Allie Barlowe Wins Clara Mayo Award
PhD Student Allie Barlowe, a Psychological & Brain Sciences PhD Student in the Caldwell-Harris and Ling Labs––and a member of the Neurophotonics Trainee Program––was recently awarded the Clara Mayo Award.
Clara Mayo was a professor at Boston University from 1964-1981. She dedicated her career to the study of nonverbal communication, racism and sexism, and women’s work lives. Upon her death, a memorial fellowship was established in her honor by her family. The intent of the Claro Mayo Award is to help support female psychology doctoral students.
Utilizing this award, Barlowe will be able to further pursue her project “Pupillometric Signatures of Linguistic Conflict in Bilingual Language Processing.”
Below is a description, provided by Barlowe, on the project:
This study examines how the body responds to the mental effort of using more than one language. The body’s automatic system, which controls things like heart rate and alertness, is known to respond not only to stress but also to thinking effort. One way to measure this is by tracking changes in pupil size, which can reflect how hard the brain is working. Previous research has shown that bilingual individuals show different bodily responses when processing emotional information in their native versus second language. However, less is known about how the body responds during everyday language use that does not involve emotion. This study asks whether more mentally demanding language situations lead to greater physical signs of effort.
To test this, bilingual participants will complete a simple computer task where they respond to arrows after briefly seeing pairs of words. These word pairs will sometimes be in the same language and sometimes in different languages. Pupil size will be measured throughout the task. We hypothesize that mixed-language trials will require more mental effort, leading to larger and longer-lasting pupil dilation compared to single-language trials. This would suggest that switching between languages places greater demands on the brain and body.
This study will provide novel insights into how bilingual language processing demands engage the brain. More broadly, this project connects language research with brain science by showing how managing multiple languages relates to attention and mental effort, helping guide future studies on how the brain supports thinking in multilingual people.