Lexi von der Lieth BA’24
“In the fall of 2022, I joined the Maxcey Memory Lab to participate in undergraduate research. Dr. Maxcey was my General Psychology teacher for the semester, and I reached out to her before classes started, expressing interest in her research. I was excited that there were spots available for me to join the lab, and enrolled in directed study, where I participated in at least nine hours of research per week in order to meet the criteria for the time commitment.
I was actively engaged with others in the lab, as well as the head researcher, Dr. Maxcey. I was responsible for coordinating the other researchers in the lab’s involvement in the retrieval-induced forgetting project, alongside the Honors Student that runs the project. I posted slots to SONA and code and evaluate the data of subjects in preparation for the upcoming publication of the project. My overall goal was to approach my research in the Maxcey Memory Lab in an exploratory and practical way.
Originally, I joined the lab to gain experience with research, and realized that I could apply what I was doing with the research to my Immersion Vanderbilt project. The specific project I was working on involved retrieval-induced forgetting to explore the effects of retrieval-cued drawing practice of semantic stimuli on memory of related semantic stimuli; our hypothesis was that memory for objects related to those that are practiced in the experiment is less efficient than that for other categories. After conducting a couple semesters’ worth of in-person subject running, the final manuscript was written and submitted. I used the data collected and the experimental processes to create a research presentation that Dr. Maxcey and I decided I should present at the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Fair.”