Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Testing P300-Based Biometric Authentication Paradigms, Jordan Razzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bench research suggests that P300 amplitude is greater in response to self-relevant stimuli compared to familiar stimuli. This effect could enable a novel method of biometric authentication based on the self-relevant P300. This dissertation aims to: (1) determine the optimal presentation paradigm for leveraging self-relevance in P300-based biometric authentication, and (2) investigate P300 responses from self-relevant stimuli versus stimuli learned over the course of a week.

Two presentation paradigms were compared – rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and matrix presentation (MP). Participant-specific RSVP and MP classifiers were trained by applying stepwise linear discriminant analysis to data collected during presentations of …

Scrolling For Connection: The Influence Of Loneliness, Self-Esteem, And Stress On Susceptibility To Conformity-Driven Online Purchasing And Gambling Behaviors In Generation Z, Emily M. Bauknight

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to examine the relationships among loneliness, self-esteem, conformity, and online purchasing and gambling behaviors in Generation Z college students. To do so, a cross-sectional design was implemented with a sample of 69 undergraduate and graduate students who completed self-report measures assessing self-esteem, loneliness, conformity, psychological distress, online shopping addiction, and online gambling severity. Data were analyzed using SPSS through multiple and simple linear regression analyses, moderated regression, and Pearson correlations. Results indicated that selfesteem and loneliness were not significant predictors of conformity, and conformity did not predict online shopping or gambling behaviors. Additionally, self-esteem, loneliness, and conformity …

Trainee Countertransference And Competency In Bereavement Therapy: Strengths And Limitations Of The Wounded Healers, Meghan Paynter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Countertransference is a common experience in therapy, happening among clinicians of all stages of their career and the outcomes of this experience hinge largely on how countertransference is managed. Challenging topics, such as grief, only make countertransference harder to manage effectively and the management of this experience improves with practice and time—something trainees have not yet ascertained. Given the pervasiveness of grief as a human experience, also indiscriminate in nature, the experiences of trainees experiencing countertransference are important to understand, including what is experienced, how they experience it, and how it impacts their process and self-perception of confidence and competence …

Young Adults’ Metaperceptions Of Their Childhood Caregivers’ Appraisals And Young Adulthood Mental Health, Cassandra Svelnys

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Early experiences and relationships have enduring impacts on the development of self and later mental health and wellbeing. In social relationships and interactions, the developing individual is continuously assessing how they view themself, how they view the other person, and how they believe the other person views them. Metaperceptions represent the latter construct: how an individual thinks another person perceives them. Childhood self-esteem, parent-child attachment, and metaperceptions are foundational constructs for the developing individual, yet metaperceptions have not previously been tested as a predictor for adulthood mental health while also accounting for childhood self-esteem and parent-child attachment. This study introduced …

Differences In Performance In Mental Rotation And Short-Term Free Recall In Gender Minorities, Katheryne Renee Wood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study examined mental rotation, short-term free recall, state anxiety, and gender expression through masculinity and femininity. This study addressed gaps in literature examining gender differences in gender minority groups by investigating gender differences in two tasks: mental rotation and short-term recall. Participants are categorized into four gender groups: cisgender men, cisgender women, non-binary, and binary transgender. In accordance with previous literature, it was hypothesized that men would outperform women in mental rotation, women would outperform men in short-term free recall performance, and that non-binary individuals would operate separately from other groups. Anxiety was recorded as a possible covariate, but …

Bridging Design And Perception: Novel Tools And Technologies For Creating Effective Human-Robot Interactions, Benjamin Dossett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores human perception of robots through the use of novel tools and technologies. First, the impact of Augmented Reality (AR) data presentation on human perception of robots is investigated. A study conducted with the AR human-robot teaming system found that robot performance significantly influenced participants’ perceptions, overshadowing the impact of matching or mismatching robot confidence feedback. Second, the DU Want to Build-A-Bot platform is presented, which enables participatory robot design and opens the door for novel research of how robot design affects human perception. The Build-A-Bot platform enables the collection of diverse robot designs, facilitating machine learning analysis …

Ensemble Perception Of Emotion: Incidental Effects Of Social Identity, Spencer T. Dobbs

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research in vision science suggests that people possess a perceptual mechanism – ensemble perception - which enables them to rapidly identify the characteristics of groups (e.g., emotion, sex-ratio, race-ratio). This work examined whether ensemble perceptions of groups are driven by the characteristics of group members whose behavior is most likely to impact the perceiver. Specifically, we predicted that more self-relevant group members would be weighted more heavily in ensemble perceptions than less self-relevant group members. Study 1 (n = 83) found that young adult participants’ ensemble perceptions of emotion were biased in favor of more self-relevant (younger adult) group …

A Phenomenological Study Of School Psychologists: The Influence Of Implicit Bias On The Disproportionate Identification Rates Of African American Students Evaluated For Emotional Disturbance, Sonya Coe-Milo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As advocates, school psychologists remain ethically responsible and uniquely positioned to identify social injustices and promote nondiscriminatory practices in prekindergarten through grade 12 public education institutions. Implicit bias and its influence on African American students is one such practice. In public education, implicit bias contributes to discipline disproportionality, differentiated teacher support, pedagogical practices, and adult perceptions and expectations of appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. These factors directly correlate to the disproportionate identification rates of African American students for special education and related services. Therefore, this phenomenological qualitative study examined the personal, lived experiences and perceptions of school psychologists regarding implicit bias …

Reference Frames In Human Sensory, Motor, And Cognitive Processing, Dongcheng He

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reference-frames, or coordinate systems, are used to express properties and relationships of objects in the environment. While the use of reference-frames is well understood in physical sciences, how the brain uses reference-frames remains a fundamental question. The goal of this dissertation is to reach a better understanding of reference-frames in human perceptual, motor, and cognitive processing. In the first project, we study reference-frames in perception and develop a model to explain the transition from egocentric (based on the observer) to exocentric (based outside the observer) reference-frames to account for the perception of relative motion. In a second project, we focus …

Process Depletion In Emotion Regulation, Christian Capistrano Boeckner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ability to regulate emotions via reappraisal is considered an important skill that is associated with greater well-being. However, the effectiveness of emotion regulation is impacted by individual differences, and its adaptiveness may vary depending on context. For example individuals from vulnerable populations such as children and mothers in the context of poverty often demonstrate less optimal reappraisal, that is in turn associated with maladaptive behaviors. Given its consequence on mental health, it is critical to understand mechanisms that influence reappraisal to maximize its adaptive consequences. The current study explored conditions that could either facilitate or impair reappraisal success. We …

Digital Manipulation Of Human Faces: Effects On Emotional Perception And Brain Activity, Martin Knoll

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The study of human face-processing has granted insight into key adaptions across various social and biological functions. However, there is an overall lack of consistency regarding digital alteration styles of human-face stimuli. In order to investigate this, two independent studies were conducted examining unique effects of image construction and presentation. In the first study, three primary forms of stimuli presentation styles (color, black and white, cutout) were used across iterations of non-thatcherized/thatcherized and non-inverted/inverted presentations. Outcome measures included subjective reactions measured via ratings of perceived “grotesqueness,” and objective outcomes of N170 event-related potentials (ERPs) measured via encephalography. Results of subjective …

Interrupting Holistic Processing May Improve The Detection Of Deceptive Emotional Facial Expressions, Christopher A. Gunderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although a growing body of evidence suggests that genuine and deceptive facial expressions differ, previous work is mixed as to whether observers can discern between them. One explanation is that cues to deception on the face are subtle and not readily perceived by observers. I argue that the way people process faces may obscure these cues, making them ‘unseen’ by observers. In the current work, I pit two hypotheses against each other to test whether interrupting holistic processing improves or impairs the ability to identify deceptive emotional expressions. Since people process faces holistically, one region of the face may interfere …

The Effect Of Parent Interactions On Young Infants’ Visual Attention In An Object Manipulation Task., Nonah Marie Olesen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Sticky Mittens (SM) task, an object-manipulation task that facilitates typically developing pre-reaching infants’ learning through active experience with objects, is often utilized to understand how experience affects young infants’ learning about objects. SM experience has been shown to increase infants’ attention to objects, object engagement, and object exploration (Libertus & Needham, 2010; Needham, Barrett, & Peterman, 2002) and facilitates development of causal perception (Rakison & Krogh, 2012; Holt, 2016). Although the majority of SM studies have involved parents interacting naturally with their infants, few have focused on how those interactions affect infants’ learning and performance during or after SM. …

The Loss-Processing Framework, Lawrence Childress

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The circumstances of responding to loss due to human death are among the most stressful experiences encountered in life. Although grief’s symptoms are typically considered essential to their gradual diminishment, possible negative impacts of complications related to grief are also well known, and have been associated with detriments to mental and physical health. Grief, however, can also generate transformative positive change. Thus, albeit ineludible, responding to loss is not uniformly experienced, expressed, or understood. It is also culturally-shaped, making attempts to define “normal” grief, as well as to label some grief “abnormal”—and to medicalize it—possibly problematic. Bereavement (the situation surrounding …

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 …

Medical Noncompliance In A Pediatric Patient Living In A Single-Parent Household, Lucy Obianuju Norrell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract Noncompliance is a patient’s inability to comply with the recommended treatment for their complete recovery from an ailment, while compliance is the extent to which a patient adheres to the provider’s directive, such as medication and orders given. The purpose of this study was to determine if motivational interviewing when applied to noncompliant pediatric patients from single-parent households, would improve global medical compliance in this population as compared to the standard of care at the end of three months. Thirty-two participants were recruited using the homogeneous purposeful sampling. The project employed a mixed-method approach. Fred Kleinsinger’s noncompliant behavior tool …

The Academic Success And Beyond-Academic Wellbeing Of High Functioning Autistic Boys: A Policy-Professional Care-School-Parent Ecological Perspective, Evelyn Sauceda

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

High Functioning Autistic (HFA) boys have significant social, emotional, and cognitive difficulties and unique cognitive abilities that require special support from stakeholders in their ecology (policy makers, care providers, schools, and parents). The quality of such support and its ecological integration are of poor quality. The purpose of this study was to report on the perceptions of parents of HFA boys about their children’s academic and beyond-academic experiences as understood within a policy-care provider-school-parent ecological framework. This study contributes to the limited ecological literature on the topic. This exploratory, qualitative, phenomenological, non-experimental, and cross-sectional research study used a non-probability, purposive, …

Risk-Taking, Thinking Styles, And Criminality: A Fuzzy-Trace Theory Perspective, Adrienne Machann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Preferred modes of thinking, otherwise known as biases, have been well documented in adult reasoning and decision-making (Evans, 2003; Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman, 2002; Reyna & Brainerd, 2011; Tversky & Kahneman, 1986). Researchers have explained these biases by proposing that the basis for them is a system of thought that relies mostly on intuition and “gut feelings” rather than logical analysis of the situation (Reyna & Brainerd, 2011; Tversky & Kahneman, 1986). According to standard dual-process theories, intuition is described as a thought process so quick, it is automatic and, at times unconscious; conversely, analytical thinking is slow and steady, …

Wellness And Karate, Cristina Kumpf

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The promotion of wellness is an integral part of the counseling field and is considered to be a central focus to the counseling process (Barden, Conley, & Young, 2015; Myers, 1992). The counseling profession adopted the concept of wellness because it harmonizes with many of the founding principles of the ACA and is seen as a process of questing toward optimal health and well-being in body, mind, and spirit (Barden, Conley, & Young, 2015; Myers, 1992; Myers, Sweeney, & Witmer, 2000). Additionally, ACA Code of Ethics (2014) state that counselors “engage in self-care activities to maintain and promote their own …

The Effects Of Monaural And Binaural Cues On Perceived Reverberation By Normal Hearing And Hearing-Impaired Listeners., Gregory Matthew Ellis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a quantitative and qualitative examination of how young normal hearing and young hearing-impaired listeners perceive reverberation. A primary complaint among hearing-impaired listeners is difficulty understanding speech in noisy or reverberant environments. This work was motivated by a desire to better understand reverberation perception and processing so that this knowledge might be used to improve outcomes for hearing-impaired listeners in these environments. This dissertation is written in six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the field and a review of the relevant literature. Chapter Two describes a motivating experiment from laboratory work completed before the dissertation. This …

The Effects Of One Neurofeedback Session On Eye-Tracking Distractibility When Completing Verbal And Visuospatial Search Tasks, Rebecca C. Recio-Swift

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common and prevalent condition seen in all ages and throughout the world. School-aged and college-aged students seem to have the most difficulty in terms of academic performance, social functioning, and adaptive functioning. Visual attention and visual search are important aspects of attention. Visual attention drives what and how the brain processes and interprets information from the environment. Visual search is the ability to find a visual target within a set of distractors. Electroencephalography (EEG) Neurofeedback is the process of re-training brainwaves through operant conditioning. Neurofeedback (NF) has been suggested to be a non-invasive …

Effects Of One Neurofeedback Session On Relationship Between Fear-Of-Pain And Visual Avoidance Of Pain, Timothy Swift

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Chronic pain is increasingly prevalent and costly and will continue to be with the increasing mean age of America’s population. It is important to identify interventions addressing pain-related biopsychosocial aspects. The purpose of the current study was to examine if a single session of specific neurofeedback (NF) protocols had an effect on subjective fear and physiological fear-avoidance behaviors in relation to pain-related stimuli. Correlational analyses revealed that FPQ-III minor pain scores were negatively associated with total fixation duration while looking at pain-related pictures. One-way ANOVAs revealed differences approaching significance for those trained on Left-Hemisphere NF protocols compared to those in …

Assessing The Relationship Between Talker Normalization And Spectral Contrast Effects In Speech Perception., Ashley Atri Assgari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Speech perception is influenced by context. This influence can help to alleviate issues that arise from the extreme acoustic variability of speech. Two examples of contextual influences are talker normalization and spectral contrast effects (SCEs). Talker normalization occurs when listeners hear different talkers causing speech perception to be slower and less accurate. SCEs occur when spectral characteristics change from context sentences to target vowels and speech perception is biased by that change. It has been demonstrated that SCEs are restrained when contexts are spoken by different talkers (Assgari & Stilp, 2015). However, what about hearing different talkers restrains these effects …

"Triggers": Systematic And Social Cues For Black College Student Racial Self-Consciousness And Rejection Sensitivity, Race-Based., Leanna T. Luney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have examined black student well-being in varying ways including through the framing of race-based rejection sensitivity (Downey & Feldman, 1996; Mendoza-Denton, Downey, Purdie, Davis, & Pietrzak, 2002) and racial self-consciousness (Clark & Clark, 1939). Research shows that black students perform worse academically when they display high levels of race-based rejection sensitivity and racial self-conscious levels (Brannon & Taylor, 2015; Clark & Clark, 1939; Koehler & Skvoretz, 2010), and feelings of racial self-consciousness or rejection sensitivity stem from discriminatory and prejudicial experiences. However, research has not fully connected the broader context surrounding black students in college to their high levels …

The Empathy Mitigation: Empathy And Its Impact On Pain Perception And Altruistic Motivation, Amanda Daly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Empathy and its impact on pain perception has been studied narrowly with the focus being on participants receiving empathy during a pain procedure. This study reversed the focus and ran a standard cold pressor test (CPT) in the context of an empathy frame structured to elicit an empathic response for others from participants. It was hypothesized that the group receiving the empathic frame would have longer CPT times due to alterations in pain perception from empathy activation and these subjects’ self-reported state-trait empathy level would positively correlate with the increased times. 85 subjects participated with a control group of 43 …

An Examination Of The Relationship Between Ethnic Identity Development, Cognitive Complexity, Differentiation Of Self, And Reports Of Racial And Ethnic Microaggressions, Deshae C. Gatti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although individuals may not engage in racism consciously due to social undesirability, they may have biases that manifest in more subtle and unconscious ways. Research has found that people of color experiencing different racial and ethnic microaggressions in their everyday lives are subject to pervasive and negative impacts on their mental health, though little is known about the influence of one’s ethnic identity formation, affective processes, and cognitive processes. A multiple regression analysis was conducted to examine the degree to which ethnic identity development, cognitive complexity, and differentiation of self were associated reported experiences of microaggressions. The analysis indicated that …

Weight Stigma, Cognitions, And Disordered Eating, Sarah E. Pelfrey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Weight stigma experiences affect people of all weights and have many negative consequences; despite this, weight stigma is still an acceptable prejudice in our society. Research has established that weight stigma is predictive of disordered eating (DE) cognitions, which are, in turn, predictive of DE behaviors. The current study explored the unique contribution DE cognitions make to DE behaviors while controlling for other DE cognitions. The DE cognitions examined in the current study were drive for thinness, weight bias internalization, and perfectionism. The DE behaviors examined were emotional eating, restrained eating, inappropriate compensatory behaviors, and binge-eating. Weight bias internalization and …

Video Game Engagement, Gender, And Age: Examining Similarities And Differences In Motivation Between Those Who May Or May Not Play Video Games, Joseph Camarata

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research aims to fill a research gap by examining video games to explore whether gender, age, or hours played per week would exert any influence on the information of those who may or may not play video games. Mood Management Theory and Uses and Gratification Theory were used as the theoretical foundation for this study. Four-hundred-three East Tennessee State University students who received the survey via email were asked to voluntarily participate in a survey about their motivations behind playing video games. Results from MANOVA showed that the motivations of male participants on video games were significantly higher than …

Mechanisms Responsible For The Development Of Causal Perception In Infancy., Nicholas A. Holt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The aim of the current dissertation was to investigate the mechanisms that contribute to the emergence of causal perception in infancy. Previous research suggests that the experience of self-produced causal action may be necessary to promote the development of causal perception (Rakison & Krogh, 2012). The goal of the current study was two-fold: (1) to further explore the roles of self-produced action, haptic, proprioceptive and visual information, and parental interaction on young infants’ understanding of causality. To assess the impact of these factors on infants’ causal learning, 4½-month-olds were randomly assigned to one four conditions. Three of the conditions (Active …

Defining A Role For Affect In Decision-Making, Pareezad Cyrus Zarolia

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent theories of decision-making have hinted that affect might be useful during some decision-making processes. I propose a model, the affective evaluation model, which defines the role of affect in decision-making as helpful when affect is decision-relevant and unhelpful when it is not. In three studies, I manipulate the decision-relevance of affect to test this central component of the affective evaluation model. Study 1 demonstrates that emphasizing decision-relevant affective signals facilitates optimal decision-making as compared to emphasizing purely cognitive evaluations. Study 2 tests the hypothesis that creating the expectation that affect is useful can facilitate decision-making. Finally, Study 3 tests …