Sound-Color Synesthesia Requires Attention: Evidence From Dichotic Listening
Heather Lander, Elizabethtown College (PA)
First Place: Allyn & Bacon Award
Faculty Sponsor: Catherine Lemley, PhD

Synesthesia is a condition in which one sense, such as sound, activates another sense, such as vision. Studies investigating the role of attention in synesthesia have yielded conflicting results, and have primarily involved grapheme-color (letters or numbers elicit seeing colors) synesthesia. In the present study, a dichotic listening task was used to investigate the attentional level required for sound-color synesthesia. T.H., a sound-color synesthete, (all sounds, including voices elicit the perception of colored shapes) and a control group of 30 nonsynesthetes participated in a dichotic listening task. None of the participants, including T.H., noticed a slight or drastic voice change in the unattended message indicating that all participants’ auditory attention was focused on the shadowed message. T.H. reported only seeing a color and shape for the attended voice, suggesting that soundcolor synesthesia does not occur preattentively.

Visual-Spatial Inattention in College Students With ADD/ADHD: A Similarity to Unilateral Neglect
Kelly Jones, Elizabethtown College (PA)
Second Place: Allyn & Bacon Award
Faculty Sponsor: Catherine Lemley, PhD

Research indicates that children and older adults with ADD/ADHD may behave similarly to adults with right hemineglect in that they ignore the left visual hemispace (Voeller & Heilman, 1988). However, there is controversy as to when this trend is evident. Visual cancellation tasks have been used to investigate these neglect symptoms but have varying results. Because college students with ADD/ADHD have not been assessed with regards to attention to left visual hemispace, they are the focus of this study. Twenty-four students with ADD or ADHD and 24 control students completed verbal and nonverbal cancellation tasks. Students with ADD/ADHD made significantly more omissions on the left side compared to controls. Within the ADD/ADHD group they missed significantly more targets on the left of the verbal task compared to the nonverbal task. There was no significant difference in total right omissions or time taken to completion between the two groups. These results suggest left visual inattention in college students with ADD/ADHD.

Epistemology, Self-Concept, and Need for Achievement as Predictors of Academic Achievement and Honors Participation
Candace M. Gross, Northwestern College (IA)
Third Place: Allyn & Bacon Award
Faculty Sponsor: Laird Edman, PhD

Aims of the current study were to predict college students' academic achievement and group membership based upon epistemology, self-concept, and need for achievement. This study also examined year effects on students' epistemology. Participants included 32 male and 145 female college students. A demographic questionnaire, the Epistemic Belief Inventory (Schraw, Bendixen, & Dunkle, 2002), seven subscales of the Self-Description Questionnaire III (Marsh, 1992), and Mehrabian's Revised Achieving Tendency (2000) were used. Results suggest academic self-concept, simple knowledge epistemology, and need for achievement discriminated nonhonors students from honors and honors eligible students, whereas fixed ability epistemology discriminated between honors students and honors eligible students. Results also indicated significant year differences for three epistemology dimensions. Conclusions and implications are discussed.