Efsun Annac, Ph.D.

The third topic is on  Uncertainty . What does uncertainty mean in PhD life? First-year in PhD is fun. It is the year you think "everything is under control". After some time, problems escalate. It is frustrating because problems may delay experiments, data collection, analysis, papers and eventually PhD Thesis...When things go wrong, you feel stressed and you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel... Do you have inconclusive data? Don't be afraid. I spent a considerable amount of time on one of my projects. Lots of experiments and lots of analysis... The results did not support our research question. My supervisor and I decided to leave this project behind and carry on with a different question. It is the right approach in science but I couldn't escape from the feeling that I gave this project a lot of effort for nothing (which was not true!). It was my third year and I was under a lot of stress. In the end, there was only one question in my mind, &qu

Recognition of incidentally learned visual search arrays is supported by fixational eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition Efsun Annac,  Mathias Pointner,  Patrick H. Khader,  Hermann J. Müller,  Xuelian Zang, & Thomas Geyer Abstract: Repeated encounter of abstract target-distractor letter arrangements leads to improved visual search for such displays. This contextual-cueing effect is attributed to incidental learning of display configurations. Whether observers can consciously access the memory underlying the cueing effect is still a controversial issue. The current study uses a novel recognition task and eyetracking to tackle this question. Experiment 1 investigated observers’ ability to recognize or “generate” the display quadrant of the target in a previous search array when the target was now substituted by distractor element as well as where observers’ eye fixations would fall while they freely viewed the recognition display,