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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Effects Of Nicotine On A Translational Model Of Working Memory, David Alderson Macqueen
Effects Of Nicotine On A Translational Model Of Working Memory, David Alderson Macqueen
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Cognitive research with human non-smokers has demonstrated that nicotine generally enhances performance on tasks of attention but, working memory does not appear to be affected. In contrast, nicotine has been shown to produce robust enhancements of working memory in non-human animals. To address this disparity, the present study investigated the effects of nicotine (2mg, 4mg nicotine gum, and placebo) on the performance of 30 non-smokers (15 male) completing a working memory task developed for rodents (the odor span task, OST). Nicotine has been reported to enhance OST performance in rodents and the present study sought to determine whether the effect …
How Luck And Fortune Shape Risk-Taking Behaviors, Andrea Yvonne Ranieri
How Luck And Fortune Shape Risk-Taking Behaviors, Andrea Yvonne Ranieri
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
The current study uses a lottery-based paradigm to examine how risk taking is affected by two specific types of good and bad experiences, luck and fortune. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, we suggest that they refer to two separate aspects of risk. Fortune refers to the overall positivity or negativity of the overall context, whereas luck refers to the probability of a better or worse outcome. To make the lottery context fortunate or unfortunate, a set of mixed-valence control lotteries were surrounded by all gain (good fortune) or all loss lotteries (bad fortune). To make the lotteries lucky …
Interleaved Effects In Inductive Category Learning: The Role Of Memory Retention, Alex Mackendrick
Interleaved Effects In Inductive Category Learning: The Role Of Memory Retention, Alex Mackendrick
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Interleaved effects are widely documented. Research demonstrates that interleaved presentation orders, as opposed to blocked orders typically benefit inductive category learning. What drives interleaved effects is less straightforward. Interleaved presentations provide both the opportunity to compare and contrast between different types of category exemplars, which are temporally juxtaposed, and the opportunity to space study of the same type of category exemplars, which are temporally separated within the presentation span. Accordingly, interleaved effects might be driven by enhanced discrimination, enhanced memory retention, or both in some measure. Though recent studies have largely endorsed enhanced discrimination as the critical mechanism driving interleaved …