Harrison Undergraduate Research Award

Bachelor of Science in Chemistry with Specialization in Biochemistry
Professor James Morris

Biography

Luke is a fourth-year undergraduate pre-medical student at UVA, majoring in chemistry (with specialization in biochemistry) and psychology. Aside from classes, he works as a certified nursing assistant and is conducting research under Prof. Morris’s guidance in social neuroscience research. Luke’s independent research project will be extending previously conducted research on a study examining the effects of valence and concurrent task difficulty on the late-positive potential (LPP), where the stimuli presented were words. Due to the visual nature of most emotional stimuli prevalent in day-to-day life and the importance of the LPP in memory encoding and storage, he is interesting in examining: How does the difficulty of a concurrent task alter the LPP corresponding to the processing of emotional images of varying levels of arousal and different valences? The LPP is a type of event-related potential (ERP), which is implicated in a variety of long-term cognitive processes and is notable for its unique stability across repeated stimulus presentations. ERPs refer to small but distinct changes in the voltage recorded by an electrode in electroencephalography, which arise due to specific events or stimuli.