Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

As a freshman student in Georgetown’s Introduction to Cognitive Science course, Mim Ari (C’05), “was immediately captivated by the brain and all the disciplines that work together to try to understand the most complex organ of the human body.”

Born in Turkey and raised in Colorado, Ari was a Psychology major and Cognitive Science minor, a combination that exposed her to an invigorating mix of faculty and research methods. “I really liked getting to learn from various faculty members of the main campus and the medical school who were at the top of their fields. I was also impressed by the focus on research: how to ask good questions, how to extract answers, and how various fields overlap and learn from each other.”

Ari served as the Cognitive Aging Lab manager and wrote a cognitive science senior thesis under Dr. Howard mentorship. Her research focused on looking at the effects of stereotype activation on implicit learning in both young and old populations.

Stereotype activation ocurrs when a subject is confronted with words that trigger certain stereotypes. Ari and Howard studied the effects of negative and positive stereotype activation on the performance of younger versus older populations in a test of implicit learning, using college students and the elderly as subjects. This study posed the real-life question: is it easier to learn something when you are feeling good about yourself as opposed to when you are feeling unsure and incompetent?

Using the tools in their laboratory, Ari and Howard defined tests that permitted accurate measurements of possible changes in implicit learning abilities. Some subjects were shown a series of words with negative connotations, such as “senile, slow, confused,” activating a negative stereotype; others were shown words with positive connotations, such as “wise, clever, alert,” activating a positive stereotype. The words were shown so quickly that the subjects were not consciously aware of having seen them. The subjects then took a computer test that measures implicit learning ability.

Ari and Howard found that both young and old subjects were affected by the stereotypes: positive stereotypes, stimulating positive self-esteem, made them learn more quickly; while negative stereotypes, stimulating negative self-esteem, made them learn more slowly. Ari presented the results of this study at the Association for Psychological Science in New York (May, 2006).

“Of all my experiences at Georgetown,” Ari said, “my relationship and research in Dr. Howard's lab was the best. I learned an incredible amount about how to do research. Dr. Howard was always enthusiastic about my efforts and gave me useful feedback on all the steps of my projects. Having a supportive mentor like Dr. Howard and an encouraging lab environment sparked my interest in making research a part of my future career goals within the framework of medicine. Having the cognitive science minor helped sew together my various interests.”

After graduating from Georgetown, Ari worked for one year doing clinical research at the National Institute of Health (NIH), in a lab that studies Turner Syndrome. This August, she began medical school at the Colorado School of Medicine. She hopes to pursue a career as a physician, possibly in a development-related field. “I remain very interested in the brain and would like to incorporate research into my career.”

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