Cognition and Perception Commons^™

The Effects Of Acute Exercise On Retrieval Induced Forgetting, Walter Simpson

Honors Theses

Retrieval Induced Forgetting (RIF) is a type of active forgetting that may play beneficial and detrimental roles in long-term memory. The benefit of the retrieval of certain information is that information will become more readily available following subsequent retrieval; a concept termed the retrieval practice effect (RP). The detrimental effect of RIF may be that, upon the subsequent recall of certain information, related information may be inhibited from recall. The effects and mechanisms of RIF have remained a topic of debate among neuroscientists, psychologists, and other related scholars. The goal of this study was to evaluate the effects of acute …

Everyday Memory In People With Down Syndrome, Yingying Yang, Zachary M. Himmelberger, Trent Robinson, Megan Davis, Frances Conners, Edward Merrill

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Although memory functions in people with Down Syndrome (DS) have been studied extensively, how well people with DS remember things about everyday life is not well understood. In the current study, 31 adolescents/young adults with DS and 26 with intellectual disabilities (ID) of mixed etiology (not DS) participated. They completed an everyday memory questionnaire about personal facts and recent events (e.g., school name, breakfast). They also completed a standard laboratory task of verbal long-term memory (LTM) where they recalled a list of unrelated words over trials. Results did not indicate impaired everyday memory, but impaired verbal LTM, in people with …

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 …

Do Emotion Words Influence Age Effects In Delayed Match-To-Sample Performance For Emotional Faces?, Ying-Han Li

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Age differences are apparent in using verbal labels of emotion to categorize emotion face stimuli. Particularly, older adults have more difficulty detecting emotion cues like anger and fear relative to younger adults, but seem to have less difficulty with disgust cues. However, age differences are diminished in situations when participants are limited to two possible emotion choices or are required to simply match stimuli based on emotion cues without the use of labels. One question that emerges from the disparities in these findings is the role that emotion labels themselves play in driving possible age differences in emotion perception. The …

The Effects Of White Noise Exposure On Cognition: An Examination Of The Impacts Of White Noise Presentation On Recall And Cognitive Load, Cordelia Ann Witty

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

White noise has historically been utilized as a tool for offsetting or masking sounds that may be perceived as disruptive, most commonly during the sleeping process. More recently, literature has begun to explore the possibility of using white noise as a tool to suppress these potentially distracting sounds within the area of cognitive processing. Present literature suggests that white noise may be a useful tool for masking noises like these in order to improve cognitive performance, especially for those individuals who may possess inattentive symptoms. However, this research has largely been conducted using tasks that involve working memory or visual …

The Journey Back To Wholeness That Already Is, Jenna Dishy Wes

Journal of Conscious Evolution

If we are born into this world with in an already heightened state of consciousness, at what point in human development do we begin to disconnect? Is the human experience innately traumatic? Through the exploration of Piaget’s stages of development, and in coherence with the concept of transgenerational trauma, I explore moments and modes of intervention, with the intention of building on what is already whole instead of waiting until it is broken. Rather than spending another generation spending our lives trying to heal, reaching for enlightenment and soul connection, what if our end point was actually our beginning one?

Mystical Experience And The Evolution Of Consciousness: A Twenty-First Century Gnosis, Gary Lachman

Journal of Conscious Evolution

This article addresses three ideas: mystical experience, the evolution of consciousness, and gnosis. There are different interpretations of these ideas, so I begin by saying how I intend to understand them. Mystical experience I see as a wider, broader, deeper perception of things and their relations than our usual limited view allows. It provides an ‘unitive’ and ‘participatory’ form of consciousness, in which the usual ‘subject/object’ divide has dissolved. The evolution of consciousness is the notion that our present consciousness is not consciousness per se, but has been arrived at over time. This suggests that there have been other forms …

Decomorose: The Somatic Flowering Of The Living Quality, Shaun J. Martin

Journal of Conscious Evolution

This essay is an exploration of the human maturation process from a transpersonal point of view. The main premise of the essay is the notion that our maturation on the level of consciousness (the living quality) is not synonymous with our bodily maturation or the ongoing construction of our social personality (the identity project). It suggests that transpersonality is a fundamental component in human development, but has been overlooked and left out in most areas of modern culture. The recent rise of mental illnesses and the overall frustration or discontent within our society is a direct result of infrastructures that …

Lawrence Leshan’S Clairvoyant Reality As William James’ Revelation Of Veridical Reality, Jonathan Bricklin

Journal of Conscious Evolution

The “Clairvoyant Reality” of pioneering psychologist Lawrence LeShan and medium Eileen Garrett, reprinted here in honor of LeShan’s recent passing at age 100, may well be the understanding of “veridical reality” that James proclaimed would not be found “in this generation or the next”.

Neurocognitive Interactions Between Anticipatory Anxiety And Memory Encoding, Felicia M. Chaisson

LSU Master's Theses

Although acute anxiety has been shown to improve encoding of threat-relevant information, its effects on threat-neutral information are less understood. Recent research suggests that anxiety can impair subsequent recall for neutral words, particularly following practice with the recall task. Here we use event-related potentials (ERPs) to test the notion that anxiety specifically disrupts the implementation of encoding strategies—such as elaborative encoding—that tend to develop with practice. ERPs were recorded as participants studied two sets of neutral words, one of which was presented in a stressful context using the threat-of-shock paradigm (threat block), and the other in a non-threatening context (safe …

Strategies For Change: Behavior Change Using Self Talk, Kaitlyn Chamberlain

Diet, Food, Exercise, and Nutrition (D-FEND)

Speaker shares how self-talk can help improve our ability to meet our goals.

How Multidimensional Is Emotional Intelligence? Bifactor Modeling Of Global And Broad Emotional Abilities Of The Geneva Emotional Competence Test, Daniel Simonet, Katherine E. Miller, Kevin Askew, Kenneth Sumner, Marcello Mortillaro, Katja Schlegel

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Drawing upon multidimensional theories of intelligence, the current paper evaluates if the Geneva Emotional Competence Test (GECo) fits within a higher-order intelligence space and if emotional intelligence (EI) branches predict distinct criteria related to adjustment and motivation. Using a combination of classical and S-1 bifactor models, we find that (a) a first-order oblique and bifactor model provide excellent and comparably fitting representation of an EI structure with self-regulatory skills operating independent of general ability, (b) residualized EI abilities uniquely predict criteria over general cognitive ability as referenced by fluid intelligence, and (c) emotion recognition and regulation incrementally predict grade point …

Automaticity Of Lexical Access In Deaf And Hearing Bilinguals: Cross-Linguistic Evidence From The Color Stroop Task Across Five Languages, Rain G. Bosworth, Sarah C. Tyler, Eli M. Binder, Jill P. Morford

Articles

The well-known Stroop interference effect has been instrumental in revealing the highly automated nature of lexical processing as well as providing new insights to the underlying lexical organization of first and second languages within proficient bilinguals. The present cross-linguistic study had two goals: 1) to examine Stroop interference for dynamic signs and printed words in deaf ASL-English bilinguals who report no reliance on speech or audiological aids; 2) to compare Stroop interference effects in several groups of bilinguals whose two languages range from very distinct to very similar in their shared orthographic patterns: ASL-English bilinguals (very distinct), Chinese-English bilinguals (low …

Biomechanics Of Trail Running Performance: Quantification Of Spatio-Temporal Parameters By Using Low Cost Sensors In Ecological Conditions, Noé Perrotin, Nicolas Gardan, Arnaud Lesprillier, Clément Le Goff, Jean-Marc Seigneur, Ellie Abdi, Borja Sanudo, Redha Taiar

Publications

The recent popularity of trail running and the use of portable sensors capable of measuring many performance results have led to the growth of new fields in sports science experimentation. Trail running is a challenging sport; it usually involves running uphill, which is physically demanding and therefore requires adaptation to the running style. The main objectives of this study were initially to use three “low-cost” sensors. These low-cost sensors can be acquired by most sports practitioners or trainers. In the second step, measurements were taken in ecological conditions orderly to expose the runners to a real trail course. Furthermore, to …

Phenomenological Study On The Lived Experience Of Black Women In Positions Of Leadership In California State Government, Tonia Burgess

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of Black women in their roles as leaders in the California state government with respect to support received and barriers encountered.

Methodology: The phenomenological qualitative study involved exploring the lived experiences of 12 Black women in positions of leadership in northern California state government with regard to the supports they received and the barriers they encountered during their careers in California state government. Patton (2015) asserted that phenomenology's philosophical interpretation occurs when individuals only know what they experience. Additionally, "to fully understand the phenomenon, it must be …

Effects Of Mindfulness Meditation On Selective, Sustained Attention, Brain Neural Oscillations, And Short-Term Memory, Anamaria Guzman

Honors Theses

The following extended literature review and research proposal study started initially as a complete research proposal but, due to the challenges COVID-19 has brought, it has become a stand-alone piece of work without data collection. The goal is to synthesize a broad range of literature and previous research on mindfulness meditation and its effects on attention, memory, and brain activity and thus, offering a new perspective and a proposed research path on this subject. This proposed research study, besides previous studies, indicates that mindfulness meditation is expected to improve and enhance selective and sustained attention, which results in better attentional …

Fundamental Principles Of Metacognition: A Qualitative Study Of Metacognition, Pedagogy And Transformation, Philip Hulbig

Educational Studies Dissertations

This study investigated the transformative quality of a metacognitive education. It examined a transformative metacognitive education from both the subjective personal perspective of the student who has gone through the process of transformation and the more objective pedagogical perspective of the professors who work to bring forth such transformational experiences in their students. Through interview and analysis these perspectives were integrated to produce a pedagogical theoretical framework derived from experience and grounded in observations about metacognition across various scientific disciplines. The personal elements of metacognition that promote educational transformation from within the students were contrasted with the pedagogical approaches of …

The Effect Of The Difference In The Perception Of Temperature Between Sexes On The Academic Performance Of Chapin High School Students, Tiffany V. Phan

Journal of the South Carolina Academy of Science

Mental performance and mental functions may be negatively affected by decreases in thermal comfort as a result of large differences in temperature. Additionally, females are seen to be less content with room temperatures and actually prefer rooms with higher temperatures in comparison to males. This investigation explored the potential effect that sex plays in thermal perception and the impact it may yield on academic performance within a high school population. It was hypothesized that female students would experience an increase in academic performance as the temperature increased while males would experience the opposite effect. A quasi-experimental approach was used to …

An Evaluation Of Wayfinding Abilities In Adolescent And Young Adult Males With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Yingying Yang, Weijia Li, Dan Huang, Wei He, Yanxi Zhang, Edward Merrill

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Background

Wayfinding refers to traveling from place to place in the environment. Despite some research headway, it remains unclear whether individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show strengths, weaknesses, or similarities in wayfinding compared with ability-matched typically developing (TD) controls.

Method

The current study tested 24 individuals with ASD, 24 mental-ability (MA) matched TD (MA-TD) controls, and 24 chronological-age (CA) matched TD (CA-TD) controls. Participants completed a route learning task and a survey learning task, both programmed in virtual environments, and a perspective taking task. Their parents completed questionnaires assessing their children’s everyday wayfinding activities and competence.

Results

Overall, CA-TD …

Database Of Picture-Based Cognitive Reappraisal Experiments: Analyses Of Trial-Level Factors, Damon Abraham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cognitive reappraisal is widely recognized as an effective emotion regulation strategy for managing negative emotions. In laboratory research, reappraisal has been shown to attenuate self-reported negative affect as well as physiological and neurological markers of emotion and arousal. In these experiments, emotionally evocative images are frequently used to induce negative affect in participants. Depending on the trial condition, participants are instructed to either look and react naturally or to change their experience using reappraisal. Data are typically aggregated within trial condition, and the average difference in reported negative affect between conditions serves as the behavioral measure of reappraisal success. While …

Memory Strategy Instruction With Goal-Setting And Positive Feedback: Impact On Memory, Strategy Use, And Task Commitment, Mercedes E. Ball

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

Strategy instruction can improve memory performance, but some training programs are more effective than others. Some scholars propose that a key element to boosting the benefits from training programs is enhancing or emphasizing self-regulatory factors, such as knowledge about memory, beliefs about ability, or motivational factors. Research supporting this claim evidence adds that programs that enhance trainees’ confidence in their abilities improve memory performance and that multifactorial programs are more effective than strategy-training-only programs. Setting performance goals and receiving feedback are two self-regulatory factors known to relate to memory performance that may sometimes be included in some training programs. However, …

How To Improve Dynamic Decision Making: Evaluation Of A Brief Training Program On Human Error, Yoannis Hermida

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current work environments require leaders to make effective and sound decisions in unpredictable situations. How can leaders improve their dynamic decision-making (DDM) skills? The current studies explored the effects of a training program on improving DDM in two computer-simulated tasks with different task characteristics. This study was comprised of two experiments. The first experiment included 83 undergraduate students who independently managed a computer simulated chocolate factory (ChocoFine). The second experiment included 111 students who played the role of a fire rescue chief overseeing a forest fire (WinFire). Half of the participants in each simulation group received a brief training on …

The Archaeology Of Height – Cultural Meaning In The Relativity Of Irish Megalithic Tomb Siting, Frank Prendergast

Book/Book Chapter

Exploring sacred mountains around the world, the book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. This chapter explores mountains in Ireland and embraces the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities.

This chapter take as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The chapter fuses ideas of space, …

The Interactive Effects Of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (Bdnf) Polymorphisms And Posttraumatic Stress Disorder On Neurocognitive Functioning In U.S. Military Veterans, Colton Shafer Rippey

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is associated with mild-to-moderate deficits in neurocognitive functioning. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene, namely, the Met allele, may also be associated with mild deficits in neurocognitive functioning. However, findings are inconsistent and may be sensitive to environmental epigenetic moderators such as psychopathology.

The current study analyzed data from European-American U.S. military veterans (n = 1,244) who participated in the 2011 National Health and Resilience in Veterans Study (NHRVS). Multivariate analyses of covariances were conducted to evaluate the unique and interactive effects of the Met allele and probable PTSD on …

The Role Of A Polyrhythm’S Pitch Interval In Music-Dependent Memory, Hadley R. Parum

Senior Projects Spring 2021

When listening to music, humans can easily and often automatically assess the perceptual similarity of different moments in music. However, it is difficult to rigorously define the way in which we determine exactly how similar we find to moments to be. This problem has driven inquiry in music cognition, musicology, and music theory alike, but previous results have depended on behaviorally mediated responses and/or recursive analytic strategies by music scholars. The present work employs the context-dependent memory paradigm as a novel way to investigate the extent to which listeners consider two musical examples to be similar. After incidentally learning words …

The Internet-Extended Mind: The Psychological Ramifications And Philosophical Implications Of Cognitive Offloading, Gloria Choi

Scripps Senior Theses

In this thesis, I explore the internet-extended mind through both philosophical and psychological lenses in order to investigate the questions “To what extent is the mind extended onto the internet and, more generally, outside our bodies?” and “How will an increasingly internet-extended brain change the ways in which humans communicate, remember, and behave?”. First, I introduce the idea of a mind that extends out into the world, instead of lying solely in the brain. Then, I outline existing research that introduces the challenges and implications of an internet-extended mind in an ever-changing internet landscape. Next, I discuss how the internet …

Effects Of Spatial Language Cues On Attention And The Perception Of Ambiguous Images, Aaron Foster

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s superman!? Sometimes there are things in our world that are ambiguous. An ambiguous object, for the purposes of this thesis is any object that has more than one interpretation to it. The brain is designed to “fill in the blanks” and make sense of the world. Thus it will use anything available, like language, to help in resolving the ambiguity. Language can change how we perceive information in the world (Dils & Boroditsky, 2010) and where we direct our attention (Ostarek & Vigliocco, 2017; Estes et. al. 2008; Estes, Verges, Adelman, 2015). Language …

Attribute-Based Choice, Francine W. Goh, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Alternative-based approaches to decision making generate overall values for each option in a choice set by processing information within options before comparing options to arrive at a decision. By contrast, attribute-based approaches compare attributes (such as monetary cost and time delay to receipt of a reward) across options and use these attribute comparisons to make a decision. Because they compare attributes, they may not use all available information to make a choice, which categorizes many of them as heuristics. Choice data have suggested that attribute-based models can better predict choice compared to alternative-based models in some situations (e.g., when there …

Exercise Shifts Hypothetical Food Choices Toward Greater Amounts And More Immediate Consumption, Karsten Koehler, Safiya E. Beckford, Elise Thayer, Alexandra R. Martin, Julie B. Boron, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Although exercise modulates appetite regulation and food intake, it remains poorly understood how exercise impacts decision-making about food. The purpose of the present study was to assess the impact of an acute exercise bout on hypothetical choices related to the amount and timing of food intake. Forty-one healthy participants (22.0 ± 2.6 years; 23.7 ± 2.5 kg/m 2 , 56% female) completed 45 min of aerobic exercise and a resting control condition in randomized order. Food amount preferences and intertemporal food preferences (preference for immediate vs. delayed consumption) were assessed using electronic questionnaires with visual food cues. Compared to rest, …

Dog And Owner Characteristics Predict Training Success, Jeffrey R. Stevens, London M. Wolff, Megan Bosworth, Jill Morstad

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Teaching owners how to train their dogs is an important part of maintaining the health and safety of dogs and people. Yet we do not know what behavioral characteristics of dogs and their owners are relevant to dog training or if owner cognitive abilities play a role in training success. The aim of this study is to determine which characteristics of both dogs and owners predict success in completing the American Kennel Club Canine Good Citizen training program. Before the first session of a dog training course, owners completed surveys evaluating the behavior and cognition of their dog and themselves. …