Psychology Changes with the Times

WHEN YOUR GOAL is to create the best undergraduate experience at a research university, you begin to explore ways to connect undergraduates and research. What better ways than to teach them research principles and turn them loose to explore the questions that interest the students by letting them propose and conduct their own experiments? That, in essence, is what’s happening in the Psychology Department at Washington State University.

A new human psychophysiological laboratory is designed specifically for undergraduates. The lab is the only one of its kind in the Pacific Northwest and provides high-tech monitoring equipment. “The undergraduate research initiative is intended to create more opportunities for in-depth experience and more material support to student researchers,” says Professor John Hinson. Using the new technology, students will execute the research projects that they initiate. “For example,” Hinson says, “a student could investigate evoked potential markers of cognition and behavior.” The evoked potential is averaged electrical activity derived from the electroncephalogram (EEG) that is taken from various regions of the brain. “Those evoked potentials will tell us which regions of the brain are involved in important cognitive processes, such as risky decision making, examples of which would include the choice to drink to excess or the decision to use illegal drugs.”

“I believe this new equipment will be incredibly beneficial to students, faculty, and the University,” says Shital Pavawalla, a doctoral candidate in the Clinical Psychology program and one of the graduate students who went through special training on how to use the equipment. “Undergraduates will be able to learn about the brain via a hands-on approach.” In traditional research settings, undergraduates might only be able to assist with a faculty member’s research and not have the chance to propose a research topic or actually use the technology to conduct an experiment.

Professor Samantha Swindell is the undergraduate director and organizer of an annual spring symposium, another part of the psychology undergraduate research initiative. The symposium allows recipients of department undergraduate research grants to present their findings. “Learning about research from a lecture is one thing, but actually doing research is something quite different,” Swindell says. “The goal of the research initiative and the symposium is to encourage undergraduate students to seek out the opportunities for hands-on learning that our department provides.”

The initiative is just one of two major changes for the Psychology Department. Final approval has been granted to a new undergraduate degree structure that will allow a bachelor of arts to complement the current bachelor of science. Many students, explains Hinson, want to major in psychology, but their intent is not to go into research. They do not have the same needs for the technically oriented research methodology and statistics courses required of B.S. candidates. Enrollment in the new degree program is expected to begin this fall.