2016-2017 Faculty Research Grant
Karl Bailey and Harvey Burnett (Behavioral Sciences)
Effects of Simulated Impairment on Working Memory, Motivations, and Intentions
Education is one approach to reducing emerging adults’ engagement in risk behaviors. One recently-developed educational awareness tool is the Fatal Vision simulation goggle, which is intended to educate people about the consequences of alcohol use, marijuana use, and concussion.
We are proposing a project to study these goggles with three goals. First, we want to examine whether simulation goggles impair working memory processes (that is, executive functions) in ways that are similar to the effects of actual substance use (alcohol, marijuana) or injury (concussion). Second, we want to see whether exposure to these simulation goggles changes the type and level of motivation for avoiding these risks among college students at a university with prohibitionist policies. Finally, we want to see whether the motivations that college students have for avoiding these risks are related to relatively stable motivational aspects of personality.
We plan to examine these questions using several experiments with pre-post within-subjects designs. Our work is related to work in the Behavioral Sciences Department on risk behaviors, as well as ongoing work on cognitive load and work on motivation in the AU Cognitive Psychology Lab. Beyond the research questions in this study, our aim is to carve out a new area of research, especially for students in the undergraduate Behavioral Neuroscience program—as a result, we have designed the project to directly involve at least two undergraduate research students, with plans to apply for a least one other student via the Undergraduate Research Scholar program.