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Assessing the Healthy

... assessing cognition in the healthy, the aging, the injured, and the malingering ...

My research with healthy younger adults focuses on examining everyday life activities in four major areas:

1. assessing everyday attention errors with the Slip Induction Task

2. characterizing the everyday impact of adverse childhood experiences

3. exploring the impact of reward in feedback and motivation

4. measuring and enhancing critical thinking in undergraduates

5. examining visual attention to social comparison information on social media 

assessing everyday attention errors with the slip induction task

Slips of action are cognitive errors that occur during routine tasks in everyday life (Clark, Parakh, Smilek, & Roy, 2012).  Minimizing everyday errors involves executive functions including cognitive control, attention, inhibition, and task switching. I designed the Slip Induction Task (SIT) as part of my dissertation and it is a measure of cognitive control (learn more).  The task involves participants learning a sequence of movements until they become routine.  Upon the sequence becoming well learned, participants complete several more trials which occasionally include sporadic deviations from that previously learned routine sequence.  In this way, participants must sometimes inhibit a routine, prepotent response. The SIT has been found to induce slips of action in healthy younger adults (Clark et al., 2012), healthy older adults (Clark & Roy, in review), young adults with ADHD (Nida & Clark, 2016), and older adults with a history of mild brain injury (Clark, Ozen, Fernandes, & Roy, 2010).

Everyday life impact of adverse childhood experiences

This body of work explores adverse life experience and how they shape stress regulation, health, and cognitive functioning in young adults. In a large survey study (Halvorson, Materia, & Clark, 2021) we found that higher ACE exposure was associated with increased perceived stress, physical illness, and reliance on poor coping strategies, though psychological resilience moderated some of these negative effects. In addition we found that higher ACEs were associated with more occurrences of depressive affect (Materia, Halvorson, & Clark, 2021). In a complementary experimental study (Strickland, Humphrey, & Clark, 2023), individuals with higher ACEs reported greater subjective stress during a demanding working memory task but maintained comparable accuracy and exhibited adaptive physiological regulation. Collectively, these findings suggest that while early adversity elevates stress vulnerability, resilience and adaptive mechanisms may help sustain both health and cognitive performance under challenge.

Paying For Attention: Examining Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

This project - championed by my prior graduate student, Jacob Robbins - explores how both enduring (trait-based) and situational (state-based) forms of intrinsic motivation shape performance when individuals engage in tasks that demand flexible attention and self-regulation. In this study, participants completed a Stroop task under either rewarded or informative feedback conditions. Results demonstrated that while both feedback types improved performance, reward conditions produced larger gains. Individual differences in Need for Cognition further moderated these effects, revealing how motivation dynamically calibrates effort and control over time (Robbins, Melone, & Clark, 2022).

Jacob is currently completing a doctoral degree in School Psychology at Texas A&M and had space in his workload to write this manuscript this year. We are collaborating with one of his current Texas A&M colleagues (Brooks) and his advisor there (Woltering). I am the senior supervising author on this project (Robbins, Woltering, Brooks & Clark, in preparation for November 2025 submission).

Enhancing critical thinking in upper-year psychology college students

Thinking critically and flexibly are cognitive skills that are necessary to ensure career success upon graduation from college.  Dr. Amye Warren and I examined if upper-level undergraduate students improve in their critical thinking ability as a function of participation in PSY 4120.  This was evaluated by comparing pre- and post-test scores from the critical thinking assessment test (CAT) for Fall 2014 and pre- and post-test scores from a Psychology analog version for Spring 2015.  We found that course-specific learning gains were not associated with significant improvement in critical thinking on the CAT and only marginal gains on the psych-specific assessment.  

Attention to idealized relationship portrayals on Facebook

Facebook is a virtual hotbed for social comparison. People post information about their relationships on Facebook, making it available for other users to compare. However, the content they share represents the most positive characteristics of those relationships, thereby presenting an inflated, or idealized view of normal romantic bonds. Those with low self-esteem evaluate their relationships more negatively after exposure to idealized relationship portrayals on Facebook, but it is unclear whether individual differences in motivation to engage in relationship social comparison (directed visual attention to the idealized content) cause this effect or whether those high in self-esteem and those low in self-esteem simply assess the social comparison content differently.

Developing Interprofessional Competency

As the project evaluator for the HRSA funded program Providing Advanced, Culturally Competent Care through Clinical Training (PACT4) I developed program evaluation instruments and protocols for data collection, worked with project personnel in securing IRB approvals, implemented data collection procedures, set up data management, analyzed of data, attended interprofessional team meetings and wrote reports of findings.  

My effort on this project resulted in:

• Peer-reviewed publication in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing

• Four poster presentations at regional and national conferences

• Conference breakout session titled: Interprofessional Guide to Supporting Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment

• Learning module on Mental Health Issues in Older Adults

• Evaluations instruments for 10 learning modules

• A visual guide to those learning modules

The work we did with this grant inspired our team of collaborators to develop a proposal titled: Preceptor Development for Systematic Advanced Clinical Training (PDS-ACT).  In this program we proposed to 1) establishing a teaching coalition to develop, implement, evaluate, and disseminate evidence-based models of practice by advanced practice RNs in the region; 2) increasing the pool of competent clinical preceptors; 3) expand the preparation of FNP students and an interprofessional preceptor group utilizing technology-enhanced education curriculum and development strategies; and 4) improve the readiness to practice of FNP students by engaging in culturally competent and diverse community-based clinical experiences.  Our HRSA ANE funding application where we sought $1,761,131 was approved but not funded.