Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Modeling Semantic Structure And Spreading Activation In Retrieval Tasks, Abhilasha Ashok Kumar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Considerable work in the past decade has focused on representational accounts of how semantic information is acquired and organized, leading to the advent of modern Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn word meanings by extracting statistical information from large text corpora. However, mechanistic accounts for how meaning-related information is accessed and retrieved from semantic representations to ultimately produce responses within semantic tasks remain relatively understudied, especially for production-based tasks that require the selection of a single response amongst several activated competitors, such as in free association and sentence completion tasks. This dissertation evaluated the extent to which state-of-the-art DSMs combined …

Presence-At-Hand, Eric Lyle Schultz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

The writing that follows is intended to provide a theoretical framework for the motives behind my practice. The primary concerns addressed are the reception, transmission, and physical shape of knowledge. I will discuss a human condition that exists as a byproduct of both the legacy of representation as well as the innate biology of the brain. I will argue that as a society we are governed by the residue of an extreme logic, and that this condition places severe margins on our potential for creative solutions. I will propose that our ability to create meaning is stifled by the …

Implicit Prejudice And Its Implications For How Communities Should Respond To Racial Injustices, Harry Kainen

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

In the spring of 2013, a racially controversial incident occurred on the Washington University Campus. The incident raised questions about the racial tolerance of the university community as well as exactly who should be held responsible for the injustice. Most importantly, the community’s response to the incident exemplified how a community with the potential for substantial collective action can fail to mobilize and improve when they are called upon to do so. This paper examines recent psychological research that studies the existence of subconscious racial prejudices in order to examine its implications in community responses to racial injustices. Results show …