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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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

Psychology

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Western University

2017

Attention

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

A Simulated Walk In Nature: Testing Predictions From The Attention Restoration Theory, Corey Crossan Oct 2017

A Simulated Walk In Nature: Testing Predictions From The Attention Restoration Theory, Corey Crossan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Attention Restoration Theory (ART) predicts that top-down processing during everyday activities can cause attentional fatigue and that bottom-up processing that occurs when people experience nature will be restorative (Kaplan, 1995). The present study examined this prediction by exposing participants to three different conditions using a repeated measures design: a control condition during which participants walked on a typical treadmill, a nature/restorative condition during which participants walked on the same treadmill, experiencing a simulated nature walk, and a perturbation condition that included the same simulated nature scene but also required top-down processing during the walk. The findings supported ART predictions. As …


Social Media And Cognition, Ana C. Ruiz Pardo Aug 2017

Social Media And Cognition, Ana C. Ruiz Pardo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Social media is an inescapable platform for sharing media and connecting with others. This thesis investigated how social media impacts cognition; specifically, attention. Study 1 investigated typical social media usage patterns and helped gauge which SM platform was most popular. Study 1 revealed three main platforms people used most often: Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Facebook was reported as the most popular social media platform. Study 2 investigated how a social media post impacts cognition. It was hypothesized that participants who posted, with the intention of provoking a reaction from their followers, on their social media prior to performing a cognitive …


The Effects Of Alcohol On Visual Attention, Amber M. Robinson Jul 2017

The Effects Of Alcohol On Visual Attention, Amber M. Robinson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Alcohol has been shown to have a variety of effects on cognitive performance in humans; the present study tested the effects of alcohol on visual selective attention using three different paradigms. The effects of alcohol intoxication over a broad range of blood alcohol concentrations (average between 0.01 and 0.08) were evaluated for change blindness, inattentional blindness, and multiple object tracking. Alcohol was found to impair inattentional blindness performance, negatively affecting participants’ ability to notice the unexpected changes presented. This result is interpreted as support for the alcohol myopia theory. No significant effects of alcohol were found for change blindness or …


Individual Differences In The Allocation Of Visual Attention During Navigation, Mikayla Keller Jul 2017

Individual Differences In The Allocation Of Visual Attention During Navigation, Mikayla Keller

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

There are large individual differences in the ability to create an accurate mental representation (i.e., a cognitive map) of a novel environment, yet the factors underlying cognitive map accuracy remain unclear. Given the roles that landmarks and cognitive map accuracy play in successful navigation, the current study examined whether differences in the landmarks that individuals look at while navigating are related to differences in cognitive map accuracy. Participants completed a battery of spatial tests: some that assessed spatial skills prior to a navigation task, and others that tested memory for the environment following exploration of a virtual world. Results indicated …


Attention To Melodic Versus Phonetic Cues In 8-Month-Old Infants, Alexandra M. Ryken Apr 2017

Attention To Melodic Versus Phonetic Cues In 8-Month-Old Infants, Alexandra M. Ryken

Undergraduate Honours Theses

Infant listeners have very sophisticated auditory processing skills. In the music domain, infants as young as 6-months of age can recognize familiar and novel melodies (e.g., Trainor, Wu, & Tsang, 2004), and in the speech domain 8-month-old infants can use the statistical frequency of syllables to recognize familiar and novel nonsense words (e.g., Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). Though infants can process music and speech information when presented separately, there has been little research to date on whether infants can process information from both streams simultaneously. Auditory streams such as lullabies often contain both a melody and lyrics, but can …