Richard Huskey, an alumnus of the Media Neuroscience Lab, was awarded the Annie Lang Dissertation Award at the 2017 International Communication Association annual conference in San Diego. This award recognizes the most outstanding dissertation in a topic of the Information Science Division.
Richard’s Dissertation, “Intrinsic Reward Motivates Large-Scale Shifts Between Cognitive Control and Default Mode Networks During Task Performance” highlights Cognitive Control as a crucial framework for understanding the allocation of attentional resources during engagement with media messages. This research fills a gap in understanding as to the role of intrinsic reward in motivating and sustaining enactment of cognitive control in a task. The dissertation consisted of three behavioral studies and one fMRI study. The dissertation, notably, also served to develop a novel, naturalistic, and open source stimulus which can be used to investigate many questions of relevance to media psychologists. This stimulus, Asteroid Impact, is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Richard is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. His research lies at the intersection of media psychology and cognitive neuroscience with a particular focus on how media content influence human cognition and behavior.