Eight Great Neck North High School students were invited to participate in the Long Island Psychology Fair at Roslyn High School, where the students presented their science research projects to a panel of psychology professionals. Two of the projects won awards in the biopsychology division.
North High junior Aaron Geula won the Best in Category award in the biopsychology division for his presentation, Using fNIRS to Determine the Effect of Distractions on Cross-Brain Coherence, which studied brain waves to determine how distractions, such as cell phone rings, affected nonverbal interactions between two people.
Honorable Mention in the same division was awarded to a team of North High juniors, Sage Sherry and Emma Young, for their project, Neuro Linguistic Eye Movement Tests Corresponding with Evoking a Remembered or Constructed Image, which compared subjects’ eye movements when a familiar image was described and when an unfamiliar image was described.
Additional participants from North High included senior Amy Shteyman for The Language of Facial Expressions: A Neuroimaging Study on How a Smile Is Generated and Perceived by Another Person. The sophomore team of Anne Goldsmith and Netta Mualem presented Determining the Accuracy of Identifying the Mental State of Faces with a Nature Background and sophomores Kayla Chan and Madeline Yang presented Think Twice: Cognitive Modulation of Physiological Reactions Comparing Two Systems of the Brain.
The Long Island Psychology Fair is open to any individual or team of students who completed a research project in psychology. Interested students submitted project descriptions for consideration, which were blind-reviewed by a panel. Only 42 applicants from across Long Island were invited to participate in the competition.
Presentations were grouped based on area of study: educational psychology, cognitive psychology, interdisciplinary psychology, biopsychology, social psychology and developmental psychology. Students presented a 10-minute PowerPoint to a panel of psychology professionals, followed by a five-minute question-and-answer period. Two prizes were awarded for each category: Best in Category and Honorable Mention.
Participants from North High conducted their research as part of the school’s science research program under the direction of science research teachers/advisors Christopher Bambino, Christina Keys, Maya Lerner, Alan Schorn and Jessica Schust, department chair.
