Roslyn students clinched victory in three of six categories at this year’s Long Island High School Psychology Fair.
Ellie Eisenberg was named Best in Category in the cognitive psychology room, Sanwood Gim earned Best in Category honors in the educational psychology room, and the team of Mayessa Rahman and Johanna Kann was awarded Best in Category in the development psychology room.
Both Eisenberg and Sanwood are seniors who were mentored by Roslyn’s Dr. Allyson Weseley.
Eisenberg’s project explored how motion perception is impacted by limbs other than the ones directly involved in an action. For instance, if a soccer goalie was defending against a penalty kick, Eisenberg’s interest was not in the kicking foot but rather in movement of the head, shoulders, and torso.
Eisenberg’s project revealed that these peripheral limbs are important to making accurate judgements of motion.
Concerned with the potential of the Common Core to quash creativity, Gim was interested in the effect of different types of music on students’ creativity.
His study showed that exposure to classical music may promote certain kinds of creative thinking. Gim’s results also suggested the contemporary popular music did not adversely affect students’ creativity.
Rahman and Kann’s project looked at perceptions of feminists. They conducted the study under the guidance of Alison Morin as part of their sophomore research seminar class.
Although only about 30 percent of the adults they surveyed self-identified as feminists, the team found that perceptions of feminists were less negative than they expected.
Female feminists were perceived as more potent and no less attractive than women who were not described as feminists, and male feminists were perceived as more attractive and no less potent than male non-feminists.
Participants in the fair were selected on the basis of one-page project descriptions submitted and blind-reviewed by four psychologists in October.
At the Jan. 11 fair hosted by Roslyn High School, participants had up to 10 minutes to present their work via Power Point to an audience including three judges, and the presentations were followed by a 5-minute question and answer session.
