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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

Moving Beyond Fulfillment: Wisdom Years Stories Of Passion, Perseverance, And Productivity, Kenneth A. Kiewra, Jessica Walsh, Chris Labenz Feb 2023

Moving Beyond Fulfillment: Wisdom Years Stories Of Passion, Perseverance, And Productivity, Kenneth A. Kiewra, Jessica Walsh, Chris Labenz

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Seven participants were interviewed to uncover how they remain so productive in their wisdom years, those typically marked by retirement. Participants included a leading educational psychologist, a renowned national television news anchor, a four-time national champion collegiate coach, the founder and former chief executive of Arbor Day Foundation, a university scholar turned playwright, and two female adventurers who quit their jobs, sold their possessions, and have lived a nomadic life, hiking thousands of miles throughout America. Their wisdom years stories describe how and why they shun retirement and remain productive. The article concludes with seven advice-laden conclusions for readers: (a) …


The Effects Of Aging On Attention In Associative Learning, Katie Wheeler Oct 2020

The Effects Of Aging On Attention In Associative Learning, Katie Wheeler

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In this study we investigated how aging affects attention to predictive and uncertain cues during associative learning. According to Mackintosh’s theory of predictiveness (1975), attention will be allocated to cues that most reliably predict an outcome. An opposing theory of uncertainty from Pearce and Hall (1980) suggest attention will be allocated to cues whose outcomes are uncertain. Although these theories are contradictory, both are well supported in the associative learning literature. There is evidence that young and older adults give more attention to cues that are predictive compared to nonpredictive cues (Mutter et al., 2019), and that young adults respond …


The Project Talent Twin And Sibling Study: Zygosity And New Data Collection, Carol A. Prescott, Ellen E. Walters, Thalida Em Arpawong, Catalina Zavala, Tara L. Gruenewald, Margaret Gatz Feb 2020

The Project Talent Twin And Sibling Study: Zygosity And New Data Collection, Carol A. Prescott, Ellen E. Walters, Thalida Em Arpawong, Catalina Zavala, Tara L. Gruenewald, Margaret Gatz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The Project Talent Twin and Sibling (PTTS) study includes 4481 multiples and their 522 nontwin siblings from 2233 families. The sample was drawn from Project Talent, a U.S. national longitudinal study of 377,000 individuals born 1942–1946, first assessed in 1960 and representative of U.S. students in secondary school (Grades 9–12). In addition to the twins and triplets, the 1960 dataset includes 84,000 siblings from 40,000 other families. This design is both genetically informative and unique in facilitating separation of the ‘common’ environment into three sources of variation: shared by all siblings within a family, specific to twin-pairs, and associated with …


The Influence Of Aging, Gaze Direction, And Context On Emotion Discrimination Performance, Alyssa Renee Minton Apr 2019

The Influence Of Aging, Gaze Direction, And Context On Emotion Discrimination Performance, Alyssa Renee Minton

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examined how younger and older adults differ in their ability to discriminate between pairs of emotions of varying degrees of similarity when presented with an averted or direct gaze in either a neutral, congruent, or incongruent emotional context. For Task 1, participants were presented with three blocks of emotion pairs (i.e., anger/disgust, sadness/disgust, and fear/disgust) and were asked to indicate which emotion was being expressed. The actors’ gaze direction was manipulated such that emotional facial expressions were depicted with a direct gaze or an averted gaze. For Task 2, the same stimuli were placed into emotional contexts (e.g., …


Impact Of Expressive Intensity And Stimulus Location On Emotion Detection, Brittany Nicole Groh Jul 2017

Impact Of Expressive Intensity And Stimulus Location On Emotion Detection, Brittany Nicole Groh

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Previous research demonstrates that the age of an observer, the peripheral location of a face stimulus on a display, and the intensity of the emotion expressed by the face all play a role in emotion perception. Older individuals have more difficulty identifying emotion in faces, especially at lower expressive intensities. The purpose of the current study was to understand how younger and older adults’ abilities to detect emotion in facial stimuli presented in the periphery would be affected by the intensity of the emotional expressions and the distance that the expressions are presented away from the center of the display. …


Age-Related Changes In Visual Spatial Performance, Samantha Farrell May 2017

Age-Related Changes In Visual Spatial Performance, Samantha Farrell

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Visual spatial skills allow individuals to understand the relationship between objects, people, and the environment for their everyday activities. Visual spatial abilities incorporate visual, motor, and cognitive components, each of which changes across the lifespan. The current study examined the effects of age-related changes and practice type on visual spatial performance. Participants between 40 and 79 years of age were asked to complete the Block Design Task (BDT) by using nine blocks to recreate various designs. Both accuracy and latency were measured to examine these changes. Task difficulty and practice type were varied and cognitive abilities were measured via MMSE …


Effects Of Age, Task Type, And Information Load On Discrimination Learning, Morgan E. Brown Jul 2016

Effects Of Age, Task Type, And Information Load On Discrimination Learning, Morgan E. Brown

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The feature positive effect (FPE) is a phenomenon in discrimination learning by which learning occurs more quickly when the presence (Feature positive; FP), rather than absence (Feature negative; FN) of a stimulus indicates a response should be made. Although the FPE has been extensively corroborated, a reversal, or feature negative effect (FNE), has been found when a target stimulus comes from a smaller set of stimuli (Fiedler, Eckert, & Poysiak, 1988). Age differences in FP and FN learning indicate that older adults perform more poorly than young adults on both FP and FN tasks, and are likely related to decline …