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Effects Of Iconic Gestures On Word Pair Learning In Autistic And Non-Autistic Adults, Caprielle G. Priola

LSU Master's Theses

Previous studies have demonstrated that simultaneous speech and iconic gestures enhance learning and memory for listeners. Additionally, metacognitive awareness, which can be measured through judgements of learning (JOLs), has also been shown to impact learning and memory. However, it has not been established that these benefits apply to all learners. Existing studies on gesture processing and metacognitive abilities in autistic adults yield mixed findings. The present study aims to investigate the impact of co-speech iconic gestures on word pair recall and perceived learning (JOLs) in autistic and non-autistic adults.

Forty non-autistic adults and 40 autistic adults participated in an online …

An Erp Study Of The Effects Of Iconic And Nonsense Gestures On Memory Formation, Brianna E. Cairney

LSU Master's Theses

Co-speech gesture is an important part of human communication and aids in comprehension, learning, and memory. The addition of iconic gestures to speech has been shown in prior work to enhance memory for the speech. However, it remains unclear as to whether this benefit requires gestures to be meaningful, or, conversely, if any attentionally-engaging gesture will enhance memory. In the current study, we tested two theories to explain the mnemonic benefits of co-speech gesture: Dual Coding Theory, which attributes these benefits to multimodal encoding and enhanced imageability, and Attentional Highlighting Theory, which posits that gestures draw more attention to concurrent …

Attention As A Mechanism For Object-Object Binding In Complex Scenes, Kacie Mennie

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The current study attempted to determine whether direct binding between objects in complex scenes occurs as a function of directed attention at encoding. In Experiment 1, participants viewed objects in one of these different types contexts: unique scenes, similar scenes, or arrays with no contextual information. Critically, only half of the objects were attended for each encoding trial. Participants then completed an associative recognition task on pairs of items created from the previously studied scenes. Test pairs consisted of two attended or unattended objects, and were associated with a unique scene, a similar scene, or an array. Evidence of binding …

Modeling Melodic Dictation, David John Baker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Melodic dictation is a cognitively demanding process that requires students to hear a melody, then without any access to an external reference, transcribe the melody within a limited time frame. Despite its ubiquity in curricula within School of Music settings, exactly how an individual learns a melody is not well understood. This dissertation aims to fill the gap in the literature between aural skills practitioners and music psychologists in order to reach conclusions that can be applied systematically in pedagogical contexts. In order to do this, I synthesize literature from music theory, music psychology, and music education in order to …

Forget Me Not: Are Stronger Memories More Susceptible To Retrieval-Induced Forgetting?, Laura Lee Heisick

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Successfully retrieving information sometimes causes forgetting of related, but unpracticed, information, termed retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). One explanatory mechanism of RIF suggests related, but currently irrelevant, information is inhibited during retrieval, resulting in poorer memory for competing representations. Critically, this perspective suggests stronger memories are more susceptible to RIF because stronger representations produce additional competition when unpracticed. To resolve this competition, strong competing items are inhibited, resulting in the counterintuitive prediction that stronger memories are more likely to be forgotten. The aim of the current experiments was to replicate and extend recent work suggesting non-typical objects and own-race faces, both of …

Home Is, Jodie Masterman

LSU Master's Theses

As an exploration of family and personal history, Home is. aims not only to chronicle my own experiences and memories, but to touch upon the innumerable definitions of the word “home”. The objects are rooted in personal reflection, but each one refers to an aspect of play, identity, love, loss, or regret, inherent within any family. Although they do serve as a blueprint of my life, they are meant to stand as moments shared by all.

Dearest, Grace Tessein

LSU Master's Theses

Dearest is the examination of what remains of a person, looking to the objects they cherished most while contemplating the inevitability of their certain absence. The work questions the futility of preservation in the measure of time, the failure of memories held in fragile containers, and the decay of the physical body. The materials that compose Dearest are chosen for their innate longevity and their ability to evoke remembrance.

Gotta Catch 'Em All, Jennifer Lynn Lombardi

LSU Master's Theses

The ability to imagine is essential to shaping who we are, and is an important part of our humanity. Children have the ability to use aspects of their environment as their playthings, becoming the characters in their world through their sense of imagination. We lose this ability as we grow, leaving us with only memories and sentimentality. I have come to realize that my art is an expression of the longing and search to regain that ability to become fused with my imagination and my environment. I allow myself to become lost in a world of fantasy once more, and …

The Effects Of Emotion And Action On Binding In Memory, Kacie Mennie

LSU Master's Theses

The ability to successfully bind features and objects at different levels of abstraction is important for everyday functioning of memory. The current study examined how actions and emotional arousal influence item recognition and between-item binding across two experiments. According to the Arousal-Biased Competition Theory (ABC; Mather and Sutherland, 2011), binding can be enhanced by emotional arousal, depending upon what is the focus of attention within a scene. In the current study, participants viewed a series of slides, each of which depicted a person performing an action with an object, as well as an object that is not interacted with. All …

The Pope And The Presidents: The Italian Unification And The American Civil War, Robert Attilio Matteucci, Jr.

LSU Master's Theses

The American Civil War and the Italian Unification occurred simultaneously, and the major parties involved – the American government, the Confederacy, the Italian state, and the still-independent Papal States – interacted with each other on numerous occasions. The revolutionaries of the Risorgimento served as promising recruits for the Union’s armies, especially Garibaldi himself, although only Italians already in America actually fought. Italy would receive ironclad warships from the wartime United States. Those actions, however, alienated the Papal States from the North, presenting the Confederacy a diplomatic opportunity. The positive position of Catholicism in the South permitted the Confederacy to act …

Fare Thee Well, Georgia L. Godwin

LSU Master's Theses

The common thread in all my work is time—its passage, effects, and remembrance. I have created a series of works that are meditations on time, the ephemeral quality of memory and the effects of aging, profession, and life decisions on our bodies, especially faces. The physical materials and my treatment of them reinforce these themes, showing the erosive qualities of earth, and drawing inspiration from natural features that signify the passage of time such as desert hoodoos, desert varnish, old wood, erosion and chemical oxidation, and from man-­‐made features such as old documents that have been written, erased, and rewritten. …

Memory, Memorial, James Kimura-Green

LSU Master's Theses

My thesis exhibition investigates concepts of memory and memorial. These are fueled by feelings of yearning, longing, and nostalgia. We allow memories to linger. I believe we try to strengthen these memories, encase them and tuck them away deep in our minds. These memories create in our psyche psychological memorials. Like physical memorials, our memories too deteriorate and crumble over time. We fill in the gaps to the point where it is unknown just how true these memories are. At times I think that mine are now idealized and idyllic then they really were. The paintings in my exhibit are …

The Imagined After: Re-Positioning Social Memory Through Twentieth-Century Post-Apocalyptic Literature And Film, Amanda Ashleigh Wicks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Maurice Halbwachs first proposed a collective approach to memory in the early twentieth century, but the vast majority of subsequent scholarship investigates memory’s social properties from a theoretical point of view. This project instead proposes that memory functions as a social phenomenon in significant and real ways, primarily understood through the social relations that arise within social frameworks, which provide a structure against which people’s memories come together to form important memory-narratives that configure individual and social consciousness. Once people transform memory from individual thought-image into socially structured language, memory takes on social properties. Memory relies upon social frameworks to …

Echoes And Artifacts, Molly Elizabeth Miller

LSU Master's Theses

Architecture has many different contexts and meanings, but regardless of time and place, buildings act as a physical container of memory. This body of work explores the use of large facades as residue of a personal memory and uses physical deterioration to parallel the distortion of memory as a result of time and emotion. The work makes use of warping and tearing of materials and is created through the combination of large-scale relief prints, drawing, sewing, and the cutting away of materials. The exhibition includes an installation of fabric-based prints, a series of wall-based altered paper prints, and several artist …

Your Loss, Lauren Jean Hegge

LSU Master's Theses

Your Loss is an exhibition of drawings, photographs, intaglio prints, found objects and prose. Drawn from personal and anonymous archives, the works in the exhibition acknowledge various forms of breakdown, exploring individual reactions and attempts to rebuild from the fragments of loss. Inherent in the work are discussions of remembering and forgetting, finding and losing, building and destroying, growth and decay. This work is both recognition of the desire to hold on too tightly and an effort to learn to let go.

Interiors Imagined And Remembered, Andrew Brown

LSU Master's Theses

My paintings are about the concept of home and how this notion constantly evolves with each successive experience, changing how I perceive and experience interior spaces. The imagery in my work is limited to common forms such as cardboard boxes and shelving, as these are elements that are easily related to, and that speak to everyday experiences. Color, space and form are manipulated to work within and at times subvert the implied narrative of each painting. Although memory remains an active part of my process, imagination and the exploration of paint’s physical and expressive possibilities have risen to the fore. …

The Truth About Lying: The Memorial Effects Of Deliberately Producing Misinformation, Kathleen M. Vieira

LSU Master's Theses

There are different ways of lying and these lies may have different impacts on memory. In this study, participants studied pictures of objects, and later lied and told the truth about these and other objects by describing them or by denying they had seen them. Forty-eight hours later, participants were tested on their source memory. Results revealed that participants had good memory for having falsely described a never-seen object, but poor memory for having falsely denied seeing a studied object. These results suggest that telling certain types of lies may make a person more likely to forget having lied at …

Up Like Weeds, Danielle Burns

LSU Master's Theses

A child playing with matches is forgivable. Kids are curious. They want to explore adult activities through play. Does it stay innocent when that child experiments with the effects of firecrackers in frogs and gasoline on animals? What happens when they light the match? The grey area between childhood innocence and realization of wrong intrigues me and I find it fascinating how adult perspectives of such malicious deeds often vary. Up Like Weeds questions these responses using a collection of narrative prints and freestanding woodcut figures. They visually tell five tales of children in a rural environment acting out in …

Assessing Attentional Bias And Cerebral Laterality In Specific Phobia Using A Dichotic Listening Paradigm, Whitney Shay Jenkins

LSU Master's Theses

Researchers have found fear to impact a variety of cognitive variables in individuals with specific phobia. Attentional bias is a cognitive variable that has received considerable attention in the specific phobia literature; however, the existing literature follows only one line of attentional bias—bias as encoded through images, words, or other content presented visually. This study aimed to expand on this area by assessing attention and cerebral laterality in individuals with specific phobia using a dichotic listening paradigm (i.e., via auditory means). Results indicated that participants with specific phobias do not significantly differ from controls in terms of the number of …

Intellectual Ability In Children With Anxiety: A Replication And Exploration Of The Differences, Melissa S. Munson

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of anxiety on the intellectual functioning of children. Specifically, the current researchers sought to replicate previous findings that children with higher levels of anxiety have significantly lower scores on tests of intelligence. A second goal was to examine possible reasons for these deficits, including possible deficits in working memory and/or attention. Participants were divided into two groups with high and low anxiety, based on a self-report measure, though none of the children reported clinically problematic anxiety. The participants were 19 children (10 males, 9 females) who were recruited from the …

Recollections Of Paradise Lost, Japheth Alan Storlie

LSU Master's Theses

Recollections of Paradise Lost is both a memoir and a fictitious account. While the images in this series are based on actual people and events from my childhood, they are nonetheless implied narratives. Through the employment of universal symbols of childhood nostalgia such as tricycles, tire swings, toys, etc., these photographs are intended to implore the viewer to make connections with their own pasts. These narratives are meant to captivate and enchant and at the same time, disturb and haunt. Ultimately, the objective is for the audience to reconsider and re-experience the joys, fears, losses and traumas associated with childhood …

Under Construction: Recollecting The Museum Of The Moving Image, Andr&Eacutee Elise Comiskey Betancourt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

On February 27, 2008 the Museum of the Moving Image launched its $65 million renovation and expansion with a digital groundbreaking. Since opening its doors in Astoria, New York in 1988, the museum, originally devoted to film and television, has embraced digital media. From its “Hollywood East” Astoria Studio historic landmark site to its popular website, the Museum of the Moving Image provides a unique setting for studying the museumification of moving image culture, particularly the production and consumption of moving images. In response to the Museum of the Moving Image’s domestication of moving image culture in its core exhibition, …

Apolipoprotein Status And Cognitive Functioning In Adulthood: Role Of Physical Health And Social Network Characteristics, Jennifer Lee Silva

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examined the relationships among cognitive function, physical health, social network characteristics, and apolipoprotein (APOE) genotype in participants from the Louisiana Healthy Aging Study. Prior literature has shown that the ε4 allele of APOE is associated with cognitive deficits (Wisdom, Callahan, & Hawkins, 2009). This study failed to find any relation between APOE genotype (ε4 carrier vs. non-carrier) and cognitive ability after controlling for age and education level. Tests for physical health mediation and social network moderation did not alter the ε4/cognition null results. This finding conflicts with prior research suggesting that physical activity and health modify the association …

"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of women’s memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision women’s roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with women’s prescribed place in the …

Reinscribing The Revolution: Genre And The Problem Of National History In Early American Historical Novels, Joseph John Letter

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines nine early historical novels of the Revolution that recover an important yet largely forgotten archive of American cultural history. In the years following the War of 1812 writers from the Revolution’s successor generation reinscribed the history of national origins through narratives of the Revolution that address issues left unresolved by the Revolutionary War and subsequent Constitutional debates; thus, the Revolution itself becomes an important and ubiquitous subject area for writers attempting to situate narratives of national history. These national allegories, consciously constructed as patriotic narratives, unconsciously “bring forth” figurations that represent the official nation’s Others, people excluded …

Mothers Grimm And Other House Held Tales, Holly Kay Streekstra

LSU Master's Theses

Mothers Grimm and Other House Held Tales is a body of work that uses fairy tale archetypes and narrative traditions to comment upon tensions and conflicts in sexual self-understanding. This is achieved through a reflection on attitudes that women adopt regarding their own sexuality. Such a reflection is instigated through a presentation of prominent cultural archetypes that exist, no longer as received ideas, but as a bold and entertaining expression of how sex can change our attitude towards those ideas that we often take for granted. Through an assemblage of objects and video, this body of work evokes a domestic …

"Honduran Memories": Identity, Race, Place And Memory In New Orleans, Louisiana, Samantha Euraque

LSU Master's Theses

During the decade preceding the height of the civil rights movement, a small population of Hondurans established residence in the New Orleans area. This Honduran migration was largely due to the trade relationship that existed between Honduras and New Orleans. Honduras was also experiencing political unrest and economic instability due to military coups, fruit company strikes and floods during the late 1950s. In response, the advent of the 1960s brought with it the first wave of Hondurans. According to the 2000 Census there were 64,340 people of Hispanic origin in the four parishes included in the New Orleans metropolitan area, …

A Performance Genealogy Of "Etchings Of Debutantes", Melanie A. Kitchens

LSU Master's Theses

In this thesis history performs that which Della Pollock terms “historicity” in her “Introduction” to Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History. History as historicity is no longer an evolutionary master narrative that dictates essential Truths. Rather, it is a site for performance where unfinalized and partial fragments of the past cluster into stories that mingle fact and fiction. Historicity defines a space or an event where history is a doing. The performer of this history embraces agency, which she uses to place herself within history rather than dominate or be dominated by it. Observing history as historicity, Joseph Roaches …

The Body Politic: Burial And Post-War Reconciliation In Baton Rouge, Leah Wood Jewett

LSU Master's Theses

Historians typically agree that reconciliation between the white North and South took place between the period of 1898 (Spanish-American War) and 1913 (before World War I). To test this hypothesis and identify when reconciliation took place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I will use the burial of R. L. Pruyn in the Baton Rouge National Cemetery. Pruyn served as a U.S. soldier during the Mexican War and a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. Anthropologists have studied rituals, beliefs, and practices associated with death since early in the discipline. Archaeologists, in particular, have focused on this aspect of culture, in large …

The Effects Of Songs In The Foreign Language Classroom On Text Recall And Involuntary Mental Rehearsal, Claudia Smith Salcedo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study investigated the effect of music on text recall and involuntary mental rehearsal (din) with students from four college-level Beginning Spanish classes. Two groups heard texts as songs, one group heard the same texts as speech, and one group was the control group. For the text recall variable, a cloze test was administered at the end of each song treatment to determine total words recalled. Students from one of the music groups heard the melody of the song while testing. For the din variable, students were asked to report on the amount of this phenomenon experienced. Data was collected …