Ashleigh Wells

Biography

Ashleigh graduated from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania in 2014 with a BA in Psychology. Her research as an undergraduate included investigating the effects of chronic and acute stress on relapse to food seeking in rats. She received a Master of Arts degree from Boston University in 2015, where her research looked at the effects of jumbled words on reading speed and accuracy in normal and dyslexic readers.

From Sept 2015 to Sept 2017, Ashleigh worked as a pre-clinical and clinical research assistant under Dr. Britta Hahn at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Catonsville, MD. Projects during this time included studying the effects of nicotine and galantamine (an Alzheimer drug) and nicotine and propranolol (a blood pressure drug) on attention in rats; studying the effects of galantamine and nicotine and propranolol and nicotine on attention in healthy adults; studying the effects of nicotine on associative memory in healthy adults; studying the effects of nicotine on cognitive remediation training (via BrainHQ – a suite of cognitive-task games) in patients with schizophrenia; and studying the effects of tryptophan on cognition in patients with schizophrenia.

Since arriving at UCSB in Sept 2017, Ashleigh has worked on five projects under Rich Mayer: the effect of segmenting in a GIS lesson, the effects of playing focused video games on executive function skill acquisition, and an exploratory study on the note-taking habits of General Psychology students. Her research interests include games for learning, VR in education, note-taking, problem solving, and implementing active learning strategies to promote generative learning.