Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Evaluating The Validity Of Technology-Enhanced Educational Assessment Items And Tasks: An Empirical Approach To Studying Item Features And Scoring Rubrics., Ally Thomas

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With the advent of the newly developed Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards, innovative assessments, including technology-enhanced items and tasks, will be needed to meet the challenges of developing valid and reliable assessments in a world of computer-based testing. In a recent critique of the next generation assessments in math (i.e., Smarter Balanced), Rasmussen (2015) observed that many aspects of the technology “enhancements” can be expected to do more harm than good as the computer interfaces may introduce construct irrelevant variance. This paper focused on issues surrounding the design of TEIs and how cognitive load ...

Observational Assessment Of Empathy In Parent-Child Verbal Exchanges And Their Influence On Child Behavior, Patty Carambot

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Empathy, the ability to both experientially share in and understand others’ thoughts, behaviors, and feelings, is vital for human adaptation. Deficits in empathy development have implications across the lifespan for the development of prosocial behavior, social functioning, mental health disorders, and risk for antisocial behavior (e.g., Guajardo, Snyder, & Petersen, 2009; Moreno, Klute & Robinson, 2008). In light of these societal and individual burdens, it is imperative to foster and strengthen the development of this ability early in life to prevent or ameliorate such negative outcomes. This type of prevention can take a variety of forms, but parent and child verbal exchanges and modeling are often the most direct methods after two years of age (e.g., Moreno et al., 2008). The aim of this research was to inform the development of a system to naturalistically assess empathy development via home-based observation of mothers and their children’s verbal exchanges.

The proposed system, iEAR-Empathy in Parent-Child Interactions (iEAR-EPIC), is a verbal coding system to code for verbal behaviors empirically demonstrated to foster empathy development, as well as behaviors found to indicate empathy development. The development of the iEPIC was theoretically informed by Preston and de Waal’s (2002) Perception Action Mechanism (PAM) model of empathy, a neurocognitive-emotional model of empathy. This model demonstrates empathy as a maturing system in which emotional and cognitive understanding develop in tandem through brain-environment interactions. However, the iEPIC also accounts for the interplay between parents and neurocognitive emotional processes, and thus captures the parallel, increasingly interactive, development of cognitive and emotional abilities from infancy onward in the context of a parent-child dyad.

To develop and test the iEPIC, an ethnically diverse subsample of 84 mothers and their 2 to 6-year-old children were recruited from a large, northeastern, urban, public university. After consenting, mother-child dyads were recorded for a 4-hour period during the dyad’s evening routine (5-9p.m.), using a two-minutes on, 10 seconds off protocol, resulting in 28 2-minute clips (56 minutes total) per dyad. Recordings were transcribed and reviewed, and then 4 pairs of coders were trained in the iEPIC coding system, and then coded the dyad recordings for behaviors comprising the proposed iEPIC assessment system.

The iEPIC observational assessment system consists of 5 codes for each parent and child: Reflection (R), Exploring Emotion and State (EES), Emotion and State Description (ESD), and Empathic Understanding and Concern (EUC), as well as Neutral verbalizations (N; non-study-related verbalizations). The EES, ESD, and EUC each have levels of complexity, with higher levels expected to occur more frequently in older children (e.g., 4 years and older).

There were several purposes of the current study: 1) assess inter-rater reliability for the iEPIC coding system 2) determine if ...

Ptsd From Childhood Trauma As A Precursor To Attachment Issues, Christy Owen

Fidei et Veritatis: The Liberty University Journal of Graduate Research

The past 20 years have been turbulent regarding Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), with conflicting research about its causes, effects, treatment, and prognosis. The current diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5 fails to adequately address this disorder. A number of deviant and maladaptive behaviors common amongst children with RAD are not even mentioned in the diagnostic criteria. As such, the diagnostic definition is almost unidentifiable or incompatible with real-life conduct manifestations of the disorder. Rather, this author contends that RAD is foundationally a unique and extreme form of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from Early Childhood Trauma. The child endured unspeakable neglect and ...

Ecopsychology Revisited: For Whom Do The “Nature” Bells Toll? (In Progress), Jorge Conesa-Sevilla

Jorge Conesa-Sevilla PhD

"[...] A recurring theme in “ecopsychology,” in its present and inchoate form, is the continuation and extension of “spirit” in juxtaposition with other privileged and/or habitually preferred (perhaps even psychologically needed) practices or causes (spirituality-somethings, farcical chemistry or physics, yoga, coopted and partially understood indigenous lore, extreme diets, and various fetishes). That these mostly emotion-laden, unreasoned, and/or idiosyncratic amalgamations are prevalent says more about the psychological needs of the persons espousing these sentiments or beliefs (their hobbies or interests) than about “nature.” Certainly, it is nothing new that humans project their hopes, desperations, and wish-fulfillment thinking onto the shifting ...

The Bilingual Brain, Victoria A. James

Journal of Counseling and Psychology

This literature review explores the neurocognitive effects of the bilingual brain. Many areas of bilingualism are examined such as age of acquisition, which is when the second language is attained, and memory. The three types of bilingual memory are implicit memory, which is procedural memory, explicit memory, which is declarative memory, and episodic memory, which is autobiographical memory. In relation to the bilingual brain, cognition, control, and /lateralization are also reviewed. Finally, second language (L2) learning strategies are considered. The objective of this study is to obtain an understanding on how two or more languages are acquired and processed in ...

Contextualized Recognition Of Fingerspelled Words, Campbell Mcdermid, Lynn Finton, Alexis Chasney

Journal of Interpretation

Fingerspelling, an aspect of American Sign Language, is difficult for second language English-speaking adults to learn (Bahleda, 1998), yet mastery is required by professional ASL-English interpreters. This study compared novice and expert interpreters’ interpretation of fingerspelled words under the assumption that exposure to priming material in their L1, English, would enable the interpreters to recognize those terms when fingerspelled in their L2, ASL. In this study, participants (15 novices, 15 experts) were asked to interpret an ASL text with 25 “carefully” fingerspelled words embedded. Ten subjects were not given priming materials, ten a list of words in printed English that ...

Category Learning In Older Adulthood: Understanding And Reducing Age-Related Deficits, Rahel R. Rabi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Executive functions are important for learning rule-based (RB) categories, as well as non-rule-based (NRB) categories (e.g., categories learned implicitly, without a verbal rule). However, executive functioning is known to decline with age, leading to age-related deficits in category learning. The current thesis examines RB and NRB category learning in older adults using category sets that vary in difficulty (e.g., rule complexity, number of stimulus dimensions, salience of stimulus dimensions). In Chapter 2, older adults and younger adults completed three category sets (simple single-dimensional RB, disjunctive RB, and NRB). Older adults learned the simple, single-dimensional rules quite well. In ...

Age Differences In The Effects Of Semantic Context On Speech Perception: The Role Of Uncertainty., John Ryan Morton

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent experiments have shown that semantic context effects on spoken word recognition differ between young and older adults (Rogers, Jacoby & Sommers, 2012; Sommers et. al, in prep). These experiments have shown that older adults provide significantly more incorrect responses than young adults when context predicts a phonological competitor that is semantically more likely than the actual target item. Incorrectly responding with the semantically predicted item rather than the true target item, with high confidence, is referred to as false hearing. The general design used in the studies reported for this dissertation is to compare identification of sentence-final items (presented in noise) in ...

Spice: A Software Tool For Studying End-User’S Insecure Cyber Behavior And Personality-Traits, Anjila Tamrakar, Anjila Tamrakar

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Insecure cyber behavior of end users may expose their computers to cyber-attack. A first step to improve their cyber behavior is to identify their tendency toward insecure cyber behavior. Unfortunately, not much work has been done in this area. In particular, the relationship between end users cyber behavior and their personality traits is much less explored. This paper presents a comprehensive review of a newly developed, easily configurable, and flexible software SPICE for psychologist and cognitive scientists to study personality traits and insecure cyber behavior of end users. The software utilizes well-established cognitive methods (such as dot-probe) to identify number ...

Neural Mechanisms Of Action Switching Moderate The Relationship Between Effortful Control And Aggression, Eric L. Rawls, Connie Lamm

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Aggression and violence are social behaviors that exact a significant toll on human societies. Individuals with aggressive tendencies display deficits in effortful control, particularly in affectively charged situations. However, not all individuals with poor effortful control are aggressive. This study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to decompose the chronology of cognitive functions underlying the link between effortful control and aggression. Specifically, this study investigates which ERPs moderate the effortful control - aggression association. We examined three successive ERP components (P2, N2 and P3) for stimuli that required effortful control. Results indicated that N2 activation, but not P2 or P3 activation, moderated the ...

Book Review: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience (1st Ed.). New York, Ny: Harpercollins. 336 Pp. Isbn 978-0-06-133920-2., Diem T.N. Hoang

FIRE: Forum for International Research in Education

BOOK REVIEW: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, NY: HarperCollins. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0-06-133920-2.

Global/Local Processing In Incidental Perception Of Hierarchical Structure, Mark S. Mills

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research: Department of Psychology

The goal of the current thesis is to provide a framework for investigating and understanding visual processing of hierarchical structure (i.e., local parts nested in global wholes, such as trees nested in forests) under incidental processing conditions—that is, where processing of information at global and local levels is both uninformative (cannot aid task performance) and task-irrelevant (need not be processed to perform the task). To do so, a novel method combining two widely-used paradigms (spatial cueing and compound stimulus paradigms) is used for implicitly probing observers’ perceptual representations over the course of processing. This compound arrow cueing paradigm ...

Improving The P300-Based Brain-Computer Interface By Examining The Role Of Psychological Factors On Performance, Samantha A. Sprague

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The effects of neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic-lateral sclerosis (ALS) eventually render those suffering from the illness unable to communicate, leaving their cognitive function relatively unharmed and causing them to be “locked-in” to their own body. With this primary function compromised there has been an increased need for assistive communication methods such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Unlike several augmentative or alternative communication methods (AACs), BCIs do not require any muscular control, which makes this method ideal for people with ALS. The wealth of BCI research focuses mainly on increasing BCI performance through improving stimulus processing and manipulating paradigms. Recent research ...

The On-Screen Water Cooler: Effects Of Televised User-Generated Comments On Cognitive Processing, Social Presence, And Viewing Experience., Jaclyn Ann Cameron

Doctoral Dissertations

Social television combines traditional television viewing and interactions with social media to create a phenomenon that connects otherwise autonomous viewers through a shared viewing experience. This dissertation explores one type of social television: on-screen user-generated comments. Although the practice spans multiple television genres, little is known about its effect on viewers’ cognitive processing of the media, perceptions of the social presence of other viewers, or the viewers’ experience of the media. Two experimental studies explored the effects of on-screen user-generated comments on cognitive processing of the media message, the effect of manipulating the content of on-screen user-generated comments and individual ...

Mechanisms Responsible For The Development Of Causal Perception In Infancy., Nicholas A. Holt

UofL Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The aim of the current dissertation was to investigate the mechanisms that contribute to the emergence of causal perception in infancy. Previous research suggests that the experience of self-produced causal action may be necessary to promote the development of causal perception (Rakison & Krogh, 2012). The goal of the current study was two-fold: (1) to further explore the roles of self-produced action, haptic, proprioceptive and visual information, and parental interaction on young infants’ understanding of causality. To assess the impact of these factors on infants’ causal learning, 4½-month-olds were randomly assigned to one four conditions. Three of the conditions (Active with ...

Learning From Science Lectures : Students Remember More And Make Better Inferences When They Complete Skeletal Outlines Compared To Other Guided Notes., David Bradley Bellinger

UofL Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It is common for students to take notes during lectures, but the accuracy and completeness of these notes is highly questionable. Therefore, instructors must make an important decision – should they provide their students with lecture notes? If so, how complete should the notes be and in what format? The present experiments examined how note format and degree of support impacted the encoding benefit of note-taking. In Experiment 1, undergraduate students listened to brief audio-recorded science lectures (Human blood, N = 42; Human ear, N = 36) and completed skeletal outlines (requiring students to conceptually organize the information using the structure indicated by ...

Putting Spearman's Hypothesis To Work: Job Iq As A Predictor Of Employee Racial Composition, Bryan J. Pesta, Peter Poznanski

Business Faculty Publications

Job complexity and employee intelligence covary strongly. Likewise, race differences exist on mean IQ / g scores. Spearman’s hypothesis predicts that race differences on cognitive tests are mainly g differences, and that the former should covary with how well mental tests measure the latter. Here we use jobs as “mental tests,” and predict that as job IQ increases, the percent of White and Asian workers will increase, while the percent of Black workers will decrease. We found moderate to strong support for Spearman’s hypothesis across these three racial groups. We also found a very large correlation (.86) between job ...

Does Sleep Enhance The Consolidation Of Implicitly Learned Visuo-Motor Sequence Learning?, Jeremy Viczko

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Sleep has been shown to facilitate the consolidation (i.e., enhancement) of simple explicit (i.e., conscious) motor sequence learning (MSL). It remains unclear the degree to which this applies to implicit (i.e., unconscious) MSL. Employing reaction time and response generation tasks, we investigated the extent to which sleep is involved in consolidating implicit MSL, specifically whether the motor or the spatial cognitive representations of a learned sequence are enhanced by sleep, and whether these changes support the development of explicit sequence knowledge across sleep but not wake. Our results indicate that spatial and motor representations can be behaviourally ...

A Model For Attention-Driven Judgements In Type Theory With Records, Simon Dobnik, John Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper makes three contributions to the discussion on the applicability of Type Theory with Records (TTR) to embodied dialogue agents. First, it highlights the problem of type assignment or judgements in practical implementations which is resource intensive. Second, it presents a judgement control mechanism, which consists of grouping of types into clusters or states by their thematic relations and selection of types following two mechanisms inspired by the Load Theory of selective attention and cognitive control (Lavie et al., 2004), that addresses this problem. Third, it presents a computational framework, based on Bayesian inference, that offers a basis for ...

Dancing In The Dark: Sleep-Dependent Motor Skill Memory Consolidation And Periodic Limb Movement Disorder, Valya Sergeeva

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Periodic Limb Movement Disorder (PLMD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by dysfunction of the striatum and brief, repetitive limb movements during sleep. PLMD can severely disrupt non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Motor skills learning and memory consolidation are dependent on striatal activation, the latter enhanced by NREM sleep. Therefore, we investigated whether individuals with PLMD had learning and sleep-related memory deficits, and whether this putative deficit was related to sleep quality or symptom severity. 14 adults with a PLM index >15/hr underwent two nights (baseline, training) of polysomnographic recording. 15 age-matched healthy controls underwent three nights (baseline, undisturbed training ...