The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Chicago drew to a close on Sunday. Our Twitter feed provides a record of the meeting with the hashtag #Psynom15. As always, the meeting included a number of poster sessions, and on the Saturday evening Cassie Jacobs and I approached a number of student authors at their posters at random (technically it wasn’t entirely random as I didn’t toss any coins or rolled any dice).

We snapped pics of the posters and authors, and I interviewed them by email to get a better sense of what the next generation of Psychonomes is up to and hopes to achieve. Specifically, I asked the student authors three questions:

1. What’s the punchline of your poster? What have we learned from it?
2. What did you enjoy the most about #Psynom15?
3. Where do you want to be 10 years from now, career-wise?

Here are the posters and the responses from the first five authors who got back to me (sorry if your response didn’t make it on time).

Retrieval Practice Can Eliminate Both the Cost and Benefit of Directed Forgetting

Sara D. Davis (and Jason Chan)

1. Retrieval practice in some cases can have a more powerful effect on memory than motivation to remember or forget. We found administering a long initial test prior to directed forgetting instructions eliminated the cost and benefit associated with directed forgetting.
2. The supportive community at Psychonomics is really great. I really enjoyed being able to meet and receive feedback on my work from the best and the brightest in the field. I not only made new connections, but was able to reconnect and network with individuals I’ve met at previous Psychonomics meetings.
3. It’s hard to know where I’ll be 10 years from now, but I’d like to be applying my memory expertise to applied domains such as eyewitness testimony and education. I’d really like to be able to find ways to take lessons learned from my research and see them implemented in the real-world.

Determinants of juror belief in witness testimony: The role of witness confidence

Rachel DeFranco (and Maria Zaragoza and David Riccio)

1. While jurors initially disbelieve witness testimony delivered with uncertainty, not only can they come to believe it over time, but they also seem to forget the witness was uncertain in the first place.
2. Being able to see and hear about all the amazing research being carried out was fantastic, and having discussions about my own work with others in the area was enlightening.
3. Ten years from now, I hope to be thriving not only in terms of my own research, but also in terms of educating the next generation of psychologists through teaching.

The Effects of Foreign-Accented Speech Maskers On Speech-in-Speech Recognition

Brittany Williams (and Navin Viswanathan)

1. English listeners are able to ignore speech in a foreign language especially if that language is dissimilar to English. However, in this poster that I co-presented with my mentor (Dr. Viswanathan), we found that listeners find it harder to ignore the foreign language background when the sources of background and target speech are similar.
2. I appreciated the diversity of projects that were presented during poster sessions and talks. I also enjoyed the new insights I gained from learning about and discussing projects with other researchers. As a current prospective PhD candidate, I had the opportunity to learn more about the kind of work I could pursue.
3. I aim to have my PhD completed in the next 5 to 6 years and then hold an academic position. As part of my research program, I will work to better understand the process of speech perception and production.

Individual Differences in Engaged Attention Can Influence Misinformation Effects

Meghan Salomon (and David Rapp)

1. High-absorption individuals (people who get easily caught up in emotional or sensory experiences) report less misinformation in a text that they just read compared to the normal population, which shows that individual differences in attention can attenuate the propensity to retain misinformation.
2. The presentations are great—but I love the dynamism, quick thinking, and theoretical argumentation displayed by researchers in the Q/A afterwards. That dialogue really unveils the nuts and bolts of how to think about experimentation in the greater landscape of theory.
3. I hope to have developed and established a line of research analyzing optimal cognitive factors and decision-making processes that lead us to be careful and savvy media consumers.

A Study of the Emotional Perception of Musical Harmony

Jaclyn Elizabeth Mandart (and Stephen Romero and Cassidy Merklen)

1. We wanted to examine the relationship between music and mood. Our study aimed to break music down into its smallest elements to see what level of musical complexity would succeed in affect a person’s emotional state.
2. My “day job” is a bit outside the realm of psychology- I work in college admissions- so I just loved being fully immersed in scientific inquiry for a weekend.
3. 10 years from now I hope to be finishing up a PhD in Cognitive Psychology!

This all sounds great. Stand by for the sequel, imaginatively called #Psynom16 and set in Boston with the same star cast of actors. And before then, don’t forget the intermezzo in Granada, Spain: #EuroPS16. Same stellar cast, stunning architecture.