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- …

The Effects Of Musical Mood And Musical Arousal On Visual Attention, Angela B. Marti Marca, Tram Nguyen, Jessica Grahn

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The presence of music is a visceral part of the human experience and its influence on cognitive function is a growing area of research in psychology. In particular, perceptual properties of music (mood and arousal) have been shown to significantly affect performance. There has been minimal research in the field on the interaction of mood and arousal and their influence on attention, thus the purpose of this study. Fifty undergraduate students currently enrolled at the University of Western Ontario were recruited for this study. Given that music is a highly subjective experience, participants rated an assortment of music clips on …

The Effects Of Musical Mood And Musical Arousal On Visual Attention, Angela B. Marti Marca, Tram Nguyen, Jessica Grahn Dr.

Undergraduate Honors Posters

The presence of music is a visceral part of the human experience and its influence on cognitive function has become a growing area of research in psychology. In particular, perceptual properties of music (mood and arousal) have been shown to significantly affect performance. There has been minimal research in the field on the interaction of these perceptual properties and their influence on attentional processes. This research study focused on the effects of musical mood and musical arousal on visual attention. Given that music is a highly subjective experience, participants were asked to rate different music clips on independent dimensions of …

The Interaction Between Spatial Working And Reference Memory In Rats On A Radial Maze, Nicole Ann Guitar

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The present study investigated the interaction between working and reference spatial memory in an effort to develop an animal model of this interaction. Twelve male Long-Evans rats were tested on an eight-arm radial maze in a two-phase procedure. In the study phase, a rat was allowed to enter four randomly selected arms for a food reward placed at the end of each arm. The test phase allowed the rat access to all eight arms, but only the previously unentered arms contained food. Two of the correct test arms were defined as reference memory arms because they were always correct. The …

Punchline Predictability, Comprehension Speed, And Joke Funniness: Investigating Incongruity Theories Of Humour, Robert J. Fearman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Surprise is an important element of many cognitive theories of humour (e.g., Suls, 1972): the less predictable the punchline, the funnier a joke is expected to be. Many theories also predict a curvilinear relationship between speed of joke comprehension and funniness: jokes that are too easy or too difficult should be less funny than those that require an intermediate amount of processing. This study was designed to investigate these two assumptions of past theories. Undergraduate psychology students (N = 183) participated online and completed two tasks. The Joke Completion Task required the participants to read the joke stem of …

Selecting And Striving For Goals, Angela Allan

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mental Contrasting (MC) is a self-regulating strategy in which one identifies a goal, visualizes a positive outcome, and then considers a current personal obstacle to that goal. Agency thinking signals an individual’s confidence in her ability to execute the necessary goal-directed behaviours (Snyder, 2002). 99 university students selected an academic goal and conducted either a MC or control exercise. Subjects completed agency scales before and after treatment and goal commitment scales following treatment. How does Mental Contrasting impact students’ sense of agency and commitment toward an academic goal? It was hypothesized that goal commitment scores would be greater for the …

Where Do I Know That? A Distributed Multimodal Model Of Semantic Knowledge, Kevin M. Stubbs

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As computers have grown more and more powerful, computational modeling has become an increasingly valuable tool for evaluating real world findings. Likewise, brain imaging has become increasingly powerful as is evidenced by recent fMRI findings which support the exciting possibility that semantic memory is segregated by modality in the brain (Goldberg et al., 2006b). The present study utilizes connectionist modeling to put the distributed multi-modal framework of semantic memory to the test, and represents the next step forward in the line of sensory-functional models. This model, based around the McRae et al. (2005) feature production norms, includes individual implementations of …

Selecting And Striving For Goals, Angela Allan

Undergraduate Honors Posters

Mental Contrasting (MC) is a self-regulating strategy in which one identifies a goal, visualizes a positive outcome, and then considers a current personal obstacle to that goal. Agency thinking signals an individual’s confidence in her ability to execute the necessary goal-directed behaviours (Snyder, 2002). 99 university students selected an academic goal and conducted either a MC or control exercise. Subjects completed agency scales before and after treatment and goal commitment scales following treatment. How does Mental Contrasting impact students’ sense of agency and commitment toward an academic goal? It was hypothesized that goal commitment scores would be greater for the …