for Fam and AoA ratings were similar between collection periods. Additionally, both Fam and AoA are significantly correlated with ELP word recognition times, however the magnitude of the correlation for Fam appears to be decreasing over time.

WWEP-Eyelab-Poster-21-2