Student Caucus Research Grant - 2023-25 Recipients
Congratulations to the three recipients of the 2023-2025 SARMAC Student Caucus Research Grants, who will be presenting their research at SARMAC XV in Ireland! These three proposals stood out for their rigorous methodological approaches and the clear theoretical and practical significance of the research.
Tia Bennett, University of Birmingham
Project title: Investigating the effect of suspect - filler similarity on eyewitness identification performance in sequential video lineups
I'm a PhD student in Psychology at the University of Birmingham, UK. My PhD is in collaboration with the national VIPER Bureau, and my research investigates the effect of suspect-filler similarity on eyewitness accuracy in police lineups. Previous research has typically used the US lineup procedure (6-person simultaneous photograph lineups), but the study I am currently conducting is an online experiment which uses the UK lineup procedure (9-person sequential video lineups). This study aims to determine how similar-looking fillers should be to the police suspect to maximise eyewitness accuracy.
Supervisors: Dr Melissa Colloff and Professor Heather Flowe In collaboration with The National VIPER Bureau
Olivia Maurice, Western Sydney University
Project title: Effects of multilingualism on preserving adult brain function over the lifespan
I am a PhD candidate in Cognitive Neuroscience at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University. My research investigates the effects of language experience and stimulus modality (auditory vs visuospatial processing) on cognitive functioning and neurodegeneration. The current study will specifically investigate the mechanisms driving multilingual advantages on memory, attention and inhibition.
Supervisors: Dr Celia Harris and Professor Caroline Jones
Kris-Ann Anderson, John Jay College of Criminal Justive and The Graduate Centre
Project title: Criminal Justice Professionals have better memory? How public perceptions of secondary trauma may contribute to this myth.
I'm a PhD student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate Center in New York City. My research broadly focuses on factors that influence memory distortions in legal contexts. In this study, I will investigate the relationship between two popular memory myths: criminal justice professionals have better memory than laypeople, and memory for trauma is special.
Supervisors: Professor Deryn Strange and Professor Melanie Takarangi
The Adjudication Process
This year we received 18 high-quality applications. These applications were blindly adjudicated by the Student Research Grant Committee, comprised of the SARMAC Student Caucus and four volunteer reviewers. We wish to express our gratitude to our volunteers - Moon Hooi Ling Yut, Khor Khai Ling, Mairi Irvine, and Kuan-Ju Huang – who made this process possible.
The committee scored applications based on six main criteria: the research aims, the methods & analysis plan, the significance and innovation of the project, the feasibility of the project, the articulation of the proposal, and consideration of open science practices. Each proposal was blindly scored by two members of the committee, with ties being broken by a third blind reviewer that was a senior PhD student.