1/30/2011: Today I finally made the site to track the progress of my research project. I'm pretty sure my project will concern embodied cognition. I met with Dr. Echols on Thursday and hopefully I will have read some articles by our next meeting.

2/3/2011: Today was my second meeting with Dr. Echols. After having read extensively over embodied cognition, I've concluded that it's going to be difficult to do a project over that particular topic. I've shifted my focus to studying language within children. She recommended several articles by Jonathan Schooling, which focus on the detrimental effect that language can have on remembering certain things (a type of wine is far better remembered by taste, for instance). This phenomenon is dubbed "verbal overshadowing." By next meeting I hope to have crafted a preliminary research question.

2/20/2011: It has been entirely too long since I've updated. Since my last update, I have decided to take a developmental approach to the verbal overshadowing phenomenon. That is, I want a question that says something like "Does verbal overshadowing affect x year olds versus y year olds differently?" This question would be due to some developmental factor in the realm of language, which I'm still attempting to form through research. I've found good articles related to verbal overshadowing, and even one which concerns children in the context of eyewitness testimony, but I still need to ground my question with a rationale. I'm thinking something related to the development of certain language-oriented areas of the brain. By next week my research question should be in better form.

3/27/2011: Since my last update, I have written a preliminary literature review. The review contains some flaws and it is far from perfect. I need a cohesive literature review which focuses on my true research question. My study will still focus on age differences in verbal overshadowing, but it will now include the added aspect of configural/holistic facial processing. Basically, verbal overshadowing tends to affect facial recall more with a greater tendency to process faces holistically. Research has stated that children have key ages in which they begin to move from analytic, specific representations of faces to holistic, configural ones. My hypothesis is that when children move from one stage to the next they will be more greatly affected by verbal overshadowing. 

9/19/2011: A lot has certainly happened since I last updated the website. I have an experiment set up and am currently awaiting final IRB approval. I also applied for a URF to help fund my study. This week the main goal is to write a script to follow when running trials of the experiment. I also need to send out letters to try and recruit participants so everything is ready to go once IRB approval presumably comes in. I'm going to try and anticipate any problems with the study so that I can use all of the participants I'm able to get, but I'm aware this is a pretty optimistic way of looking at things. Next week I would like to have a script solidified for the study and be ready to run some participants.