Cognitive Science Commons^™

Tiktok Use, Flow, And Addictive Behaviors, Santiago Vigil

McNair Summer Research Program

Abstract

TikTok’s design exploits sensory preferences through continuous scrolling, providing a seamless infinite amount of content. Therefore, I hypothesized that TikTok creates a flow state where people are immersed in the app and may lead to addiction-like symptoms. TikTok use may also be associated with boredom proneness and anxiety. Via a self-report survey, participants indicated their use of social media apps, answered items measuring their psychological flow state on TikTok and Instagram (as a comparison), reported the frequency of behaviors indicating symptoms of addiction, and rated their self-esteem, boredom proneness, and general anxiety. Results showed 7 of the 9 flow …

The Influence Of Premium Finished Paper Packaging On Consumer Behavior, Sahil Bhayani

All Theses

Companies face the challenge of determining the return on investment of premium paper packaging features, such as substrate thickness and finishing options. If companies can better understand how consumers perceive “premium,” they could channel their focus on specific design elements and maximize their returns (Dwivedi & Nayeem, 2018). Touch is a critical factor in driving consumer behavior and purchase decisions and influencing trust between brands and consumers (Krishna et al. 2017). While previous studies have explored the impact of design elements like size, shape, color, and font on consumer behavior, this research investigates the influence of touch, substrate, print finishes …

Voluntary Action And Conscious Intention, Jake Gavenas

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

Traditional experimental methodology in neuroscience involves comparing responses to different stimuli to make inferences about the human brain. However, human volition entails making decisions and acting in a manner that is underdetermined by the external environment. Investigations of the neuronal basis of volition have led to new controversies regarding the existence of free will, and offer potential directions for medical treatments of disorders such as addiction, akinetic mutism, and locked-in syndrome. However, because volition experiments leave aspects of responses “up to” participants, neuroscientists must utilize computational techniques such as modeling, simulation, and advanced analyses to progress our understanding of human …

Avoiding Anthropomoralism, Julian Friedland

Between the Species

The Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation, which has been endorsed by hundreds of influential academic ethicists, calls for establishing a vegan economy by banning what it refers to as all unnecessary animal suffering, including fishing. It does so by appeal to the moral principle of equal consideration of comparable interests. I argue that this principle is misapplied by discounting morally relevant cognitive capacities of self-conscious and volitional personhood as distinguished from merely sentient non-personhood. I describe it as a kind of anthropomorphizing moralism which I call anthropomoralism, defined as the tendency to project morally relevant characteristics of personhood onto merely …

Hippocampal Volume And The Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment In An Older Adult Population: Assessing Performance On Cognitive Screeners Administered In-Person And Electronically, Kristen Fabrizi

Dissertations

The present study investigated how performance on in-person and electronic neuropsychological assessment measures predicted subcortical hippocampal volume and cognitive decline consistent with mild cognitive impairment. It was hypothesized that the Montreal Cognitive Assessment would display better predictive strength than the Cogstate Brief Battery when evaluating subcortical hippocampal volume measured via structural magnetic resonance imaging. It was further hypothesized that the Montreal Cognitive Assessment would be more sensitive to predicting group membership to the diagnostic classification of mild cognitive impairment compared to the Cogstate Brief Battery. The sample included 445 older adult participants selected from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative 3. …

Say That Again: The Role Of Multimodal Redundancy In Communication And Context, Brandon Javier Dormes

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

With several modes of expression, such as facial expressions, body language, and speech working together to convey meaning, social communication is rich in redundancy. While typically relegated to signal preservation, this study investigates the role of cross-modal redundancies in establishing performance context, focusing on unaided, solo performances. Drawing on information theory, I operationalize redundancy as predictability and use an array of machine learning models to featurize speakers' facial expressions, body poses, movement speeds, acoustic features, and spoken language from 24 TEDTalks and 16 episodes of Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents. This analysis demonstrates that it is possible to distinguish between these …

Effects Of Daylight On College Students’ Physical And Mental Well-Being, Sathya Thenappan

Quantitative Social Science Undergraduate Senior Theses

While existing literature predominantly deals with the impact of daylight on adults in general and more specifically at the workplace, less is known about its impact on the college student demographic and daylight exposure levels at college residences. Given its considerable impact on both the physical and mental well-being of individuals, daylight has been used in the treatment of an assortment of diseases from seasonal affective disorder to depression. With college students constituting the majority of today’s people who suffer from mental health issues in society, uncovering the link between daylight exposure and its impact on the physical and mental …

The Politics Of Expertise And The Articulation Of Authority In Democracy: Cognitive Style And Intelligibility In The Education Of Problem-Solving And Professional Decision-Making In The Domain Of Law, Michael W. Raphael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Computational complexity refers to the representational aspect of problem-solving. This representational aspect is commonly understood to describe the regularities that organize the definition of the problem-situation, the qualities that designate its difficulty, either in terms of the process of arriving at a definition of the problem or in the process of arriving at a solution. It is for this reason, that it is commonly said that “representational design precedes computational efficacy.” The point of this maxim is to serve as a reminder that an efficient use of resources begins with the design of near decomposability, the specification of the properties …

Association Strength Between Concepts As The Origin Of The "Foreign Language Effect", Emilia Ezrina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals sometimes make decisions in verbal tasks differently in their first (L1) and second (L2) language. This phenomenon is known as the foreign language effect (FLE), and it suggests strong connections between language and cognition. On the one hand, it is possible that L2 “blunts” emotional language. However, the FLE can be observed in non-emotional tasks. Therefore, it is possible that L2 requires more deliberate processing due to increased cognitive load, leading to more rational decisions. The support for each explanation is mixed.

In this thesis we propose looking for a single explanation for all instances of the FLE. After …

Who Am I?: How Natives’ Mental Trauma Develop During Precolonial And Colonial Eras As Seen In Achebe’S Things Fall Apart And Fanon’S The Wretched Of The Earth, Sophia D. Casetta

Pepperdine Journal of Communication Research

Colonialism is a long, brutal process, where natives’ identities are uprooted as colonizers establish their influence in a foreign land. Consequently, through the exploration of the natives’ response to this upheaval throughout the precolonial and colonial eras, the psychological toll that is placed on the colonized is evident. Such mental trauma that is incited is explored in Chinua Achebe’s fictional novel Things Fall Apart, which unveils the slowly lost of the natives’ identities during the precolonial shift, and the non-fiction work of Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth that details psychological disorders of the colonized due to colonization. …

Security-Enhanced Serial Communications, John White, Alexander Beall, Joseph Maurio, Dane Fichter, Dr. Matthew Davis, Dr. Zachary Birnbaum

Military Cyber Affairs

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are widely used by critical infrastructure and are ubiquitous in numerous industries including telecommunications, petrochemical, and manufacturing. ICS are at a high risk of cyber attack given their internet accessibility, inherent lack of security, deployment timelines, and criticality. A unique challenge in ICS security is the prevalence of serial communication buses and other non-TCP/IP communications protocols. The communication protocols used within serial buses often lack authentication and integrity protections, leaving them vulnerable to spoofing and replay attacks. The bandwidth constraints and prevalence of legacy hardware in these systems prevent the use of modern message authentication and …

Constraining The Binding Problem Using Maps, Zhixian Han, Anne Sereno

MODVIS Workshop

We constrained the binding problem by creating maps of different attributes. We compared the performance of different models with different maps in our current study. Our preliminary results showed that the performance of the model is the highest when location maps were used. These results suggest that the optimal way to constrain the binding problem is to create location maps of different attributes.

The Effects Of Color On Flavor, Tiffany S. Yoo

Honors Capstones

Color and its relation to flavor, is a complex cognitive phenomenon that researchers today are still trying to decipher. The present literature review is an examination of the history of color, process of color perception, the effects of additional factors such as saturation, the exploration of senses that may potentially contribute to perception itself, and the different modern theories suggested. The purpose of this project was to review, revise, and narrow down which theories can be deemed as accurate in terms of the amount of support addressed by modern literature. While a clear-cut answer was not concluded, three potential theories …

Eco-Interoception: What Plants, Fungi And Protista Have Taught My Body, Sara Riley Dotterer

Art Theses and Dissertations

To me, ecology is the relational, full-body awareness that I am made up of and deeply connected to everything around me; and for better or worse, this is reciprocal. I form ecotones, an ecological transitional zone between two ecosystems, with the world around me. I use this ecotonal lens to blur binaries and dissolve boundaries between me and the world “outside my body.” During my Masters of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University, I have continuously explored and represented the lives of various more-than-human species outside of my body, including plants, fungi and protista through an ecotonal lens. Although these …

The Effect Of Word Predictability On Proofreading Accuracy And Reading Time, Sam Prasad

Theses and Dissertations

Proofreading, or reading with the purpose of finding and correcting errors, has been used in psycholinguistic research to study the relationship between bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes. The current study examined the effects of word predictability on reading time using a word-by-word self-paced reading (SPR) task. A sample of 102 native English speakers read sentences containing letter transposition errors in predictable and unpredictable contexts. Half of the sentences were followed by a question asking if there was an error in the sentence they had just read. Participants’ accuracy in detecting the errors and the time they spent reading the error-bearing …

Zoom Fatigue: Case Presentation And Brief Review, Alan Lucerna, James Espinosa, Risha Hertz, Robin Lahr, James Lee

Rowan-Virtua Research Day

In this review, we discuss the phenomenon of what has been called Zoom Fatigue—a sense of fatigue as well as physical and emotional stress that can be associated with teleconferencing (especially long teleconferences with minimal breaks). The Zoom Fatigue Scale is discussed as well as various theories to explain the phenomenon. Some preventive strategies are discussed.

Enhancing The Battleverse: The People’S Liberation Army’S Digital Twin Strategy, Joshua Baughman

Military Cyber Affairs

No abstract provided.

Operationalizing Deterrence By Denial In The Cyber Domain, Gentry Lane

Military Cyber Affairs

No abstract provided.

Inner Portraits, Bethany Salisbury

Graduate Theses

This paper investigates the many interconnected layers of women’s mental health through portraiture and how animal and plant symbolism can represent the way women's hormones and bodily health affect their mental health. I reveal how the artwork created presents these connections and inner mental health narratives to the viewer, creating a space of empathy, destigmatization, and self-reflection. This body of portraiture art connects five women through a series of both two-and three-dimensional portraits based on interviews using my own adaptation of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoots’ (1983) portrait methodology.

Women and non-binary individuals have always dealt with difficult interactions of bodily and mental …

Genetic Implications Of Language Acquisition, Marissa Renee Ciccarini

Honors Scholar Theses

The argument about whether language acquisition is "nature" or "nurture" has been long debated. Linguists have concluded that it requires the two, but how much does language acquisition rely on nature? Children show the capacity to learn languages quickly and without much effort. While research suggests that infants absorb many visual and verbal cues in their environment, biological structures are the underlying component of how this knowledge is gathered and organized. The genetics that code for specific neurophysiological pathways affect how people interact with their environment and where information is stored, forming the basis for these biological structures. Genetic research …

Does Using Clicker Questions Before Instruction Improve Students' Conceptual Understanding., Edward "Walker" Goshorn

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

Active learning can be incorporated into STEM classrooms in multiple ways. With exploratory learning, students explore a novel activity before learning the concepts or procedures. With personal response devices (e.g., clickers), students respond to real-time questions posed during lecture. The current studies examined whether, and how, clicker questions can be used as exploratory learning, to improve students’ conceptual understanding and engagement over traditional instruction. Biology professors integrated clicker questions into a lecture, and either closed the clicker poll prior to (Restricted Clicker Experiment, N = 164) or after (Extended Clicker Experiment, N = 188) giving feedback to the class. Undergraduate …

Creative Problem Solving Using Visual Thinking, Jacob L. Ravnborg

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

Creative Problem Solving Using Visual Thinking

This project explores the concept of visual and semantic thinking and how they can be incorporated into Creative Problem Solving sessions. Visual thinking is the ability to conjure mental images as part of the thinking process. This type of thinking is hard-wired into the human brain and can be seen in individual behavior and language. Meanwhile, semantic thinking is using language and grammar to convey meaning. It is a sequential process that depends on cultural and social references. The project argues that both types of thinking are essential and recommends specific guidelines for including …

Building Resilience With Creativity: A Reflective Card Deck Prototype, Lakshmi Sithambaram

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

The increasing complexity and adversity in today's world emphasize the need for resilience as a critical skill to navigate these challenges. The World Economic Forum identifies resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility as essential skills for thriving in the 21st century. But how can we intentionally develop resilience? Through this project, I explore the relationship between creativity and resilience and how creativity skills can be deliberately cultivated to build resilience. To achieve this, I developed a prototype of a reflective card deck that offers a unique approach to help individuals gain knowledge, make connections, explore their relationship with the skill, and …

Success Over Stress Support Group, Sophia Pescador-Torrance

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The Harden Wellness Center is located in Salinas, California on the campus of Harden Middle School. After surveying and interviewing eighth-grade students at Harden Middle School, it was determined that there was a need to provide healthy coping skills for stress and anxiety. The project provided students a place to learn healthy coping skills along with normalizing mental health services among adolescents. In order to engage students and keep them interested each week, focus on a new skill with an activity attached to reinforce the coping skill. By the end of the six weeks, the group started to talk about …

Resilience To Stress Across The Lifespan: Childhood Maltreatment, Heart Rate Variability, And Bereavement, Michelle A Chen, Robert Suchting, Julian F Thayer, Christopher P Fagundes

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Following a stressful life event, there is considerable variation in how individuals respond and adapt. Multiple models of risk and resilience show that adverse childhood experiences may be associated with an individual's response to stress later in life. While there is considerable support that early adversity can sensitize the stress response system and lead to adverse outcomes later in life, there is mounting evidence that in adolescence and young adulthood, certain biological predispositions to stress may be associated with resilience in the context of subsequent stressors. In this study, we evaluated how individual differences in vagally mediated heart rate variability …

Impacts Of Poverty On Language Development How Low Socio-Economic Status Students Are At An Academic Disadvantage, Farbod Samari

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Socioeconomic status impacts a variety of mental health outcomes, including language development. Delays in language development have consistently been linked to poverty. Decreases in vocabulary and phonological awareness are among developmental delays in school-aged children living in poverty. This research aims to contribute to the field of human services by examining the negative impacts of poverty on language development from a social worker’s perspective. As social workers thrive to serve disadvantaged populations, this research brings awareness to how language development deficiencies occur in school-aged children living in poverty.

To fulfill the purpose of this study, a quantitative, descriptive/explanatory design …

The Dynamics Of Emotion-Related Impulsivity: An Analysis Of Emotional Control And Daily Emotion-Driven Urges And Actions Via Ecological Momentary Assessment, Jeremy B. Clift

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emotion-related impulsivity, or the engagement in impulsive reactions specifically in response to emotions, has been identified as a crucial transdiagnostic factor. Mixed evidence from ecological momentary assessments (EMA) underscores a potential discrepancy between the existing measurements of emotion-related impulsivity at trait and state levels. Unlike previous EMA studies examining emotion-related impulsivity through measures of urgency, the current study tested Carver and colleagues’ (2008) reflexive responding to emotion framework by investigating the relationship between emotional control and emotion-related impulsivity. Participants (N = 197) with varying levels of emotional control completed one week of EMA to investigate two central questions. First, we …

Music & Synesthesia: An Exploration Of Synesthesia And Its Relation To Musical Perception, Raquel S. Johnson

Pacific Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference (PURCC)

This research investigates synesthesia and its impact on musical perception. Synesthesia is the multimodal sensory phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sensory modality generates the experience of a second, otherwise unrelated sense. Discussed topics include: a description of synesthesia and its neurophysiological and perceptual characteristics, the historical conceptualization and documentation of synesthesia beginning with the ancient Greeks, and present-day scientific inquiry. This research explores three varying types of auditory synesthesia - chromesthesia (sound-to-color synesthesia), auditory-tactile synesthesia, and sound-gustatory/sound-olfactory synesthesia - and their multimodal sensory characteristics in relation to music. Prominent neurophysiological hypotheses regarding the existence of synesthesia are examined, …

Pupil Dilation Is Not Associated With Memory For Prior Remembering, Sana Aftab

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

This experiment was conducted to assess the relationship between pupil dilation and memory for prior remembering. Prior remembering is the judgment of whether a memory was previously remembered. Previous studies have suggested that pupil dilation can change in response to emotional stimuli as well as “old” versus “new” stimuli in recognition memory tests. The present experiment had participants view emotional and neutral context image-word pairs before they completed two separate cued-recall tests. Critically, some image-word pairs changed between tests. During the second cued-recall test, participants were also asked to make a judgment about whether they previously retrieved a given word …

Perceptions Of Tourism And Quality Of Life: A Case Study In Savannah, Georgia, Marissa J. Renee

Honors College Theses

The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates that Travel and Tourism accounted for 10.3% of the world economy in 2019 and ¼ of all net new jobs over the past five years. Savannah, Georgia has experienced huge growth in the last decade due to tourism, with visitor spending on lodging alone increasing from $466 million in 2009 to $1 billion in 2019. The current study examined differences in perceived impact of tourism on quality of life using established predictors of tourism sentiments. An online community survey was conducted in Chatham County, Georgia (N = 94) using the Tourism Quality of …