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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Science

Prism: Priming Relationships In Syntax And Mathematics, Michelle J. Zhu May 2026

Prism: Priming Relationships In Syntax And Mathematics, Michelle J. Zhu

Honors Scholar Theses

The implementation of sheltered education programs has become increasingly prevalent in schools as new research in second language acquisition emerges. Yet despite this growing attention to ESL instructional practice, far less is known about the cognitive processes that underlie how bilingual students engage with academic content. This study investigates cross-domain structural priming between mathematical and linguistic processing in monolingual and bilingual individuals, focusing on how bilingual experience influences syntactic attachment preferences. Prior research suggests that mathematical and linguistic structures share underlying cognitive representations, and that exposure to structures in one domain can influence processing in another. Additionally, bilingualism has been …


Prefrontal Engagement In Cognitive Flexibility Across Paradigms, Katarina Kalajzic May 2026

Prefrontal Engagement In Cognitive Flexibility Across Paradigms, Katarina Kalajzic

Honors Scholar Theses

Cognitive flexibility is an executive function that involves dynamically adapting behavior in the face of changing environmental circumstances to achieve a particular goal. Disrupted in numerous psychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, OCD, and depression, the neural correlates of cognitive flexibility are not well understood. However, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is strongly implicated in executive function and attentional control processes. Thus, we sought to examine the neural circuitry involved in distinct cognitive flexibility tasks – the attentional set-shifting task and the probabilistic 2-armed bandit task. Through optogenetic suppression, we targeted pyramidal neurons of the rodent medial prefrontal cortex, an …


Ai In Wonderland, Bodj Oliver Alngohuro May 2026

Ai In Wonderland, Bodj Oliver Alngohuro

Honors Scholar Theses

Studies in sound symbolism have revealed a baseline preference for people to associate certain sounds with certain concepts. The Bouba/Kiki effect, for instance, reveals a preference for individuals to associate “Bouba” with a round shape and “Kiki” with a sharp shape (Köhler 1929). Other studies have revealed other associations with certain sounds and names with concepts, such as “Mil” referring to something small and “Mal” referring to something big (Sidhu and Pexman, 2017). This study looks at LLMs and how they compare to humans concerning intuitions for certain names based on sound symbolism.


Does An Impaired Sense Of Smell Make It Harder To Think About Things Like Garlic?, Ishrat N. Khan May 2025

Does An Impaired Sense Of Smell Make It Harder To Think About Things Like Garlic?, Ishrat N. Khan

Honors Scholar Theses

According to sensorimotor-based (also called "embodied" or "grounded") theories of semantic memory, accessing conceptual knowledge about things involves reactivating—or “simulating”—the sensory and motor experiences that we have had with them. For instance, thinking about things for which olfactory experience is dominant (e.g., garlic or a rose) would involve simulating their smell. However, evidence for olfactory simulation when thinking about "smelly” things is sparse and mixed. We tested smell-impaired (“anosmic”) and control participants (N=130 in the anosmic group and N=190 in the control group) on three tasks (1) Picture-Word Verification, (2) Semantic Property Verification, and (3) Free Recall. We predicted that …


Reinvestigating The Role Of Observational Contexts In Learning Hard Nouns, Kosta Boskovic, Sumarga Suanda May 2024

Reinvestigating The Role Of Observational Contexts In Learning Hard Nouns, Kosta Boskovic, Sumarga Suanda

Honors Scholar Theses

Developmental scientists have long been fascinated by children’s prodigious word learning capacities and by patterns in the composition of children’s early vocabularies that reveal that certain types of words are learned earlier than others. One notable pattern has been that words that denote more abstract concepts (e.g., “story”) are learned later than words that denote concrete objects (e.g., “ball”). In fact, prior studies have concluded that different kinds of abstract words, including nouns whose referents are not whole, concrete objects (or “hard nouns”; Kako, 2005), are not learnable from observational contexts alone and necessitate linguistic information to be learned. In …


Genetic Implications Of Language Acquisition, Marissa Renee Ciccarini May 2023

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 …