Congratulations to Kiranjot Jhajj, a graduate student in the UNBC Psychology program, for receiving the BC Graduate Scholarship. The Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills, and Training offers this scholarship (valued at $15,000) to Master’s or Doctoral students who exhibit academic excellence and compatibility with the UNBC strategic research goals.
Under the supervision of Dr. Annie Duchesne, Kiranjot is planning to investigate the use of learning strategies as a part of her Master’s thesis. Based on the learning strategy that is used, individuals can either respond to their environment in a rigid but streamlined manner or a thoughtful and evaluative manner. There are interindividual differences that exist in the recruitment of these strategies, especially based on the context that an individual is in. Further, this effect of context on learning strategy recruitment can differ between men and women.
Kiranjot’s research project aims to investigate the role of task novelty in the recruitment of learning strategies in young women, specifically in the cognitive domains of decision making, probabilistic learning (the process of making associations between certain cues and probabilities), and inhibitory control (the process of stopping an ongoing response to select an opposing one). With this research, she hopes to improve the current understanding of the inter- and intraindividual processes that contribute to differences in learning strategy recruitment.​
Photo from University of Northern British Columbia