Ap Psychology Personal Statement Examples

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Growing up, I had been taught to think and solve problems within the constraints of fixed formulas and theorems. When I was introduced to cognitive neuroscience research in my sophomore year, I was amazed by it: being able to infer the limits and potentials of the mind from behavioral performance and biological experiments was a fascinating concept to me. To further explore my interest in cognitive neuroscience, I pursued research opportunities in a laboratory setting. Through my involvement in various research activities, I fell in love with the creativity and intricacy of designing experiments, the excitement of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data, and the fulfillment in constantly learning new things about cognition. Thus, I am determined …show more content…

Morgan Barense’s research group, and currently, I am working on an independent project examining the effect of aging on memory for time and space in humans under Dr. Barense’s supervision. In my experiment, older and younger participants learn routes with different temporal structures in a virtual environment, and are later tested on their memory for the routes. With my project, I aim to investigate whether memory for temporal information is supported by the hippocampus, and if so, is this ability affected by aging-related decline in hippocampal volume. Moreover, by including older adults at risk of cognitive decline in my study, I intend to test whether spatial disorientation, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, is preceded by finergrained changes in memory, such as temporal disorientation. I led all aspects of this study, from refining the experimental procedures to analyzing and interpreting the results. The independent project has been simultaneously challenging and rewarding, and it profoundly cultivated my critical thinking, creativity, independence and professionalism in conducting research. I greatly enjoyed conducting this project, because interesting surprises about the mind always arise from the process of scientific research; it also made me realize how passionate I am about conducting research on memory and