Psychology Commons^™

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

Personality Pathology And Cognitive Aging: The Role Of Interpersonal Stress, Patrick Joseph Cruitt

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research on the relationship between normal-range personality and cognitive aging has demonstrated consistent, but modest, effects. The current investigation seeks to increase our understanding of unhealthy cognitive aging by examining the maladaptive extremes of personality. Borderline and avoidant personality disorder (PD), but not obsessive-compulsive PD, were hypothesized to show prospective associations with cognitive aging. Interpersonal stress was expected to mediate these relationships. The current investigation tested these hypotheses in two longitudinal studies of older adulthood: the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center cohort (ADRC, N = 434, Mage = 69.95, 56% women) and the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network study (SPAN, …

Accuracy Matters For The Benefits Of Sleep After Retrieval Practice, Steven Dessenberger

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research suggests that while sleep and retrieval practice can each improve memory on their own, their benefits cannot be combined to produce an additive effect unless feedback is given during the initial test. These previous findings would seem to support a retrieval-as-consolidation of the testing effect, which states that the benefits of retrieval are the result of memory consolidation, a process that normally occurs during the sleep cycle. The present study sought to determine whether the retrieval-as-consolidation account held true when initial test accuracy was considered as a factor. Using foreign language word pairs, we examined the combined effects …

Isolating Item And Subject Contributions To The Subsequent Memory Effect, Jihyun Cha

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The subsequent memory effect (SME) refers to the greater brain activation during encoding of subsequently recognized items compared to subsequently forgotten items. Previous literature regarding SME has been primarily focused on identifying the role of specific regions during encoding or factors that potentially modulate the phenomenon. The current dissertation examines the degree to which this phenomenon can be explained by item selection effects; that is, the tendency of some items to be inherently more memorable than others. To estimate the potential contribution of items to SME, I provided participants a fixed set of items during encoding, which allowed me to …

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 …

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) …

Mind In Hand, Anna Olson

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This thesis explores the intersection of art and psychology as it manifests in my art practice, particularly in the medium of weaving. The contemporary frameworks of memory and archive provide the basis of this discussion, as well as findings from the field of Art Therapy. Difficult emotions like loss and grief often show up in my work, and I will discuss how artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Sophie Calle also utilize these concepts. In weaving, I capture my internal mental states, memories, and perceptions of the future in a variety of found and gifted objects. Guided by the precedents set …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

How Do Voters Remember Flip-Flopping? Memorial And Social Consequences Of Change Recollection, Adam Lewis Putnam

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents 3 experiments that explore how people notice and remember a politician’s change in position. Subjects read position statements made by politicians at two different debates; sometimes the politicians were consistent across debates, sometimes they changed positions, and sometimes they only addressed an issue at Debate 2. Subjects recalled the positions from Debate 2 and reported whether they thought the politician had changed positions on that issue. The results showed that changing positions made it more difficult for people to remember a politician’s most recent position; however, recollecting that a change occurred eliminated that memory deficit. Experiment 1 …

Stories In Mind – The Relationship Between The Narratological Categories Of Order And Time And The Reader’S Cognitive Structures As Exemplified In Büchner’S Play Woyzeck, Marc Breetzke

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

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 …

When Can We Trust Our Memories? Quantitative And Qualitative Indicators Of Recognition Accuracy, Kurt Andrew Desoto

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present a quartet of experiments that studied confidence ratings and remember/know/guess judgments as indicators of recognition accuracy. The goal of these experiments was to examine the validity of these quantitative and qualitative measures of metacognitive monitoring and to interpret them using the continuous dual-process model of signal detection (Wixted & Mickes, 2010).

In Experiment 1, subjects heard or read items belonging to categorized lists and took an old/new recognition test over studied and new items while making remember/know/guess judgments after each recognition decision. Consistent with prior literature, remember judgments were more likely to be accurate than …

The Enhancing Effect Of Retrieval On Subsequent Encoding: Understanding Test-Potentiated Learning, Kathleen Marie Arnold

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Retrieval practice directly enhances later memory of tested material, a robust effect known as the testing effect (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b). Numerous experiments have provided support for this effect. However, another important effect of retrieval practice has received far less attention. Retrieval practice can also indirectly enhance learning by potentiating subsequent encoding of tested material, an effect known as test-potentiated learning (Izawa, 1966). Although introduced over four decades ago, little is known about how and when tests enhance subsequent encoding, information that has both practical and theoretical importance. The aim of this dissertation was to enhance understanding of test-potentiated learning …

Separating Component Signals Of Episodic Simulation Using A Catch Trial Design, Adrian W. Gilmore

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Tasks that require mentally simulating events, such as remembering events from one’s past and imagining events from one’s future, have been shown to involve a highly overlapping set of brain regions. Across a growing number of studies, relatively few regions have been found that show differences in activity between remembered and imagined events. However, studies have not disambiguated neural activity related to task orientation: i.e., preparing to remember events from the past or imagine events in the future) from activity related simulating events, per se. The current experiment uses functional MRI and employs a catch trial design to test the …

Sensory And Cognitive Declines In Older Adults: A Longitudinal Study, Melanie Storm Bauer

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

In a recent cross-sectional study, as has been found in numerous previous studies, Sommers et al.: 2011) found that age-related declines in hearing, as assessed by pure-tone thresholds, begin around age 20 and continue across the lifespan. In another article published from the same cross-sectional dataset, Hale et al.: 2011) found that working memory ability also begins declining around age 20 and continues throughout life. The present study is a longitudinal follow-up of these two studies in which a sub-sample of older adults: ≥65 years old at the time of original testing approximately four years ago) were re-tested on sensory …

Event Perception, Gabriel A. Radvansky, Jeffrey M. Zacks

Psychological & Brain Sciences Faculty Publications

Events are central elements of human experience. Formally, they can be individuated in terms of the entities that compose them, the features of those entities, and the relations amongst entities. Psychologically, representations of events capture their spatiotemporal location, the people and objects involved, and the relations between these elements. Here, we present an account of the nature of psychological representations of events and how they are constructed and updated. Event representations are like images in that they are isomorphic to the situations they represent. However, they are like models or language in that they are constructed of components rather than …