While all Laidlaw Scholars will be presenting their research at the Columbia Undergraduate Research Symposium in the fall, what are the more immediate expectations that you have for your research? Are you writing a paper? Will your research be part of a larger scientific study? Do you hope to produce an annotated bibliography that you reflect on down the line? Is your research now the first phase of a project you’ll continue to work on throughout the year, and/or next summer? Now that we are nearing the one-month mark of the program, please write about your expectations for your research.

For me, my research is a smaller component of a larger academic study that is being worked on in my lab. The larger component of the paper is about attention and using machine learning to potentially model many different inputs of data to create a much more accurate model of attention with hopeful classroom applications. Because my research is under this scope, I have found it fun to find a question that is both interesting to me, can be answered by the data we are collecting, and is not what was entirely originally intended with this project. As far as expectations for the finished work, I will not be attempting to publish my own paper on my own specific project as it is under the umbrella of a much larger project, but I do hope that my work over the summer will make a meaningful contribution to this larger project while also answering my own curiosity. 

Why does your research matter? Explain the significance of the question you are investigating, and why you are interested in it.

For all learning, confidence is an underrated yet extremely important aspect. To be able to cognitively appraise how accurate your own knowledge and our thoughts are is extremely important in "knowing what you don't know." While neural correlates of confidence/evidence accumulation have been found they are often times either in cumbersome full EEG skullcaps or even more restricting, in fMRI. While these discoveries are extremely important, they do not allow for in classroom/in context evaluations of confidence and evidence accumulation to occur. By hopefully finding that these neural correlates persist even into less accurate EEG headbands I hope to show that neural correlates of confidence can be studied not just in the lab but in learning environments therefore widening the contexts in which confidence as it relates to learning can be studied.