Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Facts From Fiction: Packaging Misinformation, Angel Ray Houts

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Previous research established that readers learn both accurate and inaccurate information from fictional stories. The current study explored factors that might moderate the impact of misinformation. Participants read fictional stories that contain three assertions; the first two were labeled as set-up assertions, and the last were labeled as the critical assertion. First, there was a manipulation of plausibility of information within the stories by presenting either assertions with truthful information, assertions with small lies (plausible misinformation), or assertions with big lies (implausible misinformation). Second, there was manipulation of reliability of the fictional stories by presenting big lies or truthful information …

Observing The Transformation Of Sketches When Rendered In Different Scenarios, Cade Fallaw

Senior Theses

The purpose of the project was to see how a single image of my house transformed when I drew multiple iterations of it under different conditions. Each condition was applied to the artist (me); either by limiting my physical state or by creating a specific mental frame that I drew from. This project consists of 31 sketches of my house: 24 of them were drawn with applied conditions and 7 were drawn from memory. As expected, the greatest differences between the drawings occurred when a greater constraint was placed on the artist, such as when I drew using three different …

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 …

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.

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/

Altering Age And Gender Stereotypes By Creating The Halo And Horns Effects With Facial Expressions, Mary Katherine Radeke, Anthony John Stahelski

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

This study examined the impact of a variable, facial expression, on the social perception and personality trait stereotypic inferences made to age and gender. Twelve facial photographs of young and old female and male models posing with either smiling, scowling, or neutral facial expressions were presented to participants who judged various social perceptions and personality traits. Results indicated that facial expression is strongly associated with two very different inference groupings. Smiling induced positive inferences, creating a Halo Effect, scowling induced negative inferences, creating a Horns Effect. Smiling influenced the age and gender inferences in a positive direction, and scowling did …

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 …

A Psychological Perspective On Elephant Rewilding, Janet Vt Pauketat

Animal Sentience

Baker & Winkler describe the complexities of captive elephant conservation efforts in Thailand through multiple lenses. They advocate rewilding captive elephants within mixed elephant-human communities based on the benefits to captive elephants as well as to Karen mahout communities, given the entrenched economic and social systems in Thailand. From a psychological perspective, this advocacy is grounded in considerations of culture, cognition, speciesism, the differential valuing of others in social hierarchies, and the potential for positive interaction to build positive emotions and trust that enable successful rewilding in a world of elephants and humans.

Behavioral Hypervigilance In A Normative Population, Karly Weinreb

Theses and Dissertations

Hypervigilance is conceptualized as a symptom of trauma-related disorders, however it can also occur in a normative population. To distinguish normative hypervigilance from trauma-related hypervigilance, 372 participants (123 trauma-exposed and 249 non-trauma-exposed) completed a questionnaire assessing hypervigilance in contexts. Trauma-exposed participants reported greater levels of hypervigilance in 3 contexts.

“A” For Effort: Rewarding Effortful Retrieval Attempts Improves Learning From General Knowledge Errors In Women, Damon Abraham, Kateri Mcrae, Jennifer A. Mangels

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Previous research has shown that the prospect of attaining a reward can promote task-engagement, up-regulate attention toward reward-relevant information, and facilitate enhanced encoding of new information into declarative memory. However, past research on reward-based enhancement of declarative memory has focused primarily on paradigms in which rewards are contingent upon accurate responses. Yet, findings from test-enhanced learning show that making errors can also be useful for learning if those errors represent effortful retrieval attempts and are followed by corrective feedback. Here, we used a challenging general knowledge task to examine the effects of explicitly rewarding retrieval effort, defined as a semantically …

Changes In Hemodynamic Response To Faces, Scenes, And Objects In A Visual Statistical Learning Task: An Fmri Analysis, Aaron T. Halvorsen

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

Learning causes changes in brain activity and neural connections. Statistical learning is an implicit learning process that involves extracting regularities from the environment and finding patterns in stimuli based on their transitional probabilities. The following study describes an attempt to elucidate temporal changes in hemodynamic activity for three category-specific brain areas using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Blood oxygen-level dependent signal (BOLD) responses were collected while subjects viewed faces, scenes, and objects with high and low transitional probabilities in an fMRI scanner. We expected brain activity to show a temporal shift in timing of activation when comparing BOLD signal responses …

Comparing Suicide Risk, Acquired Capability, Distress Tolerance, And Reasons For Living In Those With Non-Suicidal Self-Injury Or Disordered Eating, Brooke Beck

Student/Alumni Personal Papers

Acquired Capability has been a longstanding measure used to predict the likelihood that one may attempt suicide. However, does it hold true in every scenario? Are there other measures that would prove more accurate? This research evaluated these questions, examining archival data of two identified risk groups: those participating in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI) and Disordered Eating (DE).

When measured using the Acquired Capability for Suicide Scale (ACSS), both groups have similar results in survey data as well as when measuring Distress Tolerance. This would imply that both are at the same risk of attempting suicide. However, when the groups were …

The Epistemic And Psychological Mechanisms Perpetuating Racism Within The Criminal Justice System, Danielle Walker

Theses

Abstract

Many attempts have been made by philosophers, political activists, psychologists, historians, social advocates, and others to explain the mechanisms at play in the perpetuation and resulting manifestations of systemic and institutional racism. On one side of the debate there lies a theory that there is an epistemic failure at the root of racial bias towards Blacks, white ignorance, a collective amnesia regarding what has and does take place in society, as it pertains to their oppression and isolation, like the view of philosopher Charles W. Mills. According to Mills, this type of ignorance, or non-knowing, is a cognitive phenomenon …

Six Of One, Une Demi-Douzaine De L’Autre: Detecting Cross-Language Code-Switching In A Continuous Narrative, Melissa Kadish

Senior Independent Study Theses

This Independent Study examined how cross-language code-switching is processed and perceived. The following experiment compared how long English-French bilinguals, English monolinguals, and English-speaking French-language-learners took to detect instances of French/English code-switching in a semantically-rich narrative. Bilinguals displayed shorter change-detection response latencies than language learners and monolinguals, but the latter two groups did not significantly differ. These results provide insight into how the observed cognitive differences between bilinguals and monolinguals may develop, and offer support for the multi-language lexical processing theory of language interference. This study also addresses potential sociocultural origins of the observed language-level differences in code-switching perception by examining …

Developmental Perceptual Impairments: Cases When Tone-Deafness And Prosopagnosia Co-Occur, Sébastien Paquette, Hui C. Li, Sherryse L. Corrow, Stephanie S. Buss, Jason J.S. Barton, Gottfried Schlaug

Psychology Faculty Publications

Studies have shown subtle gray and white matter abnormalities in subjects with several developmental disorders including prosopagnosia, tone-deafness, and dyslexia. Correlational evidence suggests that tone-deafness and dyslexia tend to co-occur, suggesting a link between these two developmental disorders. However, it is not known whether tone-deafness can also be associated with other developmental disorders such as impaired face recognition or prosopagnosia. We addressed this question by assessing face perception abilities in a group of tone-deaf individuals and matched non-tone-deaf subjects. The Cambridge (CFMT) and the Warrington (WRMT) face memory tests were used to assess face processing in the combined group of …

Brief Report: Attentional Cueing To Images Of Social Interactions Is Automatic For Neurotypical Individuals But Not Those With Asc, Marcus Neil Morrisey, Catherine L. Reed, Daniel N. Mcintosh, M. D. Rutherford

Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

Human actions induce attentional orienting toward the target of the action. We examined the influence of action cueing in social (man throwing toward a human) and non-social (man throwing toward a tree) contexts in observers with and without autism spectrum condition (ASC). Results suggested that a social interaction enhanced the cueing effect for neurotypical participants. Participants with ASC did not benefit from non-predictive cues and were slower in social contexts, although they benefitted from reliably predictive cues. Social orienting appears to be automatic in the context of an implied social interaction for neurotypical observers, but not those with ASC. Neurotypical …

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 …

Political Polarization And Intolerance Of Intolerance, Nina Luiggi

Honors Projects in Applied Psychology

Scholarly research linking conservatism to intolerance is widespread (McAdams et al, 2008; Jost et al, 2003): however, relatively little attention is paid to the impact of intolerance on the liberal side. Nevertheless, mounting empirical research and popular journalism suggests that intolerance works both ways, but that liberals are not aware of their own intolerance. Building on survey methodology used by Crawford and Pilanski (2014), the present study uses a scale of ideological consistency, intolerance judgments across a range of issues, and perceived intolerance, to explore both the intolerance levels and perceived intolerance levels of liberals and conservatives, as well as …

Perceptions Of Uncivil And Sexual Harassment Perceptions By Gender, Employment Status, And Likelihood To Sexually Harass, John Schroader

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This research examined gender and employment status (full-time worker or student) differences in perceptions of workplace sexual harassment and incivility. Previous and recent meta-analyses suggested small effects by gender. The current research introduced a method of measuring perceptions by forcing a choice of identifying a behavior as sexual harassment, incivility, or neither. The instrument was designed in this way to determine if small effects existed because males tended to have overlapping definitions of sexual harassment and incivility. Propensity to sexually harass was also measured. Results suggest no gender or employment status effects on the method, but propensity to sexually harass …

Do Clothing Style And Color Affect Our Perceptions Of Others?, Ariel M. Kershner

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Prior research has shown that women who wear red clothing or suggestive clothing are perceived as more attractive, having greater sexual intent, and having more negative qualities than women dressed in different colors or less suggestive clothing. This bias towards perceiving sexual intent may be evolutionary or may be due to people projecting their emotions onto others. The current study builds from this research by performing a 2 (color: white or red) x 2 (clothing type: suggestive or non-suggestive) between-subjects experiment. We hypothesized that women would be perceived as more attractive and as having greater sexual intent while wearing red …

Memory Of Words: A Categorization Task, Paulina Maxim

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Through the years, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm has demonstrated to be a useful method of observing false memories from semantically related word lists. The present study was conducted fully online and measured memory performance dependent on categorization of words by using groups, as well as dragging words across the page as a form of interaction. In a 2 (Categorized, Non-Categorized) x 2 (Interactive, Non-Interactive) between-subject factorial experiment, 56 undergraduate students were shown 18 different lists of 15 associative words to be studied, one list at a time. Participants were given a free recall test immediately after studying each individual list. Participants …

Psychometric Properties Of A Modified Moral Injury Questionnaire In A Military Population, Abby L. Braitman, Allison R. Battles, Michelle L. Kelley, Hannah C. Hamrick, Robert J. Cramer, Sarah Ehlke, Adrian J. Bravo

Psychology Faculty Publications

Moral injury (MI) results from perpetration of or exposure to distressing events, known as morally injurious events (MIEs), that challenge moral beliefs and values. Due to the type of involvement in recent military conflicts, many veterans report MIEs that may cause dissonance and, in turn, MI. Although 2 existing measures assess MIEs, neither currently assesses the defining characteristics of MI (i.e., guilt, shame, difficulty forgiving self and others, and withdrawal). The present study reports the initial psychometric test of a modified version (Robbins, Kelley, Hamrick, Bravo, & White, 2017) of the Moral Injury Questionnaire—Military version (MIQ-M; Currier, Holland, Drescher, & …

Learning To Think Slower: Review Of Thinking, Fast And Slow By Daniel Kahneman (2011), Samuel L. Tunstall, Patrick N. Beymer

Numeracy

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 499 pp. ISBN 978-0374275631.

As an expansive review of Kahneman and others' work over the past half-century in understanding human decision-making, Thinking, Fast and Slow provides Numeracy readers much to consider for both pedagogy and research. In this review, we outline Kahneman's core argument—that humans use both rash (emotional) System 1 thinking and slow (logical) System 2 thinking—then discuss how such systems might be addressed in a quantitative literacy classroom.

The Effects Of Familiarity On Visual Search Performance Of Typically Developing Toddlers And Toddlers With Autism Spectrum Disorder, Laura Keegan

Honors College Theses

Visual Search is an attention task that measures how efficiently a person is able to find a target among distractors. It has been found before that children diagnosed with ASD can perform better at visual search when compared to age-matched typically developing children (Kaldy et al., 2011, 2013). Our team conducted a follow-up study with slightly different stimulus parameters (Smith et al., 2015) and two different potential target objects (in this task, an apple vs. a carrot). The results showed that the identity of the target object influenced toddlers’ search performance: they were slightly faster at finding the target when …

“Good Guys Do Rape”: An Examination Of College Student Perceptions Of Sexual Assault Perpetrators, Taylor Blythe Martinez

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When people think of a typical sexual assault, they rely heavily on preconceived notions of sexual violence, which often represents stereotypical rape scenarios. Many stereotypical depictions of perpetrators tend to be centered around individuals who are strangers, mentally ill, lonely, with poor or impoverished upbringing. How perpetrators and victims are depicted impact the likelihood of others believing victims and attributing guilt to perpetrators. This may contribute to societal endorsement of acquaintance rape as not real compared to stereotypical rape scenarios. The current study examines how college students, and in particular fraternity men and sorority women, view perpetrators of sexual assault. …

Connecting Numbers With Emotion: Review Of Numbers And Nerves: Information, Emotion, And Meaning In A World Of Data By Scott Slovic And Paul Slovic (2015), Samuel L. Tunstall

Numeracy

Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic (Eds.). Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of Data (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2015). 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-87071-776-5.

It is common to view quantitative literacy as reasoning with respect to numbers. In Numbers and Nerves, the contributors to the volume make clear that we should attend not only to how students consciously reason with numbers, but also how our innate biases influence our actions when faced with numbers. Beginning with the concepts of psychic numbing, and then psuedoinefficacy, the contributors to the volume examine how our behaviors when …

Canine Emotions As Seen Through Human Social Cognition, Miiamaaria V. Kujala

Animal Sentience

It is not possible to demonstrate that dogs (Canis familiaris) feel emotions, but the same is true for all other species, including our own. The issue must therefore be approached indirectly, using premises similar to those used with humans. Recent methodological advances in canine research reveal what dogs experience and what they derive from the emotions perceptible in others. Dogs attend to social cues, they respond appropriately to the valence of human and dog facial expressions and vocalizations of emotion, and their limbic reward regions respond to the odor of their caretakers. They behave differently according to the …

An Investigation Into Hybrid Models Of Mindreading: A Dual Type Theory Account, Alexandra Jewell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mindreading, or attributing mental states to others, involves instances of simulation and theory; but there is controversy over which one of these methods is the primary, or default, mechanism. I propose that mindreading is a theory-based process, such that we utilize theory over simulation when both are available and reliable. To argue my position, I suggest that theory has been inaccurately portrayed in past discussion and that we possess two types: a connectionist network (tt1) and a traditional, conceptual folk-psychology (tt2). By dividing theory in this way, we can explain common phenomena of mindreading that other theory-based accounts do not …

The Pribram – Bohm Hypothesis Part Ii: The Physiology Of Consciousness, Shelli R. Joye

CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty-First Century

A physiology of consciousness is elaborated, based upon implications of the Pribram-Bohm hypothesis (developed in Part I of this series). The model presented here is in sharp contrast to the prevailing conviction among neuroscientists that consciousness will eventually be discovered to be a physiological epiphenomenon of neuronal electrical impulses firing in the brain. In contrast, the Pribram-Bohm theory holds that consciousness, inherent in what Bohm views cosmologically as “the Whole,” manifests as a dynamic conscious energy resonance bridging the explicate space-time domain with the nonlocal, transcendent flux domain termed the “implicate order.” Presented in Part I, the Pribram-Bohm hypothesis posits …

Exercises On Overcoming Perfectionist Tendencies, Jake Yoo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my latest series, I investigate my neurotic perfectionist tendency through repetition of phrases that I understand to be true in my head, but have a problem with accepting it in my heart. This way, I am studying my personal biases and the way I perceive the world in order to break free from unwanted behaviors and process negative emotions. Louise Bourgeois is a historical precedence to my practice as whole, while the series functions similarly to Yayoi Kusama’s dot and net paintings—a psychological portrait achieved through continuous repetition of a few elements.