Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Mindscapes And Landscapes: Hayek And Simon On Cognitive Extension, Leslie Marsh

Leslie Marsh

Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects …

Beyond Dogma: The Role Of "Evolutionary" Science And The "Embodiment" Of Archetypal Energies, Carroy U. Ferguson

Carroy U "Cuf" Ferguson, Ph.D.

At individual and collective levels (locally, nationally, and globally), humanity is currently entertaining many challenges and opportunities for growth. In my view, these challenges and opportunities are connected to Energy shifts that are taking place on the planet, and the inability of some to move beyond dogma in relating to these Energy shifts. By its pre- and proscriptive nature, dogma fosters limiting beliefs that often interfere with how best to relate to these Energy shifts as vibrational beings in an evolving, vibrational world. Here, I want to briefly identify some of the limiting effects of dogma, and the role of …

Embodied Metaphors And Creative “Acts”, Angela K.-Y. Leung, Suntae Kim, Evan Polman, Lay See Ong, Lin Qiu, Jack A. Goncola, Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks

Ka Yee Angela LEUNG

Creativity is a highly sought after skill. To inspire people’s creativity, prescriptive advice in the form of metaphors abound: We are encouraged to think outside the box, to consider the problem on one hand, then on the other hand, and to put two and two together to achieve creative breakthroughs. These metaphors suggest a connection between concrete bodily experiences and creative cognition. Inspired by recent advances on body-mind linkages under the emerging vernacular of embodied cognition, we explored for the first time whether enacting metaphors for creativity enhances creative problem-solving. In five studies, findings revealed that both physically and psychologically …

Musical Stem Completion: Humming That Note, J.A. Warker, Andrea Halpern

Andrea Halpern

This study looked at how people store and retrieve tonal music explicitly and implicitly using a production task. Participants completed an implicit task (tune stem completion) followed by an explicit task (cued recall). The tasks were identical except for the instructions at test time. They listened to tunes and were then presented with tune stems from previously heard tunes and novel tunes. For the implicit task, they were asked to sing a note they thought would come next musically. For the explicit task, they were asked to sing the note they remembered as coming next. Experiment 1 found that people …

Essays On Mental Accounting And Consumers' Decision Making, Ali Besharat

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is structured in the form of two empirical essays, each investigating one type of irrational decision caused by mental accounting. The first essay, titled "Managing the Cost of Multiple Debt Accounts: A Behavioral Perspective", explores why many people pay off credit cards' with the lowest rate first when rationally speaking they should repay the debt with the highest rate most quickly. This essay suggests that irrationality emerges when people seek to close `mental accounts' associated with their credit cards and reduce the total number of outstanding loans rather than decrease the amount of total debt among all credit …

Designing An Information-Experience Using Creativity Science & Tools, Stephanie Belhomme

Stephanie Belhomme

An “information-experience” encapsulated by a technological/digital audio-visual tool presents data and potentially meaningful information to prompt actionable knowledge concerning: “unspoken creative process elements;” their profound impacts on both how well our “physiology of creativity” functions but also; how well foundational creative thinking and behavioral prerequisites (energy, motivation, imagination, and ownership) are leveraged.

The product: 1) introduces the user to one component of the CPS (Creative Problem Solving) Facilitation Process - Exploring the Challenge; 2) features a content specific component which prompts exploration of the many correlations between societal, organizational / community, human physiological / behavioral data, and the direct relationships …

Conversion Theory Through The Cognitive Science Of Religion Lense In A Christian-Muslim Context, Jennifer A. Garcia

Scripps Senior Theses

The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) in recent years is beginning to become more popular. This project evolves around the development of the field as well as critiques of the field. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of CSR, it lends an interesting way to understand religion as well as religious experiences. One of those religious experiences, conversion, is examined and explored through the use of conversion narratives from western women who were formally Christian but converted to Islam. Many themes arise out of this research that paves the way for trying to understand religious experiences. Overall, the project focuses on …

Designing An "Information-Experience" Using Creativity Science Theory And Tools, Stephanie Belhomme

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

An “information-experience” encapsulated by a technological/digital audio-visual tool presents data and potentially meaningful information to prompt actionable knowledge concerning: “unspoken creative process elements;” their profound impacts on both how well our “physiology of creativity” functions; but also on how well foundational creative thinking and behavioral prerequisites (energy, motivation, imagination, and ownership) are leveraged.

The product: 1) introduces the user to one component of the CPS (Creative Problem Solving) Facilitation Process - Exploring the Challenge; 2) features a content specific component which prompts exploration of the many correlations between societal, organizational / community, human physiological / behavioral data, and the direct …

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

Dan Gleason

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. …

Choice, Management, & Modification: Situational Context In Risky Choice, Nathaniel K. Decker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We sought to examine the potential differences between different types of risky decisions. While some decisions are easily represented as choices between future alternatives, other decisions may be better represented as the management of a personally owned situation. Schneider (2003) created the risk management task, which manifested these situated improvement decisions, and identified a unique pattern of risk preferences when compared to the standard gambling paradigm. To determine what cognitive processes might be differentially activated for each type of decisions so as to yield these risk preference differences, we incrementally manipulated the gambling paradigm to parse potentially influential elements of …

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 …

Introduction To The Neurosciences And Music Iv: Learning And Memory, Andrea 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, …

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 …

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 …

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).

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 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 …

Attention To And Categorization Of Monoracial And Racially Ambiguous Faces, Julie Ann. Kittel

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

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

Antioch University Full-Text 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 …

Stigmergy 3.0: From Ants To Economies, Leslie Marsh, Margery Doyle

Leslie Marsh

No abstract provided.