Cognition and Perception Commons^™

A Repulsive Inquiry: Evaluating The Impact Of Cognitive Load On Aversive Gaze Behaviors Following Exposure To Disgusting And Fearful Stimuli, Asa Miles Kaplan

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The present study analyzed the impact of gaze behavior in response to disgusting, fearful, and neutral pictures while participants operate under a cognitive load. Participants were exposed to fearful and disgusting stimuli and their eye movements were tracked accordingly. Participants were randomly sorted into either the cognitive load or no-cognitive load groups. Those within the cognitive load group were given a 5-digit memorization task before each of the four trial sets while the no cognitive load group received a break (in the form of a blank screen) instead. After completing the free-viewing task, participants from both groups were prompted to …

Moments That Matter: The Role Of Emotional Stimuli At Event Boundaries In Memory, Haonan Chen

Senior Projects Spring 2023

The present study examined the impact of event segmentation and emotional arousal on long-term memory performance. Event segmentation is the cognitive process of automatically dividing experiences into smaller pieces for better consolidation and retrieval, resulting in the formation of event boundaries. Prior research has identified the crucial role of event segmentation in long-term memory and working memory. However, few studies have explored ways to enhance its effects. Emotional arousal refers to the physiological and psychological activation of the body and mind in response to an emotional stimulus. Previous research has indicated that heightened levels of arousal may enhance memory performance. …

The Feeling Of Control: The Psychology Behind Immersive Controls In Video Games And Their Real World Effects, Atom Orbit Carrasco

Senior Projects Spring 2023

There is a phenomenon that can occur while playing video games where the player begins to feel similar sensations to the player character. This phenomenon, unnamed until now, has very little research directly related to it. There is plenty of indirect research that can be applied to this phenomenon, now called sensation mirroring. A review of both cognitive and psychobiological literature allows for major connections between human functions and how they interact with video game control schemes to be drawn. These connections help form a potential theory on the mechanisms of sensation mirroring and provide directions for future research on …

The Effects Of Music-Induced Emotion On Memory, Jessica C. Rylander

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Emotion can play a highly influential role when it comes to enhancing memory. Research has shown that emotional valence and emotional arousal are two key aspects of emotion responsible for facilitating this (APA, 2013). However, various studies have found contradicting results when it comes to which type of valence (positive or negative) and which level of arousal (high or low) have the greatest memory enhancing effects. Similarly, the majority of previous research has specifically investigated this emotion-memory relationship in terms of memory for emotional content. The present study aims to address this gap by separating emotion from the to-be-learned stimuli, …

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 Differences In Visuospatial Attentional Distribution Between Synesthetes And Non-Synesthetes, Identified Through Covert Visual Search, Kirsten Helena Ostbirk

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Synesthesia is a condition whereby sensory stimuli evoke unusual additional sensory perceptions and experiences, and can be identified through a visual search task. Grapheme-colour synesthetes have shown increased efficiency in visual search tasks, which some have hypothesized is a result of synesthetic colours drawing attention to the target stimulus, and have likened it to a weakened “pop-out” effect. Visual search has also been used to measure visuospatial attentional distribution, and findings from this method have supported the gradient model of attention, which proposes that cognitive resources are the most concentrated centrally in our visual field, and taper off, such that …

To Conceive Of Consonance In Chaos: The Influence Of The Harmonic Series On The Perception Of A New Musical System, Luke Sandbank

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Distortion In Body Schema: The Influence Of Body Fat And Mass On Perceptions Of Personal Size, Katarina Ann Ferrucci

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Obesity has been linked with a myriad of negative outcomes for both physical and mental health including feeding and eating disorders and cognitive impairments that affect perception of body size. Understanding the cognitive mechanisms and physiological factors that contribute to perception of body size may help us to comprehend how obesity impacts the construction and development of one’s mental body representations. Previous research by Scarpina, Castelnuovo, and Molinari (2014) suggests that, compared to those with a normal Body Mass Index, individuals with a BMI greater than 30 (obese) not only inaccurately estimate tactile and mental distances on their own bodies, …

The Effects Of Affective Arousal On Color Perception And Memory, Nicole Elizabeth Lang

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The link between affective arousal, color perception, and color memory was explored by inducing fear, sadness, or embarrassment in 158 participants who them completed a color perception and memory task. It was predicted that participants experiencing fear or embarrassment would more often correctly identify and remember red and green than a neutral condition whereas experiencing sadness would lead to less correct identification and memory for blue and yellow than neutral. There was only a marginally significant effect of fear on color memory for red. In the low arousal condition, there was an effect of fear on color memory for green …