The 61st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society is right around the corner, and to quote the song Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield: The conference is “So close you can almost taste it.” Now under usual circumstances, we all would be busily (some frantically) planning our travel to the conference. This might have included checking and re-checking our flight itinerary, stressfully dealing with sold-out conference hotels, strategizing on how best to save conference receipts for later reporting, and the list continues. But because this year’s conference is virtual, the only planning we need to do is pick our favorite seat on the couch (along with a tasty snack!) and log on to enjoy all the latest research on cognition. To help share this research with Psychonomic Society members and the wider public, are this year’s Twitternomes.
Last week, we introduced you all to Louisa Talipski. Louisa will likely provide us with tweets covering current research related to attention. If you’re not following us @Psychonomic_Soc, you should be! And use the #psynom20 during the Meeting to get real-time updates. This week, we introduce Raunak Pilliai, pictured below (follow him on Twitter @PillaiRaunak), who is returning to Psychonomic Twitternome service for the second year in a row. Raunak is a second-year graduate student at Vanderbilt University, working with our very own Digital Associate Editor, Lisa Fazio, in the Building Knowledge Lab.
Raunak’s research interests involve assessing human memory. More specifically, his work explores if and how memory is distorted by the phrasing with which information is presented. Read his and colleagues’ recent paper on using correct vs. incorrect worked examples in math education. This line of research has direct implications for understanding how individuals acquire new information, specifically, facts and world knowledge.
Without further ado, we present our interview with Raunak Pillai.
How has your work life changed as a result of the pandemic?
One project I had been planning on took a halt because we were going to conduct the experiment in-person. Otherwise, most of the work I’ve been doing has been feasible to do remotely. More generally, I would say I definitely miss parts of the daily pace of pre-pandemic work—having a space to work that isn’t my apartment, chatting with the other students in the office, etc.
Has the pandemic caused you to rethink your career path?
Not in particular so far—just moving forward through grad school one step at a time right now.
Has anything beneficial come out of the pandemic for you? Either for your research or personal life, or both?
The project I mentioned earlier that stalled actually benefitted a bit from some extra incubation time. We’re reconsidering some of the decisions around the design and analyses in a way that I think will be really helpful.
What inspired you to get involved with the Psychonomic Society and serve as a Twitternome?
My advisor, Dr. Lisa Fazio, is on the Digital Content team and mentioned that this was an opportunity. I was already very interested in science communications, so it was an easy decision to do this!
What about the Annual Meeting are you most looking forward to?
I grew up just outside Austin, Texas, so I had been much looking forward to getting another chance to go back home, but that, unfortunately, won’t be happening. However, it seems like everybody has been hard at work trying to make this year’s virtual conference a great experience, so I’m looking forward to seeing all of that hard work pay off and to learn about some great research!
Are you presenting at the Annual Meeting? If so, what’s the topic? What day and time?
I’m presenting a poster on 11/20/20 during the 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM slot (poster #2300). The work investigates memory for fact-checking tweets, and whether memory is affected by the wording.
Here is Raunak’s Abstract:
Examining the Effect of Phrasing on Memory for Negated Messages. RAUNAK PILLAI, SARAH BROWN-SCHMIDT, and LISA FAZIO, Vanderbilt University (Sponsored by Lisa Fazio)
Prior work has shown that negated messages (e.g. “I am not cold”) may result in dissociation errors in memory, wherein individuals remember the core affirmative supposition (e.g. “I am cold”) while forgetting the negative label. However, it remains unclear if and how the phrasing of the original negated message affects the likelihood of such errors. To address this, we conducted a two-session study spanning one-week in which participants read fact-checking tweets generated by journalists and researchers that affirmed true claims or negated false ones. Critically, we compared memory for tweets constructed with one of two commonly occurring phrasings: with an evaluation before the claim (e.g. “No, X did not do Y, as A claims”) and with an evaluation after the claim (e.g. “A claims X did Y. No, this is false). We found that participants were successfully able to distinguish true from false claims, and that this ability remained stable over the week-long delay. Contrary to our prediction, this ability was unaffected by the original tweet’s phrasing.
