Cognitive Science Commons^™

What Could Be Done Vs. What Was: How Temporal Framing Affects Representations Of Possibility, Noah Chapman Prescott

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

When making decisions for ourselves or predicting what others will do, we face the challenge of figuring out which of the infinite possible actions to consider in the first place. The space of possibilities considered, often called a “modal space”, has been shown to reflect both what people think is likely and what they think is valuable. The present work investigates how these modal spaces change with a difference in temporal orientation (what an agent could do vs. what they did do) and grammatical perspective (considering a scenario in the first- vs. the third-person). The findings suggest that both these …

Toward An Account Of Visual Aesthetic Experience In Multimodal Large Language Models, Batuhan Saridede

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly mediate visual culture, far less is known about how MLLMs themselves evaluate aesthetic value and how those evaluations shift under different beliefs about authorship. This thesis investigates how three commercial MLLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) appraise visual artworks across six dimensions: liking, beauty, profundity, worth, narrativity, and intentionality. Using a balanced dataset of 100 artworks, half human-generated and half AI-generated, with representational and abstract works equally represented, each model evaluated every image under four provenance conditions: unspecified origin, inferred origin, assumed AI origin, and assumed human origin. Results show that representationalism in visual …

Seeing Through Similar Eyes: How Social Identity Shapes Reinterpretation Of Ambiguous Stimuli, Eli Bailit

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

Identical sensory input can lead to a variety of subjective experiences and interpretations. In the face of such ambiguity, we often turn to our social context. Does the identity of the person providing an alternative interpretation to an ambiguous stimulus impact someone’s likelihood to adopt it? This study examined whether perceived interpersonal similarity modulates reinterpretation of ambiguous visual stimuli. Thirty Dartmouth undergraduates completed a modified “MadLibs” paradigm in which they generated initial interpretations of ambiguous photographs, indicated their confidence in their interpretations, then decided how much to update those interpretations upon viewing an alternative sourced from an individual of varying …

Category Learning Under Verbal Interference, Yawen Xue

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

What happens to cognition when you disrupt language? What does language actually do as a representational medium for cognition? Much literature shows a facilitative role of language on categorical thinking. This work specifically examines the role of language in category learning using a verbal interference paradigm. I ran two experiments where participants learned to distinguish between two novel categories of bugs while under conditions of verbal or visuospatial interference. In Experiment 1, category membership was determined by an XOR rule; in Experiment 2, category membership was determined by an AND rule.

In Experiment 1, participants on average did not succeed …

Neural Representations Of Valence And Arousal In Kung Fury, Jason A. Davis

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

Emotions are a core component of human experience and behavior, yet after decades of scientific research, it is still difficult to uncover the neural substrates related to emotion. Recent advances in neuroscience have examined how we interpret emotional signals from static images of facial expressions, but less work has sought to understand how the brain constructs our emotional experiences (Chen, 2020). To investigate such idiosyncratic experiences across participants, we employed naturalistic stimuli to model the real-time, reliable changes in activity that correspond to changes in emotional experience. A primary element of emotional experience is core affect, defined as the mental …

Zoom Dysmorphia: An Eye-Tracking Study Of Self-View And Attention During Video Conferences, Kathleen H. Stimson

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

This study investigates Zoom Dysmorphia, a heightened self-awareness and self-criticism of perceived physical flaws due to prolonged self-view on video conferencing platforms, with associated behaviors resembling symptoms of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). Drawing on Veale’s (2001, 2004) and Neziroglu’s (2004) cognitive-behavioral models of BDD and prior studies on BDD which suggest the development and maintenance of BDD through excessive self-focused attention and attentional bias, this study explores the potential cognitive and emotional implications of this phenomenon. Participants engaged in two mock video conferences with self-view enabled in one meeting and disabled the other for comparison. Eye tracking technology monitored their …

What We Hear In Voices: Identifying Dimensionality In Speech Stimuli Trait Impressions, Caroline W. Conway

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

Is there dimensionality in how people form impressions of speakers? The first portion of the study generated trait terms via text survey responses to recordings from the Emotional Speech Database (ESD). Following the analysis of this initial data, a second survey invited subjects to rate the speaker on a specific trait for each of many ESD recordings. The trait terms were selected from the text responses from the first survey that were most strongly correlated via a mixed-effects model with the speaker of each recording rather than the emotion or sentence. Following an exploratory factor analysis of the trait ratings …

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 …

What You Don’T Know Matters: An Ignorance-Focused Investigation Of Theory Of Mind, Steven M. Shin, Jonathan S. Phillips

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

This project examines the ways in which knowledge, or ignorance, impact healthy adults’ theory of mind (i.e. their considerations of others’ mental states). In a pilot study, and four experiments, an effect is found which supports the hypothesis that knowledge states influence the execution of theory of mind. The present findings suggest that attention is directed differently when participants reason from positions of knowledge, or positions of ignorance, in regard to a task-relevant fact. This project provides a starting point for further research, investigating the rich contextual contributions to the fluent functioning of the ‘theory of mind system.’

Bridging Philosophy And Neuroscience: How Behavioral Experiments Inform A Recent Theory Of Animal Consciousness, Qasim Abrar Qureshi

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

Consciousness is a loaded term and can mean many different things to different people. The goal of this paper is to investigate animal consciousness with an emphasis on rats. We investigated different ways of approaching the problem of animal consciousness including neuroscientific and philosophical methods. Next, we examined, a recent theory of animal consciousness in detail and examined neuroscientific evidence to support animals possessing the features described in the theory. The theory posited that consciousness includes five different components: perceptual richness, evaluative richness, self-consciousness, unity, and temporality. After, we discussed the phenomenon of “insight” and how it is similar and …