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ABSTRACTS ALPHABETIZED BY PRESENTER
THE SHAPE SCHOOL (EXTENDED VERSION)
Earl Yevak, Psychology
Michelle Ellefson, Psychology, Faculty Mentor
Funding provided by grants through the British Academy (SG-39180) and the Levehulme Trust
(F/215/AY).
The Shape School (Espy, 1997) is an exercise measuring cognitive control that has been
used in various studies conducted by Dr. Michelle R. Ellefson in the Instruct Lab at Virginia
Commonwealth University. Dr. Ellefson’s Shape School is an extended version of Espy’s Shape
School. The Instruct Lab seeks to explore how people learn with the goal of applying these
findings to how children are being taught in elementary, middle, and high school. The Shape
School exercise uses shapes and colors to test how proficient people are in controlling their
executive functions. More specifically, it explores the processes of inhibition and switching.
Task switching is a term used to describe how a person is able to manage their executive
functioning in tasks that require the participant to inhibit or stop one response that would be
correct given a previous set of rules in order to say or do something else that is correct
according to the new set of rules. One of the main focuses of Dr. Ellefson’s exercise was on how
the complexity of a task affected the participant’s ability to perform the task correctly. Task
switching has been explored in similar studies, often using the popular method known as the
Stroop Test. Dr. Ellefson’s Shape School is important in further understanding how our brains
respond when a rule is established, then changed. The participants we college aged students
who signed up to fulfill a psychology course requirement. Participants were scheduled to meet
in a lab and complete the experiment, which lasted approximately one hour. We recorded how
long it took to complete each task, as well as how many errors the participants made, and the
type of errors made.
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