Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Possible Nouns For Visual Experiences: A Theory Of The Vision-Language Interface, Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Paolo Acquaviva

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

The relation between vision and language is analyzed through a formal statement of what defines objecthood in the two domains. An interpretation of independently-motivated approaches to vision and to the grammar of nominals allows us to define the connection between them as an “infomorphism” consisting of two functions. Visual and linguistic objects are only indirectly related: the functions range over types and tokens, whose map defines objecthood in each domain. We show how the inferences proved in this system are empirically correct, and we draw some conclusions about the import of our proposal on the role of language in cognition.

Healing Through Creativity And Creation: Drama Therapy As Treatment For Individuals With Eating Disorders, Hayley Werner

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

For those living with eating disorders, intervention and effective treatment can mean the difference between life and death. Conventional treatments, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, forms of talk therapy, and Nutritional Counseling, focus solely on the psychological patterns or nutritional science of eating disorders. Though these treatments are effective for some individuals, there is a gap in treatment options that address both the mind and body as one and appeal to the humanity of patients outside of their disorder(s). Herein lies the power and potential of integrating drama therapy as a widely available treatment. Drama therapy …

Humor Improves Women’S But Impairs Men’S Iowa Gambling Task Performance, Jorge Flores‑Torres, Lydia Gómez‑Pérez, Kateri Mcrae, Vladimir López, Ivan Rubio, Eugenio Rodriguez

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a popular method for examining real-life decision-making. Research has shown gender related differences in performance, in that men consistently outperform women. It has been suggested that these performance differences are related to decreased emotional control in women compared to men. Given the likely role of emotion in these gender differences, in the present study, we examine the effect of a humor induction on IGT performance and whether the effect of humor is moderated by gender. IGT performance and parameters from the Expectancy Valence Model (EVM) were measured in 68 university students (34 men; mean …

How To Create And Maintain An Effective Information Architecture And Navigation System For Science Gateway Websites, Noreen Y. Whysel, Omni Marketing Interactive

Publications and Research

Whether you have an existing Science Gateway website or are creating your first one, this hands-on tutorial will show you, step by step, how to create and update gateway websites so that their content is easier to find and easier to use.

As a Science Gateway provides its web-based tools and resources, it is essential that these sites utilize specific usability tests and other research methods to ensure positive and productive experiences with the sites. Successful information architecture (IA), intuitive site navigation, and clear user interfaces (UIs) all rely on knowing where various users expect to find needed information.

Since …

In Search Of Psychiatric Kinds: Natural Kinds And Natural Classification In Psychiatry, Nicholas Slothouber

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years both philosophers and scientists have asked whether or not our current kinds of mental disorder—e.g., schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder—are natural kinds; and, moreover, whether or not the search for natural kinds of mental disorder is a realistic desideratum for psychiatry. In this dissertation I clarify the sense in which a kind can be said to be “natural” or “real” and argue that, despite a few notable exceptions, kinds of mental disorder cannot be considered natural kinds. Furthermore, I contend that psychopathological phenomena do not cluster together into kinds in the way that paradigmatic natural kinds (e.g., chemical …

Heroic Consciousness, Scott T. Allison

Heroism Science

This article describes heroic consciousness – how heroes perceive, experience, and think about the world. I describe the transformation of consciousness from its pre-heroic state to its heroic state. Pre-heroic consciousness is characterized by nescient and maladaptive thinking, dualism, separation, mono-rationality, and a naïve sense of empowerment. Heroic consciousness is exemplified by nondualism, unity, transrationality, and the wisdom of tempered empowerment. Heroic consciousness is achieved via three routes: (1) traversing the hero’s journey, (2) effective use of specific spiritual practices, and/or (3) participation in hero training programs. I discuss the implications of heroic consciousness for individual and global well-being.

Implicit Bias And The Boundaries Of Belief: A Single-Representational Dual-Attitude Account Of Implicit Attitudes, Austin Dakota Synoground

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since their inception, implicit attitudes have been defined as associative mental states, separate from beliefs, which are considered to be propositional in nature. Recently, several philosophers have challenged this distinction, arguing that implicit attitudes are actually unconscious beliefs. In turn, I argue that the attitudes detected by current experimental paradigms are blind to distinctions between implicit attitudes, which I define as the products of an associative learning mechanism, and unconscious beliefs, which are the products of a propositional learning mechanism. Specifically, I argue for a single-representational dual-attitude account of implicit bias.

The Impact Of Musical Components On Retrieval Performance, Adkins Franklin Dane

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Many students claim that they can study well while listening to music (Anderson & Fuller, 2010; Patton, Stinard, & Routh, 1983), but how does listening to music affect students’ ability to encode and recall studied information? Previous research on background music and attention has revealed mixed results, with some studies indicating that background music can help reduce inattentional blindness (Beanland, Allen, & Pammer, 2011), while others suggest that music may hinder the attention of the listener (by Shih, Huang, & Chaing, 2012). Additionally, individual differences in working memory capacity impact one’s ability to store and retrieve information, as well as …

“A” For Effort: Rewarding Effortful Retrieval Attempts Improves Learning From General Knowledge Errors In Women, Damon Abraham, Kateri Mcrae, Jennifer A. Mangels

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Previous research has shown that the prospect of attaining a reward can promote task-engagement, up-regulate attention toward reward-relevant information, and facilitate enhanced encoding of new information into declarative memory. However, past research on reward-based enhancement of declarative memory has focused primarily on paradigms in which rewards are contingent upon accurate responses. Yet, findings from test-enhanced learning show that making errors can also be useful for learning if those errors represent effortful retrieval attempts and are followed by corrective feedback. Here, we used a challenging general knowledge task to examine the effects of explicitly rewarding retrieval effort, defined as a semantically …

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 …

"A Bias Steam-Ironed Into Women's Lives": A Conversation With Author Phyllis Chesler About Women And Madness, 47 Years After Publication, Jody Raphael

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A conversation with Phyllis Chesler about Women and Madness, 47 years after publication, conducted by Jody Raphael. Chesler discusses her motive for writing Women and Madness and its early reception. She reflects on changes and lack of changes in views and treatment of women by society and the mental health system in the years since its publication. Her feminist analysis now includes Islamic fundamentalism, prostitution, and surrogacy, which are not always politically correct views among feminists today.

Dramatizing The Void: Crime Fiction's Journey To Forgetting, Kylene N. Cave

Andrews Research Conference

Scholars often cite the transition from the golden age to the hardboiled tradition in the 1920s and 1930s as the most radical shift in crime fiction. By 1945, crime stories regularly exhibited destabilized language, increased interest in psychology of the mind, and a blatant rejection of conclusive endings as a means of exploring the unreliable nature of memory and eye-witness testimony. Whereas the crime fiction narratives preceding 1945 embodied a clear sense of logic and order, and established hermeneutics and signifying practices as the keys to unlocking the mysteries behind human behavior; post-45 crime fiction not only rejects these notions, …

Empowering The Plus Size Body Using Dance As Therapy, Ashley Sampson

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

In Western society, having the “ideal” body image and size is a societal issue. It is advertised throughout media outlets that the “ideal” body is what should be desired, and any other body type is “abnormal”. This capstone thesis focused on the effectiveness of dance as therapy and changing the perspectives of all body types, to support and empower all bodies including plus-sized bodies. The use of individual interviews, in an open dialogue model, with a select few members (3) of Soul thru Sole, including the CEO of the dance company; which focuses on empowering women no matter their age, …

The Unfolding Argument: Why Iit And Other Causal Structure Theories Cannot Explain Consciousness, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Kathryn Hess, Michael H. Herzog

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

How can we explain consciousness? This question has become a vibrant topic of neuroscience research in recent decades. A large body of empirical results has been accumulated, and many theories have been proposed. Certain theories suggest that consciousness should be explained in terms of brain functions, such as accessing information in a global workspace, applying higher order to lower order representations, or predictive coding. These functions could be realized by a variety of patterns of brain connectivity. Other theories, such as Information Integration Theory (IIT) and Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), identify causal structure with consciousness. For example, according to …

Effects Of Genre Tag Complexity On Popular Music Perception And Enjoyment, Lauren Shepherd

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popular online streaming platform Spotify added over 1400 genre tags in the last two years. Despite that numerous artists and composition competitions claim to seek projects that “transcend the traditional notion of genre,” the industry has only added more complex and mystifying genre labels. This dichotomy between artists and industry ignores the effects these labels have on consumers. Do more complex genre tags enhance the listening experience for the average consumer by providing additional information about what they are about to hear? The current research seeks to examine the effects of the granularity of genre tags on popular music …

The Limits Of Sociality, Johnna B. Mcgovern

Theses

There is a longstanding tradition in Western philosophy of emphasizing the capacity for reflection in theories about humans’ characteristic nature. In Talking to Ourselves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency, John Doris attempts to shift the focus to an emphasis on human sociality. Particularly, Doris argues that sociality, both implicitly and in the form of collaborative reasoning, is what makes humans best equipped for moral improvement. This collaborativism possesses a defining role in his account of agency and responsibility. This thesis attempts to gain an understanding of how sociality affects moral behavior and to argue that it is not conducive to agency …

The Epistemic And Psychological Mechanisms Perpetuating Racism Within The Criminal Justice System, Danielle Walker

Theses

Abstract

Many attempts have been made by philosophers, political activists, psychologists, historians, social advocates, and others to explain the mechanisms at play in the perpetuation and resulting manifestations of systemic and institutional racism. On one side of the debate there lies a theory that there is an epistemic failure at the root of racial bias towards Blacks, white ignorance, a collective amnesia regarding what has and does take place in society, as it pertains to their oppression and isolation, like the view of philosopher Charles W. Mills. According to Mills, this type of ignorance, or non-knowing, is a cognitive phenomenon …

When A Stone Is Not A Stone: Memories Of Clerical Abuse, Charles V. Sords

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

From the fourth to the sixth grades, Charles V. Sords suffered traumatic sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. He suppressed these memories, yet the pain of what happened impacted every aspect of his life. As an adult, several strong, sensory experiences brought the truth of his childhood into focus. He confronted the Church—and the system that protected clerical criminals. This memoir is an account of childhood sexual abuse, the particularly shameful nature of being raped by priests, and how the Catholic Church’s method of handling this and similarly horrifying revelations has re-traumatized survivors.

Findings Of An Effect Of Gender, But Not Handedness, On Self-Reported Motion Sickness Propensity, Ruth E. Propper, Frederick Bonato, Leanna Ward, Kenneth Sumner

Ruth Propper

Discrepant input from vestibular and visual systems may be involved in motion sickness; individual differences in the organization of these systems may, therefore, give rise to individual differences in propensity to motion sickness. Non-right-handedness has been associated with altered cortical lateralization of vestibular function, such that non-right-handedness is associated with left hemisphere, and right-handedness with right hemisphere, lateralized, vestibular system. Interestingly, magnocellular visual processing, responsible for motion detection and ostensibly involved in motion sickness, has been shown to be decreased in non-right-handers. It is not known if the anomalous organization of the vestibular or magnocellular systems in non-right-handers might alter …

The Impact Of Microaggressions And Minority Stress On The Psychological Well-Being Of Emerging Adult Sexual Minorities Of Color, Michelle G. Thompson

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Microaggressions impact psychological well-being (PWB) among sexual minorities and people of color (POC). Research to date has explored this relationship among White sexual minorities and POC independently, and not among sexual minorities of color (SMPOC). SMPOC may be at an even greater risk for low PWB due to compounded microaggressions. Emerging adults are also at risk for low PWB, but little is known about PWB among SMPOC emerging adults. The current study examined microaggressions and PWB among emerging adult SMPOC; it also examined outness and PWB among adult sexual minorities. It was hypothesized that: a) SMPOC would report greater microaggressions …

A Defense Of Pure Connectionism, Alex B. Kiefer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Connectionism is an approach to neural-networks-based cognitive modeling that encompasses the recent deep learning movement in artificial intelligence. It came of age in the 1980s, with its roots in cybernetics and earlier attempts to model the brain as a system of simple parallel processors. Connectionist models center on statistical inference within neural networks with empirically learnable parameters, which can be represented as graphical models. More recent approaches focus on learning and inference within hierarchical generative models. Contra influential and ongoing critiques, I argue in this dissertation that the connectionist approach to cognitive science possesses in principle (and, as is becoming …

Working Memory And Auditory Imagery Predict Sensorimotor Synchronisation With Expressively Timed Music, Ian D. Colley, Peter E. Keller, Andrea R. Halpern

Andrea Halpern

Sensorimotor synchronisation (SMS) is prevalent and readily studied in musical settings, as most people are able to perceive and synchronise with a beat (e.g., by finger tapping). We took an individual differences approach to understanding SMS to real music characterised by expressive timing (i.e., fluctuating beat regularity). Given the dynamic nature of SMS, we hypothesised that individual differences in working memory and auditory imagery—both fluid cognitive processes—would predict SMS at two levels: (1) mean absolute asynchrony (a measure of synchronisation error) and (2) anticipatory timing (i.e., predicting, rather than reacting to beat intervals). In Experiment 1, participants completed two working …

Who's That Knocking At My Door? Neural Bases Of Sound Source Identification, Guillaume Lemaitre, John A. Pyles, Andrea R. Halpern, Nicole Navolio, Matthew Lehet, Laurie M. Heller

Andrea Halpern

When hearing knocking on a door, a listener typically identifies both the action (forceful and repeated impacts) and the object (a thick wooden board) causing the sound. The current work studied the neural bases of sound source identification by switching listeners' attention toward these different aspects of a set of simple sounds during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning: participants either discriminated the action or the material that caused the sounds, or they simply discriminated meaningless scrambled versions of them. Overall, discriminating action and material elicited neural activity in a left-lateralized frontoparietal network found in other studies of sound identification, wherein …

Score One For Jazz: Working Memory In Jazz And Classical Musicians, Bryan E. Nichols, Clemens Wöllner, Andrea R. Halpern

Andrea Halpern

Jazz musicians rely on different skills than do classical musicians for successful performances. We investigated the working memory span of classical and jazz student musicians on musical and nonmusical working memory tasks. College-aged musicians completed the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale, followed by verbal working memory tests and musical working memory tests that included visual and auditory presentation modes and written or played recall. Participants were asked to recall the last word (or pitch) from each task after a distraction task, by writing, speaking, or playing the pitch on the piano. Jazz musicians recalled more pitches that were presented in auditory …

Semantic Priming Of Familiar Songs, Sarah K. Johnson, Andrea R. Halpern

Andrea Halpern

We explored the functional organization of semantic memory for music by comparing priming across familiar songs both within modalities (Experiment 1, tune to tune; Experiment 3, category label to lyrics) and across modalities (Experiment 2, category label to tune; Experiment 4, tune to lyrics). Participants judged whether or not the target tune or lyrics were real (akin to lexical decision tasks). We found significant priming, analogous to linguistic associative-priming effects, in reaction times for related primes as compared to unrelated primes, but primarily for within-modality comparisons. Reaction times to tunes (e.g., "Silent Night") were faster following related tunes ("Deck the …

That Note Sounds Wrong! Age-Related Effects In Processing Of Musical Expectation, Andrea R. Halpern, Ioanna Zioga, Martin Shankleman, Job Lindsen, Marcus T. Pearce, Joydeep Bhattacharya

Andrea Halpern

Part of musical understanding and enjoyment stems from the ability to accurately predict what note (or one of a small set of notes) is likely to follow after hearing the first part of a melody. Selective violation of expectations can add to aesthetic response but radical or frequent violations are likely to be disliked or not comprehended. In this study we investigated whether a lifetime of exposure to music among untrained older adults would enhance their reaction to unexpected endings of unfamiliar melodies. Older and younger adults listened to melodies that had expected or unexpected ending notes, according to Western …

Recognition Of Familiar And Unfamiliar Melodies In Normal Aging And Alzheimers-Disease, James C. Bartlett, Andrea R. Halpern, W. Jay Dowling

Andrea Halpern

We tested normal young and elderly adults and elderly Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients on recognition memory for tunes. In Experiment 1, AD patients and age-matched controls received a study list and an old/new recognition test of highly familiar, traditional tunes, followed by a study list and test of novel tunes. The controls performed better than did the AD patients. The controls showed the ''mirror effect'' of increased hits and reduced false alarms for traditional versus novel tunes, whereas the patients false-alarmed as often to traditional tunes as to novel tunes. Experiment 2 compared young adults and healthy elderly persons using …

Pitch Imitation Ability In Mental Transformations Of Melodies, Emma B. Greenspon, Peter Q. Pfordresher, Andrea R. Halpern

Andrea Halpern

Previous research suggests that individuals with a vocal pitch imitation deficit (VPID, a.k.a. "poor-pitch singers") experience less vivid auditory images than accurate imitators (pfordresher & halpern, 2013), based on self-report. in the present research we sought to test this proposal directly by having accurate and VPID imitators produce or recognize short melodies based on their original form (untransformed), or after mentally transforming the auditory image of the melody. For the production task, group differences were largest during the untransformed imitation task. importantly, producing mental transformations of the auditory image degraded performance for all participants, but were relatively more disruptive to …

Perception Of Mode, Rhythm, And Contour In Unfamiliar Melodies: Effects Of Age And Experience, Andrea R. Halpern, James C. Bartlett, W. Jay Dowling

Andrea Halpern

We explored the ability of older (60-80 years old) and younger (18-23 years old) musicians and nonmusicians to judge the similarity of transposed melodies varying on rhythm, mode, and/or contour (Experiment 1) and to discriminate among melodies differing only in rhythm, mode, or contour (Experiment 2). Similarity ratings did not vary greatly among groups, with tunes differing only by mode being rated as most similar. In the same/different discrimination task, musicians performed better than nonmusicians, but we found no age differences. We also found that discrimination of major from minor tunes was difficult for everyone, even for musicians. Mode is …

Perceived And Induced Emotion Responses To Popular Music: Categorical And Dimensional Models, Yading Song, Simon Dixon, Marcus T. Pearce, Andrea R. Halpern

Andrea Halpern

Music both conveys and evokes emotions, and although both phenomena are widely studied, the difference between them is often neglected. The purpose of this study is to examine the difference between perceived and induced emotion for western popular music using both categorical and dimensional models of emotion, and to examine the influence of individual listener differences on their emotion judgment. A total of 80 musical excerpts were randomly selected from an established dataset of 2,904 popular songs tagged with one of the four words "happy," "sad," "angry," or "relaxed" on the last.fm web site. Participants listened to the excerpts and …