Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Social Cognition
- Creators: Doane, Leah
Students in academic environments receive near-constant feedback about both their own abilities as well as the performance of their peers which could significantly alter their cognitive and learning outcomes. This research investigates whether this social feedback concerning peer ability would improve students’ cognitive performance as measured by a visual working memory (VWM) task. Specifically, the present study provides either positive or negative feedback by means of peers’ performance to test for changes in the quality (memory precision) and the memorability (memory failure rate) of visual working memory representations. The effect of feedback on individual confidence was also examined, as feedback might impact subjective confidence instead of object task performance. Memory precision, participant guess rate, and confidence were compared across both halves of the experiment to determine potential time differences. Participants (N=105) were each administered a 300-trial Delayed Estimation Task to assess visual working memory ability. Participants were asked to rate their confidence in their task response after each trial and were all informed of their own response accuracy after every block of 30 trials. Along with personal feedback after each block, individuals were randomly assigned to view feedback ranking their performance as more or less accurate than other students. Results indicate a nonsignificant effect of peer feedback type on individual memory precision, guess rate, and confidence, which ran contrary to experimental hypotheses. These trends could have occurred due to the presence of participant-based moderating factors that could impact how certain individuals respond to feedback. Additionally, significant increases in both the precision of participants’ memory representations and the rate at which they guessed on the Delayed Estimation Task were observed across time. Together, these findings highlight the need for further research on the nuanced effects of social feedback on neural processing in order to improve student cognition over time.