Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Variable Semantic Input And Novel First-Language Vocabulary Learning, Nichole Runge

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Vocabulary learning involves mapping a word form to a semantic meaning. An individual asked to learn the Spanish word for “apple,” for example, must map a new word form (manzana) onto the appropriate semantic representation. Previous studies have found that acoustic variability of word forms can improve second language vocabulary acquisition (Barcroft & Sommers, 2005; Sommers & Barcroft, 2007). The current experiments investigated whether variable semantic input could have a similar beneficial effect on first language vocabulary learning. Participants learned low-frequency English vocabulary words and their definitions. Half of the words were shown with the same verbatim definition …

Rapid Detection And Use Of Non-Verbal Confidence Cues During Adaptive Memory Biasing, Jihyun Cha

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Prior literature has demonstrated that participants use probabilistic, verbal memory cues (‘Likely Old’ or ‘Likely New’) to adaptively bias their recognition judgments. Here we tested whether this is more effective when the cues are the actual videotaped responses of others taking the same recognition test, based on the possibility that observers might use non-verbal confidence signs to modulate their degree of cue reliance on each trial. Experiment 1 demonstrated observers could reliably rate the confidence of others (Models) from single recognition responses (‘old’ or ‘new’) and that when doing so, the latency of the model’s response was the primary influence, …

A Line In The Sand: Archaeological Evidence For The Interactions Of Settled Farmers And Mobile Pastoralists In The Late Bronze Age (1950 - 1500 Bc) Murghab Alluvial Fan, Turkmenistan, Lynne Marie Rouse

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the interactions of mobile pastoralist groups with sedentary farming communities in the Late Bronze Age period (1950 - 1500 BCE) in the Murghab alluvial fan of present-day Turkmenistan. Traditional archaeological and historical studies in Central Asia, focused as they are on urban contexts or centers of dense population, have colored interpretations of mobile-sedentary interaction in prehistory and helped reinforce a view that mobile and settled groups were always at odds with one another. The Late Bronze Age Murghab marks the period and locale of the first sustained interaction between distinct cultural communities of mobile pastoralists and …

The Effects Of Environmental Support And Age On Visuospatial Rehearsal, Lindsey Lilienthal

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Although there is substantial evidence supporting the functional distinction between verbal working memory and visuospatial working memory, most research focuses on the verbal domain, and much is still unknown about how people maintain and manipulate visuospatial information. Previous experiments have demonstrated that the amount of environmental support for rehearsal provided to participants can have an important impact on their memory for locations (Lilienthal, Hale, & Myerson, 2014b), and that young adults may benefit more from the presence of support than older adults (Lilienthal, Hale, & Myerson, 2014a). The goal of the three experiments presented in this dissertation was to further …

Labor Force Participation And Crime Among Serious And Violent Former Prisoners, Nora Ellen Wikoff

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This project examines the relationship between work and crime among male former prisoners. Criminological theories and observational studies suggest that work reduces crime, but recent studies cast doubt on the ability of employment programs to reduce recidivism among former prisoners. Ongoing weak evaluations may imperil support for employment-focused rehabilitative programming. Using data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (n = 1,575), this study examines whether selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity contribute to weak evaluation findings.First, this study tests whether unobserved heterogeneity contributes to jobs programs' weak treatment effects. It uses group-based trajectory modeling and propensity score methods to …

The Politics Of The American Policymaking System, Ian R. Turner

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Most public policy is developed and implemented by the federal bureaucracy. The possibility of unelected bureaucrats subverting the wishes of popularly elected political principals threatens to sever democratic control of policy by the populace. Through a series of essays, this dissertation explores the opportunities and limitations of one form of bureaucratic control: ex post political oversight by a third-party. Through a series of formal models I illustrate how oversight, such as judicial or executive review of agency actions, structures the policymaking incentives of bureaucratic agencies. The way oversight affects agency behavior, in turn, structures incentives for political principals to design …

Syncing Umbanda And Science (Sus): Using Umbanda’S Holistic Healing Methods To Increase Access To Healthcare, Alex E. Rosenthal

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

In 1988, after the 1985 termination of the military dictatorship in Brazil, the constitution was rewritten to guarantee individual rights to all citizens of Brazil. Among the various other rights that the new constitution protected, anyone in Brazil was granted the right to government-funded healthcare under the regulation of the Unified Healthcare System, SUS. Because of structural inequalities in Brazil as well as the rise of privatized healthcare, equal access to healthcare is not a reality in modern-day Brazil. Many citizens who live in the periphery are limited to understaffed and underfunded primary health centers.

This monograph explores the healing …

Pressing: Where The Objective Meets The Subjective, Mariana Parisca

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Through this essay I describe the theoretical and anthropological ideas that led to the creation of the Cushing Series. An interest in the obsession with photography in popular culture leads to an understanding of the permeation of structured reasoning beyond scientific research and into everyday life. Taking evidence from photography, and philosophy of science I establish the limitations of structured reasoning, both as a way of perceiving the world and as an understanding of identity, and define surface and frame as its physical representation. Using Sartre’s existential theory and phenomenological anthropology I then describe the infinite subjective existence of …

Effects Of An Interdisciplinary Gerontology Course On First-Year Undergraduate Students, Christine Caroline Merz

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This study evaluated the impact of an interdisciplinary course on aging designed to improve attitudes toward older adults and aging, and generate interest in aging-related careers. Main outcomes included knowledge of older adults and aging, attitudes toward older adults and aging, and anxiety about personal aging. Participants included first-year undergraduate students enrolled in the course (curricular intervention group) and first-year undergraduate students not enrolled in the course (control group). Data were collected at the beginning and end of one semester. At the end of the semester curricular intervention students had increased in their knowledge about aging and showed more positive …

Saving By Lumbee Indians: Toward A Theory Of Financial Practices From Yesterday And Today, Amy Locklear Hertel

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is designed to gain insight into the motivations, values, practices, and norms of saving in American Indian tribal communities, specifically the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. How Lumbee adults living in the community save financial resources, what they are saving for, and how those resources are spent are examined. Further, intergenerational messages on this topic are investigated. The main research question is what explains saving and building financial assets by Lumbee Indians? The aim is to identify common experiences in American Indian households that can inform a grounded theory of saving for this population.Grounded theory is used to …

The Knowledge Of Others' Perceptions (Kop) Model: Practical Accuracy Among The Well-Acquainted, Brittany C. Solomon

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

It is possible that people, especially those who are well-acquainted, have information about others that goes beyond their own impressions. While previous studies primarily focus on the accuracy of a perceiver's own impressions of a target, they may miss information about the perceiver's knowledge of a target's identity and reputation. The present study is based on the notion that there may be more to knowing a person than having an accurate perception of his/her personality in the traditional sense. From a practical standpoint, it might also be important to know when others' impressions of a close other, such as a …

Case Studies In Ancient Maya Human-Animal Relations: El Perú, La Corona, And Commensal Mammals, Diana Nicole Fridberg

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The ancient Maya of Mesoamerica inhabited a biodiverse landscape filled with animal taxa that provided both physical resources and rich ideological inspiration. To date, faunal studies among the Maya have been more limited than other types of archaeological investigations, leaving much still unknown about how human-animal relations varied across time and space. This study utilizes zooarchaeological, iconographic, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic data to illuminate the use of animals in Late Classic period (600-900 CE) ritual at the sites of La Corona and El Perú-Waka' (henceforth abbreviated as El Perú) in Petén, Guatemala, and to investigate the roles of commensal mammals in …

Using The Encoding Specificity Principle To Assess The Nature Of The Secondary Memory Component Of Working Memory, Dung Chi Bui

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Recent theories and evidence suggest working memory involves secondary memory as well as primary memory. It is unclear, however, if the secondary memory component of working memory is the same as the secondary memory component underlying episodic long-term memory. The present investigation explores this issue by examining whether manipulating encoding and retrieval cues on a short-term memory task produces similar effects as to what is typically seen on episodic long-term memory tasks. More specifically, it is commonly observed on episodic long-term memory tasks that retrieval cues that were not also present during encoding produces worse recall compared to retrieval cues …

Essays On The Size Distribution Of Cities, Hiroki Watanabe

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation is comprised of three essays that analyze the spatial distribution of people and economic activities from three distinct perspectives.Chapter 1: Explaining the Size Distribution of Cities: X-treme Economies. The empirical regularity known as Zipf's law or the rank-size rule has motivated development of a theoretical literature to explain it. We examine the assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity shocks, implicitly used in this literature. With either self insurance or insurance markets, and either an arbitrarily small cost of moving or the assumption that consumers do not perfectly observe the shocks …

Black Culture: A Societal Problem, Quamesha Brown

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

American society, regardless of what history has been told, has never been a society that is truly free of social prejudices especially for its black community. The many depictions of black people in America has caused a number of psychological and physical difficulties for black communities. In this paper, the main topic is the ways in which black culture is portrayed in American society and how that representation has affected the black community and the black experience. Although there are common experiences shared between people in the black community, the black experience is highly individualized; there is no singular definition …

The Final Frontier: Navigating From Material To Virtual, Alexandra Neuman

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Humankind’s continual creation of and progression into virtual space is a hugely significant event on our evolutionary timeline, one that signifies a sort of imminent and already in-process departure. While the more popular notion of our species’ eventual exodus is linked to outer space and planetary exploration, our existing conceptualization of cyberspace connotes an identical unknowable vastness and sense of discovery, with its depiction relying on nearly identical imagery. The projection of a virtually based human future is thereby left with an already carved out spot in the collective imagination. The lone floating astronaut locked into a suit unable to …

When Can We Trust Our Memories? Quantitative And Qualitative Indicators Of Recognition Accuracy, Kurt Andrew Desoto

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present a quartet of experiments that studied confidence ratings and remember/know/guess judgments as indicators of recognition accuracy. The goal of these experiments was to examine the validity of these quantitative and qualitative measures of metacognitive monitoring and to interpret them using the continuous dual-process model of signal detection (Wixted & Mickes, 2010).In Experiment 1, subjects heard or read items belonging to categorized lists and took an old/new recognition test over studied and new items while making remember/know/guess judgments after each recognition decision. Consistent with prior literature, remember judgments were more likely to be accurate than know …

Smartphones: A Game Changer For Psychological Research, Wei Wang, Jibo He

Publications and Research

As technology continues to advance and smartphones continue to grow in popularity, we argue that smartphones have rapidly evolved as a suitable tool for psychological research. In this editorial, we will first briefly introduce the technological and social features possessed by smartphones that are ideal for psychology research. Then we distinguish two approaches to use smartphones for research, highlighting the external and internal validity of each approach. We further discuss computer skills and analysis methods needed for research with smartphones.

Development Of A Pedestrian Demand Estimation Tool: A Destination Choice Model, Christopher D. Muhs

PSU Transportation Seminars

There is growing support for improvements to the quality of the walking environment, including more investments to promote pedestrian travel. Planners, engineers, and others seek improved tools to estimate pedestrian demand that are sensitive to environmental and demographic factors at the appropriate scale in order to aid policy-relevant issues like air quality, public health, and smart allocation of infrastructure and other resources. Further, in the travel demand forecasting realm, tools of this kind are difficult to implement due to the use of spatial scales of analysis that are oriented towards motorized modes, vast data requirements, and computer processing limitations.

To …

The Bounded Log-Odds Model Of Frequency And Probability Distortion, Hang Zhang, Laurence T. Maloney

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

A Signal Detection Experiment With Limited Number Of Trials, Tadamasa Sawada

MODVIS Workshop

Signal detection theory has been well accepted in vision science to measure human sensitivity to stimuli in a Psychophysical experiment. The theory is formulated so that the measured sensitivity is independent from a response bias (criterion). The formulation is based on an assumption that number of trials in the experiment is infinite but this assumption cannot be satisfied in practice. The assumption came from two normal distributions used in the formulation. The distributions respectively represent a set of signal trial and that of noise trials in the experiment. In this study, I will show how the violation of the assumption …

Testing The Bayesian Confidence Hypothesis, Wei Ji Ma, Ronald Van Den Berg

MODVIS Workshop

Asking subjects to rate their confidence is one of the oldest procedures in psychophysics. Remarkably, quantitative models of confidence ratings have been scarce. The Bayesian confidence hypothesis (BCH) states that an observer’s confidence rating is monotonically related to the posterior probability of their choice. I will report tests of this hypothesis in two visual categorization tasks: one requiring rapid categorization of a single oriented stimulus, the other a deliberative judgment typically made by scientists, namely interpreting scatterplots. We find evidence against the Bayesian confidence hypothesis in both tasks.

A Conceptual Framework Of Computations In Mid-Level Vision, Jonas Kubilius, Johan Wagemans, Hans P. Op De Beeck

MODVIS Workshop

The goal of visual processing is to extract information necessary for a variety of tasks, such as grasping objects, navigating in scenes, and recognizing them. While ultimately these tasks might be carried out by separate processing pathways, they nonetheless share a common root in the early and intermediate visual areas. What representations should these areas develop in order to facilitate all of these higher-level tasks? Several distinct ideas have received empirical support in the literature so far: (i) boundary feature detection, such as edge, corner, and curved segment extraction; (ii) second-order feature detection, such as the difference in orientation or …

Metacognition: Using Confidence Ratings For Type 2 And Type 1 Roc Curves, S A. Klein

MODVIS Workshop

In the past five years there has been a surge of renewed interest in metacognition ("thinking about thinking"). The typical experiment involves a binary judgment followed by a multilevel confidence rating. It is a confusing topic because the rating could be made either on one's confidence in the binary response (standard rating Type 1 ROC) or on one's confidence sorted by whether the response was correct (Type 2 ROC). Both are metacognition. After a few remarks on challenging aspects of the Type 2 approach, I will present some interesting results for Type 1 ROC for both memory and vision research. …

Two Correspondence Problems Easier Than One, Aaron Michaux, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

Computer vision research rarely makes use of symmetry in stereo reconstruction despite its established importance in perceptual psychology. Such stereo reconstructions produce visually satisfying figures with precisely located points and lines, even when input images have low or moderate resolution. However, because few invariants exist, there are no known general approaches to solving symmetry correspondence on real images. The problem is significantly easier when combined with the binocular correspondence problem, because each correspondence problem provides strong non-overlapping constraints on the solution space. We demonstrate a system that leverages these constraints to produce accurate stereo models from pairs of binocular images …

Binocular 3d Motion Perception As Bayesian Inference, Martin Lages, Suzanne Heron

MODVIS Workshop

The human visual system encodes monocular motion and binocular disparity input before it is integrated into a single 3D percept. Here we propose a geometric-statistical model of human 3D motion perception that solves the aperture problem in 3D by assuming that (i) velocity constraints arise from inverse projection of local 2D velocity constraints in a binocular viewing geometry, (ii) noise from monocular motion and binocular disparity processing is independent, and (iii) slower motions are more likely to occur than faster ones. In two experiments we found that instantiation of this Bayesian model can explain perceived 3D line motion direction under …

Ua80/1 Meeting Minutes, W Club

University Organizations

Meeting minutes for the May 2015 meeting of the W Club Board of Directors.

Applying Rda To Digital Resources Metadata, Sai Deng, Peter Spyers-Duran

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This presentation will describe how Resource Description and Access (RDA) has been applied in cataloging, updating, and migrating digital resources at the University of Central Florida Libraries. Presenters will explain the similarities and differences of using RDA to catalog traditional serials in an Integrated Library System (ILS) and digitized serials and serial analytics in a Content Management System (CMS). Examples will be used to illustrate the issues of using RDA in conjunction with other metadata standards such as Dublin Core (DC) and Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) to catalog digital resources including digitized newspapers and monographs, such as: relating RDA …

Network Analysis Of The Walkability Of Denver’S Light Rail And Bus Rapid Transit Network And How This Can Be Improved, Ryan Ferriman

Geography and the Environment: Graduate Student Capstones

This study evaluates how well the existing and proposed light rail and bus rapid transit lines in Denver serve residents who want to get by without a car. The number of residents and jobs within half mile and one mile walking distances of stations are calculated using network and buffer analysis methods. Results are compared to determine the accuracy benefit of conducting a network analysis rather than the more common buffer analysis. The study looks at ways to boost the number of residents and employees within walking distance by maximizing access around each station. It also quantifies the available land …

Strategic Planning Development Team Meeting Notes 5/14/2015, Strategic Planning Development Team

Resource Archive

Each member of the group receives a copy of Chronicle of Higher Education’s Trends Report for 2015. Using this document, the SPDT develop main trends that impact PSU. Some of these trends include focusing on employability and alignment of academics with career prep, and student indebtedness. The committee continues their dialogue from previous meetings talking about national trends in college, from the previous meeting.