Digital Commons Network^™

Laterality Enhances Cognition In Australian Parrots, Maria Magat, Culum Brown

Sentience Collection

Cerebral lateralization refers to the division of information processing in either hemisphere of the brain and is a ubiquitous trait among vertebrates and invertebrates. Given its widespread occurrence, it is likely that cerebral lateralization confers a fitness advantage. It has been hypothesized that this advantage takes the form of enhanced cognitive function, potentially via a dual processing mechanism whereby each hemisphere can be used to process specific types of information without contralateral interference. Here, we examined the influence of lateralization on problem solving by Australian parrots. The first task, a pebble-seed discrimination test, was designed for small parrot species that …

Deep Rationality: The Evolutionary Economics Of Decision Making, Douglas T. Kenrick, Vladas Griskevicius, Jill M. Sundie, Norman P. Li, Jessica Yexin Li, Steven L. Neuberg

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

What is a “rational” decision? Economists traditionally viewed rationality as maximizing expected satisfaction. This view has been useful in modeling basic microeconomic concepts, but falls short in accounting for many everyday human decisions. It leaves unanswered why some things reliably make people more satisfied than others, and why people frequently act to make others happy at a cost to themselves. Drawing on an evolutionary perspective, we propose that people make decisions according to a set of principles that may not appear to make sense at the superficial level, but that demonstrate rationality at a deeper evolutionary level. By this, we …

Mood Over Matter: Can Happiness Be Your Undoing?, Melissa Falkenstern, Holly H. Schiffrin, S. Katherine Nelson, Lyndsey Ford, Christina Keyser

Psychological Science

Research in the field of positive psychology has revealed many advantages of positive emotions. According to the undoing hypothesis (Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998), positive affect can undo the physiological effects of negative emotion. The present study examined whether positive emotions could undo the cognitive effects of negative emotion. A letter identification task was used to measure changes in cognitive processing of 86 college students who were induced into a positive, negative, or neutral affective state by viewing various film clips. The results of this study provided preliminary support for the hypothesis that positive emotions undo the cognitive effects of negative …

Cognitive Vulnerability To Anxiety: A Review And An Integrative Model., Allison J Ouimet, Bertram Gawronski, David J A Dozois

Psychology Publications

Consistent research evidence supports the existence of threat-relevant cognitive bias in anxiety, but there remains controversy about which stages of information processing are most important in the conferral of cognitive vulnerability to anxiety. To account for both theoretical and empirical discrepancies in the literature, an integrative multi-process model is proposed wherein core assumptions of dual-systems theories from social and cognitive psychology are adapted to explain attentional and interpretive biases in the anxiety disorders. According to the model, individual differences in associative and rule-based processing jointly influence orientation, engagement, disengagement, and avoidance of threat-relevant stimuli, as well as negatively-biased interpretation of …

The Impact Of Friendships And Mutual Antipathies On Children's Social Behavior And Social Cognition, Elizabeth M. Boulie

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Mutual antipathies are rare among preschoolers and are common among older school age children, but little is known about the prevalence of mutual antipathies among younger school age children. One goal of this study was to examine the prevalence of mutual antipathies among first graders to determine if they are common among younger children. A second goal of the study was to examine the impact of friendship and mutual antipathies on children’s social behavior and social cognition. A sample of first, third, and fifth graders (N = 512) first completed rating and nomination sociometric assessments to assess participation in friendships …

The Relationship Between Goal Orientation And Gender Roles, Amanda Michelle Hutchins

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study was designed to examine the relationship between a person’s goal orientation and the gender roles that they adopt. The relationship between gender and goal orientation has been studied for years, but the results have been inconclusive. Some studies find a gender difference and some studies do not. For this reason, this study examined if there was another factor that was influencing goal orientations that was related to gender.

Goal orientations are perceptual-cognitive frameworks for how individuals approach, interpret, and respond to achievement situations. Gender roles are the behaviors, thoughts, and emotions that are considered acceptable and appropriate for …

Training Forgetting Of Negative Material In Depression, Jutta Joormann, Paula T. Hertel, J. Lemoult, Ian Henry Gotlib

Psychology Faculty Research

In this study, the authors investigated whether training participants to use cognitive strategies can aid forgetting in depression. Participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) and never-depressed participants learned to associate neutral cue words with a positive or negative target word and were then instructed not to think about the negative targets when shown their cues. The authors compared 3 different conditions: an unaided condition, a positive-substitute condition, and a negative-substitute condition. In the substitute conditions, participants were instructed to use new targets to keep from thinking about the original targets. After the training phase, participants were instructed to recall …

Arterial Pulse Wave Velocity And Cognition With Advancing Age, Merrill F. Elias, Michael A. Robbins, Marc M. Budge, Walter P. Abhayaratna, Gregory A. Dore, Penelope K. Elias

Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Papers

We hypothesized that carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV), a marker of arterial stiffness, interacts with age such that the magnitude of associations between PWV and cognitive performance are greater with increasing age and that this interaction is observed despite adjustments for demographic variables, mean arterial pressure, and cardiovascular risk factors. PWV was estimated using applanation tonometry in 409 dementia- and stroke-free participants of the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (24 to 92 years of age; 62.3% women). Using linear regression analyses in a cross-sectional design, associations between PWV and age and the interaction of PWV and age were examined in relation to …

Constructive And Deconstructive Tool Modification By Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes), Amanda E. Bania, Stephany Harris, Hannah R. Kinsley, Sarah T. Boysen

Sentience Collection

Nine chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were tested for their ability to assemble or disassemble the appropriate tool to obtain a food reward from two different apparatus. In its deconstructed form, the tool functioned as a probe for one apparatus. In its constructed form, the tool functioned as a hook, appropriate for a second apparatus. Each subject completed four test trials with each apparatus type. Tool types were randomized and counter-balanced between the two forms. Results demonstrated that adult and juvenile chimpanzees (N = 7) were successful with both tool types, while two infant chimpanzees performed near chance. Off-line video analyses revealed …

Not All Faces Are Processed Equally: Evidence For Featural Rather Than Holistic Processing Of Ones Own Face In A Face-Imaging Task, Seth N. Greenberg, Yonatan Goshen-Gottstein

Faculty Work

The present work considers the mental imaging of faces, with a focus in own-face imaging. Experiments 1 and 3 demonstrated an own-face disadvantage, with slower generation of mental images of one’s own face than of other familiar faces. In contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that mental images of facial parts are generated more quickly for one’s own face. Finally, Experiment 4 established that a bias toward local processing is advantageous for one’s own face, whereas a global-processing bias produces an enhanced own-face disadvantage. The results suggest that own-face imaging is more synchronized with retrieval of face features and less attuned to …

Adaptive Rationality: An Evolutionary Perspective On Cognitive Bias, Martie Haselton, Gregory A. Bryant, Andreas Wilke, David Frederick, Andrew Galperin, Willem E. Frankenhuis, Tyler Moore

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

A casual look at the literature in social cognition reveals a vast collection of biases, errors, violations of rational choice, and failures to maximize utility. One is tempted to draw the conclusion that the human mind is woefully muddled. We present a three-category evolutionary taxonomy of evidence of biases: biases are (a) heuristics, (b) error management effects, or (c) experimental artifacts. We conclude that much of the research on cognitive biases can be profitably reframed and understood in evolutionary terms. An adaptationist perspective suggests that the mind is remarkably well designed for important problems of survival and reproduction, and not …