Cognition and Perception Commons^™

The Role Of Top-Down Attention In Statistical Learning Of Speech, Stacey Reyes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Statistical learning (SL) refers to the ability to extract regularities in the environment and has been well-documented to play a key role in speech segmentation and language acquisition. Whether SL is automatic or requires top-down attention is an unresolved question, with conflicting results in the literature. The current proposal tests whether SL can occur outside the focus of attention. Participants either focused towards, or diverted their attention away from an auditory speech stream made of repeating nonsense trisyllabic words. Divided-attention participants either performed a concurrent visual task or a language-related task during exposure to the nonsense speech stream, while control …

A Sense Of Proportion: How Humans Process Relative Magnitudes In Space And Time, Rebekka Lagace-Cusiac

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Humans perceive ratios for different spatial magnitudes such as length, area, and numerosity, and temporal magnitudes such as duration. Previous studies have shown that spatial ratios may be processed by a common ratio processing system. The aim of the current study was to determine whether ratios across spatial and temporal domains may also be processed by a common system. Two hundred and seventy-five participants completed a series of spatial and temporal ratio estimation and magnitude discrimination tasks. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the relationship between ratio processing across domains when controlling for absolute magnitude processing ability. Results …

Does Culture Affect The Ability To Learn And Use Categories?, Maya Ghai, Zarah Ghulamhussain

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The rapid advancement of cross-cultural research in recent decades has raised questions on the extent to which findings in cognitive psychology can be generalized to a global population. The majority of subjects in scientific literature, being WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations, only represent a sliver of the world’s diverse demographics, limiting our scope of psychological data to a highly specific subgroup. Emerging research has made us increasingly aware of the variances in cognition across cultures, including the learning and utilization of categories. Many lab-based categorization tasks have demonstrated that cognitive processes may be contingent on cultural factors. …

Neural Representation Of Stimulus Category Membership Across Modalities, Carson Rumble-Tricker

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Category learning is a process through which common features among category members, distinctive features among non-members, or even both, are identified (Hammer et al., 2009). This process is a critical aspect of cognition and can guide decision making and information inference. Furthermore, category learning is involved among a large number of stimuli, including visual (Folstein et al., 2013), auditory (Ley et al., 2012), olfactory (Qu et al., 2016), and multisensory (Viganòa, Borghesani, & Piazza, 2021) stimuli.

The aim of this systematic review is to determine and qualitatively analyze studies that investigate the changes in the neural representations of stimuli that …

Likelihood And Familiarity In The Simulation Of Future Events, Claudia Morales Valiente

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Episodic future thinking is the ability to project the self forward in time to pre-experience an event (Atance & O’Neill, 2001). Understanding how people think about potential future events is an important component of human memory research. We investigated whether and how episodic future thinking is influenced by a person's belief of the likelihood of its future occurrence in their lives, as well as a person's familiarity with that type of event based on their past experience. The combined and individual effects of these variables have been minimally studied, particularly likelihood. We used three norming studies to develop participant-specific sets …

Visual Perception In Hearing Sign Language Users, Jessica M. Lammert

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Deaf signers exhibit superior visual perception compared to hearing controls in several domains, including the perception of faces and peripheral motion. These visual enhancements are thought to compensate for an absence of auditory input. However, it is also possible that they reflect experience using a visual-manual language, where signers must process complex moving hand signs and facial cues simultaneously. Thus, the current study sought to isolate the effects of sign language experience by examining how visual perception is altered as a function of American Sign Language (ASL) proficiency in hearing individuals. Hearing signers completed an online test of ASL proficiency …

Using Cognitive Dissonance To Encourage Covid-Preventive Behaviours, Xuanqiao Wang

Brescia Psychology Undergraduate Honours Theses

This study investigated whether a hypocrisy-based intervention would increase students’ intentions to engage in COVID-preventive behaviours. We hypothesized that participants in the hypocrisy-induction condition (experimental condition) would express higher levels of intention to engage in COVID-preventative behaviours than participants in whom hypocrisy has not been induced (control condition). The sample consisted of 2 male and 64 female undergraduate students at Brescia University College. An independent t-test was conducted on the intention rating scores of practicing COVID-preventative behaviours for the experimental and control conditions. It was found that there was no significant difference in the average intention rating score between the …