Congratulations to Caitlin Sisk for winning 1st place and People's Choice in CLA’s first-ever 3-Minute Thesis Competition (3MT). Sisk is a psychology graduate student in the Cognitive and Brain Science (CAB) area and advised by Professor Yuhong Jiang. She was more than prepared to compete against seven graduate students from different CLA departments.
Sisk's presentation titled "Managing misdirection: Learning to look in all the right places" was well received. It earned her $250 for wining 1st place and a $100 for winning People's Choice. Sisk will move on to the University-wide competition on November 8th, 2019.
The abstract of Sisk's 3MT presentation: "We live in a complex visual world, where we can easily miss the things we are not directly focusing on. This blindness to things we do not pay attention to can have very serious consequences in many contexts, including distracted driving accidents. My research offers a way to minimize the likelihood that we will miss something important. In my research, I train people to automatically look at and pay attention to the most important places in their visual world, so they will not miss what happens there. I have found that this capacity to learn where to look is not affected by aging or neurological disorders and does not require conscious awareness. Because this learning ability is so robust. I am using virtual reality to train people to look at the important places in complex virtual environments. This way, I can extend our understanding of how to train people to look in the right places to real-world contexts, making us less likely to miss the important things in daily activities like driving."
The 3MT competition challenges graduate students to communicate the significance of their research projects to a general audience in just three minutes, with the aid of a single, static slide.
Sisk's 3MT presentation at the Department of Psychology's competition