Kazuo Mori Student Travel Grant Award Winners

SARMAC recognizes the high costs associated with attending international conferences, especially for students living far from the conference venue. The Kazuo Mori Student Travel Grants aim to reduce that cost, and in 2023, the Society provided 7 grants to the following recipients. Each application was blindly adjudicated by two members of the SARMAC Student Caucus Executive Committee. Awardees were evaluated on the theoretical and practical significance of their research as well as the methodological approaches being employed:

Janice Yung - University of New South Wales
Project title: Juror decision-making on face identification evidence and the influence of expert witness testimony

Bio: I am a Combined Master of Clinical Psychology/PhD student at the University of New South Wales, Australia. My research focuses on examining how image-based face identification evidence is handled within the justice system and the way in which different psychological factors can affect juror decision-making. In particular, my study investigates juror perceptions of different expert witnesses and their ability to integrate this testimony within the decision-making involved for face matching comparisons. 

Nydia Ayala - Iowa State University
Project title: Witnesses can forecast their accuracy on a vehicle lineup

Bio: I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Cognitive Psychology at Iowa State University. My research broadly focuses on improving eyewitness identification procedures and investigating those eyewitness behaviors that police investigators can leverage to determine the likely accuracy of a witness’ identification decision. The series of studies I will present at SARMAC XIV evaluates the role of selective attention at encoding on performance on forensic-vehicle lineup procedures.

Nazike Mert - Cornell University
Project title: Valence of Collective Future Thoughts in American and Chinese Adults

Bio: I’m a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University. My research focuses on the impact of sociocultural factors on recalling the past and imagining the future. Specifically, I’m interested in exploring how individuals from different cultures envision their personal and national futures. In my present study, I investigate the emotional valence of Chinese and American participants' collective thoughts regarding the future of their respective countries, utilizing various approaches including fluency tasks and event ratings.

Amy van Langeraad - Goldsmiths, University of London
Project title: What Works in Appeals for Information and Public Service Announcements?

Bio: I am a full-time PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London in the United Kingdom. My research focuses on creating an effective missing persons appeal that could be distributed to targeted audiences and the wider public. Effectiveness is, in this context, defined as to elicit an increase in cognitive processes such as attention, engagement, memory recall, and behavioural change. This project, in the form of a systematic review, looks across several disciplines to provide an evidence base within and across settings that can be used to inform what works in appeals and PSAs. 

Lan Anh Do - Tufts University
Project title: The Cognitive and Affective Consequences of Collaborative Learning

Bio: I am a PhD student at Tufts University. My research focuses on students’ learning and well-being. I am interested in examining the impact of different study methods that can make learning more effective. Specifically, the present study seeks to investigate the benefits of collaborative problem solving. I aim to reveal how the dynamic interaction among students under different collaborative learning environments will affect students’ performance, perceived emotion, and heart-rate variability (HRV). 

Bethany Muir - Australian National University
Project title: Background cues in remote courts: The effect of mess on witness credibility and evidence

Bio: I am a PhD candidate at the Australian National University (Canberra, Australia). My research examines how contextual cues in personal backgrounds can influence social impressions and decision-making in virtual courts. At SARMAC XIV, I will present our latest research that explores how messy backgrounds, compared to tidy backgrounds, may bias perceptions of remote witnesses and their evidence. 

Zoe Michael - Flinders University
Project title: The detection of suspicious behaviour: The influences of autism and Theory of Mind

Bio: I am completing my PhD at Flinders University in South Australia. My research investigates whether poor Theory of Mind, understood to be a key characteristic of autism, is related to difficulty detecting suspicious behaviour in problematic social interactions. I am interested in how this might impact criminal vulnerability and victimisation in autistic adults. This study will discuss the validation of a novel paradigm for measuring the detection of suspicious behaviour (the Suspicious Activity Paradigm) and the relationships between SAP performance, autism, and Theory of Mind.