Undergraduate Researcher Spotlight: Gurnoor Sodhi
Are you or any of your friends “professional yappers” who are excellent at chatting, being engaging, and talking about any and all topics for extended periods of time? Do you end a conversation having covered 16 different topics and having asked tons of questions, yet somehow still feel like you remember everything your friend said? Gurnoor Sodhi, a junior psychology major, worked on research this summer that might help explain this!
This summer, Gurnoor worked in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, supported by the UMD College of Behavioral & Social Sciences Summer Research Initiative (SRI), to investigate whether switching topics in conversations impacted memory for the information discussed.
Throughout the summer, she worked closely with Dr. Jared Novick and Dr. Kelly Marshall to investigate how topic switching affects memory. Dr. Marshall conducted the study a few years ago, but the memory portion had not yet been analyzed. This is where Gurnoor focused her summer research.
The data that Gurnoor analyzed was collected from recordings taken several years ago in the Cognition and Language Processing Lab. Participants were invited into the lab to engage in semi-structured conversations with members of the research team. Researchers and participants took turns asking each other a predetermined set of questions about specific topics. After the conversation, both the lab member and the participant completed a memory task to see how many of their partners' answers they could recall when the question was shown again.
Gurnoor's primary responsibility this summer was to review the memory task portion of the study, scoring whether participants answered the basic yes/no questions correctly and whether they provided additional details. She also analyzed the conversations to determine if participants initiated topic switches while asking questions, categorizing switches between sub-topics or broad topics. Topic Switching is the formal term for changing the subject in casual conversation. This work involved evaluating approximately 50 hour-long conversations. After gathering this data, she analyzed preliminary patterns using Excel, examining memory accuracy, trends across participants, and whether topic switches aided recall of the lab members' answers.
What did she find? When a topic switch occurred, participants recalled conversation details about 77% of the time, compared to roughly 69% when no switch occurred. Overall, a person initiating a topic switch improved their ability to recall the details of a conversation. The research team attributed this to topic switches potentially enhancing information encoding or serving a conversational function that prompts individuals to pay closer attention.
Beyond her research, Gurnoor gained valuable experience learning about other SRI scholars' interests and projects. The cohort bonded, exchanged ideas, and discovered connections across their respective fields. Through this experience, she gained a deeper understanding of graduate-level research and the Ph.D. application process, which she plans to apply in the near future.
This fall, Gurnoor is currently working with Dr. Jared Novick, her advisor for the Hearing and Speech Sciences Honors Program, where she is looking at the effects of bilingual code-switching, or switching languages in the middle of sentences.
