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The Effects Of Reminder Distinctiveness And Anticipatory Interval On Prospective Memory, Natalee Baldwin

All Theses

Prospective memory failures (or failures to remember a future intention) can result in a wide range of negative consequences. The use of reminders has been shown to improve the rate of PM successes. The aim of the current study was to examine the effectiveness of reminders based on their type (text or picture) and their timing. We hypothesized that successful PM performance would be successfully maintained over longer anticipatory intervals when paired with picture reminders rather than with simple text reminders because of the inherent distinctiveness of pictures. We also expected that performance for younger adults would be better than …

Sights And Spaces Of Moving Memory: The Public Memory Work Of The Women's Rights National Historical Park, Alia Renee Bellwood

Theses - ALL

This project analyzes the rhetoric of the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York as it expresses the historical context and effects of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention. With an eye towards feminist possibilities, the project traces the politics of emphasis and erasure by accounting for material, spatial and visual strategies in the Visitor Center and historic buildings. I argue that the park influences and reflects public memory of the early American women's rights movement that has rhetorical implications for modern iterations of the movements that follow.

Alongside archival research, I critically analyze the experience of the …

Performance Or Processing? Effects Of Levels Of Processing And Divided Attention On Memory-Related Eye Movements, Wei An

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Human memories are expressed either with or without consciousness, termed as explicit and implicit memories, respectively. Different encoding manipulations like levels of processing and divided attention have been shown to affect explicit memories but not implicit memories. These dissociations, however, were only found between explicit and implicit item memories. Whether explicit and implicit relational memories will exhibit similar dissociations is still unknown. In order to determine whether explicit and implicit relational memories dissociated in a similar way as explicit and implicit item memories, the levels of processing and divided attention were manipulated in the present study and participants' relational memories …

The Role Of Napping On Memory Consolidation In Preschool Children, Laura Kurdziel

Doctoral Dissertations

Nocturnal sleep has been shown to benefit memory in adults and children. During the preschool age range (~3-5 years), the distribution of sleep across the 24-hour period changes dramatically. Children transition from biphasic sleep patterns (a nap in addition to overnight sleep) to a monophasic sleep pattern (only overnight sleep). In addition, early childhood is a time of neuronal plasticity and pronounced acquisition of new information. This dissertation sought to examine the relationship between daytime napping and memory consolidation in preschool-aged children during this transitional time. Children were taught either a declarative or an emotional task in the morning, and …

The Role Of Representational Flexibility In Toddlers' Manual Search, Lauren Hartstein

Masters Theses

In the model room task, children watch as a miniature toy is hidden somewhere in a scale model of a room and are asked to find the larger version of the toy in the corresponding place in the actual room. Previous work has shown that children under age three often perform very poorly on this task. One prominent theory for their failure is that they lack the ability to understand the model as both a physical object and as a symbolic representation of the larger room. An alternative hypothesis is that they need to overcome weak, competing representations of where …

Blue Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: A Cross Cultural Study On Color Perception And Memory, Mark Douglas Lowry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

According the linguistic relativity hypothesis, the language one speaks affects how one thinks. Because languages differ in how they categorize color, linguistic relativity has often been tested by conducting experiments on color perception and memory. This study examines the linguistic relativity hypothesis using ecologically valid stimuli: pictures of eyes. Because Russian-speakers are more likely to describe blue/grey eyes as grey, whereas English speakers are more likely to describe them as blue, English and Russian participants were asked to match the overall color of blue eyes to a color scale. There were three conditions. In the first condition (perception), participants saw …

Disrupting Infrastructure: Social Media And Accessing Digital Publics, Carolyn K. Grant

Open Access Theses

This thesis investigates infrastructural barriers to effecting change through social media participation. Though social media is said to hold "democratic potential" by enabling open access to the digital public sphere, in reality it is often still the most privileged voices that get heard. Even in success cases of the power of social media like the Arab Spring, situational contexts lead to particular infrastructural access points that are not universally transferable, and still tend to favor mainstream perspectives. Barriers to amplifying marginalized voices include inadequate systems for digital memory and sharing algorithms that promote the visibility of the already visible. These …

Directed Forgetting Of Happy And Angry Faces: The Effects Of Facial Emotion And Sex On Recognition Memory For Facial Identity, Kay Chai Tay

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The literature on directed forgetting – which refers to forgetting the specified information intentionally – has almost exclusively focused on either emotional words or pictures. Consequently, little is known about the impact of facial stimuli that demand more complex cognitive processing than words or pictures. A pilot study was conducted to obtain norm ratings on 152 facial images portraying neutral, happy and angry emotions. From this set of facial stimuli, 96 faces were selected for the main study. In the main study, 75 female participants were presented with 48 faces individually with equal number of happy and angry and, male …

The Ha-Ha Holocaust: Exploring Levity Amidst The Ruins And Beyond In Testimony, Literature And Film, Aviva Atlani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

ABSTRACT

Jewish humour sheds a crude light on the social, political, and historical realities of the Holocaust. Paradoxically, contentiously, doses of levity during this period were very much a reality, and even a psychological necessity. The purpose of my thesis is to explore the historical, social, and political ramifications of such laughter provoking manifestations. In doing so, the nuances are highlighted which are found within the laughter of the ghettos, the transit camps, and the concentration camps. Furthermore, some of these jokes, and their subsequent variations, reappear within the discourse of children of survivors. The dissertation explores how some of …

Influence Of Seductive Details, Belief-Congruence, And Repeated Testing On Memory For Controversial Information, Daniel Adam Nuccio

Theses and Dissertations

People often encounter conflicting information on a wide array of topics. How they evaluate this information in relation to their current beliefs, and the effects of other influences, such as the weight given to superficial aspects of the information (e.g. pictures, anecdotes, or jargon that are at most minimally related to an author's argument), has been of interest to researchers for many years. One component of their processing

and evaluation of this information is their memory for the information. This study set out to examine the following questions: (1) Is belief-congruent in

formation remembered better or worse than belief incongruent …

The Effect Of Local Element Density On Processing Of Visual Hierarchical Patterns: An Infant Erp Study, Sara M. Mosteller

Masters Theses

Previous research with infants, children, and adults has shown that global, or configural, information is processed before local, or featural, information in high density visual hierarchical patterns (Freeseman, Colombo, & Coldren, 1993; Ghim & Eimas, 1988; Kimchi, 1988; Navon, 1981; Navon, 1977). The current study used event-related potential to determine if a well documented bias toward global processing in infancy can be disrupted when the number and density of local elements is reduced through increasing the distance between elements. Infant responses were compared between high and low density conditions to global and local novel patterns and to familiar patterns. A …

Memory Retrieval Is Maintained By Intrinsic And Synaptic Plasticity In Prelimbic Cortex, James Otis

Theses and Dissertations

Abnormally strong memories underlie common disorders including addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Memory disruption would therefore be beneficial for treatment of these disorders. Evidence reveals that cocaine conditioned place preference (CPP) memories are susceptible to long-lasting disruption during memory retrieval. For example, inhibition of β-adrenergic receptor (β-AR) activity within the prelimbic medial prefrontal cortex (PL-mPFC) prevents cocaine CPP memory retrieval, and this retrieval impairment is both long-lasting and prevents subsequent reinstatement of the CPP. Despite this, whether PL-mPFC β-AR activity is a fundamental mechanism required to maintain retrieval of other memories is unclear. Furthermore, how PL-mPFC β-AR activity maintains …

Ways To Refuge: Bosnians In Central New York In Ethnographic Perspective, Fethi Keles

Dissertations - ALL

Ways to Refuge: Bosnians in Central New York in Ethnographic Perspective

This dissertation documents the resettlement experiences of Bosnian Muslims relocated to two urban locales in the north of New York State during and after the Bosnian War in the Balkans. To do so, it relies on ethnographic data gathered mainly through extensive interviews and participant-observation conducted over a period of fourteen months of fieldwork in a variety of places in Central New York.

The dissertation provides individual- and group-level descriptions and analyses of various aspects of the diasporic experiences of the Bosnians encountered in the research, in addition to …

Rummaging Through The Wreckage: Geographies Of Trauma, Memory, And Loss At The National September 11th Memorial & Museum At The World Trade Center, Jacquelyn Micieli-Voutsinas

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation traces the emergence of 9/11 memory as it is shaped in relation to the event's memorialization at nationally-dedicated landscapes of memory. Focusing on the National September 11th Memorial & Museum, The National Flight 93 Memorial, and the National Pentagon 9/11 Memorial, my research examines how cultural memory is mediated through the establishment of `places of memory' within the built-environment. Here, I argue, the preservation of place acts as a repository of national memory by safeguarding the history of 9/11 for future generations. Contextualizing these landscapes of memory within the global war on terrorism, my analytical framework engages the …

Examining The Effects Of Saccade Execution And Handedness On Proactive Interference., Montgomery A. Kroger

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

Proactive interference is the phenomenon by which previously-learned information impairs recall of more recently-learned information. The present experiment was conducted to investigate two factors that may affect the occurrence of proactive interference. The first of these factors is saccade execution. Saccade execution has been shown in numerous studies to improve performance on a wide range of memory tasks. The second factor was people’s consistency of handedness, a term referring to the strength of people’s tendency to use one hand (right or left) over the other. Although the results of the primary analyses were inconclusive, further exploration of the data led …

Chronic, Lethal Versus Acute, Non-Lethal Threats: A Look Inside The Memories Of Cancer Patients At The Time Of Their Diagnosis, Angeline M. Modesti

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Consequentiality, affect, and rehearsal are also important components that help contribute to the recall of autobiographical memories. Traditionally, these features have been assessed in public dramatic events in the past such as the Challenger explosion and the 9/11 terrorist attack. In opposition to these traditionally studied events, the present study examined the effects of these features on five different private events. An analysis of these different experiences was assessed to determine the role of consequentiality, affect, and rehearsal play on memory recall. These three components were assessed in five different events during different points of the lifetime. Adults diagnosed with …

Is Contextual Cue Learning Flexible? An Eye-Movement Study Of The Contextual Cueing Task, Youcai Yang

Theses and Dissertations

Visual searching can be facilitated without awareness when the target is repeatedly presented in an invariant context in tasks such as contextual cueing (Chun & Jiang 1998). A behavioral cost (increased reaction time) was observed when the target was moved to a new location but no such cost was observed when the target returned to the initial location. The lack of cost for return suggests two possible explanations: One is that the learning can update the initial learning to acquire both target locations, which suggests the implicit learning is flexible. The other is that the contextual cue leaning cannot update …

The Highland Clearances And The Politics Of Memory, Daniel Guy Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways that the Highland Clearances of Scotland have entered into public consciousness through primary and secondary sources. My dissertation argues first that the Highland Clearances fall within the sphere of colonial intervention, and secondly that there exists a robust body of cultural production that reflects the postcolonial nature of the Highlands. This cultural production is the subject of my dissertation, which examines primary and secondary histories, historical novels, drama and public memorials that preserve and reconstruct the memory of the Clearances. The first chapter examines a number of primary and secondary histories of the Highland Clearances. …

The Formation Of Situation Models In Multimedia, Kris Gunawan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

When people read traditional text-based stories, they construct mental representations of the described state of affairs, called situation models, to connect various details of events (e.g., time, space, entity) in memory (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). According to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2005; 2011), stories presented as pictures and text generate independent channels of mental representations that can work hand-in-hand or separately to acquire and remember the materials presented. This dissertation consisted of two experiments that were used to further explore how the two modalities affect what is being mentally represented in memory. In Experiment 1, participants were …

The Effects Of Focality Of Processing And Delay On Event-Based Prospective Memory, Samantha Nicole Petrella

Theses and Dissertations

The current experiment proposes an examination of the effects of focality of processing and delays on event-based prospective memory tasks. Several perspectives regarding the process of remembering to perform an intended action in the future have been proposed by researchers in this area. Smith (2007) proposed the Preparatory Attentional and Memory (PAM) process theory regarding PM. According to the PAM theory, the retrieval of a prospective memory continuously requires resource-demanding preparatory attentional processes, or effortful and deliberate focus. Further, it suggests that successful PM retrieval is never automatic and that attention to the PM task interferes with and compromises ongoing …

Effects Of Classroom Design And Atmosphere Towards Affective Reactions And Memory Of Content, Brittney Bonnick

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of the present study was to investigate how a classroom’s design can alter an

individual’s memory of content and affective reactions towards the experience. 123 University of

Western Ontario Undergraduate students who were part of a first year psychology participation

pool listened to a video lecture on schizophrenia and then completed two paper and pencil

questionnaires. The first was a multiple-choice assessment of participant memory for lecture

material, and the second was a Likert scale on the perceived learning experience. The

atmosphere of the classroom as well as the design of the desk arrangements was changed for

different …

The Genealogy Of Dislocated Memory: Yugoslav Cinema After The Break, Dijana Jelaca

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the post-conflict cinema in the region of the former Yugoslavia, and the way that this particular form of cultural production establishes affective regimes within which bearing witness to trauma becomes variously articulated to national identity, history, politics, and memory. Using affect and trauma theories as organizing frameworks, my project looks at the way in which post-Yugoslav cinema has become a pivotal outlet for the process of working through the trauma of recent violent history in the region. I examine this process through its various iterations, from its applications to identity - be it ethnic, national, class, age, …

The Production Effect And Item-Order Encoding, Bethany Kregiel

Senior Honors Projects

When reading a mixed list of words, participants show better memory for uncommon words compared to common words (McDaniel & Bugg, 2008). The research suggests differential memory effects in item-order encoding between mixed and pure lists. Uncommon words lead to item-specific encoding whereas common words lead to order encoding. Similarly, the production effect shows that, when reading a mixed list (some words aloud, others silently), participants show better memory for the words read aloud, but the effect does not obtain for pure lists. The purpose of this study is to examine if the production effect is due to differences in …

Recreational Segregation: The Role Of Place In Shaping Communities, Iyshia Michelle Lowman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Institutionalized racial segregation in the United States has had a significant impact on many aspects of American culture. Segregation was practiced in every aspect of public life, even in areas of recreation. For those labeled as "nonwhite," even going to the beach was legally restricted. The events between the 1950s and 1960s at Homestead Bayfront Beach in Homestead, Florida are evidence that social stratification based on the social categorization of race has a significant effect even today. This research examines how legalized segregation in the past impacted society and contributed to the development of a place and identity at Homestead …

A Psychoanalytic Exploration Into The Memory And Aesthetics Of Everyday Life: Photographs, Recollections, And Encounters With Loss, Dimitrios Mellos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project at hand explores some of the psychological functions of photography as both an everyday and an artistic cultural practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is proposed that, contrary to commonsensical opinion, photographs are not accurate depositories of memory, but rather function as a functional equivalent of screen memories, thus channeling the subject's memory in ways that are objectively distorted and distorting, but psychologically meaningful and important; moreover, they are a special kind of screen memory in that they are often created pre-emptively and are physically instantiated.

Additionally, it is suggested that, by dint of their materiality, photographs achieve …

Coming Of Age During The Sixties: A Narration Of Lives Through Music And Battle, Jennifer L. Oliveri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis has been written based on my retrieved memory, as it concentrates on autobiographical memories and the lives of two politically opposing men, from the American sixties. I discuss the effect of music and the war in Vietnam as it was experienced by these men--a moderately angry veteran and a "hippie." I examine how their stories were "retold" to me, which in turn created new memories. This is a study in the memory of memories.

The Effect Of Sleep-Dependent Consolidation On Pattern Separation And Pattern Completion In Delayed Retrieval, Jesse Ray James

Theses and Dissertations

While people sleep, the brain replays the same neural firings that resulted from waking activities that day. This results in greater memory strength following a sleeping delay than a waking delay. The current project built upon this fact in a series of three experiments. Experiment 1. Although previous research has demonstrated a benefit of sleep to memory strength, the literature has not established the impact of sleep on memory specificity. Computational models of medial temporal lobe function posit that discrimination and generalization across similar memories are accomplished through processes known as pattern separation and pattern completion, respectively. To discover whether …

Changes In Cerebral White Matter, Vascular Risk And Cognition Across The Adult Lifespan, Andrew Robert Bender

Wayne State University Dissertations

Numerous studies over the past decade have used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to examine associations between age, diffusion and anisotropy measures of cerebral white matter (WM), and cognitive performance. However, few have examined relationships between intra-individual change in DTI measures of WM and cognitive function. It is possible that the extant cross-sectional findings are a poor representation of age-related change in WM and cognition. The present study used latent difference-score modeling (LDM) to assess change over two years in DTI indices fractional anisotropy (FA), radial diffusivity (DR), axial diffusivity (DA) and mean diffusivity (MD). In addition, we examined the effects …

Effects Of Instruction And Parent-Child Conversation On Children's Stem Learning And Transfer, Maria Marcus

Master's Theses

This study examined the effects of direct instruction and parent-child conversation on children's STEM learning, transfer abilities, and remembering. A total of forty mothers and their 5- to 6-year-old children (M = 5.87) participated in this study. Mother-child dyads were randomly assigned to one of two conditions that differed in the amount of engineering information they received prior to engaging in a building activity in a museum exhibit. The provision of engineering information fostered dyads building activities and their long-term recall of the museum visit. Implications for museum research and practice are discussed.

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.