Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College from the studios at KSPC. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: And I'm Martin Wood. This season on Sagecast, we'll be talking to current and former Pomona faculty about their personal, professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today we're talking with Lise Abrams, Peter W. Stanley Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science and Coordinator of Cognitive Science here at Pomona College. Mark Wood: Welcome, Lise. Lise Abrams: Thanks so much. Mark Wood: It's good to have you with us. You're not only professor, you're also an alumna, class of '91. Tell us about your time here with a student. Lise Abrams: I look back, it all seems a bit like a blur, but it was so transformative for me being at Pomona because I came from a small town in New Jersey, although I moved to New Mexico in high school. But anyway, I came from a small town mostly and it was very homogeneous, so I hadn't been exposed to a lot of diversity. I didn't come from a family that traveled a lot. Lise Abrams: And so coming here and seeing such an incredibly diverse set of students from all over the world and with such different backgrounds, it was really enlightening for me I think in broadening my perspective about just life in general about myself and it made me be a better student being in this environment. Lise Abrams: And so when I came to Pomona, I think I was really nervous about being the least intelligent person in the room because you're surrounded by so many intelligent people, but that again, just motivated me to work harder, and to want to contribute, and to be a participant in classes although I was really quiet, so it took the right professors to drag that out of me. But ultimately I was really fortunate to have these incredible faculty who helped me find what I was passionate about and then pursue that. Patty Vest: Let's talk about those pursuits. Did you have in mind something that you wanted to study, did that change, did that materialize? Tell us about that. Lise Abrams: I thought I knew what I was going to study. Mark Wood: Famous last word. Lise Abrams: Yeah, exactly. Although it's such a good example for students now. Mark Wood: Or first words. Lise Abrams: Or famous first words. So I thought I wanted to study computer science. I had been fascinated with computers, which were becoming bigger. They weren't in all the homes at this point, or let alone on your phones and watches, but I had begged for a computer in the mid '80s and finally got my parents to get one. And I just loved the discovery and problem solving of what a computer could do in simulating human behavior. I didn't really conceptualize it that way. Lise Abrams: I was like, "This is fun, I can program games." But then when I came to Pomona, I thought, well, I want to study computer science although they didn't have a computer science major at that point. And so they ran it through the Math Department where you could do a specialization. And I liked math, so I thought, yeah, sure, I'll take a calc three, and linear algebra, and differential equations and kill myself in the process, but I'm going along taking all things. Lise Abrams: And then finally I take the first computer class and I don't love it. And so I have this crisis now of what am I going to do with my life because that's what I'd been planning for years and then I'm realizing, well, hmm, what do I do now? So a lot of my friends were double-majoring at the time and I didn't really have an obvious next major, so I thought, just start taking some classes, see how that goes. Lise Abrams: And I took, it was the beginning of my junior year, so I was feeling the panic then too of oh, oh, here I am a junior and I still don't know what I'm doing. And so I took psych 162, which was called memory and learning with lab then. And the professor, Debbie Burke she's a great professor, but also the material really just struck me. Lise Abrams: I didn't know psychology could be this, I didn't know psychology could be hypothesis testing and discovery and all these cool things about the mind and the brain. And so a funny aside to this story is, so for the first exam for that class, it was on the same day I had an exam in a common rhetoric's class. So I pulled an all nighter, stayed up trying to study for both of the exams and then the next day took the exams and realized, well, that wasn't a great idea. Lise Abrams: So a week later when she gave the exam back, I see it so clearly, I was walking up the steps of Mason Hall and she's standing in that archway and she says, Oh, nice exam Lise and I'm thinking, wow, she's being sarcastic. Wow, that's surprising. So I get into class and she gives the exams back and I got a B+, which I am ecstatic about. Lise Abrams: But I learned two really important things from getting that exam back. One was, don't ever pull another all nighter again because apparently sleep is important for consolidating your memory of things- Mark Wood: Oh, wow. Lise Abrams: ... you learn. Who knew? And then the second thing I learned was, I thought, I'm thrilled with the B+, but why would she say, "Nice exam?" Clearly that's not the best exam in the class. And in retrospect, what I see is I missed all the sleep deprived kinds of questions, like the really simple, easy, straightforward things, but I got all the conceptually challenging, tough questions. Lise Abrams: And so I actually keep that exam in my office still as a reminder now that I'm on the faculty side to try to help students, inspire them to find what they're passionate about, but also to maybe help them uncover some hidden talents they might not know about. Patty Vest: Wow. Mark Wood: Now you teach that same class- Lise Abrams: Right. Mark Wood: ... right? Lise Abrams: Yes, I'm teaching it this semester. Mark Wood: So how's the class evolved between then and now? And what's it like to come full circle like that? Lise Abrams: One big changes, Psych has made it a three hour lab instead of a one hour lab, what it used to be. It's an interesting adjustment. I had never had taught a lab class before, but then now I have to fill my three hours of lecture plus my three hours of lab. But the technology has changed so much in terms of what you can do in a lab environment. Lise Abrams: Back when I took the course, we were doing experiments basically with paper and pencil for the most part. And now we can actually teach students in the lab, a software they can then program experiments and we can analyze data and do things really in real time in a way that I think was a lot harder back then. And so I'm loving it. Lise Abrams: I love the creativity that you can do in this environment to get them to come up with hypotheses and then figure out ways to test them, and they don't need a whole lot of background to do that, that's your challenge is how do you make this accessible to a range of ability of student in terms of first year students and seniors? That's the range of students I have in the class. Lise Abrams: Again, it feels surreal being back full circle teaching the class that started it all for me, but I couldn't be happier. I'm the happiest I think I've ever been in my career, but I also think I'm the best professor I've ever been in my career, and having that happen 22 years in, it's just an incredible feeling. Patty Vest: Talk to us a little bit about your career. You've been at a large public university prior to Pomona, and you went to Pamona, then went to a large university and now are back at Liberal Arts College. Tell us a little bit about those experiences. Lise Abrams: And it was a surprise to everybody when I went to the University of Florida, so everyone who knew me went, "Why would you go there? You should've gone to Liberal Arts College. That was always the kind of place you envisioned yourself." And it was, but when I interviewed at Florida, the piece I hadn't really thought through in my career was working with graduate students. Lise Abrams: And so when I went there and met with a number of graduate students, it just struck me as opportunity I hadn't really explored and that I thought, it seemed like the kind of place where I could have that piece, but also work with undergraduates in my lab, and it seemed like the kind of place where I could have an impact in teaching. Lise Abrams: Even at a big place, you can sometimes have choices of things that you do in the class that could help students. Yeah, so I went there, I think to everyone's surprise, but no regrets. I had a lot of really good experiences in that environment like I said, working with graduate students. I still collaborate with the student who was my first graduate student. Patty Vest: Oh wow. Lise Abrams: She's now chair of a psychology department at Liberal Arts College and we continue to collaborate in research. So in that sense I still was able to mentor some really wonderful undergrads who went on successfully to do a lot of great things. Lise Abrams: I didn't love the teaching 150 students in a class. It sort of feels like you're doing an acting performancE. You're standing in front of this huge crowd. That for me wasn't what teaching was about. I missed the kind of experiences I had at Pomona with these small group interactions in class, getting to know your professors. Lise Abrams: So in that sense I didn't love that piece, but I feel like my research program was really able to evolve in a large institution because there's resources and time devoted for that. So I wasn't really thinking about a change. I'd been there 20 years, no one thinks you're going anywhere after that. And I'd been chair of my department for the three years then up to that point and feeling kind of burned out from that experience, in part because I had gotten further and further away from the things that drew me to this career in the first place. Lise Abrams: I spent very little time with students, I had very little time for my research. I was hardly teaching and I just started thinking, what am I doing? How did I get into the part of this career that isn't what I love doing? And so I'm coincidentally at this time, Debbie was going to be retiring and so she had mentioned at a conference to me that, "Oh, they're going to be advertising my position. You should apply." Lise Abrams: I even said to her, "You're crazy. I'm leaving Florida after 20 years. Who's going to pick up a life?" I said, "I get too much junk. How would I possibly clean it all out in my office, my house?" Anyway, she encouraged me and I thought about it for a long time and then I thought, applying doesn't commit you to anything. It's a good opportunity actually refresh my materials to think through what is my research program and how has it evolved? What is my teaching philosophy these days? Lise Abrams: And then the really neat piece was Pomona requires a diversity statement, which that was a brand new concept at that time. Never wrote one of those, so that was a great exercise. So then it became, okay, I've got a Skype interview. That doesn't mean anything. Okay, I have an in person interview. That doesn't mean anything. I really I think kept saying, "None of these things guarantees anything." And then when the Dean calls with an offer, I think, oh, oh, now it really- Patty Vest: This is something. Lise Abrams: ... something, I have to- Mark Wood: That means something. Lise Abrams: But even then I kept saying, "It'd have to be just this incredible opportunity that I couldn't pass up." And that's what it became and here I am. Mark Wood: Famous last word. Lise Abrams: Yeah, famous last word. And so yeah, I still kind of go, "What happened? What?" Mark Wood: Let's talk about your relationship with Debbie. Lise Abrams: Sure. Mark Wood: Your moment of truth in college happened in her class. And then you did research with her, right? Lise Abrams: Yeah. Mark Wood: Can tell us about that? And then your research areas mesh. Right? Lise Abrams: Yeah. Mark Wood: So can you talk to us about the effect she's had on you and starting- Lise Abrams: Sure. Mark Wood: ... all the way back with working with her as a student? Lise Abrams: Sure. So in that class after the +, it motivated me. I worked hard and I did well in the rest of the course and she invited me to come do research in her lab and I didn't really know what that meant. I think we hear that term research, but I didn't really understand what does that entail, but I'm thinking, yeah, this seems like a great opportunity. Why not try it? Lise Abrams: And so she served as a mentor for me then doing research in her lab, and then she went on to be my senior thesis advisor because all psychology majors did a thesis and I loved it. I loved everything that it brought together, so many of the skills, again in retrospect, so many things I loved it found a way to put together in one place. So the computer, the programming piece, the problem solving piece, the even math piece via the statistics, writing. Lise Abrams: So it was so many of those things that I didn't know cohered around that theme of research. And so once I started doing it I loved all that sort of integration of the things I enjoy doing, but then she also introduced me to the topic of healthy aging, which is something I had never given any thought to, but in the context of doing research with her, I realized how much I love that too and how much I wanted that to be a part of my longterm research program. Lise Abrams: In part, I think because we're all aging, so having that understanding is useful not only for current people, but for all of us throughout our lives. And then I also had older parents, so my mom had me at 42, so I was already seeing when I started college, they were in their 60s. And so it just from a personal standpoint made me think, gosh, I want to have a better understanding of cognitively what's normal, what's not normal and what can we do about it, if anything? Lise Abrams: And so she's been a lifelong mentor for me. So she then said, "You should go to graduate school and get a PhD. And you should go work with my husband at UCLA and psycho linguistics." Which I did. "You should apply for a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship." I did and I got one. I couldn't believe it. I'm being facetious, but the point was she made me aware of opportunities of what I could do with these interests in this major in a way that I just had no idea not knowing about the discipline and what research meant. Lise Abrams: And so then when I went to graduate school, I still didn't completely really have a clear idea where my future would be. And then as a graduate student, I had this incredible opportunity to come back to Pomona and teach psychological statistics because Pat Smiley went on maternity leave. And so for two semesters I commuted from LA. I was at UCLA, so I commuted back to Pomona and taught this class and realized, wow, I love research, but I also throughout- Patty Vest: Teaching. Lise Abrams: ... my life have always loved teaching. I was always tutoring. So here at Pomona I served as a math tutor. There's just so many indicators, but you just can't put them all together I think until you have hindsight. So then when I got out of graduate school and I applied for all 67 academic jobs, it was a plethora of jobs, which is really lucky for me, but I was so worried about not getting a job that I had to apply everywhere and everything, and she was supportive throughout that process. Lise Abrams: And then into my career, she gave me advice for getting tenure. I think she might've even written me a letter, an external letter for tenure. So she's just been a lifelong mentor. And then now as I started in this position, she was invaluable and helping me get up to speed of what is cognitive science. We didn't have that as a major when I was a student. What is that? What does it mean to be the coordinator of the major? Lise Abrams: And so I've really been just building on hopefully the legacy she started here and that's what I hope to do is leave it in a better place than she started it, which was also great. Patty Vest: Talk to us about cognitive science. You just mentioned that because now you the coordinator of this section, what does that entail and how does it intersect with psychological science I should say? Lise Abrams: And it's interesting because when I applied for the position, I sort of looked up and said, "I better really understand what cognitive science is now that I'm applying for this position." And in looking at a lot of different programs across the country, they call themselves cognitive science, but they're really not. Lise Abrams: They're really, I would say cognitive psychology at the core and then have a few extra courses, but true cognitive science is interdisciplinary because it draws on understanding the mind, not just from psychology, but from philosophy, from a computer science perspective, if you think about artificial intelligence and how that helps us think about the mind. Lise Abrams: From linguistics, so understanding the structural issues underlying language and how that helps us understand the mind. Neuroscience plays a role in there. Anthropology can play a role in there, although that's not been explored as well as it could. And so for me, I then felt a need to learn about how all those disciplines contribute to cognitive science and to be able to, when I teach, to bring that interdisciplinary perspective to my classes. Lise Abrams: And so I've really worked on that. It was a challenge because I knew nothing about the philosophy of the mind. And so that meant doing some reading and get caught up to speed. But I think that's really important to represent the interdisciplinarity because honestly, as coordinator in talking with students who are interested in the major, that's what they're really drawn to. Lise Abrams: When I ask, "Why are you interested in cognitive science?" So many, that's what they say, "I really like the interdisciplinary aspect and the different courses I can take, and just I'm interested in a lot of different things. And so it's a major that encourages me and allows me to explore those things." And so as coordinator, my role, I see it is advising potential majors who are interested. Lise Abrams: I work with students who want to study abroad to figure out are there potential courses you can take abroad that might help you with this major? I have tried to make students more aware of potential internships and research opportunities, so I started a listserv in the department so that now I can regularly communicate about these kinds of options that students might be interested in pursuing. Lise Abrams: And there's just tons of other paperwork aspects coordinating a manager that involve signing a lot of forms and those kinds of things, but it's really the student piece and helping students that for me I love. Mark Wood: Let's move to your research. You focus on real world retrieval problems, as did Debbie. Can you tell us a little bit about the work you've done and the work you're doing now? Lise Abrams: Sure. And I would say that funny, the things I'm studying actually weren't the things I studied with Debbie, so how it evolved I think is just one of the things of core interests, and then it just led me in some of the similar directions. So early in my career I was studying written errors, so things like spelling errors, factors that contribute to why we make those kinds of written errors. Lise Abrams: And then also in that context, I was interested in something, we call homophone substitution areas, which you probably see a lot in email where somebody uses the wrong here. So H-E-R-E instead of H-E-A-R. And so I was interested in why do we make those kinds of mistakes when we know the difference? We know the difference between the words, but we make those errors. Lise Abrams: And so then I moved into more spoken errors and my first graduate student, she got interested in wanting to study the tip of the tongue state. And Debbie, of course, had done that for many years as well and I hadn't done that with her, but my students said, "We've read some articles in class." And I said, "Sure, we can do that." Lise Abrams: And so then I started studying what are the different factors that go into why we have tip of the tongues? And in more recent years, instead of cycle-linguistic factors, I've been exploring other factors such as anxiety and emotional arousal because people subjectively say that they'll have those word finding problems when you're under a stressful situation. Patty Vest: Stress. Lise Abrams: So students say it all the time in class. "Oh, I blanked. What was that word?" Older adults say it in a public speaking setting or in a conversational setting like a party that sometimes they go to introduce a spouse and can't remember their name. And so it made me think, there has to be some ways to try to investigate those sort of affective factors and what role they're having. So in recent years I've been doing some of that. Lise Abrams: I've also moved into some directions of studying errors in comprehension or reading. So in recent years I've explored something called the Moses Illusion. Do you know what that is? Mark Wood: No. Patty Vest: Mm-hmm (negative). Lise Abrams: I'll give you an example. Mark Wood: I would like to. Lise Abrams: Sure. I'll give you an example. So you ask people questions like how many animals of each type did Moses take on the ark? And what do people say? Patty Vest: They say two. Mark Wood: Two. Lise Abrams: And you're looking at me [crosstalk 00:20:14] going. Mark Wood: Right. Lise Abrams: Right. That's what you're looking [crosstalk 00:20:18] at me going, "Okay, that seems obvious." Yeah, but Moses didn't take the animals on the ark. Mark Wood: No, didn't do that. It was Moses, of course. Lise Abrams: It was Noah. Patty Vest: Noah. Lise Abrams: Okay? And so that's called the Moses Illusion and this happens quite often where people think or they don't... initially the question was, why are people having that? And initially some thought was, you're just shallowly processing that name and skipping over it potentially. Mine and other research has suggested actually that's not what's going on. Lise Abrams: That in fact it's that you get a convergence of exhortation on Noah because of the shared meaning that Noah Moses have. They're both biblical figures. They both did something involving water in the Bible. And then my research has found that actually visual similarity plays a role. They're both sort of bearded white, old men. Mark Wood: Yep. Lise Abrams: And we found that actually compounds or exacerbates the illusion even more so when you have two people in these questions that are visually similar to each other. Mark Wood: If you'd said Lincoln, I think we probably would have picked up on it- Lise Abrams: The light way, right? Mark Wood: ... a lot sooner than... Yeah. Lise Abrams: Yeah. Anyway, I enjoy again, susceptibility to these sort of real world kinds of illusions and things that happen. Patty Vest: Talk to us about your methods. How do you go about researching these topics because it has to be super interdisciplinary? And how has that evolved throughout your career? Lise Abrams: It was really challenging initially when you'd start off in a research program where there aren't a lot of existing methodologies to use, you have to be the pioneer and figure that out. And so that means you have some failed studies as you test and figure out what works. But I actually drew for my tip of the tongue studies, I drew a methodology from a ground breaking paper, Debbie and then one of my good friends, Lori James did in 2000. Lise Abrams: They had actually presented this work in the mid '90s at a conference I was at. And I kept a copy of their poster because I thought it was so cool. And then when my students said, "Hey, let's do something with TOTs." I said, "Let's build on this." I'd seen this work a few years ago. And so basically the idea is we use what's called a priming methodology where you're subtly or unconsciously exposing people to information and then looking at the impact that has without them being aware that that's happening. So it's like a secret. Lise Abrams: So in the tip of the tongue studies, what happens is you have general knowledge questions that you come up with and you ask people, "Do you know the answer? Do you not know it? Are you having a tip of the tongue?" And so a little bit of side trivia here, one of the best questions throughout my career that used to be really good at inducing TOTs, it can change, so if something starts getting more exposure in the media, the news. Lise Abrams: Tsunami used to be a really good word, and then when there was that big tsunami in Indonesia, it's not a good word anymore. Patty Vest: Right. Lise Abrams: The best celebrity name that was a great ToT for so many years for me was Donald Trump. Not kidding, because right? Think about it, he had enough of that sort of- Mark Wood: Yeah. Lise Abrams: ... celebrity exposure but then wasn't really doing that anymore. And so there's this period of where he'd had familiarity, so it made it a good TOT. No more, no more sadly. Mark Wood: Yeah, sadly. Patty Vest: Sadly. Lise Abrams: Sadly, yeah. Mark Wood: We won't make political comments over here- Lise Abrams: Sorry- Mark Wood: ... but sadly. Lise Abrams: But it is sadly, it means that he's not obscured because that's- Mark Wood: Right. Lise Abrams: ... the implication. Mark Wood: Yeah. Lise Abrams: So you test a lot of these questions, you have to stay on top of them that over time, but there are certain ones that are always good, advocates is a great TOT word, marsupial can be a great TOT word. You can see things that you knew and just haven't really used it. Patty Vest: Don't use it [crosstalk 00:23:50]. Mark Wood: Yes. Lise Abrams: And so then what we did in our studies then was you would get a question and then if you said you were having a TOT for it, we had you read a list of words and we made up some cover story like, oh, we're getting some data on people's subjective impressions of these words. Like how easy is it to pronounce? How familiar are you with this word? We made them rate them on various dimensions. Lise Abrams: It didn't matter what we did, but the point was we embedded in that list something we were studying. So in one study, the first study we did, we were interested in how the words phonology, the sounds of the words impacted your ability to resolve a TOT. So when you were having a TOT for abacus in that list, we embedded a word that contained the first syllable ab, or we contained it like in the middle syllable or the last syllable cus. Lise Abrams: And then after you'd read that list of words, we were like, "Now we're going to go switch back to the general knowledge questions." And we gave them the TOT question and we looked at how now could they resolve the TOT as a function of which of the syllables they'd read. And we found that the initial syllable was critical for its retrieval. If you get another word that has that syllable, guess what? It helps you resolve that TOT more than any other type of phonological information in the word. Lise Abrams: So we've continued to use priming in a lot of different ways. Other things you can embed in that list, you can look at what effect it has on people's ability to resolve the TOTs, but to get at your point of the interdisciplinarity, we also then dig into literature and we've had to look at other literatures, not just to TOTs. Lise Abrams: We have to look at memory literature, you look at speech production literature, and now I'm looking at emotion literature, which is completely separate from all of these kinds of language issues. So it's a good reminder that you get ideas for methodologies by looking at how they're studying related concepts. Mark Wood: This may not be a fear question because I know we're talking about research not therapy here, but these question [crosstalk 00:25:40]- Lise Abrams: I like way you frame it though. Mark Wood: ... that interest a lot of us at my age. Do you have any advice for people that have grown out of what you've seen about TOTs, and memory, and speech? Lise Abrams: I do. Again, they're based on general patterns in data, so what works for any individual, can't necessarily extend. It's sort of what I say to students, "What study strategy works for your friend might not work for you at all, but you don't know until you try and figure out what works with you." Lise Abrams: So I would say the three suggestions I would make, and actually a couple of them are aging specific. So for people as they age, we've learned that they have different influences of what helps the resolution, so I'm going to give you a couple of age specific recommendations too. But in general, I think the first thing I would suggest is, my research suggest the first letter by itself isn't helpful, which is counterintuitive because that's what a lot of us use to try to start generating when you're about [crosstalk 00:26:42]- Mark Wood: On top of the alphabet. Patty Vest: It starts with. Lise Abrams: It starts with. Mark Wood: C, C, C. Lise Abrams: So then you start going, "Okay, C." And you start throwing out a lot of C words, but I've found in my work that letter isn't enough, you actually need the syllable unit. Mark Wood: Yes. Lise Abrams: So instead the strategy is add a vowel to you. If you know it begins of a C you start going, "Ca," generating cowards, or ca, or ce, or co at least. And maybe if you hit upon the first syllable, it could be a way of instigating the resolution. So let go of that first letter strategy. Not useful. Lise Abrams: The other, a funny suggestion I make when I'm talking in older adult audiences and that is research that we found is for younger people, so having this another phonologically related word can help resolution, but there are situations for older people where it actually can hurt resolution. Lise Abrams: And so what I say is, "Don't be so helpful to your spouse." So when your spouse is struggling, the natural reaction is to be like, "Is it this? Is it this? Is it this?" Mark Wood: Oh yeah. Lise Abrams: And it turns out actually for older adults that can be counterproductive in helping them to resolve a TOT, so not helping. And then some recent data I published with some collaborators is we use an existing large scale data set of people across a wide array of ages in Cambridge, in England. Lise Abrams: And we dug into those data and we found a really interesting relationship between self reported anxiety symptoms and having TOTs. And what we found was that for college aged people, there wasn't a relationship, for middle aged people, there was a positive relationship where the more anxiety symptoms people self reported actually the fewer TOTs they had. But in old age it was the opposite. The more anxiety symptoms people reported it was predictive of then having more TOTs. Lise Abrams: So to me this suggests this age difference in the influence of these affective factors in this case anxiety, and it was especially interesting because overall older adults were actually less anxious than the other age groups. So it's not that they were just overly anxious. No, in fact, overall they're actually less anxious, but their level of anxiety for whatever that was predictive of TOTs. Lise Abrams: So in terms of learning to manage potentially these affective factors, that's easier to say than do, but obviously when you get introduced somebody and you have a TOT, a young person laughed it off. They make a joke of it. Patty Vest: Right. Mark Wood: Right. Lise Abrams: What do you do as an older adult is this dementia? Mark Wood: Of course. Lise Abrams: Honestly, but my- Mark Wood: I was about to say, there's nothing more anxiety producing than a TOT- Lise Abrams: Right? Mark Wood: ... when you're in my age. Lise Abrams: No. I'm sorry. Even at my age, I just turned 50. And even at 50 I'm feeling that... because that didn't use to feel that way when I had one. But trying to remember these are such a part of normal aging. If you didn't have them, that would be weird. So the universality of the experience and so trying to find some ways when you have that experience to get that arousal under control. Lise Abrams: I don't know for certain that predicts it, but I just know from these data that there was these relationships. Patty Vest: What is it about cognition and aging that you find it's appealing to research and to study? Lise Abrams: It's funny, I taught cognitive psychology for many years at Florida and almost every semester a student would say at the end of the semester, "Wow, I really like this class and I thought it was going to be boring." And I immediately would think, how could studying the mind be boring? What? That comment after 20 years still, I could never wrap my head around how that can- Patty Vest: It's a backhanded compliment. Lise Abrams: But I just didn't get it, like what part would be uninteresting? Where's the uninteresting piece? So I think that right there just gives you some sense of my ing like of if I can't even understand how you couldn't find it interesting, maybe it tells you why I find it interesting. Lise Abrams: But I think for me what's been so wonderful about studying aging as part of that is there's mutual benefit and one is by studying older adults we can learn potentially things that have, like Mark was saying, therapeutic possibility or ways that can help them offset some cognitive problems that they find really problematic. So it could have that application to it. Lise Abrams: And I see in some ways the theoretical approach of my research can lead to that, but also they've been able to inform us about cognition more broadly because what I learned from 20 year olds when I then contrast it with what happens at 60, 70, 80 gives me a much more complete picture of the mechanisms that underlie whatever the cognitive processes that I'm studying. Lise Abrams: So I feel like they're contributing to research, not only to help us understand them, but for us to understand others through them. Patty Vest: It's putting a reference, right? Lise Abrams: Yeah. And for me, again, I feel like how could that not be the interesting? Mark Wood: Yeah. Right. Lise Abrams: What's wrong with them? Mark Wood: One has more importance in our lives in our ability to think. Lise Abrams: Right. Yes, exactly. Mark Wood: Do you find that studying this feeds back into your own awareness of yourself and your own memory and speech? Lise Abrams: Absolutely. I especially feel that, again, as I have aged because I was 27 when I started at Florida and here I am 50. And so certainly having experienced just normal cognitive changes across that span of time. And so I even find myself already starting to do that, "Wait, is this normal? Is this healthy?" Those kinds of things. Lise Abrams: But then again trying to remind myself what I talk about in my work, in my papers, but also then when I'm communicating in public settings, remembering the reassurances that I'm giving them, I try to remember them for myself as well. But it's scary when... For example, I've had friends and colleagues that then ended up getting Alzheimer's and dementia. Lise Abrams: And then watching them go through that, the smartest people I knew, the people who were so intellectually creative and sharp. And so it's hard to not have that also in the back of my mind that, yeah, I know, I think what I'm experiencing is healthy, but then I'm sure they all felt that way too and then it turned out it wasn't. Lise Abrams: So yeah, there's a lot of reflection I think that goes into that from my work. Patty Vest: What are some research projects you're working on now or some future ideas that you would want to work on? Lise Abrams: Part of the excitement of coming here was reinvigorating my research. Like I said, having been chair of a department in that administrative role, I was sort of less and less connected to that, but then being able to come here, I can start over and do what ever I want. There's no precedent. Lise Abrams: So in terms of what I'm doing currently, I have six undergraduate students who are research assistants in my lab, and so I'm loving teaching them about the research process. And it's also that challenge because for 20 years I had grad students intervening and doing that role. So it's been a really great experience for me to realize how do I teach about research to this population in this way that excites them about it, but also makes them cognizant of there's so many facets that go into research, not all of it is fascinating and fun, and giving them that whole broad perspective. Lise Abrams: So what I did then when they started with me, it was last January, I pulled a number... I have a number of existing completed studies that I could never have time to get to the data. So I pulled out one of those, it's a 15 year old study now and it's a wonderful study, and I just kick myself because it's really fascinating and I have had no time to look at this data in 15 years. Lise Abrams: And so what I did though was for them, I had them actually run through the experiments so they could see what a participant did, so they'd understand looking at the data better. And then I made them come up with a hypothesis of something they thought we should test in this data. And so they had to go into the literature, they had to look things up, and then we submitted conference abstracts and now four of them were going to present their hypotheses and results at a conference in Atlanta in April. Patty Vest: Nice. Mark Wood: Oh wow. Lise Abrams: So super exciting. So anyway, the point of that study though, what we did initially was... It was actually originally designed as a TOT study, it was a collaboration with somebody else, but it could be a TOT study as it turned out. And so we gave people general knowledge questions, but then what we were interested in was, when you then have a TOT and you now get the right answer, does the way that you get the right answer influence your later retention of that information? Lise Abrams: So we gave people either a multiple choice test where you then have to pick out the answer among I think five alternatives or we gave a letter by letter completion tests. You get one letter at a time. If you didn't know it, you could get another letter, and then you could get another letter until you had enough information you could retrieve it. And so we were curious to see then does that format getting the correct answer when you've been in a TOT then influence? Lise Abrams: Then 15 minutes later, are you able to retrieve that word again? And then a week later we brought people back and said, "Are you able to still get these words?" And then we had younger and older adults in the study. There's a rich dataset of lots of different variables, and then my students were interested in, what if you pick the wrong answer on the multiple choice? Lise Abrams: We gave them feedback afterward that no matter what you picked you were told the correct- Patty Vest: This is the answer. Lise Abrams: ... answer is marsupial, but does actually then you generating you- Patty Vest: Pick the right number? Lise Abrams: Yeah. Patty Vest: Would that make the number. Mark Wood: Do you remember what you picked instead of what you were told [crosstalk 00:36:15]- Lise Abrams: Instead of what you were told. So anyway, I'll let you know. We are going to analyze this data for the April conference and then I'll know the answer. So we started off on that so they could get into a project right away. And then after they were doing that, we started a new study, which was a followup to a recent experiment I'd completed where we were interested, I mentioned sort of these emotional affect factors and trying to figure out what effect they might have on to TOTs. Lise Abrams: So we did this study where I was trying to figure out, how do we measure emotional rouse? And I've tried a couple of different things. I tried showing people emotionally rousing pictures. There are some problems with that methodology, but try and get people to be aroused by something in a laboratory. Lise Abrams: So what we've been doing in these recent studies is we have you say bad words out loud in front of the experimenter. So in this study, what we did was we did the general knowledge question, you had a TOT, and then you either had to say a neutral word or a bad word. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on the radio, but like the F word and some other words. Lise Abrams: And then we had them rated on a couple of dimensions like how taboo do you find this? How easy is this pronounced? And then you'd get that TOT question again, and we're looking at seeing whether the emotional arousal, that intervening word affects whether or not you resolve the TOT. So they were involved with collecting the data, so testing the participants, coding and organizing the data. And now we're in the process of getting into moving that to analysis as well. Lise Abrams: So current things in terms of future, one of the things I negotiated when I came was to get an eye tracker. Never used an eye tracker and there's very little research on eye tracking in speech production because often you can imagine we're not actually looking at things, but I think there's some creative ways you could devise some projects that would involve people having to look at things. Lise Abrams: So anyway, I'm in the process with a new colleague in my department because she also does eye tracking, so we're in the process of figuring out which eye tracker to get. And then I'm thinking we could do things like that Moses Illusion study and then look at where people are looking, like how much are they looking at Moses? At Moses [crosstalk 00:38:22]- Patty Vest: ... at Moses. Lise Abrams: And then does that tell us anything about their susceptibility illusion. So I know I haven't really fleshed out these eye tracking studies yet, but it's definitely a fun and exciting new direction I think my students are going to be really interested in pursuing. Mark Wood: I have yet to find a faculty member who doesn't think that research is important for students. I'm not going to ask you that, but why is it important and what kinds of research work is it that is important for students? I can imagine certain kinds of busy work that might not actually be very positive, but what makes it important for students? Lise Abrams: My approach has always been that you want to give students the all around experience of research, so the good with the bad so to speak. I know at Florida for example, some people did research with students where they had them just do one piece, you're just going to code videotapes, you're just going to help with this piece. And that's just not my philosophy. I feel like you have to see everything. Lise Abrams: The problem is though that your projects are often at different stages and a student doesn't necessarily stay around for the length of time to see all the aspects. So that's why I try to have them engaged in multiple projects because then you can have them at this stage in one project at this stage in a different project. Lise Abrams: And so it's still not perfect, and again, if they leave your lab after two semesters, you can't give them everything. But for the students who want to stay on long term, that's the plan. Lise Abrams: And so why I think it's important is in a lot of the same ways for what we're doing in the classroom. We're trying to encourage students to think critically about new ideas, to analyze new incoming information, to synthesize with what you already know, to make predictions and research does all those things, so it's by having them come up with a hypothesis. Lise Abrams: Here I just found a way then to get them thinking about existing literature and then figuring out what the data that we had, what's something that they could test and why was their hypothesis grounded in existing literature? They had to do that. You couldn't just say, "I want to test this." They had to come up with a reason why we should test it and why we might expect what we found. Lise Abrams: And so yeah, even coding data, which can be kind of tedious, but we need to code data. And what I mean by that, I'll give you an example in the tip of the tongue world is so when people have a TOT, or they know the answer, or they're typing the responses into the computer, are people perfect spellers? No. Lise Abrams: So then if you want to have a computer to be able to compute, was this a correct answer or not a correct answer, the computer then is going to count it misspelling is the wrong answer even if it's functionally the right word. So the students go through then and recode all those answers then in terms of their correct spelling, and then we can use a computer macro to do the comparisons and save time that way. Lise Abrams: So when I put it in the context of saving time, I said, "You could either be hand calculating whether this is correct each time or you can do this coding." They then see the benefit of doing it in the code play. So I feel like we're teaching a skillset in research that has a broad applicability no matter what you go on to do. Lise Abrams: You don't have to go on and be a researcher, you can go on and do anything. You still have to learn how to critically think, develop hypotheses, solve problems from different perspectives. You can't tell your boss, "Sorry, I don't have any ideas." And so I feel like in research we're teaching those skills that apply to just a broad array of problems you'll troubleshoot no matter what your career is. Lise Abrams: Am I right? Patty Vest: Oh, absolutely. Mark Wood: Absolutely. Lise Abrams: "What do you think?" "Ah." You can try approaching a problem from one perspective, but if that doesn't work, you got to now think out of that box. Patty Vest: You're good? Mark Wood: So on that note, we're going to wrap this up. We've been talking with Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Lise Abrams. Thanks Lise. Lise Abrams: Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. Patty Vest: Thank you. That was great. Patty Vest: And so all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast at Pomona College. Until next time.