Psychology Commons^™

Evolution Of Women’S Consciousness: Toward Integral Consciousness, Katherine T. Ziemke

Journal of Conscious Evolution

This article presents research materials which demonstrate historical consciousness for women of ancient European descent, the cultural heritage of the author. Awareness is examined from various historical angles in a transdisciplinary approach to the work. I explore the possibility that women’s historical and continued oppression may be a sign of the disintegration of the mental and a re-emergence of the integral structure of consciousness. A broad examination of women’s historical roles and corresponding thought shows how ancient consciousness may be used to accelerate a path toward integral consciousness today. Finally, this essay proposes that women’s historical consciousness and primordial memories …

All Hands On Deck: Choosing Virtual End Effector Representations To Improve Near Field Object Manipulation Interactions In Extended Reality, Roshan Venkatakrishnan

All Dissertations

Extended reality, or "XR", is the adopted umbrella term that is heavily gaining traction to collectively describe Virtual reality (VR), Augmented reality (AR), and Mixed reality (MR) technologies. Together, these technologies extend the reality that we experience either by creating a fully immersive experience like in VR or by blending in the virtual and "real" worlds like in AR and MR.

The sustained success of XR in the workplace largely hinges on its ability to facilitate efficient user interactions. Similar to interacting with objects in the real world, users in XR typically interact with virtual integrants like objects, menus, windows, …

The Effects Of Primary And Secondary Task Workloads On Cybersickness In Immersive Virtual Active Exploration Experiences, Rohith Venkatakrishnan

All Dissertations

Virtual reality (VR) technology promises to transform humanity. The technology enables users to explore and interact with computer-generated environments that can be simulated to approximate or deviate from reality. This creates an endless number of ways to propitiously apply the technology in our lives. It follows that large technological conglomerates are pushing for the widespread adoption of VR, financing the creation of the Metaverse - a hypothetical representation of the next iteration of the internet.

Even with VR technology's continuous growth, its widespread adoption remains long overdue. This can largely be attributed to an affliction called cybersickness, an analog to …

Exploring Gastrointestinal Health In Mecp2 Duplication Syndrome, Davut Pehlivan, Muharrem Ak, Daniel G Glaze, Bernhard Suter, Kathleen J Motil

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

BACKGROUND: MECP2 duplication syndrome (MDS) is a rare neurogenetic syndrome caused by duplications of MECP2 at the Xq28 region. Although constipation and gastrointestinal reflux are reported in MDS, a comprehensive characterization of gastrointestinal health has not been fully explored.

METHODS: We conducted a parent survey to explore the characteristics of gastrointestinal health in individuals with MDS using a secure online registry and compared differences in gastrointestinal symptoms between individuals with MDS and those with Rett syndrome (RTT).

KEY RESULTS: One hundred six surveys were analyzed. Symptoms commonly associated with constipation occurred in 72% to 89% of MDS individuals. Eleven percent …

On The Topology Of The Noosphere, Julie A. Yusupova

Journal of Conscious Evolution

As a young child I had a certain set of dreams, the enigma of which remained mysteriously hovering in my memories to this day. In one of these earliest dreams of my life, I am playing hide-and-seek with my friends, but am observing myself from an external third-person perspective, just as all my dreams had regularly been until then. I remember that the next morning, my waking conscious mind had noticed this split between self and observer and judged it unusual, and so in the following night’s dream, I somehow willed my observer self to merge into the body of …

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 …

The Processing Of Task-Relevant And Task-Irrelevant Information In Working Memory, Stephanie M. Saltzmann

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers have aimed to better understand the capacity limits and boundaries of working memory (WM) for decades. With a growing body of literature, researchers have started to direct their focus to identifying and understanding specific processes of WM. Information enters WM and is processed differently based on bottom-up (i.e., feature-driven) and top-down (i.e., task-driven) processes. Specifically, the current dissertation aimed to better understand how task-relevant and irrelevant information is maintained, selection, and prioritized in WM. In Chapter 1, we explored how the maintenance of task-relevant information in WM impacts the maintenance of task-irrelevant information. During a hybrid search task, participants …

Incorporating Poi As A Therapeutic Modality For Preschool Aged Children In The Care Clinic, Danielle Zirkle

Department of Occupational Therapy Entry-Level Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Women's Interracial Friendships: Cultivating Coalitional Possibilities Across Difference Through Dialogue, Akie Fukushige Wenk

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, I thread through the macro-structure as well as micro-operations of hegemonic ideologies, namely white-supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy (hooks, 1995, Valdes, 1996), that has historically plagued the United States, eventually gaining a global reach over time. I center interracial friendship between Black and White cis-women, where I locate coalitional possibilities that begin at the grassroots level. I situate this interracial relationship within the socio-ecological system where the personal meets the social (including racialized backgrounds). I use a series of analogies to equate these ideologies as toxins in the air, water, and soil. Soil is where we can work …

Comparison Between The Effects Of Acute Physical And Psychosocial Stress On Feedback-Based Learning, Xiao Yang, Brittany Nackley, Bruce H. Friedman

Psychology Faculty Publications

Stress modulates feedback-based learning, a process that has been implicated in declining mental function in aging and mental disorders. While acute physical and psychosocial stressors have been used interchangeably in studies on feedback-based learning, the two types of stressors involve distinct physiological and psychological processes. Whether the two types of stressors differentially influence feedback processing remains unclear. The present study compared the effects of physical and psychosocial stressors on feedback-based learning. Ninety-six subjects (Mage = 19.11 years; 50 female) completed either a cold pressor task (CPT) or mental arithmetic task (MAT), as the physical or psychosocial stressor, while electrocardiography and …

Rethinking Attention Control: An Individual Differences Approach, Vincent A. Medina

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

While there is extensive literature on visual spatial attention, less is known about auditory spatial attention, especially in terms of attention control. There is also a growing literature highlighting the importance of considering individual differences in attention control ability. Given these points, the purpose of this study was twofold. The first was to understand how auditory attention control is influenced by spatial location as well as vision. The second was to examine whether individual differences in attention control ability can predict task performance in that context. We utilized two tasks for these purposes. Experiment 1a consisted of a cross-modal Stroop …

Animal Communication And Sentience, Catia Correia-Caeiro, Katja Liebal

Animal Sentience

Segundo-Ortin & Calvo (S&C) argue for sentience in plants on the basis of several studies of what they describe as "cognitive abilities" in plants. As other commentaries (e.g., Brooks Pribac, 2023; Damasio & Damasio, 2023; ten Cate, 2023) have pointed out, however, there is some misuse of several concepts, and a lack of evidence for sentience. We try to clarify three questions in S&C’s discussion: (1) How is communication defined and conceptualised in animal research? (2) Is plant communication comparable to animal communication? (3) Is communication (or the process we see in plants) a good basis for inferring sentience in …

Using An Approach-Avoidance Framework To Understand The Relationship Between Non-Lethal Weapons And Performance, Andrew J. Mojica, Christopher P. Bartak, Joseph N. Mitchell, Alan Ashworth

Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments

It is proposed that performance degradation from exposure to non-lethal technology is mediated by impulsive and reflective approachavoidance motivation. An approach-avoidance motivational framework was used to specify a four-stage information processing model that predicts performance degradation. The first stage is Evaluation: it processes physiological, sensory, perceptual, and cognitive information. The second stage is Comparison: it processes the content of the Evaluation into avoidance and approach motivational indices. The third stage is Probability: it processes information from previous stages into a probability of choosing to continue or abandon goal-directed behavior. Finally, the fourth stage is Performance: it processes performance accuracy on …

An Erp Measure Of Non-Conscious Memory Reveals Dissociable Implicit Processes In Human Recognition Using An Open-Source Automated Analytic Pipeline, Richard J. Addante, Javier Lopez-Calderon, Nathan Allen, Carter Luck, Alana Muller, Lindsey Sirianni, Cory S. Inman, Daniel L. Drake

Psychology Student Publications

Non-conscious processing of human memory has traditionally been difficult to objectively measure and thus understand. A prior study on a group of hippocampal amnesia (N = 3) patients and healthy controls (N = 6) used a novel procedure for capturing neural correlates of implicit memory using event-related potentials (ERPs): old and new items were equated for varying levels of memory awareness, with ERP differences observed from 400 to 800 ms in bilateral parietal regions that were hippocampal-dependent. The current investigation sought to address the limitations of that study by increasing the sample of healthy subjects (N = …

Destined Failure, Chengjun Pan

Masters Theses

I attempt to examine the complex structure of human communication, explaining why it is bound to fail. By reproducing experienceable phenomena, I demonstrate how they can expose communication structure and reveal the limitations of our perception and symbolization.I divide the process of communication into six stages: input, detection, symbolization, dictionary, interpretation, and output. In this thesis, I examine the flaws and challenges that arise in the first five stages. I argue that reception acts as a filter and that understanding relies on a symbolic system that is full of redundancies. Therefore, every interpretation is destined to be a deviation.

Phantom Spaces, Craytonia Williams Ii

Masters Theses

The world is built on ‘what-ifs’ and ‘I hopes.’ The more one can dream, the further development goes in design. We are told anything is possible if you put your mind to it, and as we have lived through many different eras, the limit in which we extend our mind has expanded. Research shows that emotional and mental instability has risen over 50% in the past decade in people under 30. How does the understanding of emotions and trauma impact the understanding and the feelings attached to designed spaces for rest and rehabilitation. We are constantly observing and adapting to …

​​The Effects Of Viewpoint, Motion, And Affordance Priming On Perceptual Learning Of Feelies​, Catherine Dowell

Dissertations

According to Gibson and Gibson (1955) perceptual learning is a process of developing the skill to differentiate previously undifferentiated but available information. The initial investigations focused on object identification, lacking a behaviorally relevant functional task. In the current study participants learned to differentiate between novel objects (feelies). To test the role of visual exploration objects were viewed from either a side or a top view and were displayed as either static pictures or rotating about a vertical axis. In Experiment 1 a simple object discrimination task was used. Perfect accuracy was achieved sooner in static conditions compared to motion conditions …

Slow Speed Rail: The Social, Psychological And Environmental Benefits Of Long-Distance Train Travel, Vincent Gragnani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Long-distance train travel in the United States is slow, inefficient and woefully underfunded. Trains are routinely delayed for freight traffic. Many major cities are served in the middle of the night, or not at all. And the cost of a sleeping compartment is far out of reach for most Americans. This is all in stark contrast to the reliable services offered across Europe and parts of Asia. But for the 3.5 million people who ride Amtrak’s long-distance trains every year, the experience can be a fulfilling one. This web-based project, slowspeedrail.com, explores these benefits, namely, an intimacy with the landscape …

The Effects Of Music Therapy On Elderly Adults With Dementia, Jeante J. Jackson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As people age, the brain is more susceptible to changes that diminish cognitive function. In recent years neuroscience has found convergent evidence between music therapy and brain architecture, as it has shown the generation of new connections in the brain or a reorganization and possible strengthening of existing connections already in the brain. However, the literature regarding music training’s effects on executive control, selective attention, and speech processing is lacking particularly when it comes to older populations.

This study investigated Verbal Working Memory, Visuospatial Attention and Task Initiation, and Auditory Selective Attention in a 91-year-old adult (B.P.) diagnosed with dementia. …

Voiding The Unwanted Self: An Examination Of Racialized Violence In The United States, Benjamin Stark

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is concerned with the role of the psychic defenses projection and projective identification in the processes which lead to racialized violence in the United States. The dissertation posits that projection has been less considered as a primary driver of racialized violence than other psychic processes and should be better integrated into psychological research and literature on racialized violence. The thesis begins with a detailed examination of two instances of racialized violence, the first a macro example of nation vs. nation: the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, before which the United States fantasized Iraq was developing weapons …

Mapping The Conceptualization Of Gender In Gambling Literature, Abu Saleh Mohammad Sowad

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

This study maps the existing conceptualization of gender in peer-reviewed gambling scholarship to locate areas of future inquiry for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender and gambling. In this study, we located the literature relevant to the conceptualization of gender in gambling published between 2000-2020 by searching eight academic databases using Boolean operators and various key search terms, yielding 31,533 results. After a thorough screening based on inclusion/exclusion criteria and excluding duplicates, we located 2,532 journal publications that addressed gender and gambling. Among them, 53.4% used gender as a descriptive demographic variable, 44.3% explored the comparative analysis between …

Creating Project Contrast: A Video Game Exploring Consciousness And Qualia, Pierce Papke

Honors Projects

Project Contrast is a video game that explores how the unique traits inherent to video games might engage reflective player responses to qualitative experience. Project Contrast does this through suspension of disbelief, avatar projection, presence, player agency in storytelling, visual perception, functional gameplay, and art. Considering the difficulty in researching qualitative experience due to its subjectivity and circular explanations, I created Project Contrast not to analyze qualia, though that was my original hope. I instead created Project Contrast as an avenue for player self-reflection and learning about qualitative experience. While video games might be just code and art on a …

The Benefits Of Art Therapy On Stress And Anxiety Of Oncology Patients During Treatment, Helen Shiepe

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Within the last ten years research on art therapy and its positive impact on oncology patients’ stress and anxiety during treatment has been minimal. Oncology patients whether they are children or adults when diagnosed experience similar reactions due to their diagnosis, treatment, and in some cases end of life care. The current question is whether or not art therapy does have a positive impact on decreasing the stress and anxiety with oncology patients while undergoing treatment. Deane, Fitch & Carmen (2000), discussed art therapy as a healing art that is “intended to integrate physical, emotional, and spiritual care by facilitating …

Cognitive Dissonance: Analysis Of The Theory, Marcus Crespo

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

Cognitive dissonance arises as a person experiences discomfort when their belief does not align with their behavior. Cognitive dissonance can be divided into three categories: irrelevance, dissonance, and consonance; it also can viewed in terms of what it is and what effects it produces for an individual. Studies have shown the struggles and inconsistencies that arise when people experience conflict between who they want to be and who they actually are. This paper examines cognitive dissonance at length and assesses the current theoretical models that exist to describe cognitive dissonance.

Extracting Edges In Space And Time During Visual Fixations, Lynn Schmittwilken, Marianne Maertens

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

A Signal Detection Model For The Analysis Of Continuous Response Gradients And An Application To Confidence Rating Data, Fabian A. Soto

MODVIS Workshop

see attached

Modelling Pairwise Comparisons For Thurstonian Scaling And Kendall Rank Correlation, Maarten Wijntjes

MODVIS Workshop

Pairwise comparisons are a simple and effective way to measure the relative ordering of two samples. For more than two samples, a global ordering can be constructed and with sufficient data it is possible to construct a metric scale, for example by using Thurstonian scaling. We will discuss the concept of Number of Distinguishable Levels (NDLs) that emerges from a Thurstonian scaling procedure. The NDL is the attribute range in terms of Just Noticeable Differences (JNDs), for example the number of grayscale values. The NDL is either limited by the visual system or by the range of stimuli. The latter …

Evaluating Models Of Scanpath Prediction, Matthias Kümmerer, Matthias Bethge

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Modeling The Spread Of Object-Based Attention During Free Viewing, Nicolas Roth, Olga Shurygina, Flora Marleen Muscinelli, Klaus Obermayer, Martin Rolfs

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

A Dynamical Model Of Binding In Visual Cortex During Incremental Grouping And Search, Daniel Schmid, Daniel A. Braun, Heiko Neumann

MODVIS Workshop

Binding of visual information is crucial for several perceptual tasks. To incrementally group an object, elements in a space-feature neighborhood need to be bound together starting from an attended location (Roelfsema, TICS, 2005). To perform visual search, candidate locations and cued features must be evaluated conjunctively to retrieve a target (Treisman&Gormican, Psychol Rev, 1988). Despite different requirements on binding, both tasks are solved by the same neural substrate. In a model of perceptual decision-making, we give a mechanistic explanation for how this can be achieved. The architecture consists of a visual cortex module and a higher-order thalamic module. While the …