Source: Lester Loschky, 785-532-6882, loschky@k-state.edu
Web site: http://www.k-state.edu/psych/vcl/home/index.html
Note to editor: Christopher Wallace, Olathe, is a graduate of Blue Valley West High School.
News release prepared by: Beth Bohn, 785-532-6415, bbohn@k-state.edu

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS EARN K-STATE UNDERGRADUATES CONFERENCE HONORS

MANHATTAN -- Several Kansas State University undergraduate students in psychology earned honors for their research presentations at the recent Great Plains Student Psychology Conference in St. Joseph, Mo.

The students are all undergraduate researchers in K-State's Visual Cognition Laboratory and work with Lester Loschky, an assistant professor of psychology at K-State. The lab does research dealing with scene perception and its real world applications. Lab researchers investigate how people perceive, attend to and remember scenes and the objects in them, thus spanning the traditional areas of perception and cognition.

Students earning honors include:

Margarita McQuade, junior in psychology, Ellinwood, first place, co-presenter of "Attention modulates gist performance between central and peripheral vision."

From Manhattan: Gabriel Hughes, senior in psychology, first place, co-presenter of "Attention modulates gist performance between central and peripheral vision"; and Joshua Davis, senior in psychology and sociology, third place, co-presenter of "The effects of image rotation in scene gist recognition in ground-based versus aerial views."

Christopher Wallace, senior in psychology, Olathe, second place, co-presenter of "The effects of story structure and order on recognition memory for a picture story"; Ryan Ringer, senior in psychology, Prairie Village, third place, co-presenter of "The effects of image rotation in scene gist recognition in ground-based versus aerial views"; and Caitlyn Badke, senior in psychology, Wichita, first place, co-presenter of "Attention modulates gist performance between central and peripheral vision."

From out-of-state: Suzanne Goddard, senior in psychology, La Verne, Calif., second place, co-presenter of "The effects of story structure and order on recognition memory for a picture story."

In addition, two of Loschky's graduate students, Tyler Freeman, doctoral student in psychology, Olathe, and Adam Larson, master's student in psychology, Ames, Iowa, worked closely with the undergraduates in both carrying out the research and preparing them for their conference presentations.