Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Antisaccade Task: Visual Distractors Elicit A Location-Independent Planning 'Cost', Jesse C. Desimone

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Prosaccades are rapid eye movements with direct stimulus and response relations and are designed to bring the fovea onto a target or area of interest. In contrast, antisaccades require the inhibition of a prosaccade and the evocation of a saccade to a target’s mirror-symmetrical location. Previous work has shown that a remote (i.e., midline, contralateral) – but not proximal (i.e., ipsilateral) – task-irrelevant distractor relative to a visual target delays prosaccade reaction times (RT) (i.e., remote distractor effect: RDE). To my knowledge, however, no work has examined whether antisaccade RTs are similarly influenced by a RDE. Accordingly, I sought to …

How Attention And Beat Perception Modulate Neural Entrainment To Rhythm, Aaron Wc Gibbings

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recently, steady-state evoked potentials (SS-EPs) at the frequency of the beat have been observed in electroencephalograms (EEG; Nozaradan et al., 2011, 2012). Previous studies involved participants actively attending to isochronous sequences and repeating rhythms. Here we assessed whether neural enhancement of SS-EPs at beat-related frequencies occurred when (1) participants did not attend to the rhythms, and (2) the rhythm was novel and did not repeat.

When participants listened to rhythms that contained a beat SS-EP enhancement was larger during attended rhythms than when participants were distracted by another task, although SS-EPs were still present in all conditions. SS-EP enhancement therefore …

The Relationship Between Implicit And Explicit Processing In Statistical Language Learning, Nicolette B. Noonan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Statistical language learning is an implicit process wherein language learners track sequential statistics in fluent speech, and may it facilitate the learning of word boundaries. This process is well studied, however, the cognitive mechanisms supporting it remain poorly understood. The present thesis investigated whether domain-specific or cross-domain explicit working memory engagement would impair implicit statistical learning of word boundaries in fluent speech. Participants (n = 110) were exposed to an implicit statistical word segmentation paradigm while concurrently engaged in no other task (control), or an explicit domain- specific (verbal) or cross-domain (visuospatial) working memory task of either low- or high- …