For Alex, from Whitehouse, OH, Ohio State was her dream school. She was excited about the many opportunities OSU would provide, include access to outstanding research opportunities and faculty.

With help from Dr. Vladimir Sloutsky, Alex recently defended her thesis, “Investigating semantic priming in adulthood: differential contribution of subtypes of thematic relatedness” which investigated how different items in our daily lives interact with one another. Her work in this area won her second place in the poster competition at CogFest.

Per Alex regarding her research: “I looked at a specific type of semantic relation known as a thematic relation, which have not been well studied in research until the last decade. Because of that, the relation is not well defined among different researchers. My study looked to see if different types of thematic relations had an effect on cognitive processing, which in turn would help researchers see what makes up thematic relations, or what has more influence in the relation.”

After graduating this May, Alex plans to take a year off and continue working in the research field. Her long-term goal is to pursue a PhD in Cognitive Psychology.