I am pleased to here be able to announce the winners of the honorary prize for the best Bachelor’s Thesis and the best Master’s Thesis in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Skövde for the year 2018!
At Bachelor’s level, the prize goes to Consciousness Studies student Emilia Svennersjö, for her thesis Thinking things over: The electrophysiology and temporal dynamics of self- and situation-focused reappraisal. Emilia has written an empirical thesis on ERPs in relation to certain features of emotion regulation. And in her framing of the topic, the thesis is simply outstanding: beyond the impeccable academic language (precise without being too technical, formally correct without feeling dry), she has managed to summarize relevant research in a manner that provides an excellent foundation for the subsequent empirical undertaking. She then goes on to do an excellent job outlining the nature of the experiment, and provides a robust and well-balanced interpretation of the final results.
At Master’s level, the prize goes to Master program student Morgan Frost, for her thesis Social perception in Autism: An eye tracking and pupillometric study, which deals with the differences in how individuals on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those with functionally similar but non-ASD diagnoses differ in the way they visually scan social elements in images. In the thesis, Morgan is economic in her phrasing, without adding unnecessary cruft, but strikingly on-point throughout. This makes for altogether compelling reading, motivating the reader from the outset through to the end, in order to be able to find out what happens next, almost like a detective novel. In addition, the empirical undertaking is solid, the results are robust, and their interpretation is impressively nuanced. A truly stellar thesis.
Congratulations to both Emilia and Morgan for the awards!