Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Detecting Structure In Glass Patterns: An Interocular Transfer Study, Dawn Vreven, Jarrod Berge

Dawn L Vreven

Glass patterns are visual stimuli used here to study how local orientation signals are spatially integrated into global pattern perception. We measured a form aftereffect from adaptation to both static and dynamic Glass patterns and calculated the amount of interocular transfer to determine the binocularity of the detectors responsible for the perception of global structure. Both static and dynamic adaptation produced significant form aftereffects and showed a very high degree of interocular transfer, suggesting that Glass-pattern perception involves cortical processing beyond primary visual cortex. Surprisingly, dynamic adaptation produced significantly greater interocular transfer than static adaptation. Our results suggest a functional …

The Absence Of Depth Constancy In Contour Stereograms, Dawn Vreven, Leslie Welch

Dawn L Vreven

Stereoscopic surfaces constructed from Kanizsa-type illusory contours or explicit luminance contours were tested for three-dimensional (3-D) shape constancy. The curvature of the contours and the apparent viewing distance between the surface and the observer were manipulated. Observers judged which of two surfaces appeared more curved. Experiment 1 allowed eye movements and revealed a bias in 3-D shape judgment with changes in apparent viewing distance, such that surfaces presented far from the observer appeared less curved than surfaces presented close to the observer. The lack of depth constancy was approximately the same for illusory-contour surfaces and for explicit-contour surfaces. Experiment 2 …

Age Differences In Reward Anticipation And Memory, Kristen L. Cushman

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Aging research on item- and associative-recognition memory has demonstrated that older adults are deficient in forming associations between two unrelated stimuli. Although older adult performance on tests of item-recognition is similar to younger adult performance, older adults perform worse than younger adults on tests of associative memory (Naveh-Benjamin, Hussain, Guez, & Bar-On, 2003). In addition to the idea that younger adult performance on associative-recognition tests is superior to that of older adults, research has shown that reward cues can enhance motivated learning and item memory performance of younger adults. In an fMRI study that examined the influence of reward anticipation …

Positive And Neutral Mood Inductions: Ties To Creativity, Kaylan Stephanie Wilson

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Positive mood may broaden cognition, allowing for an increase in creativity. This study tested whether creativity could be increased when positive mood and creativity were induced through verbal instructions that direct ed participants to revisit memories that depicted positive mood and/or creative moments. This experiment had a 2(mood induction positive/neutral) X 2(creativity induction yes/no) design, and 112 participants in four condi tions: 22 in the first, 33 in the second, 25 in the third, and 32 in the fourth. Mood and creativity inductions were autobiographical, as this method is the most effective technique for inducing mood. Scales used were the …

Are All Older Adult Transgressors Treated Equally?, Heather Marie Dahlgren

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Research has shown that young adults treat older adults with less blame and more forgiveness when they commit a social transgression. This study sought to understand whether the stereotype of an assumed positive personality and/or a supposed lack of cognitive ability are potential driving forces behind the greater leniency that young adults display toward older transgressors. Seventy-five young adult participants were randomly assigned to one of five experimental conditions. Participants’ aging stereotypes were primed with one of four paragraphs that depicted older adults as (a) socially warm and cognitively competent, (b) socially cold but cognitively competent, (c) socially warm but …

Manager-In-Chief: Applying Public Management Theory To Examine White House Chief Of Staff Performance, David B. Cohen, Justin S. Vaughn, José D. Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

In an effort to examine the causal determinants of performance dynamics for the administrative presidency, we apply empirical public management theory to White House administration to explain managerial performance. Utilizing original survey data that measures the perceptions of former officials from the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations, we conduct quantitative analyses to determine the extent to which a chief of staff’s background, relationship with the president, and internal as well as external management approaches shape overall perceptions of White House administrative efforts. We find that managerial dimensions matter considerably when explaining the dynamics of White House organizational performance.

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

Joseph W. Houpt

No abstract provided.

Individual Differences In The Discrimination Of Novel Speech Sounds: Effects Of Sex, Temporal Processing, Musical And Cognitive Abilities, Vera Kempe, John C. Thoresen, Neil W. Kirk, Felix Schaeffler, Patricia J. Brooks

Publications and Research

This study examined whether rapid temporal auditory processing, verbal working memory capacity, non-verbal intelligence, executive functioning, musical ability and prior foreign language experience predicted how well native English speakers (N = 120) discriminated Norwegian tonal and vowel contrasts as well as a non-speech analogue of the tonal contrast and a native vowel contrast presented over noise. Results confirmed a male advantage for temporal and tonal processing, and also revealed that temporal processing was associated with both non-verbal intelligence and speech processing. In contrast, effects of musical ability on non-native speech-sound processing and of inhibitory control on vowel discrimination were not …

Teleological Reasoning In Adults: Believing In The Purpose Of Events, Carrie Jeanette Guggenmos

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Teleological reasoning reflects the general tendency to view objects, behaviors and events in terms of their “purpose.” Although healthy educated adults tend to refrain from committing errors in teleological reasoning about objects, our knowledge regarding how adults reason about events is limited. It has been suggested that teleological reasoning biases our interpretations of emotionally significant and unexpected life events of which a physical or social cause is absent or unsatisfactory. The current investigation seeks to better understand the types of events that evoke a teleological perspective and the conditions and individual difference factors that facilitate it. The results revealed that …

Sitting With Oprah, Dancing With Ellen: Presidents, Daytime Television, And Soft News, José D. Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

On July 29, 2010, President Barack Obama took to the air on "The View" to talk politics, policy, and family. Pundits billed the visit as the first time a sitting U.S. president appeared in a daytime television program. The telecast drew about 6.7 million viewers, the highest rating ever for the show, and garnered the largest number of women viewers in 17 months. However, whether and to what extent Obama succeeded in getting his message out and endearing himself to female voters remains an open question that merits further scholarly inquiry. In this chapter, I put Obama’s visit to "The …

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 …

Asymmetry In Resting Alpha Activity: Effects Of Handedness, Ruth E. Propper, Jenna Pierce, Mark W. Geisler, Stephen D. Christman, Nathan Bellorado

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha band power during rest shows increased right, and/or decreased left, hemisphere activity under conditions of state or trait withdrawal-associated effect. Non-right-handers (NRH) are more likely to have mental illnesses and dispositions that involve such withdrawal-related effect. The aim of the study was to examine whether NRH might be characterized by increased right, relative to left, hemisphere activity during rest. Methods: The present research investigated that hypothesis by examining resting EEG alpha power in consistently-right-handed (CRH) and NRH individuals. Results: In support of the hypothesis, NRH demonstrated decreased right hemisphere alpha power, and therefore increased right hemisphere …

A Theoretical Framework For Serious Game Design: Exploring Pedagogy, Play And Fidelity And Their Implications For The Design Process, Pauline Rooney

Articles

It is widely acknowledged that digital games can provide an engaging, motivating and “fun” experience for students. However an entertaining game does not necessarily constitute a meaningful, valuable learning experience. For this reason, experts espouse the importance of underpinning serious games with a sound theoretical framework which integrates and balances theories from two fields of practice: pedagogy and game design (Kiili, 2005; Seeney & Routledge, 2009). Additionally, with the advent of sophisticated, immersive technologies, and increasing interest in the opportunities for constructivist learning offered by these technologies, concepts of fidelity and its impact on student learning and engagement, have emerged …

The Reminiscence Effect In Autobiographical Memory And Tests Of Its Prominent Accounts, Justin T. Coleman

Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The reminiscence effect, in which people aged 40 and over remember more autobiographical memories from between ages 10 to 30 than from adjacent periods, producing a “bump” in lifespan distributions, is a highly robust effect. When it was discovered to occur for highly positive emotional memories, but not negative ones, the cultural life script account of reminiscence was proposed. The cultural life script account asserts that individuals possess scripts for important events in the normative life that structure autobiographical recall. The reminiscence effect is explained by the fact that in life scripts, positive events have highly prescribed timings and cluster …

Are Conscious Perception And Action Guidance Dissociable In Whole-Body Movement?, Laura J. Elias, Jessica Lin Willesch

Undergraduate Research Posters 2012

Conscious recognition of an object (“what”) and guidance of action toward it (“how”) have been identified as two dissociable processes of perception in visual, auditory, and somatosensory systems. The current study investigated whether the two dissociable processes of perception can also be observed in whole-body movements that encompass not only somatosensory (proprioceptive) inputs but also vestibular inputs.

Characteristics Indicative Of The Likelihood Of Leaving Open-Ended Comments On An Organizational Survey, Astrid Jennifer Hernandez, Michael Horvath

Undergraduate Research Posters 2012

It has been suggested that individuals who take surveys solely answer questions to obtain the incentive offered. However, people who answer surveys also tend to do so because they want to give their genuine feedback. Ultimately, the results of Chi-Square and Logistic Regression did not support the hypotheses.

The Effects Of Path Crossover On Spatial Orientation, Jayleen A. Meléndez, Naohide Yamamoto

Undergraduate Research Posters 2012

Prior research has discovered that when an individual’s path has a crossover, there seems to be a significant deterioration in the individual’s spatial orientation.

The Policy Czar Debate, Justin S. Vaughn, José D. Villalobos

José D. Villalobos

Presidential policy czars have been an important and powerful component of President Barack Obama’s approach to management and leadership in the first part of his time in office. By using czars, the President has been able to demonstrate the importance of policy issues, both to his own agenda and to the broader political system. In this chapter, we find that performance outcomes for these czars have been a mixed bag, with as many stories of success to report as tales of frustration and failure. As such, we posit that the cost of czars, in political and organizational terms, has outweighed …

Beyond Dogma: The Role Of "Evolutionary" Science And The "Embodiment" Of Archetypal Energies, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

At individual and collective levels (locally, nationally, and globally), humanity is currently entertaining many challenges and opportunities for growth. In my view, these challenges and opportunities are connected to Energy shifts that are taking place on the planet, and the inability of some to move beyond dogma in relating to these Energy shifts. By its pre- and proscriptive nature, dogma fosters limiting beliefs that often interfere with how best to relate to these Energy shifts as vibrational beings in an evolving, vibrational world. Here, I want to briefly identify some of the limiting effects of dogma, and the role of …

Reconciling Greed And Altruism In The Open Source Community, Aaron Jay Dunn

MALS Final Projects, 1995-2019

Adam Smith observed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that people pursue wealth not to "to supply the necessities of nature" but in order to procure "superfluities" that satisfy a basic psychological need to be thought of well by others (Smith, 62). "It is not wealth that men desire, but the consideration and good opinion that wait upon riches".

We know that there is some truth to this statement, as even a cursory glance at metrics representing standards of living show them increasing 1 or 2% each year since they were first measured (in terms of GDP per capita, Tables …

Ambivalence And The Decision Tree, Kirby Farrell

kirby farrell

We are insolubly ambivalent creatures. Traditionally cultures have managed ambivalence by focusing on character and morality in motives. Freudian psychology recognized that cognitive conflict is insoluble and stressed equilibrium and grace in adaptation. Today technology's binary structure is complicating and sometimes superseding the traditional trope of character by organizing cognition around the trope of the decision tree.

Effect Of Menstrual Cycle Related Estrogen Fluctuations On Working Memory, Mia Segal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Working memory (WM) is a dynamic brain system which allows for the on-line moment-to-moment maintenance, processing and monitoring of information involved in human cognition. Behavioural and neuroimaging studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an essential role in WM. Data suggest the PFC may be susceptible to modulation by estrogen. Behavioural studies examining whether PFC-dependent WM tasks exhibit estrogen sensitivity in postmenopausal women have shown a benefit of estrogen. The present study used hormone changes associated with the menstrual cycle to examine whether estrogen has a beneficial effect on WM function in reproductively aged women. Thirty-six women completed …

Motivational Inequality: Prevention Goals Induce More Effort Than Promotion Goals, Jennifer Marie Pattershall-Geide

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Regulatory focus theory describes two motivational strategies--promotion and prevention focus--that may be employed during goal directed action. Although a theory of motivation, there is no research examining differences in effort between promotion and prevention focus. Two studies are presented which test the hypothesis that goals pursued with a prevention focus, with its emphasis on duties, responsibilities, and avoidance of negative outcomes, will induce more effort than goals pursued with a promotion focus, which emphasizes hopes, ideals, and achieving positive outcomes. In addition, several potential mediators and moderators of this effect were examined. In Study 1, students who completed an essay …

Perform + Function: A Proposal For A Healthy Public Housing Community, Brandon M. Harvey

Masters Theses

PERFORM+FUNCTION: Proposal for A Healthy Public Housing Community

Architecture exists in Place, the integrated context of both the built and natural environments, including socio-economic, cultural, and political climates that influence our growth, development, and survival. As architecture necessitates around human purposes, it is important that architecture is built for and sited in an environment compatible for human well-being. My thesis focuses on human habitation and its immediate relationship with human health, assessing the performance and functionality of Place that have an impact on human health. Using public housing as the vehicle of my investigation, I will seek the appropriate application …

Varying Degrees Of Difficulty In Melodic Dictation Examples According To Intervallic Content, Michael Hines Robinson

Masters Theses

Melodic dictation has long been a daunting task for students in aural skills training. Research has found that interval identification is a factor when taking melodic dictation. Research has also found that some intervals are easier to identify than other intervals. The goal of this thesis is to determine whether the difficulty of melodic dictation examples can be categorized by their intervallic content. A popular aural skills text was used as the source for the melodic dictation examples. The adjacent intervals in each melodic dictation example were counted and recorded by interval type. The analysis of the melodic dictation examples …

Affect Identification And Interpersonal Skills: An In-Depth Evaluation Of Social Cognition In Schizophrenia, Griffin Pollock Sutton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The presence of deficits in various sub-domains of social cognition has been investigated to a degree in individuals with schizophrenia. Some of the most commonly researched and documented deficits have included impairments in the identification of affect portrayed in faces. Research has indicated that the performance of individuals with schizophrenia on such tasks is generally impaired as compared to normal controls. However, some have questioned the generalizability of such findings to real-world situations, as day-to-day interactions generally necessitate a constant, fluid assessment of the thoughts and feelings of others and are rarely, if ever, limited to still images of others. …

Frequency-Specificity And Pattern-Specificity Of The Buildup Of Auditory Stream Segregation, David Michael Weintraub

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

During repeating sequences of low (A) and high (B) tones in an "...ABAB..." pattern, the likelihood of hearing two separate streams ("streaming") increases with more repetitions of the patterns, a phenomenon referred to as "buildup". Previous studies have shown that buildup is frequency specific (Anstis & Saida, 1985) and that its biasing effects decays over several seconds (Beauvois & Meddis, 1997). No study has examined whether the frequency specificity of buildup persists for such a long duration. To address these issues, Experiment 1 tested the decay of frequency-specific and non-frequency specific buildup. The results revealed that (1) frequency-specific buildup effects …

Rule-Based Category Learning In Children: The Role Of Inhibitory Control, Rahel R. Rabi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present study examined category learning in relation to inhibitory control and working memory in children and adults. Results revealed that categorization performance improved with age. Young children struggled with rule learning, many older children were successful at rule learning, and most adults had no difficulty with the task. Model-based analyses suggested that performance differences were due to young children’s inability to inhibit the salient, but irrelevant rule. Interestingly, when the analyses focused only on older children and adults who used the task appropriate strategy, the age-related rule-based deficit disappeared. Also, results revealed that successful performance on the categorization task …

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 …