Personal website : https://nadinecharanek60.wixsite.com/nadine-charanek
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadine-charanek-2331425b/
L-NEURO LAB: https://www.olessiajouravlev.com/team-3
Program Info:
In what program are you currently enrolled? Cognitive Science
What year of the program are you currently in? 2
Area of Study / Concentration: Neuroscience
Citation in APA format:
Charanek, N., Athanasopoulos, P., Jouravlev, O. (2022, November 17-20). Visuospatial working memory of serial order in bilinguals, monolinguals, and chimpanzees: Who has the advantage? [Conference talk]. The Psychonomics Society 63rd Annual Meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Plain language abstract:
Chimpanzees have been shown to outperform humans in visuospatial serial order recall (Matsuzawa, 2003). According to the cognitive trade-off hypothesis (Matsuzawa, 2007), chimpanzees are superior to humans in this task because humans sacrificed the robust working memory system to accommodate the complex system of language. Building on the premises of the cognitive trade-off hypothesis, we hypothesized that acquiring multiple languages might be associated with additional costs in the visuospatial working memory that bilinguals incur. To test this hypothesis, we compared performance of monolinguals vs. bilinguals (and vs. data from chimpanzees reported in Matsuzawa, 2003) as they engaged in a limited-hold masking task. In this task, visual stimuli (numerals or nonverbal pictures) are briefly displayed on the screen before being masked by white boxes. Participants memorized the location of the stimuli in the order of their appearance. Consistent with prior research, we found that chimpanzees outperformed humans. Further, there were indications that bilinguals with a particular language background history (balanced; need to use 2 languages on daily basis) differed from monolinguals in their performance in the visuospatial serial order recall.
Getting Started:
How did the idea for this research come about?
I was watching YouTube documentaries during my master’s degree in the UK and came across Matsuzawa’s work. I shared my idea with a professor who proceeded to call it “crazy” then when I got my supervisory decision, it was with this professor. Guess crazy meant something good in this context! Now, I am extending this project to bilinguals under Dr. Olessia Jouravlev’s supervision at Carleton.
Is this part of a larger project?
No
Was it for a class?
No.
Was this research conducted as part of your Honours/M.Cog./Ph.D. thesis?
MA in the UK.
Collaboration:
Was this research conducted with your supervisor?
This project was done under the supervision of Dr. Olessia Jouravlev at Carleton.
Was this research conducted with fellow graduate students at Carleton?
Yes.
What program are they in? / What is their area of expertise?
Masters in Cognitive Science. Their area is in programming.
How did this collaboration come about?
I needed someone to help me set up the experiment on Pavlovia and back then I had limited capabilities. They helped get the experiment up and running and teach me about Psychopy coding.
Was this research conducted with researchers external to Carleton?
Yes, with my UK supervisor Dr. Panos Athansopoulos.
Where are they from? (Affiliation/Country) / What is their area of expertise?
Lancaster University, United Kingdom.
How did this collaboration come about?
Because Dr. Panos was my initial supervisor for this project when I started it in my master’s, it was only natural to have his capabilities and advice carry on.
Were there challenges to conducting this research?
Yes. Because bilingualism is prevalent more than ever in today’s society, it was really challenging to find pure monolinguals who were not exposed to any other language than their native tongue.
How was data collected for this project? (if applicable)
We collected data using online platforms such as Carleton’s SONA and Prolific.
How was data analyzed for this project? (if applicable)
We used multiple factor analysis which is a fairly recent multivariate approach to analyzing bilingual data. Previously, bilingualism was seen as a categorical construct. However, given that no two bilinguals are the same, it is important for us to consider individual differences in bilingual language experience. Using MFA allows us to get a “bilingual quotient” if you will which represents how bilingual a person is a on a continuum. For instance, if the combination of your age of acquisition and language proficiency etc. gave a 2.8 factor value on a -1 to 3 continuum, you are considered a highly balanced bilingual.
Where did you present your work?
I presented this project at multiple conferences and most recently at the prestigious Psychonomics in Boston.
Why did you choose this conference/colloquium/symposium?
This year was the first year that graduate students were allowed to present their work in talks and so when we applied and got accepted for a talk, we were surprised and super excited as this conference is the largest Cognitive Science and Psychology conference in the world.
Was your work presented as a poster and/or talk?
I presented my work as a talk.
If you presented a talk, what was the duration?
The talk was for 15 minutes with 5 minutes for questions so total 20 minutes.
How would you describe your overall experience presenting your work at this conference?
This conference was really at a whole other level compared to other conferences given the large attendance from various fields such as neuroscience, psychology, and education. In addition, there were notable professors from all over the world such as Dr. Jeremy Wolfe, Dr. Kenneth Paap and so on.
Were there any challenges in presenting your work?
Figuring out the best approach to deal with bilingualism as a continuous complex construct was very challenging given that MFA is not that popular in this field. However, having read a recent paper advocating for this method we were convinced this was the right approach and I am now an advocate for MFA, at least until we can get an even better measure of bilingualism.
Will you be making any changes to your research project based on feedback received?
A lot of people are curious about special populations compared to chimpanzees on this task. I think we will try to test this in populations such as hearing-impaired individuals or those on the autism spectrum as they tend to have better visuospatial capabilities than neurotypicals. Also, we will be looking at the neural correlates of this task and compare results between bilinguals and monolinguals as in our findings, we did not find significant behavioral differences in some aspects and significant in others (such as bilinguals performing better only when they had higher bilingual quotient and chose a nonverbal strategy). Neural investigations are very important because the absence of behavioral differences does not mean the absence of differences altogether.