Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Investigating The Proposed Mechanisms Guiding Negative Attentional Templates, Michael Kevin Mugno

Masters Theses

To complete goal-directed visual search, information that is gathered in working memory must be sorted by relevancy to the current task. In order to bias search, attentional templates are created within the construct of visual working memory (VWM) using both endogenous and exogenous information. While most attentional templates are built around positive information, which is directly relevant to the target of search, there are cases where negative information, which is directly relevant to the search but not necessarily the target itself, may be more efficient. However, the mechanisms behind how these negative templates direct search is debated. The goal of …

Rethinking Attention Control: An Individual Differences Approach, Vincent A. Medina

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

While there is extensive literature on visual spatial attention, less is known about auditory spatial attention, especially in terms of attention control. There is also a growing literature highlighting the importance of considering individual differences in attention control ability. Given these points, the purpose of this study was twofold. The first was to understand how auditory attention control is influenced by spatial location as well as vision. The second was to examine whether individual differences in attention control ability can predict task performance in that context. We utilized two tasks for these purposes. Experiment 1a consisted of a cross-modal Stroop …

The Structure Of Working Memory: A Review And New View Of Psychometric Models, Kevin Pablo Rosales

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Beginning in the 1970s, a great deal of research in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, psychometrics, and cognitive neuroscience has investigated the structure and function of working memory (WM), defined as the ability to actively maintain and manipulate information in the service of complex cognition (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). It is well established that WM is a limited capacity system and individual differences in WM capacity are strongly associated with important cognitive abilities and outcomes, such as general intelligence (Engle et al., 1999) and academic achievement (Swanson & Berninger, 1996; Ramirez et al., 2013). For this reason, WM is a central …

Prenatal Ethanol Exposure Impairs Performance On Spatial And Tactile Sequential Discrimination Task In Juvenile Rats, Caleb S. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) are a set of cognitive and behavioral abnormalities that arise in ~5% of children who have been prenatally-exposed to alcohol. Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) can cause impairments in learning acquisition, working memory, response inhibition, and attentional-set shifting that result in exaggerated deficits in executive function and impairments in goal-seeking behavior. There are standard procedures used in rodent research to address some components of these deficits, but few procedures are sensitive enough to comprehensively assess such deficits. To address this issue in FASDs research techniques, we developed a procedure that requires prolonged executive function in a …

The Long-Term Effects Of Cannabis On Attention To Motion, Rachel Mccaig

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

The purpose of the following study was to investigate the long-term effects of cannabis use on attention to motion.

Methods: Cannabis users, who varied in age of onset of use, were compared to control participants after abstaining from cannabis for at least 24 hours. One-hundred and ninety-seven participants engaged in a cognitive assessment followed by a motion discrimination task and an attention to motion task. The assessment consisted of a series of standard tasks that measured a range of cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and executive functioning. The motion discrimination task assessed the participants’ abilities in discriminating between various …

Adhd Symptoms And Inattentional Blindness In An Undergraduate Sample, Katherine Rose Matchett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The relationship between Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and the phenomenon of inattentional blindness has received little empirical attention, with only a single published study on the topic. The purpose of the present study was to investigate individual differences in ADHD symptom severity in a non-clinical, undergraduate sample as they relate to susceptibility to inattentional blindness. Because research conducted in an individual differences framework requires the use of reliable measurement instruments, the present study also set out to develop and pilot a task that could induce inattentional blindness repeatedly and reliably in the same participants. The results showed that a) the measure …