Psychology Commons^™

The Stability Of The Speech-To-Song Illusion And Individual Differences, Rodica R. Constantine

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Music and language are easily distinguishable for the average listener despite sharing many structural acoustic similarities. The Speech-to-Song illusion can give rise to both musical and linguistic percepts by inducing a perceptual switch after listening to multiple repetitions of a natural spoken utterance. As such, it has been used as a tool to control for low-level acoustic characteristics previously shown to drive lateralized brain responses regardless of domain-type, helping to disambiguate the contribution of high- versus low-level processes in both music and speech perception. However, there exists a lack of research on how large a role individual differences such as …

The Impact Of Alzheimer Disease On Semantic Knowledge, Maileen G. Ulep

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The research furthers the understanding of the impact of Alzheimer disease (AD) on cognition and the organization of semantic knowledge in the brain, which might contribute to the development of diagnostic and staging tools, and interventions to palliate cognitive deficits. The disruption of semantic knowledge in AD is well documented in the literature. Much of the existing research focuses on the general impact AD has on semantic knowledge. This study explores the impact of AD on specific domains of knowledge, chiefly, living kinds and artifacts, critical to ordinary functioning. The content, organization and structure of the investigated domains of knowledge …

How Instruction, Math Anxiety, And Math Achievement Affect Learning A Novel Math Task: Evidence For Better Instruction, Amy Jane Mcauley

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The primary goal of this paper is to test how math anxiety, achievement, and instruction affect learning a novel math task. Currently, most research measures achievement and math anxiety on previously learned tasks. A two-part study was proposed to measure the effects of math anxiety on learning modular arithmetic (MA), a novel math task that involves subtraction and division. Participants of varying degrees of anxiety and achievement were randomly assigned to either a specific or vague instruction condition. Participants were either taught how to solve the task or given minimal information about how to solve the task. Before moving on, …

Examining The Influence Of Executive Resources And Mathematical Abilities On Framing Biases, Gabriel Allred

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The finding that the presentation of a choice (i.e., either as a loss or a gain) can affect and bias our willingness to engage in risk is one of the paramount findings of behavioral economics. First discussed by Tversky and Kahneman (1981), the framing effect demonstrates that when given two choices framed as a loss, we tend to become risk seeking. However, when the exact same outcome is presented as a gain, we become risk averse, choosing the more conservative option, regardless of the actual expected value. The effect is not limited to general research samples but has been demonstrated …

Dual Task Interference In Low-Level Abilities: The Role Of Working Memory And Effects Of Mathematics Anxiety, Alex Michael Moore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Mathematics anxiety is a negative affective reaction to situations involving mathematical thought and is commonly believed to reduce cognitive functioning by impairing the efficient use of working memory resources. The conventional theory describes that the processing disadvantage associated with high levels of math anxiety increasingly impairs performance as working memory demands increase in a math task. Despite this convention, recent reports demonstrate that the high math anxious disadvantage can be measured in tasks that are relatively free of working memory assistance (Maloney, Ansari, & Fugelang, 2011; Maloney, Risko, Ansari, & Fugelsang, 2010). The present study examines these relatively low level …

The Effect Of Endpoint Knowledge On Dot Enumeration, Alex Michael Moore

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study attempts to extend the principle tenets of the Overlapping Waves Theory (Siegler, 1996), a framework designed to explain the progression of trends in cognitive development, to adult participants’ performance in a dot enumeration task. Literature in the 0-100 number line estimation task (Siegler & Booth, 2004, Ashcraft & Moore, 2011) has revealed a pervasive trend in child estimation such that young children (especially those in kindergarten) respond with a logarithmic line of best fit, while children at the third grade and above overwhelmingly respond with linear estimates to this same range of numbers. A similar developmental trend is …

Executive Function Profiles In Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury, Erik Nelson Ringdahl

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Traumatic brain injury is a common cause of disability and death among children in the United States. Insult to the frontal and temporal lobes are frequent in closed head brain injury. Cognitive deficits in a variety of domains are common sequelae of brain trauma. In many cases, trauma to the frontal and temporal lobe regions engender prominent deficits in higher-order cognitive processing, memory, and attention.

Higher-order cognitive processing, or Executive Functions are the grouping of cognitive processes necessary for organization of thoughts and activities, attending to the activities, prioritizing tasks, managing time efficiently, and making decisions (Alvarez & Emory, 2006; …