Cognition and Perception Commons^™

The Phenomenon Of Abstract Cognition Among Scholastic Chess Participants: A Case Study, Brent C. Laws

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A qualitative investigation was conducted to explore the phenomenon of abstract cognition among a purposive sample of 5 secondary scholastic chess club participants. The case study enabled the researcher to explore the faculties of abstract cognition among students of contrasting skills and abilities in playing chess. The study also allowed for the consideration of potential visual-spatial, logical, academic, social competency and life benefits of chess play. Through analysis of interviews, chess simulations, blindfold chess play, and narration of chess lines and sequences, the investigator was able to extract meaning and code schemata into a holistic understanding of the phenomenon of …

Perceived Depth In Non-Transitive Stereo Displays, Bart Farell, Cherlyn J. Ng

Biomedical and Chemical Engineering - All Scholarship

The separation between the eyes shapes the distribution of binocular disparities and gives a special role to horizontal disparities. However, for one-dimensional stimuli, disparity direction, like motion direction, is linked to stimulus orientation. This makes the perceived depth of one-dimensional stimuli orientation dependent and generally non-veridical. It also allows perceived depth to violate transitivity. Three stimuli, A, B, and C, can be arranged such that A > B (stimulus A is seen as farther than stimulus B when they are presented together) and B > C, yet A ≤ C. This study examines how the visual system handles the depth of A, …

Change Detection In Rhesus Monkeys And Humans, Deepna T. Devkar, Deepna T. Devkar

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Visual working memory (VWM) is the temporary retention of visual information and a key component of cognitive processing. The classical paradigm for studying VWM and its encoding limitations has been change detection. Early work focused on how many items could be stored in VWM, leading to the popular theory that humans could remember no more than 4±1 items. More recently, proposals have suggested that VWM is a noisy, continuous resource distributed across virtually all items in the visual field, resulting in diminished memory quality rather than limited quantity. This debate about the nature of VWM has predominantly been studied with …

Attention Modulates Erp Indices Of The Precedence Effect, Benjamin H. Zobel

Masters Theses

When presented with two identical sounds from different locations separated by a short onset asynchrony, listeners report hearing a single source at the location of the lead sound, a phenomenon called the precedence effect (Wallach et al., 1949; Haas, 1951). When the onset asynchrony is above echo threshold, listeners report hearing the lead and lag sounds as separate sources with distinct locations. Event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that perception of separate sound sources is accompanied by an object-related negativity (ORN) 100-250 ms after onset and a late posterior positivity (LP) 300-500 ms after onset (Sanders et al., 2008; Sanders …

The New Normal: Goodness Judgments Of Non-Invariant Speech, Julia R. Drouin

Honors Scholar Theses

Previous research has found that perceptual learning, or normalizing the idiosyncratic phonemes of speech, causes a shift in speech sound category boundaries. The present study examined if perceptual learning was limited to the boundary or if also caused a shift in internal category structure. Seventeen individuals participated in three behavioral tasks to explicate this question. In the Lexical Decision task, participants were trained in either /s/-biasing or /ʃ/- biasing context. In the Goodness Judgment task, participants rated a continuum of sounds on perceived /s/ goodness using a designated scale. Finally, in the Phoneme Identification task, participants listened to the same …

Normal Acquisition Of Expertise With Greebles In Two Cases Of Acquired Prosopagnosia, Constantin Rezlescu, Jason J. S. Barton, David Pitcher, Bradley Duchaine

Dartmouth Scholarship

Face recognition is generally thought to rely on different neurocognitive mechanisms than most types of objects, but the specificity of these mechanisms is debated. One account suggests the mechanisms are specific to upright faces, whereas the expertise view proposes the mechanisms operate on objects of high within-class similarity with which an observer has become proficient at rapid individuation. Much of the evidence cited in support of the expertise view comes from laboratory-based training experiments involving computer-generated objects called greebles that are designed to place face-like demands on recognition mechanisms. A fundamental prediction of the expertise hypothesis is that recognition deficits …

Direct Control Of Visual Perception With Phase-Specific Modulation Of Posterior Parietal Cortex, Andrew Jaegle, Tony Ro

Publications and Research

We examined the causal relationship between the phase of alpha oscillations (9–12 Hz) and conscious visual perception using rhythmic TMS (rTMS) while simultaneously recording EEG activity. rTMS of posterior parietal cortex at an alpha frequency (10 Hz), but not occipital or sham rTMS, both entrained the phase of subsequent alpha oscillatory activity and produced a phase-dependent change on subsequent visual perception, with lower discrimination accuracy for targets presented at one phase of the alpha oscillatory waveform than for targets presented at the opposite phase. By extrinsically manipulating the phase of alpha before stimulus presentation, we provide direct evidence that the …

Perceived Depth In Non-Transitive Stereo Displays, Bart Farell, Cherlyn J. Ng

Biomedical and Chemical Engineering - All Scholarship

The separation between the eyes shapes the distribution of binocular disparities and gives a special role to horizontal disparities. However, for one-dimensional stimuli, disparity direction, like motion direction, is linked to stimulus orientation. This makes the perceived depth of one-dimensional stimuli orientation dependent and generally non-veridical. It also allows perceived depth to violate transitivity. Three stimuli, A, B, and C, can be arranged such that A > B (stimulus A is seen as farther than stimulus B when they are presented together) and B > C, yet A 6 C. This study examines how the visual system handles the depth of A, …

Examining The Intersection Of The Cognitive Advantages And Disadvantages Of The Bilingual Brain, Irina Rabkina

Scripps Senior Theses

Two conflicting findings characterize cognitive processing accompanying bilingualism. The “bilingual advantage” refers to improved cognitive performance for bilingual compared to monolingual participants. Most bilingual advantages fall under the umbrella of cognitive control mechanisms, most frequently demonstrated using the Stroop task and the Simon task (e.g., Bialystok, 2008; Coderre, Van Heuven, & Conklin, 2013). The “bilingual disadvantage,” on the other hand, refers to bilinguals’ diminished performance on tasks that require word retrieval or switching between languages. This study examined the intersection of the bilingual advantage and the bilingual disadvantage to investigate whether they stem from a single cognitive control process. The …

Stimulus Induced Reversal Of Information Flow Through A Cortical Network For Animacy Perception., Sarah Shultz, Rebecca Van Den Honert, Andrew Engell, Gregory Mccarthy

Andrew Engell