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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

Pushing It To The Limit: Determining Asian Elephant (Elephas Maximus) Olfactory Sensitivity And Discrimination Through A Behavioral Choice Task, Matthew S. Rudolph Dec 2021

Pushing It To The Limit: Determining Asian Elephant (Elephas Maximus) Olfactory Sensitivity And Discrimination Through A Behavioral Choice Task, Matthew S. Rudolph

Theses and Dissertations

Elephants have shown remarkable olfactory capabilities. Their sense of smell impacts their foraging choices, behavior, and ultimately, survival. Being able to detect a target odor can allow elephants to locate specific resources, identify threats, and find receptive conspecifics. Previous studies have shown that elephants can consistently detect target odors, but have not identified the limits of this detection. Thus, to investigate the extent of elephants’ odor detection capabilities, we tested Asian elephants in a two-step odor discrimination task. First, we investigated whether elephants could detect odors at varying levels of dilution after a training procedure, and then whether they could …


Environmental Cues And The Sociospatial Imaginary: An Examination Of Spatial Perception And Meaning-Making In A Gentrifying Neighborhood, Todd Levon Brown Jun 2021

Environmental Cues And The Sociospatial Imaginary: An Examination Of Spatial Perception And Meaning-Making In A Gentrifying Neighborhood, Todd Levon Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What could be more ordinary or pedestrian than two people walking down an urban street and talking about what we see and what we make of it? Yet this simple, quotidian act of walking a street—seeing, perceiving and experiencing physical spaces, places and objects—and making meaning of what is encountered, is the basis of my dissertation. It is also my basis for claiming that I have learned a great deal—and much unexpectedly—about how differently different people see and interpret the urban streetscape. What are the various environmental cues that stand out to different individuals? What are the psychosocial imaginaries that …


From Psychology To Phylogeny: Bridging Levels Of Analysis In Cultural Evolution, Mason Youngblood Jun 2021

From Psychology To Phylogeny: Bridging Levels Of Analysis In Cultural Evolution, Mason Youngblood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cultural evolution, or change in the socially learned behavior of a population over time, is a fascinating phenomenon that is widespread in humans and present in some non-human animals. In this dissertation, I present an array of cultural evolutionary studies that bridge pattern and process in a wide range of research models including music, extremism, and birdsong. The first chapter is an introduction to the field of cultural evolution, including a bibliometric analysis of its structure. The second and third chapters are studies on the cultural dynamics of music sampling traditions in hip-hop and electronic music communities and far-right extremism …


Investigating Social Preferences In A High Fission-Fusion Society Of Black And White Ruffed Lemur (Varecia Variegata), Patricia A. Adamo Apr 2021

Investigating Social Preferences In A High Fission-Fusion Society Of Black And White Ruffed Lemur (Varecia Variegata), Patricia A. Adamo

Theses and Dissertations

Wild lemur primates were tested for social preferences across behaviors. Study found highly conservative social preferences that were very consistent across all behavioral states, despite high fission fusion traits common of lemur groups. This finding lays the foundation for using nearest-neighbor as a proxy of social preference for future endeavors.