My current academic research project is based in psychology, specifically focusing on motivation and attention. Throughout my behavioral study, I will focus on how motivation can have an impact on someone’s attentional breadth, or the amount that someone is attuned to global vs specific features of an object or situation. By doing this, I hope to clear up disparities in existing work on the effect of motivation on attentional breadth and produce a literature review of the current experiments that pertain to the subject. Motivation is key to understand in the discipline of psychology, for it affects how willing people are to put their time, effort, and resources into certain projects or ideas. Additionally, if motivation plays a role in attentional breadth, this could inform how people’s understanding of certain ideas can be manipulated by their level of motivation at a given time.

One of NASA’s Science and Mission Directorate’s goals is to engage with learners in order to get them excited about NASA’s missions. Therefore, obtaining the attention of listeners is vital, especially if motivation plays a role in how broad or narrow (focused) their attention is. If motivation of kids, adults, donors, and others is essential to how they pay attention to NASA’s talks, this could then influence how much they care about issues like Earth’s changing weather changing systems, NASA’s space missions, and other long-term goals that the Science and Mission Directorate aim to educate and raise awareness for.