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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

The Effect Of Retrieval Practice On Vocabulary Learning For Children Who Are Deaf Or Hard Of Hearing, Casey Krauss Reimer May 2019

The Effect Of Retrieval Practice On Vocabulary Learning For Children Who Are Deaf Or Hard Of Hearing, Casey Krauss Reimer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of the current study was to determine if students who are deaf or hard of hearing (d/hh) would learn more new vocabulary words through the use of retrieval practice than repeated exposure (repeated study). No studies to date have used this cognitive strategy—retrieval practice—with children who are d/hh. Previous studies have shown that children with hearing loss struggle with learning vocabulary words. This deficit can negatively affect language development, reading outcomes, and overall academic success. Few studies have investigated specific interventions to address the poor vocabulary development for children with hearing loss. The current study investigated retrieval practice …


Learning From Past Conflict: Investigating The Time Scale Of Conflict Learning For Cognitive Control Processes, Abhishek Dey May 2019

Learning From Past Conflict: Investigating The Time Scale Of Conflict Learning For Cognitive Control Processes, Abhishek Dey

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Conflict-modulated cognitive control accounts posit that control processes adjust attention based on the probability of conflict associated with a given context (e.g., list of items, a particular item within a list, etc.). However, within these accounts, it is not yet fully understood how the control system learns about the probability of conflict. A specific question I address in the present research is how far back does the control system look to learn about the probability of conflict? In other words, what is the time scale of conflict learning for the control system? I use a statistical model recently developed by …


Individual Differences In Verbal And Visuospatial Learning Efficiency, Thomas Spaventa May 2019

Individual Differences In Verbal And Visuospatial Learning Efficiency, Thomas Spaventa

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is a great deal of variability in how quickly people learn and how long they remember information. Zerr and colleagues (2018) found a robust and stable relationship between an individual’s rate of learning and the durability of their memory, with faster learners tending to retain more after a delay. The relationship between the rapidity and longevity of learning was characterized as learning efficiency. The present study extends these findings by testing whether learning efficiency generalizes across divergent verbal and visuospatial tasks. An ancillary aim was to assess learning efficiency using a continuous measure that can capture fine-grained individual differences …


Evaluating The Latent Variable Structure Of Episodic Long-Term Memory Abilities, Kyle Featherston Apr 2019

Evaluating The Latent Variable Structure Of Episodic Long-Term Memory Abilities, Kyle Featherston

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I investigated how recall and recognition differ depending on the nature of the memory items and what one is asked to remember about them. Participants were asked to remember lists of various types of verbal items, including words, nonwords, common first names, and the names of common objects in pictures that they viewed, or to remember the contextual information that accompanied those items, including their size, location, color, or font. Immediately following presentation of each list, free recall or recognition tests for items or context were administered. It has been proposed that memory for context, or source memory, differs from …


The Effect Of Talker And Contextual Variability On Memory For Words In Sentences, Nichole Runge Dec 2018

The Effect Of Talker And Contextual Variability On Memory For Words In Sentences, Nichole Runge

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has found that adding different forms of variability during study can affect later memory at test. For example, having words spoken by different talkers has been shown to improve recall of known and novel words (Goldinger et al., 1999; Barcroft & Sommers, 2005), and varying the cues in cue-target related word pairs has been found to improve recall of the targets (Glenberg, 1979; Bevan et al., 1966). It was unclear, however, whether benefits of variability would extend to more naturalistic stimuli, such as sentences, which have higher working memory demands. The present set of experiments investigated how talker …


Lexical Retrieval Inhibition From Semantically Related Retrieval Primes, Abhilasha Ashok Kumar Dec 2018

Lexical Retrieval Inhibition From Semantically Related Retrieval Primes, Abhilasha Ashok Kumar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The phenomenological experience of lexical retrieval involves conscious and active attempts to retrieve semantically related information, but the direct influence of this retrieval process on subsequent retrieval is presently unknown. We investigated the influence of passively viewing or actively retrieving different types of information at the critical moment preceding lexical retrieval through a novel priming paradigm. Participants attempted to retrieve target words (e.g., FOLIAGE) from their low-frequency definitions or descriptions (e.g., the leafy parts of a plant or tree, collectively). Across five experiments, target retrieval was preceded by the brief presentation of a prime word (Experiment 1), progressive demasking of …


The Consequences Of Processing Of Goal-Irrelevant Information During The Stroop Task In Younger And Older Adults, Jessica Nicosia Dec 2018

The Consequences Of Processing Of Goal-Irrelevant Information During The Stroop Task In Younger And Older Adults, Jessica Nicosia

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent evidence from memory paradigms indicates that older adults can sometimes benefit more from processing goal-irrelevant information than younger adults, however these studies have often failed to simultaneously provide evidence of age-related control deficits. In the present experiments, participants initially studied a list of words. They then received a color-naming Stroop task where neutral words were either previously studied or new words. Across three experiments, participants were given different types of memory tests to examine the lingering effects of the neutral words during color-naming in younger and older adults. The results from all three experiments (including an attempted replication study) …


Exercise Engagement And Longitudinal Change In Alzheimer's Disease Biomarkers, Regional Brain Structure, And Cognitive Functioning, Marta Stojanovic Dec 2018

Exercise Engagement And Longitudinal Change In Alzheimer's Disease Biomarkers, Regional Brain Structure, And Cognitive Functioning, Marta Stojanovic

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.


Levels Of Processing And The Parietal Memory Network, Hung-Yu Chen Aug 2018

Levels Of Processing And The Parietal Memory Network, Hung-Yu Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The parietal memory network (PMN) is a functional brain network that has been recently described through the convergence of task-based fMRI and resting-state functional MRI studies (Gilmore et al., 2015). The networkճ characteristic encoding/retrieval flip (deactivation at encoding and activation at later retrieval, discussed by Gilmore and colleagues) and its manifestation of a negative subsequent memory effect (greater deactivation at encoding for items that will later be recognizedѩ.e., subsequent hitsѴhan for those that will notѳubsequent misses) (Cabeza et al., 2004; Daselaar, Prince, & Cabeza, 2004; De Chastelaine & Rugg, 2014; Elman, Rosner, Cohn-Sheehy, Cerreta, & Shimamura, 2013; Kim, 2011; Otten …


Just Don't Do It!: A Comparison Of Strategies For Reducing Commission Errors In Older And Younger Adults, Emily Streeper Jul 2018

Just Don't Do It!: A Comparison Of Strategies For Reducing Commission Errors In Older And Younger Adults, Emily Streeper

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Prospective memory (PM) commission errors occur when an individual erroneously repeats an intention that is finished and therefore no longer relevant (e.g., accidentally taking a medication one no longer needs to take). Commission errors have been observed in younger and older adults with age exacerbating commission error risk in select conditions. Only one prior study has used the finished paradigm to investigate the use of explicit strategies to reduce commission error rates in older adults. Bugg, Scullin, and Rauvola (2016) found that forgetting practice, an experience-based strategy, minimized commission errors to floor levels but a preparation-based strategy was ineffective. The …


Prospective Memory Impairment In Parkinson Disease Without Dementia: Cognitive Mechanisms And Intervention, Erin R. Foster May 2018

Prospective Memory Impairment In Parkinson Disease Without Dementia: Cognitive Mechanisms And Intervention, Erin R. Foster

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cognitive impairment among non-demented individuals with Parkinson disease (PD) produces significant disability, reduced quality of life, and restricted participation. This dissertation will cover PD-related impairment in prospective memory, or the ability to remember to execute delayed intentions at the appropriate moment in the future. Prospective memory impairment in PD is increasingly recognized as a functionally and clinically relevant problem and viable target for cognitive intervention. To lay the groundwork for the development of effective interventions for prospective memory in PD, this dissertation examines the cognitive mechanisms underlying prospective memory impairment in PD and the potential of training in a targeted …


Individual Differences In Discounting Delayed Gains, Delayed Losses, And Probabilistic Losses, Yu-Hua Yeh May 2018

Individual Differences In Discounting Delayed Gains, Delayed Losses, And Probabilistic Losses, Yu-Hua Yeh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many decisions in one’s daily life involve the discounting of delayed or probabilistic losses: Should we pay off our credit-card balance in full or incur interest; should we buy more collision and liability insurance or risk having to pay more in case of an accident? Despite its importance, however, discounting of losses is understudied, and few studies have focused on individual differences. The current study recruited 407 on-line participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk who completed three discounting questionnaires: delayed losses, probabilistic losses, and delayed gains. Magnitude effects were observed with delayed gains (i.e., larger delayed gains were discounted less steeply …


The Domain-Generality And Durability Of Efficient Learning, Christopher Zerr Dec 2017

The Domain-Generality And Durability Of Efficient Learning, Christopher Zerr

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

People differ in how quickly they learn information and how long they remember it, and a common finding in the literature is that a quicker rate of learning coincides with better retention for the learned material. Zerr and colleagues (2017) termed the relation between learning rate and retention as learning efficiency, with more efficient learning representing both a faster acquisition rate and better memory performance after a delay. Zerr et al. also demonstrated in separate experiments that how efficiently someone learns is stable across a range of days and years. The current thesis includes two experiments addressing additional questions …


Exploring The Underlying Mechanisms Of Structure Building, Reshma Gouravajhala Dec 2017

Exploring The Underlying Mechanisms Of Structure Building, Reshma Gouravajhala

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Structure building, the ability to build a coherent mental model of any narrative, requires the identification and integration of important parts of that narrative, as well as the suppression of irrelevant details. Critically, while individual differences in structure building have been shown to have important consequences in the classroom, little has been concluded about underlying deficits and causal mechanisms of low structure building ability. In the present study, we tested the theory that an impaired ability to suppress unimportant details is low structure builders’ sole deficit (Gernsbacher, 1990). We presented participants with educationally authentic text materials that offered varying degrees …


Do Learners Have Insight Into The Levels Of Processing Effect? Exploring Unresolved Levels Of Processing Phenomena With Judgments Of Learning, Elif Eylul Tekin Dec 2017

Do Learners Have Insight Into The Levels Of Processing Effect? Exploring Unresolved Levels Of Processing Phenomena With Judgments Of Learning, Elif Eylul Tekin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The levels of processing (LOP) effect shows that semantic processing leads to better retention than other types of processing. The effect is routinely obtained on many types of tests, yet, to this day, its mechanisms are still debated and it is poorly understood. In two old/new recognition experiments, I investigated potential explanations as to why the LOP effect occurs under intentional learning instructions. I asked a) whether subjects were aware of the LOP effect while they were studying the material, b) whether explicitly encouraging subjects to study the words with their idiosyncratic strategies would eliminate the effect, and c) whether …


The Impact Of Delay On Retrieval Success In The Parietal Memory Network, Nathan Anderson Dec 2017

The Impact Of Delay On Retrieval Success In The Parietal Memory Network, Nathan Anderson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent work has identified a Parietal Memory Network (PMN), which exhibits regular patterns of activation during memory encoding and retrieval. Among these characteristic patterns, this network displays a strong “retrieval success” effect, showing greater activation for correctlyremembered studied items (hits) compared to correctly-rejected novel items (CRs). To date, most relevant studies have used short retention intervals. Here, we ask if the retrieval success effect seen in the PMN would remain consistent over a delay. Twenty participants underwent fMRI while encoding and recognizing scenes. Greater activity for hits than for correctly-rejected lures within PMN regions was observed after a short delay …


How Does Increasing The Power Of Retrieval Cues Change The Experience Of Remembering?, Oyku Uner Dec 2017

How Does Increasing The Power Of Retrieval Cues Change The Experience Of Remembering?, Oyku Uner

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Increasing the power of retrieval cues typically enhances recall and recognition. Is this driven by remembering, knowing, or both? The current study used the remember/know paradigm in different recall tasks that manipulated the power of retrieval cues. In the first two experiments, participants studied words in a semantic or phonetic context, and were tested in one of these contexts, resulting in two match and two mismatch conditions. Participants recalled more in the match conditions, and this was driven by remembering. In the third experiment, participants studied multiple word lists and were tested immediately after each list with varying number of …


Quizzing And Restudy Dynamics In A Tst Paradigm: The (Null) Effect Of Feedback And The (Significant) Effects Of Metacognition, Francis Anderson Dec 2017

Quizzing And Restudy Dynamics In A Tst Paradigm: The (Null) Effect Of Feedback And The (Significant) Effects Of Metacognition, Francis Anderson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In authentic educational settings, using formative quizzes or tests can improve students’ memory by direct strengthening of the memory trace. There are other indirect effects of testing, however, such as improved understanding of what one does and does not know. That is, quizzes can benefit students’ metacognitive awareness, which may in turn affect their restudy behaviors. We tested whether different types of feedback (correct/incorrect, correct answer, or minimal) differentially affected students’ metacognition, changed their restudy behaviors, and influenced final test performance. We found no effect of feedback type, but were able to better understand quizzing and restudy dynamics in an …


The Effects Of Repeated Lineups And Delay On Eyewitness Identification, Wenbo Lin Dec 2017

The Effects Of Repeated Lineups And Delay On Eyewitness Identification, Wenbo Lin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Prior eyewitness research has examined the effects of repeated identification procedures and delays on eyewitness identification, but these studies have either confounded these two factors or studied them in isolation. Experiment 1 attempted to disentangle these factors through systematic manipulations of the number of repeated lineups and the length of delay between the original event and the first lineup. Experiment 2 examined whether the length of delay between two lineups (Lineups 1 and 2) affects the subsequent lineup identification decisions. We found that people were more inclined to choose when a lineup was repeated. A longer delay between the crime …


Is There A Higher-Order Mechanism That Explains Performance Across Prediction Tasks?, Michelle Lisa Eisenberg Aug 2017

Is There A Higher-Order Mechanism That Explains Performance Across Prediction Tasks?, Michelle Lisa Eisenberg

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

People constantly make predictions about what will happen in the near future. People anticipate how other people around them will act, what other people will say, and what actions will help them achieve the greatest rewards. Because all of these behaviors are typically called prediction, it is easy to make the assumption that performance across all of these types of tasks is driven by the same underlying mechanism. However, there has been little investigation into whether the mechanisms underlying prediction are the same across multiple task modalities. Therefore, in the current study, 226 participants completed four types of tasks that …


The Effect Of Incentives On Pupil Dilation During Recognition Memory: An Attentional Saliency Account Of The Pupil Old/New Effect, Lisa A. Solinger May 2017

The Effect Of Incentives On Pupil Dilation During Recognition Memory: An Attentional Saliency Account Of The Pupil Old/New Effect, Lisa A. Solinger

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Another interesting feature of this OMS circuit is the strong surround suppression occurring in the inner retina, which enables both VG3-ACs and W3-RGCs to remain silent to the global image motion. Pharmacological evidence suggested wide-field and/or spiking ACs are the source of the inhibition. The specific AC types, however, have not been identified. To address this question, in chapter 3, I explored candidate cell types using transgenic mouse lines expressing Cre recombinase, mainly tyrosine hydroxylase (TH)-Cre transgenic mice. In 2-photon guided patch clamp recordings, response patterns of TH2-ACs to object motion visual stimuli corresponded to inhibitory inputs of both VG3-ACs …


Process Dissociation Analyses Of Memory Changes In Healthy Aging, Preclinical, And Very Mild Alzheimer Disease: Evidence For Isolated Recollection Deficits, Peter R. Millar Dec 2016

Process Dissociation Analyses Of Memory Changes In Healthy Aging, Preclinical, And Very Mild Alzheimer Disease: Evidence For Isolated Recollection Deficits, Peter R. Millar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recollection and familiarity are independent processes that contribute to memory performance. Recollection is dependent on attentional control, which breaks down in early-stage Alzheimer disease (AD), whereas familiarity is independent of attention. The present study examines the sensitivity of recollection estimates based on Jacoby’s (1991) process dissociation procedure to AD-related biomarkers in a large sample of well-characterized cognitively normal older adults (N = 519) and the extent to which recollection discriminates these individuals from individuals with very mild symptomatic AD (N = 64). Participants studied word pairs, e.g., “knee bone,” then completed a primed, explicit, cued fragment-completion memory task, e.g., “knee …


Approaching Individual Differences Questions In Cognitive Control: A Case Study Of The Ax-Cpt, Shelly Cooper Dec 2016

Approaching Individual Differences Questions In Cognitive Control: A Case Study Of The Ax-Cpt, Shelly Cooper

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Investigating individual differences in cognition requires addressing questions not often thought about in standard experimental designs, especially those regarding the psychometrics of a task. The purpose of the present study is to use the AX-CPT cognitive control task as a representative case study example to address four concerns that may impact the ability to answer questions related to individual differences. First, the importance of a task's true score variance for evaluating potential failures to replicate predicted individual differences effects is demonstrated. Second, evidence is provided that Internet-based studies (e.g., MTurk) can exhibit comparable, or even higher true score variance than …


Perceiving Oldness In Parietal Cortex: Fmri Characterization Of A Parietal Memory Network, Adrian Gilmore Aug 2016

Perceiving Oldness In Parietal Cortex: Fmri Characterization Of A Parietal Memory Network, Adrian Gilmore

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The manner in which the human brain recognizes certain stimuli as novel or familiar is a matter of ongoing investigation. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of how this may be accomplished. More specifically, work contained herein focuses on a recently described "parietal memory network" (PMN; Gilmore et al., 2015) that shows opposite patterns of activity when perceiving novel or familiar stimuli: deactivating in response to novelty, and activating in response to familiarity. Critically, our understanding of this network is based on explicit memory tasks, in which subjects are deliberately instructed to learn or remember …


Humans Integrate Monetary And Liquid Incentives To Motivate Cognitive Task Performance, Debbie Yee Dec 2015

Humans Integrate Monetary And Liquid Incentives To Motivate Cognitive Task Performance, Debbie Yee

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is unequivocal that a wide variety of incentives can motivate behavior. However, few studies have explicitly examined whether and how different incentives are integrated in terms of their motivational influence. The current study examines the combined effects of monetary and liquid incentives on cognitive processing, and whether appetitive and aversive incentives have distinct influences. We introduce a novel task paradigm, in which participants perform cued task-switching for monetary rewards that vary parametrically across trials, with liquid incentives serving as post-trial performance feedback. Critically, the symbolic meaning of the liquid was held constant (indicating successful reward attainment), while liquid valence …


Breaking Apart The Reinforcement Learning Deficit In Schizophrenia, Adam Culbreth Aug 2015

Breaking Apart The Reinforcement Learning Deficit In Schizophrenia, Adam Culbreth

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reinforcement learning deficits have long been associated with schizophrenia. However, tasks traditionally used to assess these deficits often rely on multiple processing streams leaving the etiology of these task deficits unclear. In the current study, we borrowed a recent framework from computational neuroscience, which separates reinforcement-learning into two distinct systems, model-based and model-free. Under this framework, the model-free system learns about the value of actions in the immediate context, while the model-based system learns about the value of actions in both immediate and subsequent states that may be encountered as a result of their actions. Using a decision task that …


Spatial Proximity As A Determinant Of Cognitive Control Context, Nathaniel T. Diede Aug 2015

Spatial Proximity As A Determinant Of Cognitive Control Context, Nathaniel T. Diede

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The speed and flexibility of cognitive control is exemplified by the context-specific proportion congruency (CSPC) effect. Two locations on a computer screen may be biased to present either mostly congruent (MC) stimuli or mostly incongruent (MI) stimuli, necessitating rapid shifts of cognitive control in order to maximize speed and accuracy of responding. The episodic retrieval account has posited that the speed and flexibility of control can be explained by attentional settings being bound with contextual cues (e.g. the location at which a stimulus appears) into an episodic representation—allowing for settings to be retrieved automatically. However, what determines which setting is …


Are There Multiple Kinds Of Episodic Memory? An Fmri Investigation Comparing Autobiographical And Recognition Memory Tasks, Hung-Yu Chen May 2015

Are There Multiple Kinds Of Episodic Memory? An Fmri Investigation Comparing Autobiographical And Recognition Memory Tasks, Hung-Yu Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What brain regions underlie retrieval from episodic memory? The bulk of research addressing this question has relied upon laboratory-based recognition memory. Another, less dominant tradition has employed autobiographical methods, whereby people recall events from their lifetime, often after being cued with words or pictures. Previous research comparing regions underlying successful memory retrieval between these two methodological approaches has shown mixed results. To examine the neural processes underlying recognition memory for materials encountered in the laboratory and autobiographical memory, we conducted a within-subject study using fMRI. We showed participants indoor and outdoor scenes under two types of instructions: In the lab-based …


Variable Semantic Input And Novel First-Language Vocabulary Learning, Nichole Runge May 2015

Variable Semantic Input And Novel First-Language Vocabulary Learning, Nichole Runge

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vocabulary learning involves mapping a word form to a semantic meaning. An individual asked to learn the Spanish word for “apple,” for example, must map a new word form (manzana) onto the appropriate semantic representation. Previous studies have found that acoustic variability of word forms can improve second language vocabulary acquisition (Barcroft & Sommers, 2005; Sommers & Barcroft, 2007). The current experiments investigated whether variable semantic input could have a similar beneficial effect on first language vocabulary learning. Participants learned low-frequency English vocabulary words and their definitions. Half of the words were shown with the same verbatim definition …


Rapid Detection And Use Of Non-Verbal Confidence Cues During Adaptive Memory Biasing, Jihyun Cha May 2015

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, …