Valerie Hsieh: Language Science Undergrad Research Fellow

The Language Science Center awarded Valerie Hsieh an undergraduate research fellowships for fall 2022. This fellowship is funded in part from the generous contributions of donors on Giving Day.

Valerie is a Hearing & Speech Sciences major in the Honors program, who aims to become a speech language pathologist. After working with autistic UMD students as a peer coach in the SIGNA program, she was inspired to learn more about research on assessing social abilities in interactive communication. She worked with mentors Yi Ting Huang and Kathy Dow-Burger to design an experiment investigating how neurotypical and autistic adults use social information for decision making. In the experiment, participants have to correctly guess a hidden color. They received “advice” from a computer (60% accurate), as well as two human advisors—one who turned out to be reliable (80% accurate), and the other unreliable (20% accurate). Data collection is still ongoing, but so far the results suggest that neurotypical participants show a greater reliance on the human advisors, and autistic participants show a greater dispreference for the unreliable human advisor. Valerie says, “These data suggest that autistic adults infer and react to the intentions of others, but utilize this information differently than neurotypicals.”