Psychology Students Receive UCF Summer Fellowships

Psychology students Amanda Matioli, Lindsay Conner, Eva Parkhurst and Ashley Ercolino.

Four incoming UCF Psychology Department graduate students received awards from the UCF Summer Mentoring Fellowship Program.

The campus-wide competitive fellowship program provides funding support from the College of Graduate Studies for underrepresented students to complete summer research projects before they begin graduate school.

The four recipients included incoming Applied Experimental and Human Factors doctoral students Lindsay Conner, Ashley Ercolino and Eva Parkhurst, and incoming Industrial and Organizational Psychology master’s student Amanda Matioli.

The program ended with a showcase on August 2, 2016 featuring research presentations by each student. This year’s program included 18 graduate students from 12 graduate programs across the university. Students spent the summer working with a faculty mentor on a specific research project and also participated in professional development trainings related to academic careers.

The UCF Psychology Department fellows worked on a wide range of research projects. Lindsay Conner worked with assistant professor of psychology Nichole Lighthall, Ph.D., on a study examining consumer decision-making processes through brain imaging.

With psychology assistant professor Joseph Schmidt, Ph.D., Ashley Ercolino completed a study on the relationship between category learning techniques and search performance.

Amanda Matioli and her mentor Victoria Pace, Ph.D., director of the M.S. program in I/O Psychology, conducted a meta-analysis on the correlation between extraversion personality facets and turnover.

And Eva Parkhurst examined how to improve the user interface for a wheelchair-mounted robotic arm with her mentor, Peter Hancock, Ph.D., Pegasus Professor in the UCF Psychology Department.

The UCF Department of Psychology looks forward to more exciting research from these outstanding new students in the years to come.