Benjamin Katz, Jessica Hering and Elizabeth Whitmore present at New England Psychological Association annual conference
Along with their faculty mentors Jennifer Stiegler-Balfour, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology and Regula Robnett, Ph.D., professor of occupational therapy, students Benjamin Katz (Psychology ’17), Jessica Hering (Occupational Studies major and Psychology minor ’15), and Elizabeth Whitmore (Medical Biology major and Psychology minor ’14) recently presented at the . This year’s event was held at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
The presentation, titled "Protagonist goal monitoring in participants with mild cognitive impairment and normal cognitive functioning​," examined the effects of aging and memory decline on reading comprehension.
For this study, the research team administered a reading comprehension task via computer in conjunction with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test to determine if participants had experienced any cognitive decline.
The results showed that individuals with lower scores on the MoCA tend not to be sensitive to subtle nuances of written text such as detecting small inconsistencies. Specifically, individuals who had lower attention spans as well as trouble with language fluency (sub-scales on the MoCA) had difficulty monitoring protagonists’ goals and were unable to detect if the protagonist performed an action that was inconsistent with previously stated intentions.