Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Computational Thinking And Coding For Young Children: A Hybrid Approach To Link Unplugged And Plugged Activities, Daisuke Akiba

Publications and Research

In our increasingly technology-dependent society, the importance of promoting digital literacy (e.g., computational thinking, coding, and programming) has become a critical focus in the field of childhood education. While young children these days are routinely and extensively exposed to digital devices and tools, the efficacy of the methods for fostering digital skills in the early childhood classroom has not always been closely considered. This is particularly true in settings where early childhood educators are not digital experts. Currently, most of the efforts in standard early childhood settings, taught by teachers who are not digital experts, appear to revolve around “unplugged” …

Ssri-Induced Emotional Blunting: A Study Of Cognitive Changes In Pharmaceutically Treated Depression, Carly Tocco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: In recent years, approximately 12.7% of the American population are on a prescribed antidepressant medication. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) are a widely used pharmacological treatment for depressive and anxiety disorders, primarily due to their tolerance levels, mild side effects in comparison to other antidepressants, and broad range of clinical indications. However, there are still numerous concerns about SSRIs’ ability to improve depressive symptoms without adding side effects such as sexual dysfunction, gastrointestinal upset, and a restricted range of emotions. Although patients typically claim that they have less emotional pain while on SSRIs than they do during a depressive …

Psychology In The Modern World, Kutay Agardici

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus is created for the two courses I will be teaching at City College in the psychology dept. Topics include cognition, language, learning, memory, nature vs. nurture, abnormal psychology, social psychology, etc.

Withdrawal From Voluntary Oral Methamphetamine Reveals Female Specific Susceptibilities To Behavioral Deficits And Neurochemical Perpetuators Of Neurotoxicity And Drug Seeking Behavior, Nicoletta K. Memos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

MA is a potent, highly addictive psychomotor stimulant known to produce neurotoxic effects on the brain leading to neurological impairments^1-6 characterized by neurodegeneration of dopaminergic fibers, cell bodies and pathways, as well as brain regions such as the hippocampus, frontal cortex, and midbrain^1,5.

In MA addiction, women are more vulnerable to the behavioral and cognitive effects of MA compared to men. Adult human literature reveals gender differences in usage patterns and women demonstrate increased vulnerability to the neurotoxic effects and health effects of MA use. Women begin drug use at an earlier age, escalate drug use quicker, …

Individual Differences In Coping With Large Multimodal Conflicts In A Spatial Orientation Paradigm, Cassandra J. Engstrom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined how humans respond to large 180º disparities between internally generated self-motion cues and external landmarks in a navigation task. Subjects learned the locations of 4 objects in a virtual environment, navigating back to these sites in a testing phase that probed their sense of direction at dead-ends. In select (incongruent) trials, subjects’ virtual rotations were mirrored relative to their physical turns, forcing them to navigate along separate virtual and physical trajectories. On these trials, subjects were either instructed to navigate using their memory of the required turn sequence (proprioceptive instructions) or the external environment (visual …

The Significance Of Sonic Branding To Strategically Stimulate Consumer Behavior: Content Analysis Of Four Interviews From Jeanna Isham’S “Sound In Marketing” Podcast, Ina Beilina

Student Theses and Dissertations

Purpose:
Sonic branding is not just about composing jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It.” Sonic branding is an industry that strategically designs a cohesive auditory component of a brand’s corporate identity. This paper examines the psychological impact of music and sound on consumer behavior reviewing studies from the past 40 years and investigates the significance of stimulating auditory perception by infusing sound in consumer experience in the modern 2020s.

Design/methodology/approach:
Qualitative content analysis of audio media was used to test two hypotheses. Four archival oral interview recordings from Jeanna Isham’s podcast “Sound in Marketing” featuring the sonic branding experts …

Investigation Of Behavioral Responses Including Visual Side Biases To Social Stimuli In Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus), Jennifer R. Savoie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cetacean field studies have reported consistent population-level side biases for foraging behaviors and this right side feeding bias is arguably the strongest in any species next to handedness in humans. Notably, experimental studies with cetaceans, particularly dolphins, have struggled to find laterality in other behaviors, and some have reported patterns that are inconsistent with those typically found in vertebrates. Side biases related to social processing have been reported in a few observational studies of wild delphinids but have not been successfully evaluated in a controlled experimental context. This dissertation investigated viewing side biases of bottlenose dolphins in two contexts: when …

Emotion Recognition With Audio, Video, Eeg, And Emg: A Dataset And Baseline Approaches, Jin Chen, Tony Ro, Zhigang Zhu

Publications and Research

This paper describes a new posed multimodal emotional dataset and compares human emotion classification based on four different modalities - audio, video, electromyography (EMG), and electroencephalography (EEG). The results are reported with several baseline approaches using various feature extraction techniques and machine-learning algorithms. First, we collected a dataset from 11 human subjects expressing six basic emotions and one neutral emotion. We then extracted features from each modality using principal component analysis, autoencoder, convolution network, and mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC), some unique to individual modalities. A number of baseline models have been applied to compare the classification performance in emotion recognition, …

Pushing It To The Limit: Determining Asian Elephant (Elephas Maximus) Olfactory Sensitivity And Discrimination Through A Behavioral Choice Task, Matthew S. Rudolph

Theses and Dissertations

Elephants have shown remarkable olfactory capabilities. Their sense of smell impacts their foraging choices, behavior, and ultimately, survival. Being able to detect a target odor can allow elephants to locate specific resources, identify threats, and find receptive conspecifics. Previous studies have shown that elephants can consistently detect target odors, but have not identified the limits of this detection. Thus, to investigate the extent of elephants’ odor detection capabilities, we tested Asian elephants in a two-step odor discrimination task. First, we investigated whether elephants could detect odors at varying levels of dilution after a training procedure, and then whether they could …

Crowd Salience Heightens Tolerance To Healthy Facial Features, Mitch Brown, Ryan E. Tracy, Steven G. Young, Donald F. Sacco

Publications and Research

Objective: Recent findings suggest crowd salience heightens pathogen-avoidant motives, serving to reduce individuals’ infection risk through interpersonal contact. Such experiences may similarly facilitate the identification, and avoidance, of diseased conspecifics. The current experiment sought to replicate and extend previous crowding research.

Methods: In this experiment, we primed participants at two universities with either a crowding or control experience before having them evaluate faces manipulated to appear healthy or diseased by indicating the degree to which they would want to interact with them.

Results: Crowding-primed participants reported a more heightened preferences for healthy faces than control-primed participants. Additionally, crowd salience reduced …

During Natural Viewing, Neural Processing Of Visual Targets Continues Throughout Saccades, Atanas D. Stankov, Jonathan Touryan, Stephen Gordon, Anthony J. Ries, Jason Ki, Lucas C. Parra

Publications and Research

Relatively little is known about visual processing during free-viewing visual search in realistic dynamic environments. Free-viewing is characterized by frequent saccades. During saccades, visual processing is thought to be suppressed, yet we know that the presaccadic visual content can modulate postsaccadic processing. To better understand these processes in a realistic setting, we study here saccades and neural responses elicited by the appearance of visual targets in a realistic virtual environment. While subjects were being driven through a 3D virtual town, they were asked to discriminate between targets that appear on the road. Using a system identification approach, we separated overlapping …

Semantic Network Activation Contributes To The Relationship Between Mood And Inhibition, James S. Maniscalco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prior research has identified several relationships between mood and executive functions. Very broadly, these findings generally suggest that positive moods are associated with enhanced cognitive performance, particularly in working memory and learning. However, recent studies note that there are some instances in which negative moods may benefit select executive skills, such as those involved in divided attention and inhibition. In sum, these findings indicate that positive moods favor top-down, heuristic, or relational processing, whereas negative trait moods favor bottom-up, detail-oriented processing. However, a clear mechanism by which these effects occur has yet to be identified.

The most compelling theories that …

A Schema-Theoretic Approach To Hierarchy In Eighteenth-Century Tonality, Simon K. S. Prosser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prevalent modern-day theories of tonal hierarchy for eighteenth-century music, especially those influenced by the ideas of Heinrich Schenker, have been called into question by schema theorists such as Robert Gjerdingen and Vasili Byros, who argue from both cognitive and historical evidence that eighteenth-century tonal cognition was sequential or “windowed” rather than hierarchical. This dissertation seeks to recuperate the concept of tonal hierarchy in eighteenth-century music, drawing on research that reconstructs the implicit tonal theories of the partimento and thoroughbass traditions, as well as concepts of hierarchy from schema theory itself, to formulate a historically and cognitively grounded theory of tonal …

Desire, Culture, And The Body, Zoey Lavallee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What is the nature of desire? In this dissertation I develop a theory of desire according to which desires are essentially enculturated states that play the role of presenting favorable outcomes that act as inputs to intention formation, and thereby intentional action. This analysis of desire debunks a common assumption shared by prominent accounts of desire in philosophy of mind, what can be called the dualist assumption: that bodily desires such as urges and appetites differ in kind from conceptual desires that are typically described as higher cognitive attitudes. I argue that the desires traditionally understood as bodily or appetitive …

They Should Know Better: Recognizing Sexual Grooming And Culpability Placement In Adolescents Versus Children, Taylor C. Smith

Student Theses

Sexual grooming is a process used by individuals in order to facilitate sexual abuse with a minor while simultaneously avoiding detection. As many sexual grooming behaviors are used before the perpetration of abuse, the identification of grooming behaviors is integral to child sexual abuse prevention. To date, few studies have researched the identification of sexual grooming behaviors utilized by child molesters and even fewer have examined the identification of those same behaviors utilized on adolescents. This study examined whether the age of the victim (child versus adolescent) affected how well someone can identify sexual grooming behaviors. Five hundred and forty-eight …

Characterizing The Brain Dynamics And Eye Movement Behavior Of Memory-Guided Saccades: A Preliminary Investigation Of Distractor Influence On Memory-Guided Saccades, Angelo V. Colmenero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research has helped to shed light on the functional organization and neural mechanisms of distractors on memory-guided saccades. In our current study we have utilized eye tracking and EEG technology to simultaneously record the changes in saccadic eye movement (SEM) behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with performance on a memory-guided saccade task with distractor conditions. Thirteen healthy control participants (n = 13; 6 female) were tasked to complete 864 memory-guided saccade trials with both visible (white) and invisible (black) distractors presented on a black background before saccade initiation. Compared with the control (black) distractor condition, distractor presentation produced a …

Environmental Cues And The Sociospatial Imaginary: An Examination Of Spatial Perception And Meaning-Making In A Gentrifying Neighborhood, Todd Levon Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What could be more ordinary or pedestrian than two people walking down an urban street and talking about what we see and what we make of it? Yet this simple, quotidian act of walking a street—seeing, perceiving and experiencing physical spaces, places and objects—and making meaning of what is encountered, is the basis of my dissertation. It is also my basis for claiming that I have learned a great deal—and much unexpectedly—about how differently different people see and interpret the urban streetscape. What are the various environmental cues that stand out to different individuals? What are the psychosocial imaginaries that …

Semester Schedule For Cognitive And Behavioral Neuroscience, Megan V. Caldwell

Open Educational Resources

This course schedule has been created for an asynchronous 15-week, 4 credit Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience course. It is a comprehensive schedule including a week-by-week breakdown of lecture topics, reading material, assignments, and exam schedule. The course covers topics related to cognition and neuroscience including the action potential, neurotransmitters, cell gradients, sensation (vision, hearing, and pain/somatosensation), neuroplasticity, memory, and movement systems. The schedule is intended to be accompanied by a syllabus.

Does Rehearsal Matter? Left Anterior Temporal Alpha And Theta Band Changes Correlate With The Beneficial Effects Of Rehearsal On Working Memory, Chelsea Reichert Plaska, Kenneth Ng, Timothy M. Ellmore

Publications and Research

Rehearsal during working memory (WM) maintenance is assumed to facilitate retrieval. Less is known about how rehearsal modulates WM delay activity. In the present study, 44 participants completed a Sternberg Task with either intact novel scenes or phase-scrambled scenes, which had similar color and spatial frequency but lacked semantic content. During the rehearsal condition participants generated a descriptive label during encoding and covertly rehearsed during the delay period. During the suppression condition participants did not generate a label during encoding and suppressed (repeated “the”) during the delay period. This was easy in the former (novel scenes) but more difficult in …

The Role Of Perceived Warmth And Competence In Civil Trials With Corporate Litigants, Alexander C. Jay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporations are involved in approximately 40% of all civil litigation (Langton & Cohen, 2008), yet there is much to be learned concerning how jurors make decisions in trials involving corporate litigants. Mock juror research suggests that for-profit corporations are treated more harshly than other defendants, such as non-profit corporations and individuals (e.g., Hans, 1998). This discrepant treatment of for-profit corporate defendants might be linked to unmitigated stereotypical perceptions of them being low in warmth (i.e., likely to have immoral intentions) but high in competence (i.e., likely to be capable of acting on those intentions; Aaker et al., 2010). Research shows …

An Evaluation Of An Application Designed For The Ipad® To Measure Stimulus Overselectivity For Future Use In Autism Research, Adrienne A. Fitzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Twenty-three college students participated in two studies evaluating an application designed to measure stimulus overselectivity in pictures depicting facial affect. We analyzed whether this application worked as designed by evaluating whether it could provide a robust analysis of the types of errors users make (e.g., by matching by the top features, the bottom features, or not by the top or the bottom features), and the extent to which the application worked to decrease selective responding in the event a user was not matching consistently by all features. We also evaluated if participant scores on the Autism Quotient and RAADS-14 could …

The Insanity Spectrum, Nicholas Gallagher

Capstones

Schizophrenia, which includes a combination of persistent and overwhelming hallucinations and delusions, emerges in men between the ages of 18 and 25. After I experienced a string of strange auditory hallucinations as a 19-year-old, I begged to fast-forward past the threshold of early adulthood to learn my fate: whether I was among the one-time voice-hearers, the people with a long-term mental illness or the conspiracy-peddling catastrophizers. I came to understand that those distinctions are blurrier than we’d like to admit. We are all connected through a shared pathology, falling in some liminal space between sanity and madness.

http://theinsanityspectrum.tilda.ws/

The Cognitive Thalamus: Source Analysis Of Scene Working Memory Delay Activity, Bernard A. Gomes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Working Memory represents a limited-capacity store for maintaining information and manipulating the store's contents over a short period for the guidance of goal-directed behavior. Working Memory is an essential component of executive functions that are intricately associated with the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC has been implicated in maintaining task-related information online for brief periods in the absence of relevant information. This active maintenance phase is called the delay period that occurs between encoding and retrieval of the stimulus. Previous studies have attempted to understand the relationship between working memory and the PFC, especially during the delay or maintenance phase …

A Glance At The Mirror: Ensemble Perception Of Symmetry, Gene Jerskey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A growing body of research has demonstrated the ability of subjects to extract representative statistics from visual ensembles, images of similar but distinct groups of objects, without conscious effort or attention focused on individual members of the ensemble. When presented with ensembles, subjects have been able to accurately report the mean, range, and even distribution of various features in the ensemble. Research into ensemble perception, as it has become known, has divided mainly into studies of either low-level features, such as orientation, motion, and color, which are processed in early visual areas, at least for individual objects, or high-level features, …

The Temporal Dynamics Of Ensemble Perception, Michael L. Epstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The striking disparity between the subjective richness of experience and the considerable limitations of perceptual processing has emerged as an essential, enduring question in both vision science and philosophy of mind. A potential solution to this issue is ensemble perception: the ability for the visual system to compute the statistical summaries of object groups, effectively compressing an otherwise overwhelming amount of information. Previous work has supported that ensemble statistics can be perceived quickly and accurately for a wide range of object features. This has motivated models of ensemble perception as an early process in vision, providing an initial sense of …

Memory Bias Toward Emotional Information In Burnout And Depression, Renzo Bianchi, Eric Laurent, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Lucas M. Bietti, Eric Mayor

Publications and Research

A sample of 1015 educational staff members, exhibiting various levels of burnout and depressive symptoms, underwent a memory test involving incident encoding of positive and negative words and a free recall task. Burnout and depression were each found to be associated with increased recall of negative items and decreased recall of positive items. Results remained statistically significant when controlling for history of depressive disorders. Burnout and depression were not related to mistakes in the reported words, or to the overall number of recalled words. This study suggests that burnout and depression overlap in terms of memory biases toward emotional information.

Consistent Failure To Produce A Cognitive Load Effect In Visual Working Memory Using A Standard Dual-Task Procedure, Timothy J. Ricker, Evie Vergauwe

Publications and Research

Working memory performance is impaired when an attention-demanding task is executed during memory retention. The cognitive load effect is the consistent finding that the size of the memory impairment is determined by the relative amount of time that the secondary processing task occupies attention during memory retention. Cognitive load has been proposed to be a Priority-A benchmark any model of working memory should be able to explain (Oberauer et al., 2018), in part because the effect appears to generalize across different experimental procedures and materials. Using a standard dual-task procedure, we detail four experiments using a visual working memory recall …

Pre-Report Review Of Body-Worn Camera Footage: An Examination Of Stakeholder Beliefs, Laypeople’S Judgments Of Officer Credibility, And The Consequences For Memory, Kristyn A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Aim: This dissertation examines people’s beliefs about police officer access to body-worn camera footage, people’s judgments of officer credibility as it relates to video footage, and the consequences that review of footage has on reporting accuracy.

Rationale: With escalating police-civilian tensions in 2014, American police departments adopted body-worn camera programs. A majority of departments have policies allowing officers unrestricted access to camera footage. Because officers fear that inconsistencies between reports and videos could result in suspicion of officer deceit, they argue that officers should have access to footage before writing their reports to ensure reports match the footage. Yet, because …

Presence And Degree Of Contrafreeloading In African Grey Parrots (Psittacus Erithacus), Gabriella E. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined contrafreeloading—choosing a physical task to access food over free food—in two Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus). Both birds contrafreeloaded for food of equal or higher value, but differed in which contrafreeloading task they preferred. Differences between the parrots are considered as individual preferences for self-reinforcing tasks.

Using Object-Choice Tasks To Investigate Sensory Perception In Sunda Pangolins (Manis Javanica), Joshua Dipaola

Theses and Dissertations

Pangolins are one of the most heavily poached, yet least understood mammals in the world. In this study, we used an object-choice task to assess the ecological relevance and use of sensory information in Sunda pangolin foraging behavior. This is the first controlled experiment on pangolin behavior to our knowledge.