Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Medulla: A 2d Sidescrolling Platformer Game That Teaches Basic Brain Structure And Function, Joey R. Fanfarelli, Stephanie Vie

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article explores the design and instructional effectiveness of Medulla, an educational game meant to teach brain structure and function to undergraduate psychology students. Developed in the retro-style platformer genre, Medulla uses two-dimensional gameplay with pixel-based graphics to engage students in learning content related to the brain, information which is often pre-requisite to more rigorous psychological study. A pretest posttest design was used in an experiment assessing Medulla’s ability to teach psychology content. Results indicated content knowledge was significantly higher on the posttest than the pretest, with a large effect size. Medulla appears to be an effective learning tool. These …

Central Auditory Processing And The Link To Reading Ability In Adults, Lisa M. Brody

Honors Scholar Theses

What makes someone a good reader? What makes someone a poor reader? The root biological marker of reading ability has yet to be determined. Many scientists agree that phonological awareness, the understanding of speech sounds, and phonological decoding are key components of reading ability (Melby-Lervag, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012). In addition to this, new research suggests that the auditory system, specifically the timing of auditory processing in the brain, provides a crucial platform that supports the development of reading ability (Banai et al., 2009). This thesis provides empirical data to support the link between reading skill …

How To Go Beyond The Body: An Introduction, Guy Dove

Faculty Scholarship

Embodied cognition represents one of most important theoretical developments in contemporary cognitive science. Many cognitive processes appear to be influenced by body morphology, emotions, and sensorimotor systems. This perspective is supported by an ever increasing collection of empirical studies that fall into two broad classes: one consisting of experiments that implicate action, emotion, and perception systems in seemingly abstract cognitive tasks and the other consisting of experiments that demonstrate the contribution of bodily interaction with the external environment to the performance of such tasks.

Now that embodied cognition is fairly well established, the time seems right for assessing its further …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Research Brief: "Examining The Lived Experience And Factors Influencing Education Of Two Student Veterans Using Photovoice Methodology", Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This brief is about how student veterans' military experiences impact their social and higher education experiences. In policy and practice, student veterans should seek help from faculty and staff, and universities should be available to address the needs of student veterans; the VA should increase its partnerships with universities to allow for additional access to resources for student veterans, and policymakers should support universities in creating student veteran centers. Suggestions for future research include expanding the size and diversity of the sample, reducing constraints on participants, and allowing for group-sharing experiences within the study.

The Ripple Effects Of Stranger Harassment On Objectification Of Self And Others, Meghan Davidson, Sarah Gervais, Lindsey W. Sherd

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Despite the frequency and negative consequences of stranger harassment, only a scant number of studies have explicitly examined stranger harassment and its consequences through the lens of objectification theory. The current study introduced and tested a mediation model in which women’s experiences of stranger harassment may lead to self-objectification, which in turn may lead to objectification of other people. To examine this model, undergraduate women (N = 501) completed measures of stranger harassment (including the verbal harassment and sexual pressure subscales of the Stranger Harassment Index), body surveillance, and objectification of other women and men. Consistent with hypotheses, significant positive …

Absolute Pitch In Naturalistic Singing: A Commentary On Olthof Et Al., Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

The parent article looks at pitch stability in an archive of folksongs recorded over several decades. Some evidence for pitch stability was found. Here, I consider some additional aspects of the archive that could be examined, offer some extensions to relevant laboratory studies, and consider some inherent strengths and limitations of the naturalistic, archival approach.

Music, Andrea R. Halpern, Robert J. Zatorre

Faculty Contributions to Books

Neuroimaging has contributed greatly to our understanding of the sensory, motor, and cognitive systems involved in musical processing. Cortical loops connecting auditory with parietal, premotor, and prefrontal cortices are important for encoding pitch and temporal relationships from which music is built and for generating musical expectancies. These circuits are also important for holding information in working memory and for interfacing perceptual and motor representations. Musical imagery recruits auditory areas together with frontal and supplementary motor regions. Musical emotion emerges from the interaction of these systems with the reward circuit. All of these systems are modifiable functionally and structurally following training.

Differences In Auditory Imagery Self-Report Predict Neural And Behavioral Outcomes, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

Mental imagery abilities vary among individuals, as shown both by objective measures and by self-report. Few imagery studies consider auditory imagery, however. The Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale is a short self-report measure encompassing both Vividness and Control subscales for musical, verbal, and environmental sounds. It has high internal reliability, no relation to social desirability, and only a modest relation to musical training. High scores on Vividness predict fewer source memory errors in distinguishing heard from imagined tunes on a recognition test, and better performance on pitch imitation tasks. Furthermore, higher scores are related to hemodynamic response and gray matter volume …

Recording The Learning Curve During The Mastery Of Glassblowing, Katie L. Corticelli

Senior Honors Projects

Fire and inspiration melted glass art’s enchanting ways into the center of my passions. Lampworking is a small-scale method of glass blowing, which is the term to refer to an art form where one shapes molten glass into a variety of items. To create glass art, propane and oxygen supply a flame torch which melts the glass. Gravity and rhythmic hands work symbiotically to shape glass rods and tubes. The result is unique three-dimensional visual art.

After years of aspiring to work with borosilicate glass, the opportunity to incorporate the endeavor with academia presented itself. Through months of time and …

The Effects Of Musical Mood And Musical Arousal On Visual Attention, Angela B. Marti Marca, Tram Nguyen, Jessica Grahn Dr.

Undergraduate Honors Posters

The presence of music is a visceral part of the human experience and its influence on cognitive function has become a growing area of research in psychology. In particular, perceptual properties of music (mood and arousal) have been shown to significantly affect performance. There has been minimal research in the field on the interaction of these perceptual properties and their influence on attentional processes. This research study focused on the effects of musical mood and musical arousal on visual attention. Given that music is a highly subjective experience, participants were asked to rate different music clips on independent dimensions of …

Course Syllabus (Sp14) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "The Sublime, The Uncanny, And The Imagination", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

In a world in which what counts as knowledge is predominantly restricted to the measurable and the calculable, those elements of human experience which elude and exceed these parameters are often ignored and discounted. In this course, we will examine questions of the sublime, the uncanny, and the speculative as treated in literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy in order to think and write critically about them. Here, we will consider the possible extent to which an openness to such experiences can enrich our lives.

Recovered Memories And Accusations Of Sexual Abuse: A Review Of Scientific Research Relevant To Missionary Contexts, David R. Dunaetz

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Childhood sexual abuse of missionary children is a tragedy that mission organizations are seeking to prevent. A second tragedy concerns missionaries falsely accused of sexual abuse. Psychotherapy that generated false memories of sexual abuse was common in the 1980s and 1990s and still continues to some degree today in Christian circles. This chapter reviews scientific evidence that such false memories exist and provides guidelines that Christian organizations may use to help sort true memories of childhood sexual abuse from false memories of childhood sexual abuse.

The Functions Of Literature And The Evolution Of Extended Mind, Nancy Easterlin

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Music And Movement Share A Dynamic Structure That Supports Universal Expressions Of Emotion, Beau Sievers, Larry Polansky, Michael Casey, Thalia Wheatley

Dartmouth Scholarship

Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in …

Metaphor And Analogy: The Sun And Moon Of Legal Persuasion, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Drawing on recent studies of social cognition, decision making, and analogical processing, this article recommends that lawyers turn to novel characterizations and metaphors to solve a particular kind of persuasion problem that is created by the way judges and juries think and decide. According to social cognition researchers, we perceive and interpret new information by following a process of schematic cognition, analogizing the new data we encounter to the knowledge structures embedded in our memories. Decision-making researchers differentiate between intuitive and reflective processes (System 1 and System 2), and they agree that in System 1 decision making, only the most …

The Possible Connection Of Gamma Oscillation And 3-D Object Representation, Thien N. Vu

Summer Research

We process and encode for different features of a particular object (shape, color, texture, etc.) in distinct areas of the brain. How we bind these attributes together into a unified perception of an object is unknown. Past research suggests that synchronized activity between brain areas, particularly induced gamma activity (~ 40 Hz), may account for this binding process and the basis of our conscious perceptual experience, specifically through object representation. In this study, participants were asked to look at a series of 2-D pictures of cars from distinctive rotations (0⁰, 90⁰, 180⁰) and were …

Animal Cognition, The Importance Of Touch, And The Cit, Deirdre Yeater

Presidential Seminar on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

A presentation of Professor Yeater's incorporation in her class PSCC103 of 5 in- class discussions comparing human and non-human species, particularly dolphins, with an emphasis on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the importance of touch. PSCC-103, The Human Community: The Individual and Society, is a 3 credit course which engages students in a study of the relationship between psychology – the science of human behavior and mental processes, and the Catholic intellectual tradition – which is characterized by rigorous intellectual inquiry and an openness to scientific ideas. This course aims to help us understand ourselves as human persons, as well …

Social Cognition And The Allure Of The Second-Person Perspective: In Defense Of Empathy And Simulation, Karsten R. Stueber

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

This essay serves as an evaluation of challenges to the orthodox way of conceiving "mindreading" abilities by defending a 2006 claim by the author that those abilities involve basic and reenactive empathy .

Dynamic Aspects Of Musical Imagery, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

Auditory imagery can represent many aspects of music, such as the starting pitches of a tune or the instrument that typically plays it. In this paper, I concentrate on more dynamic, or time-sensitive aspects of musical imagery, as demonstrated in two recently published studies. The first was a behavioral study that examined the ability to make emotional judgments about both heard and imagined music in real time. The second was a neuroimaging study on the neural correlates of anticipating an upcoming tune, after hearing a cue tune. That study found activation of several sequence-learning brain areas, some of which varied …

Semantic Priming Of Familiar Songs, Sarah K. Johnson, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

We explored the functional organization of semantic memory for music by comparing priming across familiar songs both within modalities (Experiment 1, tune to tune; Experiment 3, category label to lyrics) and across modalities (Experiment 2, category label to tune; Experiment 4, tune to lyrics). Participants judged whether or not the target tune or lyrics were real (akin to lexical decision tasks). We found significant priming, analogous to linguistic associative-priming effects, in reaction times for related primes as compared to unrelated primes, but primarily for within-modality comparisons. Reaction times to tunes (e.g., "Silent Night") were faster following related tunes ("Deck the …

Introduction To The Neurosciences And Music Iv: Learning And Memory, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

The conference entitled "The Neurosciences and Music-IV: Learning and Memory" was held at the University of Edinburgh from June 9-12, 2011, jointly hosted by the Mariani Foundation and the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development, and involving nearly 500 international delegates. Two opening workshops, three large and vibrant poster sessions, and nine invited symposia introduced a diverse range of recent research findings and discussed current research directions. Here, the proceedings are introduced by the workshop and symposia leaders on topics including working with children, rhythm perception, language processing, cultural learning, memory, musical imagery, neural plasticity, stroke rehabilitation, autism, …

Introduction To Special Issue: Dementia And Music, Andrea R. Halpern, Isabelle Peretz, Lola L. Cuddy

Faculty Journal Articles

This special issue follows two previous special issues on music and neurological disorders (April 2008, Volume 23/Issue 4 and April 2010, Volume 25/Issue 4). Like its predecessors, the issue presents studies employing a patient-based approach to music perception, cognition, and emotion. Whereas the earlier issues dealt with acquired and congenital disorders and impairments, the present issue focuses on dementia, primarily on its most common form, Alzheimer's disease (AD).

The Wounded Healer: Finding Meaning In Suffering, Garret B. Wyner

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

In modern history, no event has more profoundly symbolized suffering than the Holocaust. This novel “Husserlian-realist” phenomenological dissertation elucidates the meaning of existential trauma through an interdisciplinary and psychologically integrative vantage point. I use the testimony of a select group of Holocaust witnesses who committed suicide decades after that event as a lens to examine what their despair may reveal about an unprecedented existential, moral, and spiritual crisis of humanity that threatens to undermine our faith in human history and reality itself. By distinguishing what they actually saw about our condition from what they merely believed about reality, I show …

Levels-Of-Processing Effects On "Remember" Responses In Recognition For Familiar And Unfamiliar Tunes, Esra Mungan, Zehra F. Peynircioğlu, Andrea R. Halpern

Faculty Journal Articles

We investigated the effect of level-of-processing manipulations on "remember" and "know" responses in episodic melody recognition (Experiments 1 and 2) and how this effect is modulated by item familiarity (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants performed 2 conceptual and 2 perceptual orienting tasks while listening to familiar melodies: judging the mood, continuing the tune, tracing the pitch contour, and counting long notes. The conceptual mood task led to higher d' rates for "remember" but not "know" responses. In Experiment 2, participants either judged the mood or counted long notes of tunes with high and low familiarity. A level-of-processing effect emerged …

If These Men Could Still Talk, Rebecca Damphousse

Academic Symposium of Undergraduate Scholarship

For this assignment, two theorists in psychology were selected to engage in conversation. Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget were chosen and their theories of human development were researched. Erikson was asked how his experiences as a child impacted the formation of his theories. The question for Piaget was directed at the permanence, relevancy and universality of his theory into the 21st century. While a large amount of research was conducted, the questions and answers were pure conjecture.

Inspiring Art And Science, Andrea R. Halpern

Other Faculty Research and Publications

I read Ralf Dahm's article "Finding Alzheimer's Disease" (March-April) with interest for two reasons. First, as a cognitive neuroscientist, I have studied the effect of early-stage Alzheimer's disease on memory and on the appreciation of music and art. In addition, I am a member of a community chorus here in Pennsylvania, the Susquehanna Valley Chorale, which recently commissioned and premiered a choral work on the topic of the ailment, called Alzheimer's Stories.

Brain‐Mind And Structure‐Function Relationships: A Methodological Response To Coltheart, Adina L. Roskies

Dartmouth Scholarship

In some recent papers, Max Coltheart has questioned the ability of neuroimaging techniques to tell us anything interesting about the mind and has thrown down the gauntlet before neuroimagers, challenging them to prove he is mistaken. Here I analyze Coltheart’s challenge, show that as posed its terms are unfair, and reconstruct it so that it is addressable. I argue that, so modified, Coltheart’s challenge is able to be met and indeed has been met. In an effort to delineate the extent of neuroimaging’s ability to address Coltheart’s concerns, I explore how different brain structure‐function relationships would constrain the ability of …

El Concepto De Audiencia Y La Colaboración Entre Iguales En La Revisión De Textos Escritos, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Visual Experience Of Image Metaphor: Cognitive Insights Into Imagist Figures, Daniel W. Gleason

Faculty Publications & Research

In this essay I investigate how image metaphors – metaphors that link one concrete object to another, such as “her spread hand was a starfish” – promote visualization in the reader. Focusing on image metaphors in Imagist poetry, I assert that the two terms (e.g., the hand and the starfish) of many of these metaphors are similar in shape, and that this “structural correspondence” encourages the reader to visualize those metaphors. Readers may spontaneously form a “visual template,” a schematic middle ground that mediates between those similar shapes, in order to smoothly move between the two images within each metaphor. …