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Changes In Audiovisual Integration In Aging, Alyssa S. Lynn

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The proposed study will examine changes in audiovisual integration between younger and older adults. Audiovisual integration enables us to associate and bind related auditory and visual information and experience it as a single percept (Spence, 2007). Being able to properly integrate is crucial in our everyday lives. When perceiving speech, audiovisual integration binds visual information from lip movements with auditory information from the speaker's utterances so that speech can be perceived multimodally. With age, our auditory and visual sensory acuity tends to decline with audiovisual integration being impacted as a result (Brooks et al., 2018; Mahoney et al., 2011). We …

Musical Instrument Familiarity Affects Statistical Learning Of Tone Sequences., Stephen C Van Hedger, Ingrid Johnsrude, Laura J Batterink

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Most listeners have an implicit understanding of the rules that govern how music unfolds over time. This knowledge is acquired in part through statistical learning, a robust learning mechanism that allows individuals to extract regularities from the environment. However, it is presently unclear how this prior musical knowledge might facilitate or interfere with the learning of novel tone sequences that do not conform to familiar musical rules. In the present experiment, participants listened to novel, statistically structured tone sequences composed of pitch intervals not typically found in Western music. Between participants, the tone sequences either had the timbre of artificial, …

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 …

Intelligibility Benefit For Familiar Voices Does Not Depend On Better Discrimination Of Fundamental Frequency Or Vocal Tract Length, Emma Holmes, Ingrid Johnsrude

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Speech is more intelligible when it is spoken by familiar than unfamiliar people. Two cues to voice identity are glottal pulse rate (GPR) and vocal tract length (VTL): perhaps these features are more accurately represented for familiar voices in a listener’s brain. If so, listeners should be able to discriminate smaller manipulations to perceptual correlates of these vocal parameters for familiar than unfamiliar voices. We recruited pairs of friends who had known each other for 0.5–22.5 years. We measured thresholds for discriminating pitch (correlate of GPR) and formant spacing (correlate of VTL; ‘VTL-timbre’) for voices that were familiar (friends) and …

The Relationship Between Perceived Sedentary Behaviour And Psychological Health, Kelsey Sick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present study examined relationships between individuals’ perceptions of their level of sedentary behaviour, as compared with other people their age, and mental health and well-being. Adults (n = 374, M_age= 60% between 18 and 24) completed the online Perceived Sedentary Behaviour and Psychological Health Survey which assessed perceptions of sedentary behaviour on a typical weekday and weekend day, mental health and well-being (i.e., depression, state anxiety, perceived stress, mental well-being, mental health function), and potential covariates that have known associations with mental well-being (e.g., sociodemographic characteristics, health status factors, actual sitting time). Perceived sedentary behaviour …

Understanding Perirhinal Contributions To Perception And Memory: Evidence Through The Lens Of Selective Perirhinal Damage, Marika C. Inhoff, Andrew C. Heusser, Arielle Tambini, Chris B. Martin, Edward B. O'Neil, Stefan Köhler, Michael R. Meager, Karen Blackmon, Blanca Vazquez, Orrin Devinsky, Lila Davachi

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Although a memory systems view of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) has been widely influential in understanding how memory processes are implemented, a large body of work across humans and animals has converged on the idea that the MTL can support various other decisions, beyond those involving memory. Specifically, recent work suggests that perception of and memory for visual representations may interact in order to support ongoing cognition. However, given considerations involving lesion profiles in neuropsychological investigations and the correlational nature of fMRI, the precise nature of representations supported by the MTL are not well understood …

The Role Of Familiarity In Rhythmic Timing And Beat Perception, Joshua Hoddinott

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Behavioural and neural differences associated with strong and weak-beat rhythms may indicate that strong-beat rhythms are more familiar stimuli than weak-beat rhythms, or differences may be because intervals in strong-beat rhythms are more easily encoded relative to a beat. To test these different possibilities, participants were trained to reproduce strong-, weak-, and non-beat rhythms over 4 days, in an attempt to equate familiarity across the different categories of rhythms. On a fifth day, participants were tested on their ability to reproduce these same rhythms at learned, slower, and faster rates, as well as novel rhythms. Participants improved performance on all …

The Effects Of Reading Metaphor On Perceptual Distance Judgments, Jeffrey N. Reid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present research examined the effects of reading metaphor on judgments of distance between people. In two experiments, we found that reading metaphor induced participants to perceive pairs of models shown in pictures as physically farther apart compared to reading either literal language, or nothing aside from instructions. A third experiment ruled out that this effect was due to participants feeling closer themselves to the models and a fourth experiment ruled out that this effect was related to perceived social distance. Construal level theory posits that there are multiple dimensions of psychological distance and that these dimensions are cognitively related. …

Madness In The Media: Understanding How People With Lived Experience Interpret Newspaper Headlines, Da Qing Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There is research on media representations of mental health that suggests there is a tendency to portray mental health as problematic and those who are affected by mental illness as dangerous. It is evident there has been an increase in anti-stigma media campaigns. However, the effects of these efforts on beliefs held by members of the public has been mixed. What is most surprising from the literature is a lack of research about how people who have personal experience with mental illness interpret media messages. Individuals with and without lived experience participated in a structured conceptualization process known as concept …

The Representational-Hierarchical View Of Pattern Separation: Not Just Hippocampus, Not Just Space, Not Just Memory?, B. A. Kent, M. Hvoslef-Eide, L. M. Saksida, T. J. Bussey

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Pattern separation (PS) has been defined as a process of reducing overlap between similar input patterns to minimize interference amongst stored representations. The present article describes this putative PS process from the "representational-hierarchical" perspective (R-H), which uses a hierarchical continuum instead of a cognitive modular processing framework to describe the organization of the ventral visual perirhinal-hippocampal processing stream. Instead of trying to map psychological constructs onto anatomical modules in the brain, the R-H model suggests that the function of brain regions depends upon what representations they contain. We begin by discussing a main principle of the R-H framework, the resolution …

Behavioral, Perceptual, And Neural Alterations In Sensory And Multisensory Function In Autism Spectrum Disorder., Sarah H Baum, Ryan A Stevenson, Mark T Wallace

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Although sensory processing challenges have been noted since the first clinical descriptions of autism, it has taken until the release of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013 for sensory problems to be included as part of the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the diagnostic profile. Because sensory information forms the building blocks for higher-order social and cognitive functions, we argue that sensory processing is not only an additional piece of the puzzle, but rather a critical cornerstone for characterizing and understanding ASD. In this review we discuss what …

Effect Of Olfaction On The Perception Of Movie Clips, Nikita A. Wong

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Odours are important to many species but their effect on human perception in the context of concurrent auditory and visual stimulation has received little investigation. Here we examined how the experience of viewing audio-visual movie clips changes when accompanied by congruent or incongruent odours. Using an olfactometer to control odourant delivery, thirty-five undergraduate students from Western University were randomly presented 36 different odour-video pairs twice. Following each presentation, participants completed three Likert scales to assess multisensory interaction in terms of engagement, pleasantness, and emotional arousal. Comparison of congruent and incongruent odours to the no odour control condition revealed that incongruent …

Do Our Perceptions Affect Our Decision Making In Legal Contexts?, Scott Benedict

Undergraduate Honours Theses

Previous research has established that community interaction with the mentally ill, public education on the subject, and social integration all lead to a significantly more positive prognosis for sufferers of mental illness (Trute & Loewen, 1978), especially in ensuring less-frequent interaction with the legal system. Research has also shown however, that the misinformed and uneducated are more punitive and less empathetic (Shaw & Woodworth, 2013). The large representation of the mentally ill in the prison system necessitates revisions of policies regarding the handling of mental illness in social and community immersion, public education and legal contexts. The present study was …

Working Memory And Music Perception And Production In An Adult Sample, Keara L. Gillis

Undergraduate Honours Theses

This study examined the relationship between working memory and music perception and production in an adult population. Music perception and production was assessed using The Vocal Auditory Motor Development Assessment (VAMDA). Working memory was examined using both a forward and backward digit span test. A significant positive correlation was found between working memory and melody discrimination, while no significant relationship was found between working memory and pitch discrimination and production. Result implications and future research directions are discussed.

Decoding The Neural Mechanisms Of Human Tool Use., Jason P Gallivan, D Adam Mclean, Kenneth F Valyear, Jody C Culham

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Sophisticated tool use is a defining characteristic of the primate species but how is it supported by the brain, particularly the human brain? Here we show, using functional MRI and pattern classification methods, that tool use is subserved by multiple distributed action-centred neural representations that are both shared with and distinct from those of the hand. In areas of frontoparietal cortex we found a common representation for planned hand- and tool-related actions. In contrast, in parietal and occipitotemporal regions implicated in hand actions and body perception we found that coding remained selectively linked to upcoming actions of the hand whereas …

Perceived Parental Attachment And Achievement Motivation, Mena Bal, Imants Barušs

Psychology

A significant amount of research in attachment theory has been devoted to factors affecting academic achievement, but less attention has been given to the role of attachment in the relation between academic achievement and achievement motivation. The current preliminary study examined the role of perceived parental attachment in achievement motivation. Self-report data obtained from the Parental Attachment Questionnaire, Achievement Goals Questionnaire, and the Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory were collected from 50 university students with a mean age of 18.8 yr. Correlation and regression analyses indicated that parental facilitation of independence correlated significantly and negatively with fear of failure. Results yielded …

A Dissociation Between Perception And Action In The Material‐Weight Illusion, Gavin Buckingham, Jonathan S. Cant, Kai-Ling C. Kao, Melvyn A. Goodale

Psychology Presentations

We examined what forces are applied to objects that elicit this illusion when they are lifted.We predicted that:

(1) Forces on early trials will scale to each participant’s expectations of how much a particular block will weigh ‐ excessive force will be applied to the metal block and insufficient force applied to the polystyrene block.

(2) Forces on later trials will scale to the real weight of each block ‐ identical levels of force applied to all the blocks.

(3) MWI will persist throughout ‐ polystyrene block will feel the heaviest, metal block will feel the lightest.