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Sad Socks Without Sole Mates, Shaelee Comettant

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Portrait of A Hundred Heartbreaks is a series that uses the unmatched sock as a symbol to speak about the experience of losing and grieving a relationship. Positioned as a series of memorials, the project facilitates spaces for viewers to bring their own life experiences to the project as well as empathize with those presented in the series. The use of the unmatched sock, an inanimate object, allows for it to be projected onto and melded into the specific and individualized narratives that viewers bring to the works. In its ability to access a level of specificity for each viewer, …

Witness, Revival, Testimony, Laura Ann Schroeder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist, Laura Ann Schroeder, discusses her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Witness, Revival, Testimony, which was installed at Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, TN from March 2, 2023 through March 31, 2023, with a public reception held on March 24, 2023. The exhibition consisted of a collection of sculptural works and installations that evoke scenes and memories from the artist’s childhood. This body of work deconstructs the traditional family dynamic and the private domestic space through recreations of everyday life. The artworks are primarily made with repurposed consumer textiles and techniques like stitching and quilting that have historically …

Covered Monuments And Black Erasure In Nashville, Tennessee, Kayla S. Roulhac

Masters Theses

Centennial Park is a staple of downtown Nashville, Tennessee because of its founding after the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in 1897, and also for the urban green space it provides for contemporary residents and visitors. A family-friendly space is presented to the visitors, yet there is a history of slavery within the park boundaries and Black removal. The lack of acknowledgement of the former plantation, the later removal of an African American university nearly adjacent to Vanderbilt University, and the modern presence of a Confederate monument in this space brings about questions regarding the memory of this particular landscape …

Exploring Teacher Perceptions About Cultural Practices During Transitions, Katherine Lee Haberstroh

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This dissertation explores teacher perceptions of cultural practices and language that teachers use during transitional times between class-to-class and assignment-to-assignment. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is more to cultural practices than what current literature defines for critical life events and transitions. Artifact analysis from 18 school mission statements, semi structured interviews with eight participants, and rich observations were conducted. The content analysis defined, reviewed, and analyzed teacher perceptions of cultural practices and the language which they produced during their practices. From the exploration of the class-to-class and assignment-to-assignment, specific examples of cultural practices and language …

The Project That Claire, Uh I Mean The Student Completed: Relative Clauses And Repair Disfluencies, Claire O’Shaughnessy

Honors Theses

Several areas of psycholinguistics focus on the role of memory in language processing. Two of these areas are repair disfluencies and complex syntactic structures; however, these two topics have traditionally been investigated completely separately from one another. The current experiment combines these two topics by presenting listeners with spoken sentences containing subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in which the semantic similarity between the critical noun phrases (NPs) was manipulated. In addition, the sentences could be spoken fluently, or there could be a repair disfluency in which the reparandum contained information that would be potentially helpful in …

From Enslaver To White Savior: The Blackford Family And The Memory Of The American Colonization Society, Helen Dhue

Student Research Submissions

Part of the same family but with a generation dividing them, Mary Berkeley Minor Blackford and her grandson, Launcelot Minor Blackford Junior, shared much of the same sentiment toward the American Colonization Society (ACS). Mary, active in the ACS before the Civil War, supported the organization despite criticisms wielded by abolitionists of the period. Mary looked to the ACS for salvation from discussions about the morality of enslavement while enjoying the comforts that the thought of an all-white America brought her. Launcelot, writing fifty years after Mary’s passing at the beginning of an emerging national conversation about Black civil rights, …

Pupil Dilation Is Not Associated With Memory For Prior Remembering, Sana Aftab

Student Research Submissions

This experiment was conducted to assess the relationship between pupil dilation and memory for prior remembering. Prior remembering is the judgment of whether a memory was previously remembered. Previous studies have suggested that pupil dilation can change in response to emotional stimuli as well as “old” versus “new” stimuli in recognition memory tests. The present experiment had participants view emotional and neutral context image-word pairs before they completed two separate cued-recall tests. Critically, some image-word pairs changed between tests. During the second cued-recall test, participants were also asked to make a judgment about whether they previously retrieved a given word …

Working Memory During The Menstrual Cycle: A Study Of The Role Of The Different Phases Of The Menstrual Cycle On Working Memory, Daniella Brownrigg

Brescia Psychology Undergraduate Honours Theses

This study investigated the role of the menstrual cycle phases (Follicular, Luteal and Menstruation) on working memory components (verbal and visuospatial). Eighty-eight undergraduate students attending Brescia University college completed a survey regarding: demographics, menstrual cycle information and working memory cognitive tasks. The cognitive tasks were the Corsi Block Tapping Test and a shorter version of the Hooper Visual Organization test for visuospatial working memory; and the Forward Digit Span Test and the Semantic Verbal Fluency Subset: Animals from the Barcelona Test for verbal working memory. Participants were categorized into the different menstrual phases they were experiencing. No significant differences were …

"Like A Shadow Or Even A Dream": Memory And Haptic Motifs On Classical Attic Funerary Stelai, Vonne Daszkilewicz

Student Research Submissions

During the third quarter of the fifth century BCE, Athens witnessed the revival of funerary stele reliefs. Sculpted motifs representing touch and interaction, often situated within familial scenes, characterized the grave monuments and contributed strongly to their tactility. Haptic stele motifs promoted the construction of memory by heightening the depiction of lasting bonds between living and deceased individuals. Grave reliefs provide a lasting representation of the deceased, while also serving as conspicuous reminders of the permanence of death. However, Attic funerary stelai provided a physical substitute for the departed towards which the living could direct their continued care and dedication. …

'Gave His Life For The Empire': Memory, Memorials, And Identity In The British Empire After The First World War, Bryan Mcclure

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the construction of personal memorials after the First World War across the British Empire nations of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, to understand how individuals sought to make their own memorial to remember their loved one killed in the conflict. In comparison to other studies on the construction of national or other community memorials, this dissertation explores how individuals accepted or rejected dominant discourses in creating their own memorials that spoke to how they remembered the war. It is based on a large database of more than 2,000 private memorials to individuals that …

Effects Of The Ketogenic Diet On Spatial Memory And Long-Term Potentiation In The Ca1 Region Of The Hippocampus In Young Rodents, Jed Christensen

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The ketogenic diet (KD) originated as a treatment for epilepsy nearly a century ago, though its neurological effects are not completely understood. In recent years the diet has resurged as a weight loss aid, reinvigorating research investigating its effects on the nervous system. Notably, the KD alters the concentration of glucose and ketones in the brain, and recent research suggests that the elevated ketone concentration, in the form of beta-hydroxybutyrate, induced by the diet enhances recognition memory and mitochondrial efficiency in the hippocampus. To further explore the effects of the KD, we examined its cognitive effects on spatial memory and …

"Emerging And Submerging": Silence, Commemoration, And Sexual Violence In Minneapolis, Alissa Roy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dedicated in Minneapolis in October 2020, the Survivors Memorial became the first permanent memorial to survivors of sexual violence in the United States. However, as my research reveals, sexual violence has long been a part of the commemorative landscape in northeast Minneapolis. Whereas the Survivors Memorial explicitly commemorates survivors of sexual violence, a much older site, the 1936 Pioneers Monument - commemorates sexual violence through silence. This thesis argues that with the building and dedication of the Survivors Memorial, a different memory than the one embodied within the Pioneers Monument begins to take shape. An older narrative of peaceful conquest …

The Effects Of Divided Attention In Free Recall: Affecting Trace Accumulation By Dividing Attention, Anne Olsen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How environmental information stores in memory directly affects our ability to retrieve the information. This thesis investigates the effects that dividing attention during study has on the storage of contextual information. Through several experiments, participants were asked to study and later recall word lists using a mixed-pure design with strengtheners varying as either repetition or study time. Experiment 1 investigates the effects of divided attention on the formation of inter-item associations and Experiments 2-6 manipulate strengthening item and context information in a memory trace when cognitive load is strained at various levels. Experimental results indicated that dividing attention during study …

Temporal And Spatial Properties Of Orientation Summary Statistic Representations, Jacob S. Zepp

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aim of the current work was to determine the amount of information that contributes to the formation of summary statistical representations (SSRs), as well as the time course over which these representations are formed. While the prevailing interpretation of SSRs within literature is that the summaries are formed through a compulsory rapid integration across all information in a scene, debate exists on the necessity of this unique processing mode. To investigate the formation of SSRs, two experiments were conducted. In the first, results from an orientation averaging task were compared to results from a whole-report task, over equivalent stimulus …

Characterizing The Roles Of The Variable Linker And Hub Domains In Camkii Activation, Noelle Dziedzic

Doctoral Dissertations

Learning and memory formation at the cellular level involves decoding complex electrochemical signals between nerve cells, or neurons. Understanding these processes at the molecular level requires a comprehensive study of calcium-sensitive proteins that serve as signal mediators within cells. More specifically, the protein calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) is a key regulator of downstream cellular signaling events in the brain, playing an important role in long term memory formation. CaMKII is encoded in humans on four different genes: alpha, beta, gamma and delta. For added complexity, each of these gene products can be alternatively spliced and translated into multiple protein …

Accelerated Forgetting In People With Epilepsy: Pathologic Memory Loss, Its Neural Basis, And Potential Therapies, Sarah Ashley Steimel Phd

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

While forgetting is vital to human functioning, delineating between normative and disordered forgetting can become incredibly complex. This thesis characterizes a pathologic form of forgetting in epilepsy, identifies a neural basis, and investigates the potential of stimulation as a therapeutic tool. Chapter 2 presents a behavioral characterization of the time course of Accelerated Long-Term Forgetting (ALF) in people with epilepsy (PWE). This chapter shows evidence of ALF on a shorter time scale than previous studies, with a differential impact on recall and recognition. Chapter 3 builds upon the work in Chapter 2 by extending ALF time points and investigating the …

Narrativising Episodic Memory: From Memory Episodes To Micronarratives, Shaani Jag

Law, Humanities and the Arts - Honours Theses

In the current literature on Episodic Memory (EM), mental representations are often assumed to stand out as the main view that promises to explain how we experience past personal events. However, proponents of Radical Enactive Cognition (REC) have argued that this view is empirically and theoretically inadequate due to issues with misremembering - failure to recall events in the past accurately - and the Hard Problem of Content (HPC) (Hutto & Myin 2013, 2017). This thesis aims to utilise REC’s already established framework and narrative formulations of memory to provide the tools needed to characterise episodic memory. The thesis turns …

Doctoral Students’ Experiences Of The Pandemic And Their Perceptions Of Grit, Josie Bryant

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The pandemic has significantly changed societal structures and individuals’ lives. The early tragedies and stress of the pandemic affected health, relationships, families, education, work, travel, and immigration. Students who entered doctoral programs in 2020 chose a unique time to pursue an already arduous goal amidst unprecedented challenges. Using a phenomenological approach, this study explored doctoral students’ experiences during the pandemic and sought to understand their perspectives of grit. The study aimed to offer first-hand insight into the pandemic’s effects on doctoral students, and add critical contributions to understanding the necessary actions, support systems, and policies for a life in a …

The Relationship Between Semantic Search And Semantic Priming, Lily Rachel Mencarini

Senior Projects Fall 2023

Memory is an essential skill for survival but also very complicated. Semantic memory is an aspect of long-term memory that consists of words and facts about the world. This study aims to see if there is a relationship between semantic priming and semantic search. There were 57 participants with full data who took both the Remote Associates Test (RAT) and a primed lexical decision task (LDT). The RAT tests for semantic search abilities and the primed LDT tests semantic priming ability. It is hypothesized that participants who get faster reaction times (RTs) on correct trials of the RAT will have …

The Effect Of Visual Alcohol Cues On Risk Taking Behavior Based On Memory Primes And Individual Drinking Habits, Madison Mccue

CMC Senior Theses

Given the strong presence of alcohol cues in the media, this study aimed to investigate whether exposure to a visual alcohol cue versus a neutral cue would elicit memories about alcohol and increase the likelihood to engage in risk taking behavior, particularly for individuals who consume higher levels of alcohol or who report positive memories associated with alcohol. Through an online Qualtrics survey, 110 college student participants watched either two video advertisements for alcohol brands (alcohol cue), or two advertisements for soda brands (neutral cue), and then completed a memory cue task to assess if positive, neutral or negative memories …

Culturally Modified Trees In Western Washington: Impact And Perspective From The Stillaguamish Cultural Resources Department, Kelsey Maloy

WWU Graduate School Collection

This study braids qualitative and quantitative views of CMT studies to explore meanings and relationships with Culturally Modified Trees (CMT) with a concern for the ethnographic perspective currently absent in dominant structures. This research showcases community value when combining different CMT ontologies (Stillaguamish and Western Academic Definitions). Ethnohistorical methods and grounded theory help organize semi-structured interviews at five previously recorded archaeological CMT sites. There is a lack of feedback concerning Indigenous philosophy about classifying eco-facts or vivio-facts, specifically CMT. This study comprises an interdisciplinary team within the Stillaguamish Cultural Resources Department to reassess five previously documented cedar use sites in …

Moments That Matter: The Role Of Emotional Stimuli At Event Boundaries In Memory, Haonan Chen

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The present study examined the impact of event segmentation and emotional arousal on long-term memory performance. Event segmentation is the cognitive process of automatically dividing experiences into smaller pieces for better consolidation and retrieval, resulting in the formation of event boundaries. Prior research has identified the crucial role of event segmentation in long-term memory and working memory. However, few studies have explored ways to enhance its effects. Emotional arousal refers to the physiological and psychological activation of the body and mind in response to an emotional stimulus. Previous research has indicated that heightened levels of arousal may enhance memory performance. …

The Effect Of Testing On New Learning Of Related And Unrelated Text Sections, Katie Ingram

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When individuals are presented with a variety of materials, including word lists, face-name pairs, text passages, and more, the presence of a test between sections can enhance future section learning, a phenomenon called the forward testing effect (FTE). In addition to the FTE, studies have suggested that a decrease in the relatedness of the subject matter units can increase learning of the material. The current study examined the interaction between the presence of a test and the relatedness of material using text sections and cued-recall questions. Participants were 119 individuals assigned to a related test, related no-test, unrelated test, or …

Unable To Locate A Fire, Lily Isabel Taggart

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Pendjur For Baba, Mina Emilia Dahl

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Realm Of Remembrance, Brandon Vanbach

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

In September of 2021, I turned 21 years old. During that time I also discovered a 8mm video tape in my childhood home. Unbeknownst to me, this tape, which hadn’t seen the light of day since its conception, would end up consuming my life.

The tape was a home movie filmed by my mother and her partner at the time during an outing to Vietnam in 2005. The footage consisted mostly of landscapes and claustrophobic close-ups of distant relatives. Rarely would I enter the frame. But I wasn't interested …

A Close Look At The Connections Between Mental-State Talk, Theory Of Mind, And Source Monitoring During Parent-Child Reminiscing Of Emotional Events, Mallory Earnshaw

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Autobiographical memories play a critical role in shaping personal identity, regulating emotions, and guiding future behaviour. Reminiscing about these memories can be particularly beneficial for coping with negative experiences. This study investigated the connections between mental-state talk, theory of mind, and source monitoring in parent-child reminiscing, and how it can be influenced by remembering enjoyable versus frustrating events. This study involved children ages 3-8 (N = 50) and consisted of two sessions. In the first session, the child reminisced with their parent about an enjoyable and frustrating event and completed two source-monitoring tasks. In the second session, the child …

菠蘿包(Pineapple Bun): Exploring Memory And Language Through Animation, Elaine Yang

Scripps Senior Theses

菠蘿包(Pineapple Bun) explores the themes of reconstruction, evocation, and memory through my childhood in Taiwan. Inspired by other Asian American animators, I aim to tell a simple story of connection through my grandfather and I's daily swimming ritual. The film is a 3-minute animated short film following our language barrier and how we engage with each other's differing backgrounds.

Seeking Translation, Taryn Sakry

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

I am interested in how we navigate and understand the world around us. As we move through life, meeting different people and having new experiences, we develop a language of self-interpretation that allows us to communicate intangibles such as ideas, values, and emotions. Within this body of work, I explore this idea of translating self, highlighting the reinterpretation of memory and emotion through color and narrative. Seeking Translation includes woodcut, intaglio, silkscreen, and stone lithography prints. The multiplicity of printmaking allows me to experiment with the effects of different colors and juxtaposition of different materials and mediums. And while the …

Stereotype Threat In Older Adults’ Episodic Memory Tests: Susceptibility And Protection, Talia Barrett

Honors Theses

The objective of the present study was to investigate whether prior task success would protect older adults against stereotype threat in an episodic memory test. Previous experiments have established that, whereas stereotype threat negatively impacts older participants’ episodic memory performance, prior task success benefits it. However, up until this point, researchers had yet to combine the two manipulations to test their joint effect on episodic memory. Participants were randomly assigned to read a stereotype threat or neutral passage, after which they were placed in the success or no success group. Participants next received a stereotype condition reminder, and they then …