Digital Commons Network^™

Individual Differences In Categorization, Urooj Anees

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The appearance of individual differences used to be regarded as noise in psychological experiments, but is slowly becoming a tool used to enhance and solidify findings in various fields of cognitive psychology. This presentation aims to very briefly discuss individual differences and categorization and what questions future research could aim to answer.

Using A Musical Beat To Influence Linguistic Statistical Learning, Aspen Leung

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The similarities between music and language continue to provide research questions in the area of psychology. Despite the large amount of research on this area of knowledge, there are still many existing questions in regards to the processing of musical and linguistic stimuli. Statistical learning involves the ability to extract statistical regularities from a stimulus and continues to be studied in both domains due to the similar hierarchical structure of music and language. Recently, neural entrainment (the synchronization of neural oscillations with the rhythm of an external stimulus) has been studied as a mechanism of statistical learning. Music has been …

The Influence Of Personality Trait Variation On Curiosity Seeking Behaviours, Brian Krivoruk

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Curiosity is defined as our desire to acquire new information and leads us to engage in information-seeking behaviours. The present study investigates how personality influences curiosity-based information-seeking behaviours during a state of curiosity induced by unsuccessful memory recall. Specifically, this study assessed the personality traits of deprivation-type (D-type), interest-type (I-type), and intolerance of uncertainty to explore their role in curiosity-based decisions making. Information-seeking choices were examined during unsuccessful recall in a paradigm using face-name pairs. The behaviour was correlated with responses from a series of questionnaires that looked at personality traits associated with curiosity and information-seeking. The findings suggested that …

Does Culture Affect The Ability To Learn And Use Categories?, Maya Ghai, Zarah Ghulamhussain

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The rapid advancement of cross-cultural research in recent decades has raised questions on the extent to which findings in cognitive psychology can be generalized to a global population. The majority of subjects in scientific literature, being WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations, only represent a sliver of the world’s diverse demographics, limiting our scope of psychological data to a highly specific subgroup. Emerging research has made us increasingly aware of the variances in cognition across cultures, including the learning and utilization of categories. Many lab-based categorization tasks have demonstrated that cognitive processes may be contingent on cultural factors. …

Social Cognition Across Eating Disorders: A Systematic Review, Jina C. Kim

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Social cognition refers to the cognitive processes involved in social interactions. Deficits in social cognition may play a role in the onset and maintenance of eating disorders (ED). The goal of this review was to examine the current literature on social cognition across EDs, specifically, anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), and binge eating disorder (BED).

The search revealed 79 studies which were organized according to six domains of social cognition: alexithymia, theory of mind, empathy, social processing, emotion recognition, and emotion processing. Most studies examined AN, finding evidence for deficits in some domains of social cognition. Literature on BN …

Memoir Dataset: Quantifying Image Memorability In Adolescents, Gal Almog, Yalda Mohsenzadeh

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Every day, humans observe and interact with hundreds of images and scenes; whether it be on a cellphone, on television, or in print. Yet a vast majority of these images are forgotten, some immediately and some after variable lengths of time. Memorability is indeed a property intrinsic to all images that can be extracted, as well as predicted. While memory itself is a process that occurs in the brain of an individual, the concept of memorability is an intrinsic, continuous property of a stimulus that can be both measured and manipulated. We selected images from the MemCat data set that …