Psychology Commons^™

Investigating Metacognitive Fluency As A Judgment Cue In Choice Overload, Michael R. Ho

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Choice overload describes the finding that individuals report being less satisfied and defer choice more often when choosing from larger rather than smaller choice sets. Researchers have proposed various theoretical models to account for this phenomenon; however, these models have yielded conflicting results. Critically, little research has sought to identify the cognitive mechanism underlying choice overload. The present study reviews models of choice overload and offers a more parsimonious account of choice overload. More specifically, metacognitive fluency, or the subjective interpretation of choice difficulty, plays a critical role during choice and may account for conflicting results in current choice overload …

Bilingual Versus Monolingual Performance Within Memory Suppression, Santiago David

CMC Senior Theses

Bilingual participants have been argued to have a cognitive inhibitory advantage over monolinguals resulting in a faster ability to inhibit information. However, the advantage has not been studied using the item-method within the Directed Forgetting (DF) paradigm, which is suggested to cause inhibition through remember and forget instructions. As the DF paradigm uses a recall and then recognition task format, the current study also investigated the possibility of retrieval-practice effects of the recall task on recognition. By utilizing the item-method with recall and no-recall conditions, the possible bilingual cognitive advantage, role of inhibition in DF, and potential retrieval-practice effects were …

The Future Self: Promoting Prosocial Decision-Making Through Motivated Episodic Simulation, Su Young (Kevin) Choi

CMC Senior Theses

Vividly imagining the future self can help inform our present decisions. Given that most attempts aimed at understanding the prosocial effect of imagining future episodes have focused on sensory properties, little is known about how prosocial motivations can explain the link between episodic simulation and helping intentions. Here, the current research investigated whether altruistically and reputationally motivated simulation of helping behavior promote a willingness to help a person in need. The study found that imagining helping episodes increased willingness to help relative to a control manipulation, especially when reputational concerns were made salient. Path modeling analyses revealed that the prosocial …

Can Metacognitive Monitoring Ability Be Trained?, Erica Abed

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Low performers tend to greatly overestimate their performance on a task, but high

performers slightly underestimate their performance; the unskilled-unaware effect (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Because assessment of one’s own skill (monitoring) impacts future decisions, such as selecting information to re-study (control), low performers may be disadvantaged in both what they know and what they are likely to learn. Although most research has attempted to reduce metacognitive errors in low performers by training cognitive ability (e.g., teaching them to perform better on a task), training metacognitive ability may be both more efficient and more likely to transfer to other tasks. …

Retrieval-Induced Forgetting In Autism Spectrum: Combining Narrative Experience With Clinical Research To Explore Stress-Induced, Transitory Retrograde Amnesia, Elizabeth Willsmore-Finkle

Scripps Senior Theses

Currently, psychological research explores autism, a blanket term for a range of neurobiological and developmental differences, through a clinical, as opposed to an experiential, lens. Autism has only existed as formal diagnosis under that name since 1943 (Kanner); however, the advocacy of activists such as Temple Grandin, a slaughterhouse systems designer best known for documenting her life with autism in a series of autobiographic accounts, has begun to legitimize the incorporation of emic experiences of autism within clinical research. Researcher Dermot Bowler and colleagues (2011) have conducted extensive reviews of memory distinctions in autism, finding differences of varying degrees across …