Psychology Commons^™

Characterizing The Relationship Between Accented Speech Intelligibility And Listening Effort, Mel Mallard

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unfamiliar accents can make speech communication difficult, both by reducing speech intelligibility and by increasing the effort listeners must put forth to understand speech. However, these two constructs, while related, are independent: for example, two 100% intelligible utterances may require different amounts of effort to accurately process. To better characterize the relationship between intelligibility and effort, this study presents speakers of four intelligibility levels (one natively-accented English speaker, and three Mandarin-accented English speakers) within a dual-task paradigm (featuring a vibrotactile secondary task) to measure listening effort. We found a negative nonlinear relationship between intelligibility and effort, with the steepest slope …

Construction And Use Of Cognitive Maps In Model-Based Control, Ata Karagoz

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

When making decisions, we sometimes rely on habit and at other times plan towards goals. Planning requires the construction and use of an internal representation of the environment, a cognitive map. How are these maps constructed, and how do they guide goal-directed decisions? We coupled a sequential decision-making task with a behavioral representational similarity analysis approach to examine how relationships between choice options change when people build a cognitive map of the task structure. We found that participants who encoded stronger higher-order relationships among choice options showed increased planning and better performance. These higher-order relationships were more strongly encoded among …

Impaired Suppression Of Attentional Capture Near The Hands, Xiaojin Ma

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Attention tends to be attracted to eye-catching stimuli, which, however, are not always helpful to look at, depending on the particular task. Recent findings demonstrated that attention to a salient but task-irrelevant distractor could be actively suppressed via a top-down process. In other research, increased scrutiny in visual inspection has been found in the near hand space, making it interesting to question, at the intersection of the two lines of research, whether the ability to ignore salient distraction would be compromised near the hands. Two experiments were conducted to test this idea. Experiment 1 compared the attentional allocation to a …

Children's Perceptions Of Status At The Intersection Of Race And Gender, Grace Reid

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By 6 years of age, children associate males with higher status than females (Liben, Bigler & Krogh, 2001), and Whites with higher status than Blacks (Bigler, Averhart & Liben, 2003). However, little is known about how race and gender interact to influence children’s thinking about status. In Study 1, we asked whether children associate White men with higher status than other races and genders. Sixty children selected from among Black and White male and female targets the person who they thought would do familiar and novel jobs that varied in status. White men were the most likely to be chosen …

Task-Evoked Pupillary Response For Completely Intelligible Accented Speech, Drew Mclaughlin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Speech perception under adverse conditions, such as those caused by noise in the environment or a speaker’s accent, can be cognitively demanding. For second language- (L2-) accented speech, mismatches between the speech patterns of an L2-accented speaker and a listener can result in poorer understanding and reduced intelligibility (i.e., fewer words in the speech stream can be correctly identified). However, it remains unclear whether completely intelligible L2-accented speech imposes greater cognitive load (defined here as the degree to which cognitive resources are recruited at a given moment to meet processing demands) than native speech. In the current study, we used …

Its Skin Is My Skin, Bryan Page

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text examines the complexity of attempting to empathize with bodies that are vastly othered from my own. This broad yet nuanced subject crosses epistemological boundaries and complicates the dualities between both the mind and body, and between the corporeal and the virtual. My desire to better understand the conditions of another’s experience originates from a painful traumatic loss which caused me to feel isolated and incomplete. In response to this suffering, I long to emotionally connect with other beings and create artwork that attempts to bridge the qualia of individual experience.

I am interested in the capacity (or lack …

Through The Ear, To The Brain: How Cognitive Aging Impacts Veridical And False Hearing In The Presence Of Misleading Context, Eric Failes

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A consistent finding in the literature (Benichov, Cox, Tun, & Wingfield, 2012; Dubno, Ahlstrom, & Horwitz, 2000; Hutchinson, 1989; Nittrouer & Boothroyd, 1990; Pichora-Fuller, Schneider & Daneman, 1995; Rogers, Jacoby, & Sommers, 2012; Sommers & Danielson, 1999; Wingfield, Aberdeen, & Stine, 1991) is that spoken word identification improves for both older and younger adults following the addition of a meaningful semantic context, but the improvements are typically greater for older adults. However, more recent findings (Jacoby, Rogers, Bishara, & Shimizu, 2012; Rogers, Jacoby, & Sommers, 2012) suggest that, especially under less favorable perceptual conditions, the increased benefits of semantic context …

Exercises On Overcoming Perfectionist Tendencies, Jake Yoo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my latest series, I investigate my neurotic perfectionist tendency through repetition of phrases that I understand to be true in my head, but have a problem with accepting it in my heart. This way, I am studying my personal biases and the way I perceive the world in order to break free from unwanted behaviors and process negative emotions. Louise Bourgeois is a historical precedence to my practice as whole, while the series functions similarly to Yayoi Kusama’s dot and net paintings—a psychological portrait achieved through continuous repetition of a few elements.

Rapid Detection And Use Of Non-Verbal Confidence Cues During Adaptive Memory Biasing, Jihyun Cha

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Prior literature has demonstrated that participants use probabilistic, verbal memory cues (‘Likely Old’ or ‘Likely New’) to adaptively bias their recognition judgments. Here we tested whether this is more effective when the cues are the actual videotaped responses of others taking the same recognition test, based on the possibility that observers might use non-verbal confidence signs to modulate their degree of cue reliance on each trial. Experiment 1 demonstrated observers could reliably rate the confidence of others (Models) from single recognition responses (‘old’ or ‘new’) and that when doing so, the latency of the model’s response was the primary influence, …

Stories In Mind – The Relationship Between The Narratological Categories Of Order And Time And The Reader’S Cognitive Structures As Exemplified In Büchner’S Play Woyzeck, Marc Breetzke

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Presence-At-Hand, Eric Lyle Schultz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

The writing that follows is intended to provide a theoretical framework for the motives behind my practice. The primary concerns addressed are the reception, transmission, and physical shape of knowledge. I will discuss a human condition that exists as a byproduct of both the legacy of representation as well as the innate biology of the brain. I will argue that as a society we are governed by the residue of an extreme logic, and that this condition places severe margins on our potential for creative solutions. I will propose that our ability to create meaning is stifled by the …