One of the aspects of research I love is how random hallway conversations can so quickly lead to a cool collaboration. Working in a team and leveraging each member’s unique skillsets is pretty spectacular when things go right. Most of my collaborations fall quite neatly into my main lines of research but a few just fall outside that neat box so here’s a little corner for these guys.
Also listed here are some “two-birds-one-stone” studies that I conducted while fulfilling teaching responsibilities throughout my career. The first looks at factors that predict the improvement of undergraduate perceptions of statistics and the second looks at how aspects of MCQ test construction can exert subtle influences on student test performance.
EMOTIONAL PROCESSING AND SUBCLINICAL SCHIZOTYPY
The goal of this investigation was to assess potential impairments in social processing as a function of various dimensions of subclinical schizotypy. In this project, I worked with Dr. Charles Davidson to analyze ERP data from a population of young adults expressing varying degrees of subclinical schizotypy characteristics. Intriguingly several basic ERP components were shown to significantly differentiate various schziotypal features.
Davidson, C. A., Kiat, J.E., Tarasenko, M., Ritchie, A. J. R., Molfese, D., Spaulding, W. D. (in press). Electrophysiological correlates of social cognition in subclinical schizotypy. Personality and Mental Health.
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
In my early days. I seriously considered completing a doctorate in quants instead of going into neuroscience. Needless to say, statistics is an area I really enjoy working in. Sadly, not everyone shares this love, and back in my undergraduate years, I collaborated with Dr. Albert Liau to see if we could identify what in-class methods were most effective in shifting folks towards having a more positive view of statistics.
Liau, A.K., Kiat, J.E., Nie, Y. (2014). Investigating the Pedagogical Approaches Related to Changes in Attitudes Toward Statistics in a Quantitative Methods Course for Psychology Undergraduate Students. The AsiaPacific Education Researcher,24(2): 319-327. doi: 10.1007/s40299-014-0182-5.
On a similiar vein, while putting together a test for one of the classes I was teaching, I started wondering if the order of the items in an MCQ item impacted student performance. For example, if a reasonable-sounding albeit incorrect answer was the first one you read in an MCQ item, you might be more likely to pick that response relative to if you had read it after having read the correct answer. This could happen either through satisficing or memory interference-related effects. I got together with a bunch of friends and, in collaboration with Winnee Cheong, we ran and published a study showing that this is indeed the case, with strong MCQ distractors showing a distinct tendency towards being more likely to be selected when encountered earlier in a response list.
Kiat, J. E., Ong, A. R., & Ganesan, A. (2017). The influence of Distractor Strength and Placement on MCQ Responding. Educational Psychology. Advance online publication.
OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENTS
Don’t you just love a good long nature walk? There’s a great deal of interest in the restorative effects of natural environments on psychological function. In a collaboration with Julia Torquati and Anne Schutte (my primary role being the EEG analyst), we looked at how ERP responses related to attentional focus to various measures of attention and inhibitory control in children differed between indoor and outdoor environments. Intriguingly, while behavioral performance did not differ as a function of environment, levels of task-related attention were lower outdoors. These findings suggest that perhaps for some tasks, we can afford to relax a little and mentally stretch our legs, things facilitated by being outdoors, with less of a cost than we might think!
Schutte, A., Torquati, J., Kiat, J.E. (2017). The influence of Indoor and Natural Environments on Children’s Executive Function and Event-Related Potentials. Children, Youth & Environments, 27(2).