Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Cognitive Psychology Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 18 of 18

Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

Rapid Knowledge Assessment (Rka): Assessing Students Content Knowledge Through Rapid, In Class Assessment Of Expertise, Erin Margaret O'Connell Dec 2012

Rapid Knowledge Assessment (Rka): Assessing Students Content Knowledge Through Rapid, In Class Assessment Of Expertise, Erin Margaret O'Connell

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how students go about problem solving in chemistry lends many possible advantages for interventions in teaching strategies for the college classroom. The work presented here is the development of an in-classroom, real-time, formative instrument to assess student expertise in chemistry with the purpose of developing classroom interventions. The development of appropriate interventions requires the understanding of how students go about starting to solve tasks presented to them, what their mental effort (load on working memory) is, and whether or not their performance was accurate. To measure this, the Rapid Knowledge Assessment (RKA) instrument uses clickers (handheld electronic instruments for …


Capacity Coefficient Variations, Joseph W. Houpt, Andrew Heathcote, Ami Eidels, Nathan Medeiros-Ward, Jason Watson, David Strayer Nov 2012

Capacity Coefficient Variations, Joseph W. Houpt, Andrew Heathcote, Ami Eidels, Nathan Medeiros-Ward, Jason Watson, David Strayer

Joseph W. Houpt

The capacity coefficient has become an increasingly popular measure of efficiency under changes in workload. It has been used in applications ranging from psychophysical detection tasks to complex cognitive tasks, as well as in addressing questions in social and clinical psychology. The basic formulation compares response times to each stimulus property (or task) in isolation to response times with all stimulus properties (or tasks) at the same time. A number of variations on the basic capacity coefficient have been used, both in the experimental design and in the calculations, and many more are possible. Here we outline the theoretical reasons …


General Recognition Theory Extended To Include Response Times: Predictions For A Class Of Parallel Systems, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend, Noah H. Silbert Nov 2012

General Recognition Theory Extended To Include Response Times: Predictions For A Class Of Parallel Systems, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend, Noah H. Silbert

Joseph W. Houpt

No abstract provided.


Mindscapes And Landscapes: Hayek And Simon On Cognitive Extension, Leslie Marsh Oct 2012

Mindscapes And Landscapes: Hayek And Simon On Cognitive Extension, Leslie Marsh

Leslie Marsh

Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects …


Bayesian Approaches To Assessing Architecture And Stopping Rule, Joseph W. Houpt, A. Heathcote, A. Eidels, J. T. Townsend Jul 2012

Bayesian Approaches To Assessing Architecture And Stopping Rule, Joseph W. Houpt, A. Heathcote, A. Eidels, J. T. Townsend

Joseph W. Houpt

Much of scientific psychology and cognitive science can be viewed as a search to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of perception, thought and action. Two processing attributes of particular interest to psychologists are the architecture, or temporal relationships between sub-processes of the system, and the stopping rule, which dictates how many of the sub-processes must be completed for the system to finish. The Survivor Interaction Contrast (SIC) is a powerful tool for assessing the architecture and stopping rule of a mental process model. Thus far, statistical analysis of the SIC has been limited to null-hypothesis- significance tests. In this talk …


Bayesian Approaches To Assessing Architecture And Stopping Rule, Joseph W. Houpt, Andrew Heathcote, Ami Eidels, J. T. Townsend Jul 2012

Bayesian Approaches To Assessing Architecture And Stopping Rule, Joseph W. Houpt, Andrew Heathcote, Ami Eidels, J. T. Townsend

Psychology Faculty Publications

Much of scientific psychology and cognitive science can be viewed as a search to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of perception, thought and action. Two processing attributes of particular interest to psychologists are the architecture, or temporal relationships between sub-processes of the system, and the stopping rule, which dictates how many of the sub-processes must be completed for the system to finish. The Survivor Interaction Contrast (SIC) is a powerful tool for assessing the architecture and stopping rule of a mental process model. Thus far, statistical analysis of the SIC has been limited to null-hypothesis- significance tests. In this talk …


A Decomposition Approach For A New Test-Scenario In Complex Problem Solving, Michael Engelhart, Joachim Funke, Sebastian Sager Jun 2012

A Decomposition Approach For A New Test-Scenario In Complex Problem Solving, Michael Engelhart, Joachim Funke, Sebastian Sager

Joachim Funke

Over the last years, psychological research has increasingly used computer-supported tests, especially in the analysis of complex human decision making and problem solving. The approach is to use computer-based test scenarios and to evaluate the performance of participants and correlate it to certain attributes, such as the participant's capacity to regulate emotions. However, two important questions can only be answered with the help of modern optimization methodology. The first one considers an analysis of the exact situations and decisions that led to a bad or good overall performance of test persons. The second important question concerns performance, as the choices …


The Effects Of Diagrams And Relational Complexity On User Performance In Conditional Probability Problems In A Non-Learning Context, Vincent J. Kellen Jun 2012

The Effects Of Diagrams And Relational Complexity On User Performance In Conditional Probability Problems In A Non-Learning Context, Vincent J. Kellen

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Many disciplines in everyday life depend on improved performance in conditional probability problems. Most adults struggle with conditional probability problems and several prior studies have shown participant accuracy is less than 50%. This study examined user performance when aided with computer-generated Venn and Euler type diagrams in a non-learning context. Despite the prevalence of research into diagrams and extensive research into conditional probability problem solving, this study is one of the only studies to apply theories of working memory to predict user performance in conditional probability problems with diagrams. Following relational complexity theory, this study manipulated problem complexity in computer …


General Recognition Theory Extended To Include Response Times: Predictions For A Class Of Parallel Systems, James T. Townsend, Joseph W. Houpt, Noah H. Silbert Jan 2012

General Recognition Theory Extended To Include Response Times: Predictions For A Class Of Parallel Systems, James T. Townsend, Joseph W. Houpt, Noah H. Silbert

Joseph W. Houpt

General Recognition Theory (GRT; Ashby & Townsend, 1986) is a multidimensional theory of classification. Originally developed to study various types of perceptual independence, it has also been widely employed in diverse cognitive venues, such as categorization. The initial theory and applications have been static, that is, lacking a time variable and focusing on patterns of responses, such as confusion matrices. Ashby proposed a parallel, dynamic stochastic version of GRT with application to perceptual independence based on discrete linear systems theory with imposed noise \citep{Ash89}. The current study again focuses on cognitive/perceptual independence within an identification classification paradigm. We extend stochastic …


General Recognition Theory Extended To Include Response Times: Predictions For A Class Of Parallel Systems, James T. Townsend, Joseph W. Houpt, Noah H. Silbert Jan 2012

General Recognition Theory Extended To Include Response Times: Predictions For A Class Of Parallel Systems, James T. Townsend, Joseph W. Houpt, Noah H. Silbert

Psychology Faculty Publications

General Recognition Theory (GRT; Ashby & Townsend, 1986) is a multidimensional theory of classification. Originally developed to study various types of perceptual independence, it has also been widely employed in diverse cognitive venues, such as categorization. The initial theory and applications have been static, that is, lacking a time variable and focusing on patterns of responses, such as confusion matrices. Ashby proposed a parallel, dynamic stochastic version of GRT with application to perceptual independence based on discrete linear systems theory with imposed noise (Ashby, 1989). The current study again focuses on cognitive/perceptual independence within an identification classification paradigm. We extend …


Adding Within-Utterance Emotion Decay For More Human-Like Dialog, Michael Hans Durcholz Jan 2012

Adding Within-Utterance Emotion Decay For More Human-Like Dialog, Michael Hans Durcholz

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

While spoken dialog systems have been used for commercial applications for several decades, most commercial spoken dialog systems provide only simple information exchange capabilities. Emotion synthesis in spoken dialog systems has become an active research area recently, and use of emotion-adaptive dialog systems has demonstrated improvements in user experience and rapport. This thesis seeks to improve how emotions are conveyed in dialog systems to enable robust emotional support that improves user experiences with dialog systems and models human speech characteristics more accurately than current dialog systems.

Prior work with Gracie (GRAduate Coordinator with Immediate response Emotions), an emotion-adaptive dialog system, …


Stigmergy 3.0: From Ants To Economies, Leslie Marsh, Margery Doyle Dec 2011

Stigmergy 3.0: From Ants To Economies, Leslie Marsh, Margery Doyle

Leslie Marsh

No abstract provided.


Distinctive Neural Processes During Learning In Autism, Sarah Schipul, Diane Williams, Timothy Keller, Nancy Minshew, Marcel Just Dec 2011

Distinctive Neural Processes During Learning In Autism, Sarah Schipul, Diane Williams, Timothy Keller, Nancy Minshew, Marcel Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.


Brain Activation For Language Dual-Tasking: Listening To Two People Speak At The Same Time And A Change In Network Timing, Augusto Buchweitz, Timothy Keller, Ann Meyler, Marcel Just Dec 2011

Brain Activation For Language Dual-Tasking: Listening To Two People Speak At The Same Time And A Change In Network Timing, Augusto Buchweitz, Timothy Keller, Ann Meyler, Marcel Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.


Autism As A Neural Systems Disorder: A Theory Of Frontal-Posterior Underconnectivity, Marcel Just, Timothy Keller, Vicente Malave, Rajesh Kana, Sashank Varma Dec 2011

Autism As A Neural Systems Disorder: A Theory Of Frontal-Posterior Underconnectivity, Marcel Just, Timothy Keller, Vicente Malave, Rajesh Kana, Sashank Varma

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.


An Fmri Investigation Of Analogical Mapping In Metaphor Comprehension: The Influence Of Context And Individual Cognitive Capacities On Processing Demands., Chantel Prat, Robert Mason, Marcel Just Dec 2011

An Fmri Investigation Of Analogical Mapping In Metaphor Comprehension: The Influence Of Context And Individual Cognitive Capacities On Processing Demands., Chantel Prat, Robert Mason, Marcel Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.


Exploring Commonalities Across Participants In The Neural Representation Of Objects, Svetlana V. Shinkareva, Vicente L. Malave, Marcel Adam Just, Tom M. Mitchell Dec 2011

Exploring Commonalities Across Participants In The Neural Representation Of Objects, Svetlana V. Shinkareva, Vicente L. Malave, Marcel Adam Just, Tom M. Mitchell

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.


Identifying Bilingual Semantic Neural Representations Across Languages, Augusto Buchweitz, Svetlana V. Shinkareva, Robert A. Mason, Tom M. Mitchell, Marcel Adam Just Dec 2011

Identifying Bilingual Semantic Neural Representations Across Languages, Augusto Buchweitz, Svetlana V. Shinkareva, Robert A. Mason, Tom M. Mitchell, Marcel Adam Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.