• Question: What has been / was your most important scientific finding?

    Asked by anon-188704 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Paul Matusz

      Paul Matusz answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Hey,

      I study how what we know about how we (adults and children) pay attention and learn differs when we study it with purely visual information compared to audio-visual (“multisensory”) information, which is much more typical for everyday situations, like the classroom or the office. To summarise what is 10 years of my research – the most important finding of my research is that we pay attention more strongly to multisensory information and learning it is often much easier, compared to attending to or learning visual information. I summarise one of my studies on multisensory attention in children and adults here – https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00008 – and my research on learning of multisensory information in a blogpost here – https://bold.expert/learning-occurs-in-multisensory-environments/. Have a look 🙂

    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      Hi, thanks for your question. For me it was actually probably some work I did a few years ago during my PhD. A PhD is a qualification that takes a few years to complete and you have to run a number of experiments to get one. One of my experiments used a novel (new) measure I created to probe the way new memories combine with your pre-existing memories during sleep. The more compatible this new information is with what you already know the more flexible your memories are. This is one line of evidence (there are more) that sleep plays an important role in integrating new information with existing memory.

    • Photo: Nadine Mirza

      Nadine Mirza answered on 14 Nov 2018:

      Thanks for the question madster. I think my most important finding so far has been something I worked on for my master’s.
      Basically, I developed a process or “methodology” that can be used by anybody to develop any language version of any test for any cultural context. A lot of the tests we use, particularily to assess mental health, are only available in English for people from Western European countries, so they won’t work for everybody. Using the process, which is a set of standard steps and guidelines, you could for example, take a test that is used to detect depression and make it valid for say middle classmen in Japan. Or an interview schedule that provides information on mood for low income earners in Prague. Or, as I did, a cognitive test to detect dementia in South Asians living in the UK.
      The process can work for anybody and I’m trying to get it published (a little bit of it just got accepted for publication!!!!!) so I can share it with as many people as possible.

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