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Difficult Turned Easy: Suggestion Renders A Challenging Visual Task Simple, Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, Amir Raz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Suggestions can cause some individuals to miss or disregard existing visual stimuli, but can they infuse sensory input with nonexistent information? Although several prominent theories of hypnotic suggestion propose that mental imagery can change our perceptual experience, data to support this stance remain sparse. The present study addressed this lacuna, showing how suggesting the presence of physically absent, yet critical, visual information transforms an otherwise difficult task into an easy one. Here, we show how adult participants who are highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion successfully hallucinated visual occluders on top of moving objects. Our findings support the idea that, at …

Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?, Stephen J. Morse

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains (MIT Press, 2018), which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our …

S3e6: How Do Face Masks Affect First Impressions?, Ron Lisnet, Mollie Ruben

The Maine Question

There’s an adage that people don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. Mollie Ruben, assistant professor of psychology, examines how face masks affect people’s first impressions of others during the COVID-19 outbreak. Do people appear more or less smart to others, depending on whether they’re wearing or not wearing a mask? More or less friendly? Learn about this research project conducted by Ruben, who directs the Emotion, Pain, and Interpersonal Communication (EPIC) Lab at the University of Maine.

Young Men’S Perceptions Of Teenage Pregnancy, Oluwatoyin Adewole, Oluwaseun M. Otubanjo

The Qualitative Report

The purpose of the qualitative study was to understand the perceptions and experiences of young men who lived in a county of Texas regarding teenage pregnancy. Face-to-face audio-taped interviews were conducted with 20 young men between ages 18 and 21. Five major themes and one subtheme were uncovered from the interview: unplanned pregnancy/attitude to unprotected sex, being a father at an early age, wanting sex education in the school curriculum, advice for other young men, and desiring parent’s role in sex education. The sub-theme was early childhood education to start at home. The findings of this study demonstrate that young …

Development And Validation Of A Multidimensional Scale For Measuring Public Confidence In The Criminal Justice System, Jimin Pyo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two studies were conducted with an aim of developing multidimensional measures of public confidence that are conceptually integrated, psychometrically sound, and useful in predicting individuals’ law related behaviors. Study 1 involves two-phased construction of scale in which a preliminary inventory was generated (Phase 1) and then finalized after evaluating psychometric properties based on 304 US adults recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) (Phase 2). As a result, six multidimensional scales were constructed respectively for measuring efficiency-, finality-, fairness-, strictness-, accuracy-, and transparency-oriented confidence. Despite more complexity of factor structures than originally expected, results of psychometric evaluation six scales of confidence …

Scope Of Attention Variation As A Function Of Anxiety And Depression, Kathleen O'Donnell

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

As a social species, correct emotional perception is so vital, that the human brain has evolved a mechanism to control attentional choices by exerting a narrowed field of perception during danger, called the scope of attention (SoA). The SoA determines what information will be focused on or ignored by blocking the perception of non-relevant items and increasing selective focus on danger; even if danger is merely a sad-face. The emotional items blocked from perception cannot be remembered because they were never perceived. But, attention-control to emotional stimuli also varies with mood, as seen in mood-disorders. A mood-disorder’s effect upon the …

Let's Get Physical: The Dual-Task Costs Of Multiple Motor Responses, Taylor Nicole Hutson

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Dual-task costs occur when attention is divided among two or more concurrent tasks. Most dual-task studies involve paradigms where participants complete two, concurrent cognitive tasks; in these studies, performance on one or both tasks are slower and/or less accurate. The goal of this study was to examine whether dual-task costs would exist when participants completed a cognitive task while walking and whether those costs would be greater when the cognitive task required a motor-based response or when the task was more difficult. Twenty-two college students completed four blocks of a visual search task while walking. The difficult and the manual …

The Effects Of Self-Regulation Depletion And Race On The Willingness To Interact With Individuals With Mental Illness, Kenocha K. Epperson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although the discrimination that Black individuals encounter is unique, it is similar in some ways to the discrimination experienced by individuals with mental illness (Corrigan & Wassel, 2008; Follmer & Jones, 2018; Jackson & Stewart, 2003). Research has found that these kinds of stigma can be overridden (Baumeister et al., 1998), but doing so requires self-regulation, which can be depleted (Gailliot et al., 2007). Because stigma exists against both Black individuals and those with mental illness, and because self-regulation is necessary to override those stigmas, the purpose of this project was to examine the relationships to which Black participants would …

Perception Of County Extension Agents’ Organizational Fit After Participating In The Mentoring Component Of The Cooperative Extension Service Onboarding Program, Angela Blacklaw-Freel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to determine the perception employees of the Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service (CES) after participating in a mentoring program. The CES implemented an onboarding program in 2010 which included a yearlong mentoring component for county extension agents because they were resigning at an alarming rate. The study aimed to illuminate if the mentoring program increased the county extension agents’ perception of fit after completing the program by determining if they felt they possessed characteristics that were compatible with the organization.

This study was founded on the mentees’ viewpoints of their perceptions of person-organization (PO) fit, …

Perceptual Characterization: On Perceptual Learning And Perspectival Sedimentation, Anthony Holdier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In her analysis of perspectival effects on perception, Susanna Siegel has argued that perceptual experience is directly rationally assessable and can thereby justify perceptual beliefs, save for in cases of epistemic downgrade or perceptual hijacking; I contend that the recalcitrance of known illusions poses an insurmountable problem for Siegel’s thesis. In its place, I argue that a model of perceptual learning informed by the dual-aspect framework of base-level cognitive architecture proposed by Elisabeth Camp successfully answers the questions motivating Siegel’s project in a manner that avoids such issues.

The Role Of Action In Affordance Perception Using Virtual Reality, Ashley J. Funkhouser

Honors Theses

Space perception in virtual reality (VR) is distorted. Does action in conjunction with an avatar's presence improve perception in VR? Participants judged whether a virtual ball was within reach. Condition 1 was perception-only, where the participant was not allowed to move nor could see their arms. Condition 2 was perception with nonvisible action, where the participant could move their real arm to reach but could not see an avatar representation of the arm. Condition 3 was perception with visible action, where the participant could move and see a virtual hand that corresponded to the actual arm movement. Participants overestimated their …

Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref

Dissertations and Theses

In dynamic environments, split-second sensorimotor decisions must be prioritized according to potential payoffs to maximize overall rewards. The impact of relative value on deliberative perceptual judgments has been examined extensively, but relatively little is known about value-biasing mechanisms in the common situation where physical evidence is strong but the time to act is severely limited. This research examines the behavioral and electrophysiological indices of how value biases split-second perceptual decisions and the possible mechanisms underlying the process. In prominent decision models, a noisy but statistically stationary representation of sensory evidence is integrated over time to an action-triggering bound, and value-biases …

Peer Influence On Conformity And Confidence In A Perceptual Judgment Task, Alen Hajnal, Jennifer Vonk, Virgil Zeigler-Hill

Faculty Publications

© 2020 by authors. Undergraduate college students were presented with two arrays of dots varying in numerosity on a computer screen and asked to indicate if the arrays differed in number. They also rated their level of confidence in their responses. Trials varied in difficulty based on the size of the arrays. On half of the trials, participants were shown the ostensible responses of confederates to test the effect of peer influence on numerosity judgments and participant confidence. On the other half of the trials, participants received no information about the responses of the confederates to provide a measure of …

An Exploration Of Graduate And Medical Students’ Perception And Knowledge Of Other Healthcare Disciplines Contributions To Patient Care, Ashley Poole

PCOM Psychology Dissertations

Multidisciplinary teams have been identified as an effective approach to improving patient treatment outcomes for a number of health conditions, including cancer and depression. Interprofessional education (IPE) facilitates learning opportunities for health professional students to gain exposure to the ways different healthcare professions can work together to provide patient care. The objective of this study was to assess graduate and medical students’ ratings of health care professional characteristics after engaging in an IPE experience. A survey using the Student Stereotypes Rating Questionnaire (SSRQ), which consists of a five-point Likert-type scale was utilized to carry out the study goals. Each student …

An Exploratory Study Of The Perceptions Of Footwear For Individuals Who Use Lower Limb Orthotics, Margaret E. Gegen, Teresa Plummer, Nancy Darr

Internet Journal of Allied Health Sciences and Practice

The purpose of this study was to explore individual’s perceptions of orthotics and footwear. A survey was created by the authors with the expert opinions of physical and occupational therapists and was distributed to two therapy clinics in Tennessee that provide both occupational therapy and physical therapy as well as on several online support groups. Seventy-nine (79) caregivers completed surveys. Thematic analysis was performed using Nvivo 10 (QSR International) and descriptive statistics were generated using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) IBM International). Ninety percent (90%) of participants report that orthotics affect what type of shoes the user …