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Asked by anon-188259 to Warren, Shanti, Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 11 Nov 2018. This question was also asked by anon-188262.
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Nadine Mirza answered on 11 Nov 2018:
Oooo this is a tough one! Discovery usually implies finding out something people didn’t know before and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to be THAT awesome. I guess I’m more highlighting the problems we know exist but don’t get enough attention and then coming up with ways to fix them?
So I my closest answer would be that I’ve managed to highlight how much culture and language effects how we perform on tests that diagnose dementia and how likely we are to get help for it. I talk about it, write about- try to get the word out there. And then to fix this I came up with a method that others can use to adapt tests for culture and language so everyone can get diagnosed equally. And now I’m trying to make a toolkit that can be used to give all people the help they need, no matter what their background is!
Hope that answers it!
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Alex Reid answered on 12 Nov 2018: last edited 12 Nov 2018 11:16 pm
Hi sasasarah55. I am still relatively junior in my career so I don’t have a huge list of discoveries to my time yet! However, I am most proud of helping out with an investigation into the sleep patterns of dyslexic children. We thought that one of the issues that might relate to dyslexia is that sleep might not help integrate memories properly (like it does in children without dyslexia). We found evidence for this and it may have future implications when it comes to helping young people with this diagnosis. I need to stress though that this wasn’t just me! Science is typically a group effort, and I was just one a member of a very big team.
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Paul Matusz answered on 13 Nov 2018:
Hey,
Thanks for a cool question. I have really just began working as head of a group so can’t say I’ve made huge “discoveries”. I was always interested in how we process information in the busy, complex, multisensory environments. So that’s forever motivated my research – I started from studying how what we know about the way we attend and learn differs when we use simple, typically used stimuli, like coloured shapes to stimuli that carry emotional information, like fearful faces or threatening words. From there I went to another “salient” category of stimuli – those engaging multiple senses at once – multisensory stimuli. The more I studied (and study all the time) the differences in how what we know about how people pay attention and learn new information, as demonstrated by traditional research (that typically uses just visual objects or just sounds) compared to when we study multisensory information, the more differences I was finding – in the way adults pay attention, in the way children of different ages pay attention ( for example, to letters – we mainly studied visual shapes, but we find that when these shapes appear together with sounds that represent these letters people pay attention to them differently!), and the same goes for how we learn information when it’s just visual, or just presented as sounds, compared to when the two are presetned at the same time. So to summarise, our everyday attention is stronger and memorising – easier for multisensory information.
If you’re interested, I wrote a short article about how these findings change what we know about how kids pay attention to multisensory information, as well as a blogpost about how this knowledge changes what we know about how people learn – both written in an accessible way – have a look! 🙂https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2017.00008
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