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Differences In Stimulus-Response Prediction And Reorientation Of Attention Relative To Student Athletic Background, Madelyn Quirk, Jessica Green

Senior Theses

Within the game of baseball, every hit, pitch, and catch, rely on a player’s ability to respond quickly and appropriately to the resulting play in a manner that allows them to be an asset on the field. The most successful athletes are those best able to allocate their attention to accomplish these goal-oriented tasks. To explore this attentional orientation, occipital neural recordings of alpha waves often show a preemptive shift in phase alignment according to temporal anticipations. Here we aimed to identify influences on voluntary attention using cueing paradigms to examine stimulus-response timing relative to validity and athletic background, while …

Sound Localization In Multisource Environments: The Role Of Stimulus Onset Asynchrony And Spatial Uncertainty, Brian David Simpson

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Several studies have shown that detection of a target in a concurrent noise masker improves when the masker onset occurs prior to that of the target (see, e.g., Zwicker, 1965; McFadden, 1966; Yost, 1985). Recent research indicates that this "masker fringe" (i.e., the portion of the masker occurring prior to the target onset) also facilitates sound localization in noise (Simpson, Gilkey, Brungart, Iyer, & Romigh, 2009a; Simpson, Gilkey, Brungart, Iyer, & Hamil, 2009b). However, these studies do not provide a clear indication of what information listeners are exploiting to obtain this improved localization performance. This dissertation was designed to determine …

Causality And Similarity In Autobiographical Event Structure: An Investigation Using Event Cueing And Latent Semantic Analysis, Christopher M. O'Connor

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The influence of similarity- and causally-based relations on the organization of autobiographical events was investigated using extended strings of related event memories. These strings were elicited using an event cueing paradigm in which participants generated descriptions of memories from their life, which were then presented as cues to subsequent event memories. In Experiment 1, similarity between generated events was investigated using participants’ similarity ratings, Latent Semantic Analysis, and experimenter judgements of shared event properties. For events close together in a string, event owners’ similarity ratings were higher than non-owners’, and non-owners’ ratings were comparable to similarity calculated using LSA. In …

Hysteresis Effects In Driving, Justin Morgan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents two studies examining the interaction between workload history and driver mental workload. The first experiment focuses on testing for the presence of a hysteresis effect in the driving task. The second experiment examines the proposition that cueing impending periods of higher task demand can reduce the impact of any such potential hysteresis effects. Thirty-two licensed drivers served as participants and all served in both studies. Using the directions provided by a Heads-Up-Display navigation system, participants followed a pre-set route in the simulated environment. At specified points within the drive, the navigation system would purposefully fail which required …

Orienting Of Visual-Spatial Attention With Augmented Reality: Effects Of Spatial And Non-Spatial Multi-Modal Cues, Christian Jerome

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advances in simulation technology have brought about many improvements to the way we train tasks, as well as how we perform tasks in the operational field. Augmented reality (AR) is an example of how to enhance the user's experience in the real world with computer generated information and graphics. Visual search tasks are known to be capacity demanding and therefore may be improved by training in an AR environment. During the experimental task, participants searched for enemies (while cued from visual, auditory, tactile, combinations of two, or all three modality cues) and tried to shoot them while avoiding shooting the …

Fostering The Development Of Domain-General, Nonlinear Mental Models: A Foundation For Systemic Thinking, Jeffrey S. Sinn

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Two experiments examined whether people can develop a domain-general, nonlinear mental model when provided with an appropriate conceptual model. Both experiments presented causal loop models (i.e., variables connected in a circle by arrows representing causal relationships) as a conceptual model for positive feedback. Study 1 found that participants trained in causal loop modeling could accurately represent scenarios of low but not high complexity. Study 2 expanded on the design of Study 1 by varying the type of training and type of aid presented during testing. Participants received training with modeling instruction, training with cue-utilization instruction (i.e., participants were trained to …

Differential Hawthorne Effect By Cueing, Sex, And Relevance, Richard Carl Harris

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This study attempted to create experimentally the Hawthorne effect in a freshman general psychology class at Utah State University during tall quarter of 1967. It also attempted to discover the differential effect of cueing, sex, and relevance on the experimental creation of the Hawthorne effect as measured by six general psychology criterion tests.

The design of this study included a control group and three experimental groups.

The following five hypotheses were postulated:

1. The experimental groups will show greater influence from the Hawthorne effect than the control group.

2. Within the three experimental groups there will be an increasing Hawthorne effect with …

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