What are some of the ethical issues that you are grappling with in your research? What are some of the ways in which you are responding to these questions?

As my research has shifted to focus more on attention and metacognitive confidence and not on perceptual confidence, the role of context has often become important. If an accessible and virtually objective model of attention was developed––which is the extremely optimistic outcome of the broader project I am currently working on––then students that are already rewarded by the classical classroom structure could be further rewarded while those already at the fringes of academic environments could be further pushed out. To counteract this it is important to function with the knowledge that attention is not just informed by top-down processing, or in other words a will to focus, but also a bottom up as the context informs our ability to attend. 

As you continue your research, have you considered alternative viewpoints in your investigation? If so, how have these alternative viewpoints enriched or changed your project?

While I spoke to my graduate student mentor in the lab and my PI, the focus of my project had to shift from a perceptual confidence and Mental Imagery analysis to an analysis of a more metacognitive evidence accumulation and neural correlates. In this shift, I considered not just my interests for my project, but the interest of the broader project as a whole. I had to look at my project both as a function of my own interests and as a smaller piece of a much bigger field. In doing so, I have come to appreciate how wide the possibilities to study confidence in relation to learning are and how interrelated confidence and attention are.