Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Validation Of A Virtual Auditory Space, And Its Use To Investigate How Pitch And Spatial Cues Contribute To Perceptual Segregation Of Auditory Streams, Nima Zargarnezhad

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The human auditory system can decompose complex sound mixtures into distinct perceptual auditory objects through a process (or processes) known as Auditory Scene Analysis. Pitch and spatial cues are among the sound attributes known to influence sequential streaming (Plack 2018). In this project, the fidelity of a virtual acoustic space (the Audio Dome) in reproducing precisely located sound sources with a 9^th-order ambisonics algorithm was validated. The estimated horizontal Minimum Audible Angles aligned with previously reported values (Mills 1958) homogeneously across the space, and a robust low-frequency presentation was identified. Then, the Audio Dome was utilized to test …

Spontaneous Intrapersonal Synchrony And The Effect Of Cognitive Load, Ramkumar Jagadeesan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Spontaneous intrapersonal synchronization is the spontaneous synchronization of periodic behaviors within an individual. It is less investigated than spontaneous interpersonal synchronization, the synchronization of periodic behaviors that occurs spontaneously between individuals integrated into a single system through coupling, caused by the exchange of sensory feedback between them. It was therefore hypothesized that periodic behaviors produced by an individual, a single system by default, would spontaneously be more synchronous through exchange of sensory feedback, coupling and integration within the individual, when the behaviors are produced simultaneously, compared to separately. Based on a postulate that explains spontaneous interpersonal synchronization as a strategy …

Examining Age-Related Enhancement Of Multisensory Gain: The Role Of Sensory Decline And Inverse Effectiveness, Laura C. Schneeberger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Older adults experience a greater benefit from multisensory integration than their younger counterparts, but it is unclear why. One hypothesis is that age-related sensory decline weakens unisensory stimulus effectiveness, producing a boost in multisensory gain through inverse effectiveness. Many previous studies present stimuli at the same intensity for both younger and older adults (i.e., stimulus-matched), as opposed to accounting for each participant’s unique perceptual ability (i.e., perception-matched). This makes it difficult to discern the source of age-related differences in multisensory gain. Through a combination of stimulus-matched and perception-matched tasks, I found that older adults exhibit enhanced multisensory gain at low …

Investigating The Roles Of The Dorsal And Ventral Striatum In Humor Comprehension And Appreciation Throughout Health, Aging, And Parkinson’S Disease, Maggie Prenger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Humor processing is thought to involve two distinct components. The first, humor comprehension, involves detecting and resolving incongruities that are present within a humorous stimulus. This is related to cognitive processes such as ambiguity resolution, response inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, functions that are mediated in part by the dorsal portion of the striatum (DS). Humor appreciation, on the other hand, refers to the subjective amusement and mirth that one experiences in response to a joke. This is related to reward processing, which implicates the ventral portion of the striatum (VS). Across three separate studies, we investigated the involvement …

Working Memory During The Menstrual Cycle: A Study Of The Role Of The Different Phases Of The Menstrual Cycle On Working Memory, Daniella Brownrigg

Brescia Psychology Undergraduate Honours Theses

This study investigated the role of the menstrual cycle phases (Follicular, Luteal and Menstruation) on working memory components (verbal and visuospatial). Eighty-eight undergraduate students attending Brescia University college completed a survey regarding: demographics, menstrual cycle information and working memory cognitive tasks. The cognitive tasks were the Corsi Block Tapping Test and a shorter version of the Hooper Visual Organization test for visuospatial working memory; and the Forward Digit Span Test and the Semantic Verbal Fluency Subset: Animals from the Barcelona Test for verbal working memory. Participants were categorized into the different menstrual phases they were experiencing. No significant differences were …

The Two Visual Processing Streams Through The Lens Of Deep Neural Networks, Aidasadat Mirebrahimi Tafreshi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent advances in computer vision have enabled machines to have high performance in labeling objects in natural scenes. However, object labeling constitutes only a small fraction of daily human activities. To move towards building machines that can function in natural environments, the usefulness of these models should be evaluated on a broad range of tasks beyond perception. Moving towards this goal, this thesis evaluates the internal representations of state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks in predicting a perception-based and an action-based behavior: object similarity judgment and visually guided grasping. To do so, a dataset of everyday objects was collected and used …

Perceptual Benefits From Long-Term Exposure To Naturalistic Sound Patterns, Bruno A. Mesquita

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Our brains are proficient in learning recurring structures in the environment, in order to optimize perceptual inferences based on relevant information in a stochastic input. Sensory information is multi-dimensional, and the relationship between sound dimensions may be, in itself, a source of information. Many sounds in our environment covary dynamically, and these covariances may be learned, and therefore shape our perception, through exposure to them in our natural environment. In the present study we investigate how natural (long term), and experimental (short term), learning of statistical regularities in sounds may shape our ability to categorize them (Experiment 1) and to …

Individual Differences In Categorization, Urooj Anees

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The appearance of individual differences used to be regarded as noise in psychological experiments, but is slowly becoming a tool used to enhance and solidify findings in various fields of cognitive psychology. This presentation aims to very briefly discuss individual differences and categorization and what questions future research could aim to answer.

Listening Effort: Separating The Subjective From The Objective, Joseph E. Rovetti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Challenges such as background noise may increase “listening effort.” This construct has been operationalized as the recruitment of cognitive resources during listening (objective effort) or as the self-reported feeling of effort (subjective effort). In the current study, I compared these two dimensions of listening effort directly. Normal-hearing adults listened to highly intelligible passages across several signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), with reaction time on a secondary task (objective effort) and effort ratings (subjective effort) measured in separate blocks. As the SNR became less favourable, subjective effort appeared to increase continuously, while objective effort only began to increase at a much less favourable …

Changes In Audiovisual Integration In Aging, Alyssa S. Lynn

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The proposed study will examine changes in audiovisual integration between younger and older adults. Audiovisual integration enables us to associate and bind related auditory and visual information and experience it as a single percept (Spence, 2007). Being able to properly integrate is crucial in our everyday lives. When perceiving speech, audiovisual integration binds visual information from lip movements with auditory information from the speaker's utterances so that speech can be perceived multimodally. With age, our auditory and visual sensory acuity tends to decline with audiovisual integration being impacted as a result (Brooks et al., 2018; Mahoney et al., 2011). We …

Category Learning - Studies In Mood Induction And Neural Representations Across Modalities, Raha Afkhami Nemati

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

In this powerpoint presentation, I discuss the two projects I worked on this summer: study focusing on how mood induction impacts categorization and a systematic review on stimulus categories across modalities. Throughout the presentation, I show the work I have done this past year, this summer and what I plan to continue with over the year. I discuss the papers, applications and criteria used throughout.

The Ommaba Project, Katsiaryna Buchko

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The Open Multimodal Music and Auditory Brain Archive (OMMABA) is the first multimodal (behavioural, EEG, and neuroimaging) database characterizing normal human auditory processing. My project aims to shed light on the importance of this collaborative project that is transforming the field of auditory cognitive neuroscience.

Motor Learning By Observing The Movements Of A Computer-Animated, Human-Like Actor And A Non-Limb Observational Video, Mudia Iyayi

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Our project is looking at the phenomenon of observational motor learning using a two-joint robotic manipulandum (robotic arm). When someone learns a new motor skill (i.e. throwing a football to a wide receiver) the brain must make and map an internal model of the forces required for that movement. The plasticity of the brain in constructing these representations is termed “motor learning” and can occur through physical practice or—for the purposes of our investigation—observation. Previous studies have used videos of human actors learning new skills to drive motor learning in the observer, however, it is not known what components of …

Auditory Sensory Filtering And Development In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Hiruthika Ravi, Ala Seif, Ryan A. Stevenson

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Sensory filtering is the process of separating and distilling relevant sensory information from irrelevant, which in turn greatly reduces the quantity of sensory information that is fully processed and leads to significant increases in efficiency. Atypical sensory filtering can result in sensory hypo- or hypersensitivity — atypical sensory filtering and hypo/hypersensitivity have been observed in people with autism. Atypical sensory filtering contributes to canonical symptoms in Autism.

Sensory filtering can be measured in a few different ways, one of which is the Acoustic Startle Response (ASR). ASR is a reflexively produced muscular reaction to sudden auditory stimuli.

Our study aims …

Culture And Classification: Investigating Analytic Vs. Holistic Thinking Styles, Neha Khemani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This paper sought to explore cultural preferences for analytic and holistic thinking in classification. Experiment 1 paired the Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (SHJ) tasks with the Analysis-Holism scale (AHS) and a demographics questionnaire. Effects of culture on learning rates, alongside the feasibility of online data collection, were assessed. Learning difficulty differences among the six SHJ category sets were observed. Further, as predicted, higher holistic thinking correlated positively with the family resemblance task. Experiment 2 replicated the Norenzayan et al. (2002) task. Unlike in the original study, the effect of instructional condition was not significant across our full sample. Nevertheless, the …

Temperament And Individual Differences In Category Learning, Tianshu Zhu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Objectives. Individuals can differ in their strategic approach in learning the same categorization task, researchers have sought to study what specific stable individual differences traits can help explain these differences. This dissertation first surveyed extant literature on the impact of trait differences on category learning then examined the effect of temperament traits on these dependent variables. Chapter 2 (scoping review): This scoping review synthesized the past literature that examined the relationship between sources of stable individual differences and category learning performance and strategy use outcomes. Five database platforms were searched to identify relevant articles, cross-referencing was also performed. Sixty-nine studies …

Seeing Thro The Musical Eye: Santo Daime, Fuke-Shū, 1960s Psychedelia, And The Antipodes Of Musical Experience, Forest Anthony-Muran

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates the relationships between altered states of consciousness and the musical experience in religious tradition and practice. A common accompaniment to religious worship and ceremony, music is often used as a way of attempting to capture something of the ineffable and to help bring about a mystical experience. In this thesis, I make use of three contrasting case studies – the Brazilian syncretic religion Santo Daime, the historical branch of Zen Buddhism Fuke-shū, and the psychedelic rock of 1960s counterculture – to paint a portrait of the variety of ways that music has been used in different musical …

Optimizing Music Learning: The Effects Of Contextual Interference On Memorization, Carmen Andrea Wong

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to assess if blocked or interleaved practice learning was more effective for memorizing music, and to assess if metacognitive judgements aligned with performance. The study included 21 proficient pianists who regularly engage in piano practice. Participants learnt two excerpts and two technical studies, and played them from memory on both day 1 and day 2 of testing. Performances were recorded and rated by an expert in the field on a percentage scale. A two-way repeated measures ANOVA analysis revealed no significant main effect of day on practice schedule, (F(1,20) = .15, p = 0.70, …

Movies On The Mind: Using Naturalistic Stimuli To Assess Perception, Cognition, And Awareness In Patients With Disorders Of Consciousness, Geoffrey Laforge

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Standardized behavioural assessments of awareness remain the gold standard for patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) and inform diagnosis, prognosis, and medical decision-making. However, recent neuroimaging research has identified a small but significant number of DOC patients who retain perceptual and cognitive abilities not evidenced by their behaviour. Therefore, it is imperative to develop assessment techniques to identify and characterize the conscious experiences of patients with DOC. This thesis presents a novel movie-based electroencephalographic (EEG) assessment of perceptual and cognitive function in DOC patients. In Chapter 2, we calculated EEG inter-subject correlations (ISCs) in healthy controls and DOC patients to …

The Role Of Top-Down Attention In Statistical Learning Of Speech, Stacey Reyes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Statistical learning (SL) refers to the ability to extract regularities in the environment and has been well-documented to play a key role in speech segmentation and language acquisition. Whether SL is automatic or requires top-down attention is an unresolved question, with conflicting results in the literature. The current proposal tests whether SL can occur outside the focus of attention. Participants either focused towards, or diverted their attention away from an auditory speech stream made of repeating nonsense trisyllabic words. Divided-attention participants either performed a concurrent visual task or a language-related task during exposure to the nonsense speech stream, while control …

A Sense Of Proportion: How Humans Process Relative Magnitudes In Space And Time, Rebekka Lagace-Cusiac

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Humans perceive ratios for different spatial magnitudes such as length, area, and numerosity, and temporal magnitudes such as duration. Previous studies have shown that spatial ratios may be processed by a common ratio processing system. The aim of the current study was to determine whether ratios across spatial and temporal domains may also be processed by a common system. Two hundred and seventy-five participants completed a series of spatial and temporal ratio estimation and magnitude discrimination tasks. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the relationship between ratio processing across domains when controlling for absolute magnitude processing ability. Results …

Does Culture Affect The Ability To Learn And Use Categories?, Maya Ghai, Zarah Ghulamhussain

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The rapid advancement of cross-cultural research in recent decades has raised questions on the extent to which findings in cognitive psychology can be generalized to a global population. The majority of subjects in scientific literature, being WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations, only represent a sliver of the world’s diverse demographics, limiting our scope of psychological data to a highly specific subgroup. Emerging research has made us increasingly aware of the variances in cognition across cultures, including the learning and utilization of categories. Many lab-based categorization tasks have demonstrated that cognitive processes may be contingent on cultural factors. …

Neural Representation Of Stimulus Category Membership Across Modalities, Carson Rumble-Tricker

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Category learning is a process through which common features among category members, distinctive features among non-members, or even both, are identified (Hammer et al., 2009). This process is a critical aspect of cognition and can guide decision making and information inference. Furthermore, category learning is involved among a large number of stimuli, including visual (Folstein et al., 2013), auditory (Ley et al., 2012), olfactory (Qu et al., 2016), and multisensory (Viganòa, Borghesani, & Piazza, 2021) stimuli.

The aim of this systematic review is to determine and qualitatively analyze studies that investigate the changes in the neural representations of stimuli that …

Audiovisual Integration In Cochlear Implant Users And Typical Hearing Controls: A Study Of Group Differences In Syllable Perception And Effect Of Asynchrony On Speech Intelligibility, Cailey A. Salagovic

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study examined audiovisual integration in cochlear implant (CI) users compared to typical (acoustic) hearing control participants and investigated the effect of audiovisual temporal asynchrony on speech intelligibility across these groups. Additionally, this study evaluated the utility of online data collection for audiovisual perception research. In Experiment 1, CI users were found to integrate audiovisual syllables comparably to controls as demonstrated by perception of the McGurk illusion. However, group differences were revealed in the processing of the unisensory components and underlying distributions of responses to incongruent audiovisual trials when the illusory fusion syllable was not reported. In Experiment 2, intelligibility …

Likelihood And Familiarity In The Simulation Of Future Events, Claudia Morales Valiente

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Episodic future thinking is the ability to project the self forward in time to pre-experience an event (Atance & O’Neill, 2001). Understanding how people think about potential future events is an important component of human memory research. We investigated whether and how episodic future thinking is influenced by a person's belief of the likelihood of its future occurrence in their lives, as well as a person's familiarity with that type of event based on their past experience. The combined and individual effects of these variables have been minimally studied, particularly likelihood. We used three norming studies to develop participant-specific sets …

Visual Perception In Hearing Sign Language Users, Jessica M. Lammert

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Deaf signers exhibit superior visual perception compared to hearing controls in several domains, including the perception of faces and peripheral motion. These visual enhancements are thought to compensate for an absence of auditory input. However, it is also possible that they reflect experience using a visual-manual language, where signers must process complex moving hand signs and facial cues simultaneously. Thus, the current study sought to isolate the effects of sign language experience by examining how visual perception is altered as a function of American Sign Language (ASL) proficiency in hearing individuals. Hearing signers completed an online test of ASL proficiency …

Using Cognitive Dissonance To Encourage Covid-Preventive Behaviours, Xuanqiao Wang

Brescia Psychology Undergraduate Honours Theses

This study investigated whether a hypocrisy-based intervention would increase students’ intentions to engage in COVID-preventive behaviours. We hypothesized that participants in the hypocrisy-induction condition (experimental condition) would express higher levels of intention to engage in COVID-preventative behaviours than participants in whom hypocrisy has not been induced (control condition). The sample consisted of 2 male and 64 female undergraduate students at Brescia University College. An independent t-test was conducted on the intention rating scores of practicing COVID-preventative behaviours for the experimental and control conditions. It was found that there was no significant difference in the average intention rating score between the …

Rapid Facial Reactions Of Emotional Expressions As A Function Of Trait Sadism, Cathleen Fleury

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Using electromyography (EMG), it has been shown that facial muscles imperceptibly mirror the facial expressions of others, a phenomenon referred to as rapid facial reactions (RFRs). It was previously believed to follow the direct-matching hypothesis, however several recent studies have demonstrated that context and individual differences may be influencing factors on RFRs. At the present, it is unclear to what extent RFRs can be modulated. In the present study, we propose to determine the effects of facial stimuli versus non-facial stimuli on RFRs through measuring the EMG response of participants with trait sadism. The participants observed dynamic facial expressions as …

The Relationship Between Schizotypal Traits And The Perceptual Processes Of Multisensory Integration, Temporal Processing, And Speech Perception, Anne-Marie Muller

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Multisensory integration, the binding of sensory information from different sensory modalities, may contribute to perceptual symptomatology in schizophrenia, including hallucilllnations and aberrant speech perception. Differences in multisensory integration and temporal processing, an important component of multisensory integration, are consistently found in schizophrenia. Evidence is emerging that these differences extend across the schizophrenia spectrum, including individuals in the general population with higher schizotypal traits. In two studies, the relationship between schizotypal traits and perceptual functioning is investigated. We hypothesized associations between higher schizotypal traits and decreased multisensory integration, increased auditory speech distractibility, and less precise temporal processing. In Study 1, higher …

Individual Differences In Cognitive Flexibility And Cognitive Map Accuracy, Vanessa C. Cunha

Brescia Psychology Undergraduate Honours Theses

Research has demonstrated broad individual differences in the ability to form a cognitive map of a novel environment. The current study investigated whether individual differences in cognitive map accuracy are driven by differences in cognitive flexibility specifically, the ability to switch between tasks. Using the Silcton virtual environment, participants explored four routes in Silcton and were assessed on cognitive map accuracy using the Silcton onsite pointing task and the Silcton model building task. To assess task-switching, perseveration error from the Wisconsin Card Sort Test (WCST) was measured. There was a significant correlation between the WCST and the onsite pointing task, …