Cognition and Perception Commons^™

In-Between Spaces: Atmospheres, Movement And New Narratives For The City, Paul Alexander Stoicheff

Masters Theses

We often think of architecture as distinct buildings, yet as we move through the city we continuously pass through a built environment that is a collage of buildings. These spaces between buildings are underestimated as influences on our experience of everyday life in the city. Considering architecture as linked existential experiences through spaces rather than confined to individual buildings is more in line with our experience of the city as a series of interconnected spaces and places. Rather than describing a single, static architecture through words, how can we express this linked experience of spaces dynamically through narratives? Can writing …

School Related Criminal Acts, Interpersonal Problems, And Classroom Behaviors As A Function Of The Proportion Of Black Students And Black Teachers, Leanne Zaire

Clinical Psychology Dissertations

This study’s purpose was to investigate school-level behavioral outcomes in relation to the proportion of Black teachers and students in U.S. schools. Negative school outcome and academic achievement gaps are well-documented. However, many of these studies utilized small, localized populations; my research used national data and focused on the problem behaviors in school. Drawing from Critical Race Theory, I hypothesized that a greater proportion of Black teachers would reduce school student problems and negative behaviors (e.g., student verbal abuse of teachers, widespread disorder in classrooms). After receiving a restricted-use license, I utilized data from 25,818 schools from the National Teacher …

The Politics Of The Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, And Subjectivity In The Anthropocene, Joshua Falcon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how psychedelic substances become drawn into particular sociohistorical and political arrangements, and how psychedelic experiences with psilocybin ‘magic mushrooms’ are used as tools of subjectivation. Guided by literatures in philosophy, critical theory, and the social sciences that focus on subjectivity, assemblage theory, and critical posthumanism, I argue that psychedelics are drawn into variegated assemblages, each of which conceptualizes the nature of psychedelics in highly specific ways that reflect implicit conceptions of the world and the self. In developing the concept of psychedelic assemblages, this research provides a window onto the politics of the self in the Anthropocene. …

The Influence Of A Showup Identification On A Subsequent Witness Description, Kelsey Lynne Hess

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Showups account for 30%-77% of initial identification procedures conducted by police (Flowe et al., 2001; Gonzalez et al., 1993; McQuiston & Malpass, 2001). Unlike lineups, showups are typically administered within a few hours of the crime event. The administration of a showup, due to its timing, is likely to precede a more formal police interview. The showup may introduce new characteristics of the suspect’s physical appearance to the witness. Any new characteristics inconsistent with the perpetrator’s appearance at the crime can be considered misinformation, which has the potential to contaminate witness recall. Although the contaminating effects of a showup have …

How Do We Represent Possibilities In The Visual World? — An Analysis Of Amodal Completion Under Cognitive And Perceptual Load., Camden Parker

Dartmouth College Undergraduate Theses

How do cognitive and perceptual load affect the way we experience the world when the visual scene is incomplete or partially occluded? The present study seeks to answer this question with a series of experiments based on primed matching, amodal completion, and load theory. In Experiment 1, we replicated results that amodal completion is automatic and supports multiple possible completions. In Experiment 2, we found that working memory load decreases the priming effects of both partially occluded and fully visible shapes. In Experiment 3, we found that perceptual load decreases the priming effect of partially occluded shapes more so than …

The Interplay Between Perceived Usability And Quality In Visual Design For Tablet Game Interfaces, Uttam Kokil, Tracy Harwood

Faculty and Research Publications

Research in human-computer interaction (HCI) has shown inconsistencies in the relationship between users’ perception of usability and the quality of visual design in digital products. Research is lacking in the gaming domain for visual design in user interfaces on tablet screens. Despite extensive research on visual aesthetics and perceived usability, best practices offer limited guidance for game interfaces from a user-centered design perspective.

The objectives of this study are twofold: to employ a design-oriented methodology to create a real iOS tablet game app from start to finish using ideation, focus groups, iterative prototyping, usability testing, and empirically evaluating game participants’ …

Timing Is Stressful: Do Listeners Combine Meaning And Rhythm To Predict Speech?, Molly Mcleod

Honors Theses

English and other languages such as German are stress-timed languages: the timing of the speech is determined by stressed and unstressed syllables, providing structure for sentences. While natural speech is not generally metrically regular, like in Shakespearean poetry, it still conveys timing cues through stress. Prior research has found that metric regularity enhances the processing of words (Rothermich et al, 2012), potentially because it attunes listeners’ attention to the predictability of stressed, and therefore important, syllables. Other work (e.g., Rogers, 2017) has suggested that predictability in the form of semantic associations (e.g., hearing “barn” facilitates understanding of “hay”) is a …

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 …

Memory, Mindfulness, And Perfectionism: Is There A Relationship Between Memory And Perfectionism, And Can Mindfulness Reduce False Alarms?, Stefani Morgan

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Memory has been found to improve with experience of mindfulness training. However, it has also been found to be impaired after mindfulness training. These mixed results are interesting and warrant further investigation into the relationship between memory and mindfulness. Additionally, perfectionism has been seen to play a role in task performance, making its role in memory task performance of interest to the current study. Perfectionism has been framed in a two-dimensional view, dividing it into two types. Perfectionistic concerns occurs when an individual is preoccupied with worry and concern over their performance, and perfectionistic striving occurs when an individual sets …

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 …

Validity Of Neural Distance Measures In Representational Similarity Analysis, Fabian A. Soto, Emily R. Martin, Hyeonjeong Lee, Nafiz Ahmed, Juan Estepa, Kianoosh Hosseini, Olivia A. Stibolt, Valentina Roldan, Alycia Winters, Mohammadreza Bayat

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Understanding The Influence Of Perceptual Noise On Visual Flanker Effects Through Bayesian Model Fitting, Jordan Deakin, Dietmar Heinke

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Visual Expertise In An Anatomically-Inspired Model Of The Visual System, Garrison W. Cottrell, Martha Gahl, Shubham Kulkarni

MODVIS Workshop

We report on preliminary results of an anatomically-inspired deep learning model of the visual system and its role in explaining the face inversion effect. Contrary to the generally accepted wisdom, our hypothesis is that the face inversion effect can be accounted for by the representation in V1 combined with the reliance on the configuration of features due to face expertise. We take two features of the primate visual system into account: 1) The foveated retina; and 2) The log-polar mapping from retina to V1. We simulate acquisition of faces, etc., by gradually increasing the number of identities the network learns. …

Motivated Attention To Social And Nonsocial Reward Images: Examining Relations With Externalizing Risk In Children, Adaeze C. Egwuatu

Doctoral Dissertations

Children that exhibit issues with externalizing behaviors often experience maladaptive outcomes in later life. Externalizing problems during middle childhood (e.g., 6-10 years old) are linked to issues with emotion regulation, which are, in turn, caused by disrupted attention and emotion reactivity to reward. Externalizing problems during this period have also been linked diminished processing of social reward stimuli, suggesting externalizing risk in children may be reflected in contrasting patterns in processing of non-social and social rewards. However, research comparing how differences in affective processing of specific reward content (i.e. social versus non-social) patterns relate to externalizing behavior within normative development …

Feature Tracking And Geometrical Priors Counteract Illusory Non-Rigidities From Outputs Of Motion-Energy Cells, Akihito Maruya, Qasim Zaidi

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Perceived Object Motion Variance Across Optical Contexts, Jan Jaap R. Van Assen, Mitchell J.P. Van Zuijlen, Shin'ya Nishida

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Modeling The Impacts Of Inter-Display And Inter-Lens Separation On Perceived Slant In Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays, Jonathan Tong, Laurie M. Wilcox, Robert S. Allison

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Fixational Eye Movements, Perceptual Filling-In, And Perceptual Fading Of Grayscale Images, Michael E. Rudd

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Constraining Computational Models Of Brightness Perception: What’S The Right Psychophysical Data?, Guillermo Aguilar, Joris Vincent, Marianne Maertens

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Modeling Perceptual Grouping Strategies In Visual Search Tasks, Maria Kon, Gregory Francis

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Does Optic Flow Provide Information About Actions?, Hannah Masoner

Dissertations

Optic flow, the pattern of light generated in the visual field by motion of objects and the observer’s body, serves as information that underwrites perception of events, actions and affordances. This visual pattern informs the observer about their own actions in relation to their surroundings, as well as those of others. This study explored the limits of action detection for others as well as the role of optic flow. First-person videos were created using camera recordings of the actor’s perspective as they performed various movements (jumping jacks, jumping, squatting, sitting, etc.). In three experiments participants attempted to detect the action …

Going Against The Grain? Examining The Efficacy Of Media Literacy Interventions On Congenial Media Effects, Matthew L. Blomberg

Journal of Media Literacy Education

While people’s proclivity toward congenial partisan media has been well documented, methods of resistance are less researched. This study explores the congenial media effect, the phenomenon of our gravitation to and acceptance of like-minded media, and whether a media literacy intervention can mitigate people’s acceptance of ideologically congruent partisan media. In an online experiment (N = 199), conservatives and liberals were exposed to differing media literacy interventions, one reviewing the traits of objectivity and bias, another which combined the former with an opportunity to reflect on participants’ own political beliefs. All were then exposed to amenable partisan content on the …

Effect Of Instruction Language On English-Spanish Bilinguals' Speech Perception, Alexa Andrade

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Throughout the years, researchers have investigated the various advantages that may exist of being bilingual; however, it is unknown how switching between languages affects a person’s basic perception of speech sounds. The goal of this thesis was to determine whether Spanish-English bilinguals respond to auditory stimuli differently based on the language in which they receive task instructions. Participants were randomly assigned to receive instructions and complete the study entirely in English or Spanish, thus thinking in the language that they were assigned. In the study, participants listened to three different sets of recordings, which could be perceived as a word …

The Effect Of Object Contact On Pre-Reaching Infants' Causal Perception., Mallory L. Thompson

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

The Sticky Mittens (SM) paradigm is an object manipulation task that provides infants the opportunity to explore objects through active experience before they have the necessary motor skills to do so on their own. Positive cognitive outcomes like increased attention to objects, object engagement, object exploration, and causal perception have been shown to result from active SM experience (Libertus & Needham, 2010; Rakison & Krogh, 2012). Researchers are interested in understanding which aspects of SM training are important for infant learning. Although there have been many SM studies looking at different variables, such as active vs. passive experience and parent …

Adjusting For Speaking Rate When Perceiving Speech In Background Noise., Dawson C Stephens

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

Speech perception is a very relevant concept occurring every day. Acoustic context effects such as temporal contrast effects (TCEs) influence perception significantly. For instance, when a faster context sentence is spoken, the participant should perceive the following target word as slower and more like /t/ in “tier”; when a slower context sentence is spoken, the participant should perceive the following target sound as faster and more like /d/ in “deer”. Recent work by Bosker et al. (2020) concluded that selective attention (directing attention to a specific stimulus while ignoring surrounding stimuli) had no effect on TCEs, suggesting they were automatic …

Combating Recidivism, Shaylin Daley

Senior Honors Projects

SHAYLIN DALEY (Psychology) Combating Recidivism Sponsor: Lisa Holley (Political Science) Many people believe that criminals cannot be helped. It is evident that at least some of society shuns people who break laws and have negative views about the amount of money spent on detaining inmates. Thousands of individuals are released from United States prisons a day. Many of these individuals have no plan in place for their return home and are sent into the streets with nothing except for a jail ID. Most of these people will end up returning to prison. A good sum of these people face problems …

Correlation Of The Anterior Salience Network With Attention: A Resting-State Fmri Analysis, Matthew Brooks

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Background: Some studies have broadened our understanding of attention while other studies have used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyses to identify brain regions that are functionally connected and may be associated with salience processing. This thesis sought to examine the relationship between the anterior salience network and attentional control. The current study hypothesized that resting-state functional connectivity between regions of the anterior salience network would be associated with attentional control ability. Methods: Forty-eight college-aged students completed the affective Stroop task to assess attentional regulation ability. Accuracy on trials of the task was examined in correlation with resting-state functional …

Dual Pathways To Burnout And Engagement: The Role Of Personal Goal Facilitation Through Work, Self-Discrepancy And Emotions, Bek Wuay Tang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

According to the job-person fit framework, workplace burnout is often exacerbated by mismatches between the characteristics of the employee and the organization. Consistent with this view, past research has found that employees who perceive low personal goal facilitation through work (PGFW) report higher levels of burnout. However, personal goals were often assessed nomothetically, based on the assumption that individuals across occupational groups share similar personal goals they would like to achieve through work. The current research took an idiographic approach by examining if PGFW assessed based on individuals’ uniquely defined personal goals would predict burnout and work engagement. In addition, …

Impact Of Fear On Interpersonal And Economic Decision-Making, John Wilson

Economics Undergraduate Honors Theses

Fear is one of the most basic, intrinsic, and powerful emotions an individual may experience when faced with known or unknown threats, imminent pressures, or expectations of approaching doom. Fear may allow an individual to act quickly in a fight-or-flight response. Fear can alter both physiological and psychological frameworks to avoid certain calamity. Fear provides motivation to protect oneself or to effectuate altruistic behavior towards others for the greater good. One lesser explored area of research pertaining to fear and its implications is the influence of fear on interpersonal and economic decision-making. Economic volatility can produce both immediate consequences as …