Psychology Commons^™

Measuring Neural Time Series Data In A Sensory Deprivation Tank, Jackson Gregory, Tian Lan, Uri Maoz, Amir Raz

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

We are interested in studying the neurological and physiological effects of the float pod, also known as REST therapy, or sensory deprivation tank. Float pods rely on the concept of depriving most senses (from sound and light to temperature and proprioception) in a pool filled with buoyant salt water at body temperature. While float pods are most commonly used in spa environments, we intend to look at the potential benefits of floating under the empirical lens. In this study, we aim to measure neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG). We intend to look at the different levels of relaxation and the …

Increasing Adult's Awareness Of The Importance Of End-Of-Life Care Discussions, Taylor Gardner

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

For many American families, end-of-life care is often not discussed, until advanced illness or injury has fully disrupted everyday life. There are many benefits to discussing end-of-life care prior to any medical complications. Research has shown that individuals who plan their end-of-life processes with a hospice service provider and family members report a higher quality of death than individuals receiving common health care during their final six months of life. In order to make families and friends more comfortable with end-of-life discussions, I will conduct two one-hour educational sessions to students at California State University, Monterey Bay.

Electrophysiological Correlates Of Visual Object Category Formation In A Prototype-Distortion Task, Stephanie Marie Long

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In perceptual learning studies, participants engage in extensive training in the discrimination of visual stimuli in order to modulate perceptual performance. Much of the literature in perceptual learning has looked at the induction of the reorganization of low-level representations in V1. However, much remains to be understood about the mechanisms behind how the adult brain (an expert in visual object categorization) extracts high-level visual objects from the environment and categorically represents them in the cortical visual hierarchy. Here, I used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural mechanisms involved in object representation formation during a hybrid visual search and prototype …

Familiarization Through Ambient Images Alone, Nia Imani Gipson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The term “ambient images” has begun to show up in much of the current literature on facial recognition. Ambient images refer to naturally occurring views of a face that captures the idiosyncratic ways in which a target face may vary (Ritchie & Burton, 2017). Much of the literature on ambient images have concluded that exposing people to ambient images of a target face can lead to improved facial recognition for that target face. Some studies have even suggested that familiarity is the result of increased exposure to ambient images of a target face (Burton, Kramer, Ritchie, & Jenkins, 2016). The …

Effects Of Genre Tag Complexity On Popular Music Perception And Enjoyment, Lauren Shepherd

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popular online streaming platform Spotify added over 1400 genre tags in the last two years. Despite that numerous artists and composition competitions claim to seek projects that “transcend the traditional notion of genre,” the industry has only added more complex and mystifying genre labels. This dichotomy between artists and industry ignores the effects these labels have on consumers. Do more complex genre tags enhance the listening experience for the average consumer by providing additional information about what they are about to hear? The current research seeks to examine the effects of the granularity of genre tags on popular music …

Differentiating Cognitive Deficits Between Adhd And In Utero Polysubstance Exposure, Dylan J. Seitz

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

ADHD is the most prevalent psychiatric disorder in children, affecting their executive and overall well-being as a result (Barkley, 2014; Shaw, Gogtay, & Rapoport, 2010). A rampant increase in new diagnoses of ADHD suggests the potential for misdiagnosis. Stimulants are the first line of treatment and associated with a number of deleterious long-term consequences for those misdiagnosed (Urban & Gao, 2014a). This is of particular concern for children prenatally exposed to substances as in utero use acts on similar neural mechanisms impacted by ADHD – leaving the children vulnerable to misdiagnosis and contraindicated intervention (Derauf, Kekatpure, Neyzi, Lester, & Kosofsky, …

Serial Neuropsychological Assessment Toward A Reliable Concussion Protocol, Daniel J. Soden

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

With more than 10,000 Sports Related Concussions (SRCs) per year at the collegiate level, interdisciplinary teams are often tasked with determining when an athlete may return to activity (Zuckerman et al., 2015). Due to neurochemical changes following an SRC, athletes are vulnerable to further injury if they suffer another head injury before given appropriate time to heal (Giza & Hovda, 2014). Cognitive testing is routinely utilized to detect the presence of cognitive dysfunction and aid in individualized treatment planning. Because athletes often demonstrate practice effects when retested, it is difficult to distinguish if the athlete is demonstrating cognitive dysfunction. Reliable …

Contagious Or Not Contagious: Is That The Question? Evaluating The Effects Of Disease Contagion On Memory For Word Lists, Laura Pazos

Honors Theses

Researchers have suggested that individuals possess a disease-avoidance system designed to detect and remember potential sources of harmful pathogens, a system termed the behavioral immune system. Recently, Fernandes, Pandeirada, Soares, and Nairne (2017) reported an increase in memory for objects associated with individuals that are contaminated with a disease. My thesis extends this finding by examining whether disease-related memory benefits are due to the mere presence of a disease or whether the disease needs to be perceived as contagious and thereby threatening to facilitate memory. Two experiments, one between- and one within-subjects, were designed to test memory performance in the …

Music, Language, And Rhythmic Timing, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neural, perceptual, and cognitive oscillations synchronize with rhythmic events in both speech (Luo & Poeppel, 2007) and music (Snyder & Large, 2005). This synchronization decreases perceptual thresholds to temporally predictable events (Lawrance et al., 2014), improves task performance (Ellis & Jones, 2010), and enables speech intelligibility (Peelle & Davis, 2012). Despite implications of music-language transfer effects for improving language outcomes (Gordon et al., 2015), proposals that shared neural and cognitive resources underlie music and speech rhythm perception (e.g., Tierney & Kraus, 2014) are not yet substantiated. The present research aimed to explore this potential overlap by testing whether music-induced oscillations …

Effects Of Critical Reflection On University Students’ Cognitive Achievement In Agricultural Mechanization, Patterson P. Hilaire

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Experiential learning continues to play a vital role in agricultural education and mechanization laboratories (Shoulders & Myers, 2013). An essential component of experiential learning is critical reflection. Critical reflection helps students process and construct meaning from laboratory experiences. A study conducted by Shoulders and Myers (2013) revealed that only 15.4% of the agricultural educators the researchers interviewed incorporated reflective practices laboratory experiences. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of critical reflection on students’ achievement following five agricultural mechanization laboratory activities. The results from this study revealed that critical reflection had a consistently positive effect on immediate …

The Role Of Dreams, Intuition, And Social Influences On Conscious Decision-Making Processes, Robert Bouffard

Senior Honors Projects

The average person makes approximately 35,000 conscious decisions per day, which, accounting for the daily amount of sleep a person gets, is equivalent to a decision madeevery two seconds. Upon realizing the frequency, I sought to find a distinctive connectionbetween the conscious and unconscious when it pertains to how people make decisions. I hypothesized that people make decisions regarding their personal relationships with the help of intuition, which I considered to be the ultimate link between our dreams and our conscious thought. I also believed the concept of intuition was entirely dependent on our processing and decoding of dreams. In …

Beyond Right Or Wrong: The Influences Of Thinking Disposition And Item Difficulty On Student Behavior During High-Stakes Testing, Kristina Lindquist

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A hallmark of clinician decision making is the ability to know when to make quick decisions and when decision making should be slowed to account for complicating factors. Throughout the physician training process, multiple choice test items are used to assess student knowledge however, these items do not assess the process used by a student to arrive at the answer choice. If an important characteristic of decisions in clinical practice is timing, then decision timing could be an important consideration for medical school assessments. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to investigate factors that may affect the amount of …

Sherwood's "Creative Approaches To Cbt: Art Activities For Every Stage Of The Cbt Process" (Book Review), Julianne Burnett

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

Face Affect Perception In Schizophrenia And Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Lisa Beckman

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Schizophrenia (SZ) and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are often comorbid psychological disorders. Separately, research has previously demonstrated deficits in social cognition, including affect recognition impairment in both disorders; however, less is reliably known about the specific deficits unique to a comorbid diagnosis of SZ and PTSD. This study examined the ability to correctly identify facial expressions in individuals diagnosed with SZ (n = 38) and PTSD alone (n = 20), comorbid SZ and PTSD (n = 26), and healthy controls (n = 28). Participants were administered a test battery to establish diagnoses of of schizophrenia and PTSD, and to evaluate …

Reconsolidation: Unique Cognitive Process Or State Dependent Learning?, Chris Kiley

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Accessing a previously consolidated memory trace brings it back into a labile state where it must then undergo a re-stabilization process known as reconsolidation. During this process memories are susceptible to interference and may be updated with new information. Reconsolidation has been demonstrated in animals as well as in the procedural and episodic human memory systems. However, it is still unclear when the effect will occur. Some studies suggest that reconsolidation is only necessary when new information is presented in the same spatial context or when prediction error occurs. More recent work has provided evidence that reconsolidation could be due …

Does It Matter Whether You Or Your Brain Did It? An Empirical Investigation Of The Influence Of The Double Subject Fallacy On Moral Responsibility Judgments, Uri Maoz, Kellienne R. Sita, Jeroen J. A. Van Boxtel, Liad Mudrik

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Despite progress in cognitive neuroscience, we are still far from understanding the relations between the brain and the conscious self. We previously suggested that some neuroscientific texts that attempt to clarify these relations may in fact make them more difficult to understand. Such texts—ranging from popular science to high-impact scientific publications—position the brain and the conscious self as two independent, interacting subjects, capable of possessing opposite psychological states. We termed such writing ‘Double Subject Fallacy’ (DSF). We further suggested that such DSF language, besides being conceptually confusing and reflecting dualistic intuitions, might affect people’s conceptions of moral responsibility, lessening the …

The Effect Of Color On Time Perception And Task Performance, Jake Hensz, Max Hart, Melissa Banuelos, Chad Shire

STEM Student Research Symposium Posters

Program: BS in Psychological Science

IRB#: Pro2018000277

The current study investigates the relationship between color and time perception. Prior research suggests that red stimuli create a greater temporal distortion than other colors, and that the direction of the distortion (i.e. underestimation or overestimation) varies with context. Research also shows that red stimuli tend to have negative effects on performance in academic contexts, perhaps due to the psychological and physiological arousal. This study specifically investigates the effect of arousal on this relationship, being the first to investigate the relationship between red, time perception, arousal, and task performance on a concurrent task …

The Effects Of Language In Music On Memory, Cat Terrell

Undergraduate Theses

This thesis focused on the effect of both instrumental and vocal music on performance on cognitive tests designed to test memory in order to gain more insight into whether the presence of language in music affects memory. Four hypotheses were tested concerning the effect of music type, question type, the interaction of the two, and personal experience with music/music training on memory assessment performance. The study found no significant effect of background condition on memory assessment performance, a significant effect of question type on memory assessment performance, no significant effect of the interaction between background condition and question type on …

The Effects Of Cognitive Stimulation Of Instagram On Anxiety, Fear Of Missing Out, Memory, And Self-Esteem, Anna Destino

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

With the increasing use of social media in the daily lives of undergraduate college students, it is important to investigate the effects of social media on psychological well-being and cognitive function. Lillard and Peterson (2011) found that overstimulating children’s televisions shows, such as SpongeBob, negatively impacted children’s impulsive behaviors and attention. The current research focused on emerging adults and considered the effect of overstimulation of social media, specifically Instagram, on anxiety level, self-esteem, fear of missing out (FoMo), and memory. Participants were randomly assigned into either the control (coloring on an Ipad) or experimental (Instagram stimulation) group and after a …

The Limits Of Sociality, Johnna B. Mcgovern

Theses

There is a longstanding tradition in Western philosophy of emphasizing the capacity for reflection in theories about humans’ characteristic nature. In Talking to Ourselves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency, John Doris attempts to shift the focus to an emphasis on human sociality. Particularly, Doris argues that sociality, both implicitly and in the form of collaborative reasoning, is what makes humans best equipped for moral improvement. This collaborativism possesses a defining role in his account of agency and responsibility. This thesis attempts to gain an understanding of how sociality affects moral behavior and to argue that it is not conducive to agency …

The Epistemic And Psychological Mechanisms Perpetuating Racism Within The Criminal Justice System, Danielle Walker

Theses

Abstract

Many attempts have been made by philosophers, political activists, psychologists, historians, social advocates, and others to explain the mechanisms at play in the perpetuation and resulting manifestations of systemic and institutional racism. On one side of the debate there lies a theory that there is an epistemic failure at the root of racial bias towards Blacks, white ignorance, a collective amnesia regarding what has and does take place in society, as it pertains to their oppression and isolation, like the view of philosopher Charles W. Mills. According to Mills, this type of ignorance, or non-knowing, is a cognitive phenomenon …

Gender Differences In Adhd, Jillian Vogley

Honors Theses

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a learning disability that is very prevalent in today’s society. A closer look at this disability reveals that there are differences with males and females with regards to how the symptoms manifest. Females have a tendency to exhibit inattention whereas males are often hyperactive, which is much more obvious to others around them. This difference in symptoms has led to a drastic difference in terms of how ADHD is diagnosed and causes it to be underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed in females compared to males. The consequences that this delayed diagnosis may have on females can be severe. …

Verbatim And Gist Extraction Among University Colleges, Ashley Mcmillon

Undergraduate Research Conference

Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT) posits that individuals use two different cognitive processes in encoding, storing, and retrieving information. One process (verbatim) encodes the details of the information, applying cost/benefit analysis when used for a decision. The other process (gist) encodes relational information extracted from the information and uses more intuition when applied to decisions. Often, use of one process over another can lead to different decisions. Further, there exists individual differences in the skill and preference for using these processes.

The current study examined whether differences in verbatim, and gist skill or preference would vary by university college (STEM, or …

The Art Of Learning, Richard Rolapp

Marriott Student Review

No abstract provided.

Increasing The Frequency Of Tutors' Reinforcement Of Compliance Behaviors, Sruthi Rameshkumar

Honors Theses

Abstract

Compliance behaviors occurring prior to the delivery of an instruction, such as handing over preferred items, making eye contact, and folding hands in the ready position help prepare students for success in discrete-trial training (DTT) interventions. These behaviors are usually taught in early intervention with a continuous reinforcement schedule, but once they are mastered, they are rarely revisited or maintained. Without intermittent reinforcement of these behaviors, they are likely to decrease in frequency and may lead to the use of restrictive or intrusive methods to gain compliance during DTT sessions. The current study used a multiple-baseline across participants design …

What Influences Language Impairement In Bilingual Aphasia? A Meta-Analytic Review, Ekaterina Kuzmina, Mira Goral, Monica Norvik, Brendan S. Weekes

Publications and Research

Patterns of language impairment in multilingual speakers with post-stroke aphasia are diverse: in some cases the language deficits are parallel, that is, all languages are impaired relatively equally, whereas in other cases deficits are differential, that is, one language is more impaired than the other(s). This diversity stems from the intricate structure of the multilingual language system, which is shaped by a complex interplay of influencing factors, such as age of language acquisition, frequency of language use, premorbid proficiency, and linguistic similarity between one’s languages. Previous theoretical reviews and empirical studies shed some light on these factors, however no clear …

Lexical Influence In Phoneme Perception With Non-Degraded And Spectrally-Degraded Speech, Jane Bradley Smart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In speech perception tasks with ambiguous bottom-up information, lexical processes have been shown to influence listener responses, such as in phoneme categorization tasks (Ganong, 1980). Proponents of interactive theories of speech perception and spoken word recognition assert this influence is a top-down feedback mechanism that can affect bottom-up perceptual processes (e.g., McClelland & Elman, 1986). While robust influences on phoneme perception have been reported in multiple studies (Connine & Clifton, 1987; Ganong, 1980; Gow, Segawa, Ahlfors, & Lin, 2008; Pitt & Samuel, 1993; among others), some phonetic contrasts, particularly those that distinguish place of articulation, have been tested in very …

Cbt Plus Humor-Based Psychology Interventions: A Review Of The Research, Rachel Thompson

Psychology Capstone Projects

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been demonstrated to be one of the most popular and useful psychological interventions used today (Ellis & Harper,1975; Bredemeier, Beck, & Grant, 2018; Jaya, Ascone, & Lincoln, 2018). However, a limitation of CBT is that it pathologizes behavior. Positive psychology is a supplementary theory that focuses on increasing positive emotions during psychological interventions and does not pathologize behavior. A limitation of studying positive emotions is due to the overlapping relationships between positive emotions. Positive emotions are highly related and are difficult to measure individually as opposed to negative emotions. Humor, amusement/mirth, is an observable positive …

The Influence Of Aging, Gaze Direction, And Context On Emotion Discrimination Performance, Alyssa Renee Minton

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examined how younger and older adults differ in their ability to discriminate between pairs of emotions of varying degrees of similarity when presented with an averted or direct gaze in either a neutral, congruent, or incongruent emotional context. For Task 1, participants were presented with three blocks of emotion pairs (i.e., anger/disgust, sadness/disgust, and fear/disgust) and were asked to indicate which emotion was being expressed. The actors’ gaze direction was manipulated such that emotional facial expressions were depicted with a direct gaze or an averted gaze. For Task 2, the same stimuli were placed into emotional contexts (e.g., …

Whose Drive Is It Anyway? Using Multiple Sequential Drives To Establish Patterns Of Learned Trust, Error Cost, And Non-Active Trust Repair While Considering Daytime And Nighttime Differences As A Proxy For Difficulty, Scott Mishler

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Semi-autonomous driving is a complex task domain with a broad range of problems to consider. The human operator’s role in semi-autonomous driving is crucial because safety and performance depends on how the operator interacts with the system. Drive difficulty has not been extensively studied in automated driving systems and thus is not well understood. Additionally, few studies have studied trust development, decline, or repair over multiple drives for automated driving systems. The goal of this study was to test the effect of perceived driving difficulty on human trust in the automation and how trust is dynamically learned, reduced due to …