Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Using Eye Tracking To Explore Visual Attention In Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Anne M.P. Michalek, Jonna Bobzien, Victor A. Lugo, Chung Hao Chen, Ann Bruhn, Michail Giannakos

Communication Disorders & Special Education Faculty Publications

Video social stories are used to facilitate understanding of social situations for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study explored the use of eye tracking technology to understand how adolescents with and without ASD visually attend to video social story content and whether visual attention is related to content comprehension. Six adolescents, with and without ASD, viewed a video social story of visiting a dental office. Eye gaze metrics, including fixation duration and count, and visit duration were collected to measure visual attention, and a knowledge assessment was administered for comprehension. Results indicated adolescents with ASD fixated and maintained …

Mindfulness: How It Affects Pregnancy, Labor And Delivery, Olivia R. Snipes

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

Pregnancy is a very physical and mental process during which many women face a wide variety of complications. The influx of hormones that happens during pregnancy has the ability to make pregnant women more susceptible to depression, anxiety and other stress related illnesses. High levels of stress can negatively affect the mother and unborn child and potentially the mother-child relationship. Many women prefer not to take the pharmaceutical route when coping with stress, anxiety and depression while pregnant. As a result, mindfulness practices have been utilized as an alternative method to reduce the negative effects of these complications and lower …

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, …

Increment And Decrement Effects In Motion Induced Blindness, Sofia C. Lombardo

Honors Theses and Capstones

Motion induced blindness (MIB) refers to the perceptual disappearance of a stationary stimulus in the presence of a motion mask. The current study investigated the degree to which afterimages affect MIB inhibition when measured as a contrast detection threshold in a modified replication of White et al. (2020). Adult participants (N = 3) with normal or corrected-to-normal eyesight completed a series of target detection tasks while viewing a standard MIB stimulus with the motion mask removed that consisted of increment versus decrement inducer and target components. A univariate ANOVA data analysis procedure revealed a significant afterimage effect (Scheffé p < 0.0253) on contrast detection threshold was found for targets presented at an interstimulus interval of 500 ms. This effect was stronger for decrement targets compared to increment targets in the decrement inducer conditions. Based on a comparison with previous research in which the MIB effect was found to endure across interstimulus intervals up to 15500 ms, the current findings indicate that afterimages do not significantly influence contrast detection thresholds for MIB. Further research is necessary for determining the strength and duration of afterimage effects on contrast detection thresholds in MIB that may be caused by interaction with the motion mask.

A Foray Into The Interval Timing Capabilities Of Tufted Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus [Sapajus] Apella), Gryff Griffin

Honors Theses

Time is a critical part of life and timing on the range from milliseconds to minutes has proven to be critical for several behaviors such as foraging and movement. While the exact neurological structures of interval timing are currently undefined, several studies have been completed comparing the interval timing capabilities of humans and nonhuman primates. However, these studies have unanimously utilized members of Macaca, which limits the abilities for researchers to make apt comparisons between humans and all nonhuman primates. This study sought to investigate whether tufted capuchins (Cebus [Sapajus] apella) have the capability to measure time …

Integrating The First Person View And The Third Person View Using A Connected Vr-Mr System For Pilot Training, Chang-Geun Oh, Kwanghee Lee, Myunghoon Oh

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

Virtual reality (VR)-based flight simulator provides pilots the enhanced reality from the first-person view. Mixed reality (MR) technology generates effective 3D graphics. The users who wear the MR headset can walk around the 3D graphics to see all its 360 degrees of vertical and horizontal aspects maintaining the consciousness of real space. A VR flight simulator and an MR application were connected to create the capability of both first-person view and third-person view for a comprehensive pilot training system. This system provided users the capability to monitor the aircraft progress along the planned path from the third-person view as well …

Uncovering Object Categories In Infant Views, Naiti S. Bhatt

Scripps Senior Theses

While adults recognize objects in a near-instant, infants must learn how to categorize the objects in their visual environments. Recent work has shown that egocentric head-mounted camera videos contain rich data that illuminate the infant experience (Clerkin et al., 2017; Franchak et al., 2011; Yoshida & Smith, 2008). While past work has focused on the social information in view, in this work, we aim to characterize the objects in infants’ at-home visual environments by modifying modern computer vision models for the infant view. To do so, we collected manual annotations of objects that infants seemed to be interacting within a …

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 …

Critically Evaluating Website Credibility: Factors That Influence Perceptions Of Online Mental Health Information, Mikayla Kimery

All Master's Theses

Research on the use of online information has suggested that general users of the internet do not critically evaluate the information they consume. In addition, specific elements of online information, such as the presence of advertisements, has been shown to affect perceptions of that information, resulting in less favorable ratings of websites. In contrast, communication studies have shown that perceptions of the presented information increased favorably when an image of a brain was included even when the actual information was considered insufficient in quality by experts. To date, the combined effects of brain images and advertisements on evaluations of online …

Autistic Personality Traits And Processing Of Ironic Language, Jaclyn Opie

Honors Theses

Whereas typically developing adults tend to show processing differences for ironic versus literal language, recent research has demonstrated that adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder do not show a difference. Building on these findings, the present study examined whether similar effects would emerge in a sample of college students who were assessed on autistic personality traits. Through an eye tracking during reading experiment, participants read sentence contexts in which factors of emotional language, ironic versus literal language, and sentence perspective were manipulated. Results showed that participants who had a low degree of autistic traits somewhat replicated the two-stage processing model of …

Fuzzy Cognitive Map-Based Knowledge Representation Of Hazardous Industrial Operations, Francesco Longo, Antonio Padovano, Letizia Nicoletti, Caterina Fusto, Mohaiad Elbasheer, Rafael Diaz

VMASC Publications

Hazardous industrial operations are highly stochastic, still human-dependent, and risky. Operators working in such an environment must understand the complex interrelation between several factors contributing to safe and effective operations. Therefore, being able to predict the effects of their actions on provoking or mitigating possible accidents is crucial. This study aims to utilize fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) to model the expert’s reasoning about occupational health and safety (OHS) in confined space. This knowledge is used by operators to build their mental models. The developed FCM displays all the possible incidents of a confined space and links these incidents with all …

Wait For It: An Eeg Exploration Of Excitement In Dance Music, Amelia Turrell, Andrea R. Halpern, Amir-Homayoun Javadi

Faculty Journal Articles

Previous brain-related studies on music evoked emotions have relied on listening to long music segments, which may reduce the precision of correlating emotional cues to specific brain areas. Break routines in electronic dance music (EDM) are emotive but short music moments containing three passages: breakdown, build-up, and drop. Within build-ups music features increase to peak moments prior to highly expected drop passages and peak pleasurable emotions when these expectations are fulfilled. The neural correlates of peak-pleasurable emotions (such as excitement) in the short seconds of build-up and drop passages in EDM break routines are therefore good candidates to study brain …

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 …

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 …

Excluder: An R Package That Checks For Exclusion Criteria In Online Data, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Collecting survey data online can result in low-quality data. Survey participants may not complete the survey, may complete the survey too quickly or slowly, may not reside in the country they claim, or may use unacceptable screen types. Also, online surveys are plagued by automated bots attempting to complete the surveys while offering worthless data. Researchers collecting online data may want to check their data for these and other potential criteria to exclude problematic data entries. The excluder package uses three main function types to mark, check, and exclude data based on seven different exclusion criteria.

Improving Measurements Of Similarity Judgments With Machine-Learning Algorithms, Jeffrey R. Stevens, Alexis Polzkill Saltzman, Tanner Rasmussen, Leen-Kiat Soh

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Intertemporal choices involve assessing options with different reward amounts available at different time delays. The similarity approach to intertemporal choice focuses on judging how similar amounts and delays are. Yet we do not fully understand the cognitive process of how these judgments are made. Here, we use machine-learning algorithms to predict similarity judgments to (1) investigate which algorithms best predict these judgments, (2) assess which predictors are most useful in predicting participants’ judgments, and (3) determine the minimum number of judgments required to accurately predict future judgments. We applied eight algorithms to similarity judgments for reward amount and time delay …

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, …

Effect Of Short-Storage Hrgcs On Driver Decision Behavior And Safety Concerns: Real-World Analysis And Experimental Evidence, Anne Linja

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Vehicle-train collisions at highway-rail grade crossings (HRGCs) continue to be a safety concern, and despite improvements in warnings, many of these incidents are attributed to human error. In some cases, distractions other than railroad traffic, such as HRGCs with limited space between the railroad tracks and the highway intersection, may create additional cognitive burdens for drivers. We investigated the effect of HRGC type (short-storage vs. non-short storage) on driver attention and decision-making in two studies. In Study 1, we systematically analyzed 996 incidents from 2017-2019 from the Federal Railroad Administration’s Safety database. Driver decision making and outcomes were different depending …

Third Culture Kids - Playing To Heal, Amna Sana

Theses and Dissertations

With increased globalization and a large expat population, Qatar is home to increasing numbers of Third Culture Kids (TCKs). TCKs are children who live in a country where their parents are non-native, children who grow up between cultures. Young TCKs, especially children between the ages of three and seven, do not possess the skills to adequately vocalize their feelings, but fortunately, play therapy allows them to articulate problems and feelings on their own terms. This thesis addresses the emotional hurdles facing TCKs, using concepts derived from play therapy and offering a series of interactive objects designed to reflect emotional expression …

Investigating How The Modularity Of Visuospatial Attention Shapes Conscious Perception Using Type I And Type Ii Signal Detection Theory, Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, Amir Raz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Attention abilities rest on the coordinated interplay of multiple components. One consequence to this multifaceted account is that selection processes likely intersect with perception at various junctures. Drawing from this overarching view, the current research examines how different forms of visuospatial attention influence various aspects of conscious perception, including signal detection, signal discrimination, visual awareness, and metacognition. In this effort, we combined a double spatial cueing approach, where stimulus- and goal-driven orienting were concurrently engaged via separate cues, with Type I and Type II signal detection theoretic frameworks through five experiments. Consistent with the modular view of visuospatial attention, our …

From Music To Animacy: Causal Reasoning Links Animate Agents With Musical Sounds, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We ask whether high-level causal reasoning about how music was generated can lead people to link musical sounds with animate agents. To test this, we asked whether people (N=60) make flexible inferences about whether an agent caused musical sounds, integrating information from the sounds’ timing and from the visual context in which it was produced. Using a 2x2 within-subject design, we found evidence of causal reasoning: In a context where producing a musical sequence would require self-propelled movement, people inferred that an agent had been present causing the sounds. …

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, …

Influence Of Increased Options On Performance Generalization Across Two Variations Of The Monty Hall Dilemma, Robert A. Southern

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) is a probability puzzle at which humans consistently fail to adopt the optimal winning strategy. The participant chooses between three identical doors, behind one of which is a valuable prize. After the participant makes their initial decision, the host reveals that there is nothing behind one of the two remaining doors, then asks the participant if they would like to stay with their originally selected door or switch to the remaining unopened door. The optimal choice is to switch to the previously unchosen door, which increases the probability of winning from 33% to 67%. Despite …

How Interesting Is This To You: Rating The Interestingness Of Auditory Clips, Hanna Zakharenko, James R. Unverricht, Yusuke Yamani

Psychology Faculty Publications

Modern technological environments integrate multiple devices, competing for limited attentional resources of users. This study aimed to validate the auditory stimuli used in Horrey et al. (2017) with a college student population and examine the psychological structure of task engagement. Thirty-nine students listened to thirty-nine auditory stimuli used in Horrey et al. (2017) for their level of engagement. Participants rated how interesting they found the material on a slider from -7 (boring) to 7 (interesting) while listening to each clip. Participants also rated levels of difficulty, entertainment, and likelihood to attend to each clip. Participants who rated high on difficulty, …

Now You See Me — Now You Don’T: An Investigation Of Hair Alterations Effects On Face Identification In Own- And Other-Race Faces, Maresa A. Tate

Senior Independent Study Theses

No abstract provided.

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 …

Predictors Of Academic Performance: The Roles Of Self-Compassion, Coping, Mental Toughness, Grit, And Self-Reported Stressors On Physics Final Exam Performance, Darnishia L. Morris

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The intersection of stress, persistence and success in college-aged students is progressively gaining attention in research. Analyzing how students succeed and what factors contribute to their success, failure, and ultimately the completion of their degree, is vitally important for educators and administrators in higher education to understand. Historically utilized factors such as grade point average (GPA), standardized test scores (college admissions and Advance Placement (AP) exams), and previous academic achievement (pre-requisite courses) are not the only predictors of academic performance. This study aimed to quantify contributions and inter-relationships of student perceptions, coping style, stress, mental toughness (MT), and other potential …

Visual Perception And Action In Reaching During Upper Limb Obstacle Avoidance, Nondon Chakraborty

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

During everyday activities, people reach to specific objects with their hands and avoid obstacles. For people to move successfully through an obstacle gap, it is necessary to be able to accurately perceive the actions that the surroundings afford and adjust hand movements accordingly. Reaching behaviours, including planning (perception) and execution (action), depend on visual information. This study aimed to understand and detect the differences between perceptual judgment and actual performance of both hands during a reaching task at the time of obstacle avoidance by using a hand-scaled approach. Participants were young adults (male (n=7) and female (n=10) aged 18 to …

Investigating The Inhibition Of The Return Of Attention In The Tactile Domain, Robert Plax

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Purpose: The time-course needed to elicit tactile inhibition of return (IOR) has not been well-defined due to the paucity of research in this area especially studies investigating spatial discrimination. Reportedly tactile IOR uses higher-order mental representations to orient attention spatially yet the properties of low-level dermatomal maps may better account for how IOR orients tactile attention in space although its contribution is unclear. The present study sought to establish a time-course that evokes IOR in a unimodal tactile spatial discrimination task and decouples the contribution of the dermatome from higher-order representations. Methods: Two conditions containing distinct tactile cue-target paradigms designed …

Exposure Therapy: Stimulus Intensity As A Factor In Treatment Preference, Matthew C. Arias

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Currently, a host of treatments are available for treating anxiety disorders, including specific phobia. Treatment of specific phobia includes pharmacological, psychosocial, and combined approaches. Exposure therapy, however, is considered the leading psychological treatment for specific phobia, and has shown to be effective. Exposure therapy challenges held beliefs about feared stimuli/situations and attempts to integrate new learning about the feared object/situation. Despite exposure being effective to treat specific phobia, it is associated with low adherence and high dropout rates. There is a need to examine, therefore, ways to improve patient adherence for exposure. A way to examine this issue is to …