Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Uncertainty Monitoring In Category Learning And Transfer, Rose Deng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Uncertainty is commonly experienced by many people during learning and decision making. Given that many career paths require the ability to monitor uncertainty, it’s important to understand how metacognitive processes influence cognitive performance. In attempts to explore how uncertainty monitoring impacts learning, three experiments were conducted. The first and second experiment utilized a categorization task in which participants explicitly learned to categorize Chemistry concepts. The third experiment assessed the impact of uncertainty monitoring on implicit learning and utilized a different task to tap into the implicit learning system. The present dissertation is one of few to investigate the role of …

Out Of The Body, Onto The Page: Awakening The Role Of The Body In Writing And Practical Applications Of Embodied Composition, Jasmine Jackson

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

Academic writing courses privilege a style of learning that often excludes the awareness of the body. In this thesis, I propose an exploration of the role of the body as an active agent in the writing process. This thesis collates and queries research on embodiment to provide what a sample of embodiment theory and writing activities that facilitate embodiment in the classroom might look like by bringing in interdisciplinary studies to help fill the gap of research on embodied composition in the field.

In doing so this thesis argues in favor of an embodied approach to composition and is supported …

Changing Criteria: What Decision Processes Reveal About Confidence In Memory, Johanny N. Castillo

Masters Theses

Source memory is our ability to relate central information (the “item”) to the context (the “source”) in which it was learned or experienced. People are often highly confident in their source judgements even when this information is incorrectly recalled. Past work has aimed to explain why source errors made with high confidence occur with a framework called the Converging Criteria (CC) account. The CC account posits that item memory can interact with source memory by altering decision criteria as item confidence increases, increasing the probability of a high confidence source judgement. This prediction differs from alternate models, like the Fixed …

What Did You Expect? An Investigation Of Lexical Preactivation In Sentence Processing, Jon Burnsky

Doctoral Dissertations

Language users predictively preactivate lexical units that appear to the comprehen- der to be likely to surface. Despite ample language experience and grammatical competence, it appears that language users tend to preactivate verbs in some contexts, called role-reversal contexts, that would create plausibility violations if they were to actually appear; these verbs assign thematic roles to their arguments in such a way that it leads to implausibility. These anomalous predictions provide a window into the mechanisms underlying lexical preactivation and are the case study that this dissertation focuses in on. This dissertation is an exploration of what linguistic information is …

Post Covid-19 Cognitive Impairment In A Patient With Bipolar Disorder, Nilanjana Dutta, Raghav Gupta, Dr. M Kishor Mbbs, Md

Digital Journal of Clinical Medicine

COVID-19 has caused widespread health conditions, psychological and social distress among people and there is evidence that shows profound neuropsychiatric complications during acute and post-recovery phases of the infection. Cognitive impairment occurring after COVID-19 infection can be explained by various mechanisms, including persistent systemic inflammation, direct viral invasion, alteration in the blood-brain barrier, and cerebrovascular endothelial injury.There are few studies that have explored the impact of COVID-19 on pre-existing psychiatric conditions. This case report highlights the temporal association of cognitive impairment with COVID-19 and the need for cognitive assessment and management in post-COVID-19 patients with pre-existing psychiatric conditions.

Retrieval Practice Promotes Learning Of Turkish As A Foreign Language: A Computer-Assisted Language Learning Study, Maya C. Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Adults generally find it difficult to learn a new language, yet exhibit remarkable individual differences in outcomes. Variation in second language (L2) learning is associated with input conditions (Morgan-Short et al., 2010) as well as learners’ aptitude (Dörnyei, 2005). Recent work has demonstrated benefits of retrieval practice in promoting L2 learning of grammatical patterns and vocabulary in both artificial and natural languages (Hopman & MacDonald, 2018; Keppenne et al., 2021). With that said, when retrieval practice is based on oral recall as opposed to a recognition test, it confounds potential benefits of repeated testing (Rowland, 2014) with those associated with …

Assessing The Impact Of Lipopolysaccharide On Learning And Memory In Rats, Anahat Luthra

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The immune system and the central nervous system (CNS) have a bi-direction relationship, modulating one another.⁴ Proinflammatory cytokines released from CNS immune cells have an impact on cognitive processes such as learning and memory.¹ Liposaccharide (LPS), a cell wall component of Gram-negative bacteria, which is used to activate proinflammatory cytokine release has been found to impact learning and memory processes, such as in the anticipatory nausea paradigm (ANP).² Anticipatory nausea and vomiting is that which may occur before a chemotherapy treatment session begins in a patient who has had chemotherapy before. It is caused by triggers like …

The Influence Of Personality Trait Variation On Curiosity Seeking Behaviours, Brian Krivoruk

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Curiosity is defined as our desire to acquire new information and leads us to engage in information-seeking behaviours. The present study investigates how personality influences curiosity-based information-seeking behaviours during a state of curiosity induced by unsuccessful memory recall. Specifically, this study assessed the personality traits of deprivation-type (D-type), interest-type (I-type), and intolerance of uncertainty to explore their role in curiosity-based decisions making. Information-seeking choices were examined during unsuccessful recall in a paradigm using face-name pairs. The behaviour was correlated with responses from a series of questionnaires that looked at personality traits associated with curiosity and information-seeking. The findings suggested that …

The Spacing Effect In Remote Information-Integration Category Learning, Anthony Cruz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The present study examined whether the temporal distribution of procedural category learning experiences would impact learning outcomes. Participants completed the remote category learning study on a smartphone in one of two learning conditions: Massed (control) or distributed. Consistent with expectations, distributed learners reached higher accuracy levels. This effect disappeared after accounting for reaction time differences, suggesting that it was driven by attentional mechanisms. Distribution may have made participants more likely discover the optimal categorization strategy and more robust to sensory habituation. Counter to previous findings, participants favored distributed learning. These results suggest that adult category learning is facilitated by temporal …

The Effect Of Typewriting Vs. Handwriting Lecture Notes On Learning: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis., Timothy Schaun Lau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study is a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies examining the effect of note-taking modality during lecture, that is, taking notes by hand using pen and paper vs. taking notes using a keyboard and computer, on learning among secondary and postsecondary students. I begin with a review of the literature and theoretical introduction to the theories and terms used. From a theoretical standpoint, there are strong reasons to believe that taking notes by hand might offer recall benefits relative to taking notes using a computer and keyboard. At the same time, I point out that one problem, which I …

How Valuable Are Clinical Neuropsychological Assessments? A Meta-Analysis Of Neuropsychological Tests With Comparison To Common Medical Tests And Treatments, Murphy N. Harrell

<strong> Theses and Dissertations </strong>

There has been a general decrease in neuropsychological assessments at a time when medical diagnostic technology and treatments have expanded, leading to a faulty assumption that medical tests and healthcare treatments provide more reliable or valid data than psychological assessments. A landmark report from the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Psychological Assessment Work Group (PAWG) found that validity coefficients for many psychological tests were indistinguishable from those of medical tests (Meyer et al., 2001). An updated systematic review of the advancement in neuropsychological testing is essential to the continued advancement of the value of neuropsychological assessment in healthcare. This meta-analysis sought …

Temperament And Individual Differences In Category Learning, Tianshu Zhu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Objectives. Individuals can differ in their strategic approach in learning the same categorization task, researchers have sought to study what specific stable individual differences traits can help explain these differences. This dissertation first surveyed extant literature on the impact of trait differences on category learning then examined the effect of temperament traits on these dependent variables. Chapter 2 (scoping review): This scoping review synthesized the past literature that examined the relationship between sources of stable individual differences and category learning performance and strategy use outcomes. Five database platforms were searched to identify relevant articles, cross-referencing was also performed. Sixty-nine studies …

Cognitive Task Enhancement Through Alpha Neurofeedback, Hannah L. Meyer, Douglas Peterson

Honors Thesis

Neurofeedback training has been a recent field of study in neuroscience, as a potential way to increase focus, and possibly boost cognitive performance. Most studies utilize a course of neurofeedback training sessions to find positive results in decreasing ADHD symptoms, depression symptoms, as well as further cognitive changes. In this study, we aim to determine the efficacy of a single session of neurofeedback training in increasing cognitive performance. To do so, we randomly separated 42 volunteers into either a control or experimental group. The experimental group participated in an n-back task both before and after an alpha neurofeedback training session, …

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 …

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

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Knowledge Representations In Rule Transfer On A Novel Problem-Solving Task, Megan J. Raden

Theses and Dissertations

Although the independent roles of working memory capacity (WMC) and knowledge in problem solving have been thoroughly researched, there is significantly less work that has explored how WMC and knowledge interact during problem solving. The present study investigated how the quality of knowledge representations contribute to rule transfer in a problem-solving context and how WMC might contribute to the subsequent failure or success in transferring the relevant information. Participants were trained on individual figural analogies rules and then asked to rate how similar they thought the rules were to determine how stimulispecific or abstract their rule representations were. Their rule …

Individual Differences In Structure Learning, Philip Newlin

Theses and Dissertations

Humans have a tendency to impute structure spontaneously even in simple learning tasks, however the way they approach structure learning can vary drastically. The present study sought to determine why individuals learn structure differently. One hypothesized explanation for differences in structure learning is individual differences in cognitive control. Cognitive control allows individuals to maintain representations of a task and may interact with reinforcement learning systems. It was expected that individual differences in propensity to apply cognitive control, which shares component processes with hierarchical reinforcement learning, may explain how individuals learn structure differently in a simple structure learning task. Results showed …

The Trauma Of Premature Exposure To Violence: The Destruction Of Innocence In The Hunger Games, Riley Woody

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Facial Recognition As It Relates To The Obstruction Of Holistic Processing By Partial Occlusion, Karen B. Raymond

Honors College Theses

Facial recognition is an important cognitive function in communication and is how we process, remember, and recall facial information. Research concerning processing styles and their effects on facial recognition accuracy is a prominent subject within the field of cognitive psychology. Holistic processing and featural processing have been experimentally manipulated in various ways with an aim to determine which of these processing styles would aid with accurate recognition. The current study is a replication of a previous study that examined the effects of masks on face information processing and recognition. This study assesses the effects of partial occlusion on face information …

The Electrophysiological Correlates Of Text Integration And Direct Vs. Indirect Articles: A Centralized And Lateralized Examination, Deanna C. Hall

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

As we read, we develop mental models of the discourse content called situation models. Situation models are integral to how we keep track of information, and to do so in an ongoing event incoming information needs to be integrated into the model or discarded. The type of information being presented, and its relation to prior data, impacts how that new information is processed. The current research examined discourse passages containing concepts that were either previously mentioned (match), mentioned with a general term (general category), unmentioned in lieu of another concept (mismatch), or completely unmentioned previously (indeterminate), and examined how these …