Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Individual Differences In Categorization, Urooj Anees

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The appearance of individual differences used to be regarded as noise in psychological experiments, but is slowly becoming a tool used to enhance and solidify findings in various fields of cognitive psychology. This presentation aims to very briefly discuss individual differences and categorization and what questions future research could aim to answer.

Assessing The Impact Of Lipopolysaccharide On Learning And Memory In Rats, Anahat Luthra

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The immune system and the central nervous system (CNS) have a bi-direction relationship, modulating one another.⁴ Proinflammatory cytokines released from CNS immune cells have an impact on cognitive processes such as learning and memory.¹ Liposaccharide (LPS), a cell wall component of Gram-negative bacteria, which is used to activate proinflammatory cytokine release has been found to impact learning and memory processes, such as in the anticipatory nausea paradigm (ANP).² Anticipatory nausea and vomiting is that which may occur before a chemotherapy treatment session begins in a patient who has had chemotherapy before. It is caused by triggers like …

Using A Musical Beat To Influence Linguistic Statistical Learning, Aspen Leung

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The similarities between music and language continue to provide research questions in the area of psychology. Despite the large amount of research on this area of knowledge, there are still many existing questions in regards to the processing of musical and linguistic stimuli. Statistical learning involves the ability to extract statistical regularities from a stimulus and continues to be studied in both domains due to the similar hierarchical structure of music and language. Recently, neural entrainment (the synchronization of neural oscillations with the rhythm of an external stimulus) has been studied as a mechanism of statistical learning. Music has been …

The Influence Of Personality Trait Variation On Curiosity Seeking Behaviours, Brian Krivoruk

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Curiosity is defined as our desire to acquire new information and leads us to engage in information-seeking behaviours. The present study investigates how personality influences curiosity-based information-seeking behaviours during a state of curiosity induced by unsuccessful memory recall. Specifically, this study assessed the personality traits of deprivation-type (D-type), interest-type (I-type), and intolerance of uncertainty to explore their role in curiosity-based decisions making. Information-seeking choices were examined during unsuccessful recall in a paradigm using face-name pairs. The behaviour was correlated with responses from a series of questionnaires that looked at personality traits associated with curiosity and information-seeking. The findings suggested that …

Auditory Sensory Filtering And Development In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Hiruthika Ravi, Ala Seif, Ryan A. Stevenson

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Sensory filtering is the process of separating and distilling relevant sensory information from irrelevant, which in turn greatly reduces the quantity of sensory information that is fully processed and leads to significant increases in efficiency. Atypical sensory filtering can result in sensory hypo- or hypersensitivity — atypical sensory filtering and hypo/hypersensitivity have been observed in people with autism. Atypical sensory filtering contributes to canonical symptoms in Autism.

Sensory filtering can be measured in a few different ways, one of which is the Acoustic Startle Response (ASR). ASR is a reflexively produced muscular reaction to sudden auditory stimuli.

Our study aims …

The Differences Between Visual And Auditory Pattern Separation, Alvira Khurram

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

• There has been limited investigation into pattern separation in modalities other than the visual domain, specifically little study of auditory pattern separation.

• Research on developing a measure of auditory pattern separation can aid in growing our understanding of memory and encourage further research of pattern separation in the auditory domain.

• Using Stark’s visual MST and an auditory MST (created by Helena Wang) the differences in performance of participants across the tasks was compared.

• The performance of the visual MST group was found to be not significantly different from the performance of the auditory MST group, as …

Intergenerational Transmission Of Functional Connectivity Profiles In Isolated Reading And Math Networks: A Scoping Review And Study Proposal, Ashini Peiris, Ira Gupta, Lien Peters, Eric D. Wilkey

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The scoping review surveyed the existing literature on the topic of resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) and mathematical cognition. The review revealed that rsFC is indicative of distinct long-term developmental trends in mathematical processing, alluding to individual differences in math abilities. Though there have been multiple studies that investigate individual differences in functional connectivity patterns related to math development and math learning disorders, no study has directly investigated to what degree these neurobiological factors are heritable. To address this topic, the following intergenerational transmission (IT) study is proposed. IT is the transfer of personal values, abilities, behaviours, and traits, from parents …

Does Culture Affect The Ability To Learn And Use Categories?, Maya Ghai, Zarah Ghulamhussain

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The rapid advancement of cross-cultural research in recent decades has raised questions on the extent to which findings in cognitive psychology can be generalized to a global population. The majority of subjects in scientific literature, being WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations, only represent a sliver of the world’s diverse demographics, limiting our scope of psychological data to a highly specific subgroup. Emerging research has made us increasingly aware of the variances in cognition across cultures, including the learning and utilization of categories. Many lab-based categorization tasks have demonstrated that cognitive processes may be contingent on cultural factors. …

Social Cognition Across Eating Disorders: A Systematic Review, Jina C. Kim

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Social cognition refers to the cognitive processes involved in social interactions. Deficits in social cognition may play a role in the onset and maintenance of eating disorders (ED). The goal of this review was to examine the current literature on social cognition across EDs, specifically, anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), and binge eating disorder (BED).

The search revealed 79 studies which were organized according to six domains of social cognition: alexithymia, theory of mind, empathy, social processing, emotion recognition, and emotion processing. Most studies examined AN, finding evidence for deficits in some domains of social cognition. Literature on BN …

Familiarity As A Motivator For Information-Seeking, Danielle Raynes-Goldfinger

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Curiosity is an integral part of motivation and results in information-seeking behaviors to obtain rewarding information. Theories on curiosity suggest that it occurs when an information gap is detected. Here, we explored whether the assessment of familiarity may result in the induction of curiosity. We employed 3 phases, the first involving memorization of face-name pairs. Next, participants were presented with new and the old faces and were asked to judge whether they fully remembered the name, whether the face was familiar despite the name being unrecallable, or whether the face nor name was familiar. To conclude, we allowed participants to …

Neural Representation Of Stimulus Category Membership Across Modalities, Carson Rumble-Tricker

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Category learning is a process through which common features among category members, distinctive features among non-members, or even both, are identified (Hammer et al., 2009). This process is a critical aspect of cognition and can guide decision making and information inference. Furthermore, category learning is involved among a large number of stimuli, including visual (Folstein et al., 2013), auditory (Ley et al., 2012), olfactory (Qu et al., 2016), and multisensory (Viganòa, Borghesani, & Piazza, 2021) stimuli.

The aim of this systematic review is to determine and qualitatively analyze studies that investigate the changes in the neural representations of stimuli that …

Memoir Dataset: Quantifying Image Memorability In Adolescents, Gal Almog, Yalda Mohsenzadeh

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Every day, humans observe and interact with hundreds of images and scenes; whether it be on a cellphone, on television, or in print. Yet a vast majority of these images are forgotten, some immediately and some after variable lengths of time. Memorability is indeed a property intrinsic to all images that can be extracted, as well as predicted. While memory itself is a process that occurs in the brain of an individual, the concept of memorability is an intrinsic, continuous property of a stimulus that can be both measured and manipulated. We selected images from the MemCat data set that …

Implicit Statistical Learning Facilitates Second Language Acquisition In Adult Learners, Elise Alexander, Laura Batterink, Steven Van Hedger

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

No abstract provided.