2009 Research Mentoring-Pair Travel Award

I'm applying for the AHSA (American Speech-Language and Hearing Association) travel award to attend a conference in November in New Orleans. I am required to write a narrative biological sketch and a 1,000 word essay detailing my research goals and how attending the conference will enhance them. Attached here is the biographical sketch, soon to follow (later tonight) will be the essay.

Jake Kurczek is a 2009 graduate of St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN) with a B.A. in psychology (Cum Laude with Distinction). In the summer of 2009, he began his work toward a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA). In the summer of 2009, he is completing his first rotation of the Neuroscience program and his mentor is Dr. Jean K. Gordon. Jake is assisting Dr. Gordon with two on-going research projects. The first investigates what variables of words contribute to the ease or difficulty of word production and word recognition. This is accomplished with a auditory lexical decision task and an visual naming task. In each of the tasks the response time and the accuracy was recorded. These variables are analyzed (multiple regression and linear mixed effect models) against the independent variables of the words themselves to see what contributes to the response time and accuracy of the tasks.
His previous research work includes five studies in behavioral/cognitive neuroscience. In his junior year in college (2007/2008), he spent his time investigating the effects of spatial frequencies on people’s perception of gender. Two projects were developed from this overall investigation including, “Perceptual Adaptation Aftereffects in Cross-race Gender Identification” and “Evidence for Lower Level Processing of Human Gender.” In his senior year, he would begin work on three different research projects. The first was an analysis of the St. Olaf psychology department’s Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) through the use of questionnaires that he developed along with the psychology department with responses collected from the previous six years of psychology graduates. The second was a behavioral neuroscience research study which investigated ethanol’s anxiolytic effect on rats in the elevated plus maze as well as a lesion study which attempted to reproduce this axiolytic effect. The third study was his senior distinction project. This study was entitled, “Lexical decision and the diffusion model: An investigation into the mental lexicon.” First the effects of frequency and neighborhood density were investigated and modeled with the diffusion model as a pilot study. Two future studies were developed in which semantic and repetition priming were investigated in the lexical decision task and analyzed with the diffusion model. The purpose of the research was to find a possible/plausible explanation for the cognitive differences between the two different types of priming.