Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

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 …

Effects Of Music Exposure On Autobiographical Memory In Alzheimer's Patients: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis, Gregory Vance

Honors Theses

The progression of Alzheimer’s disease is primarily characterized by a loss of memory concerning past events, as well as a lack in ability to create new memories. While this spans across many subsets of memory, such as recognition, recall, and autobiographical memory, there seems to be a lesser impact on musical memory in those with Alzheimer’s. Multiple studies have suggested that exposure to music and introduction of music therapy can even improve other aspects of memory in Alzheimer’s patients. This systematic review and meta-analysis sought to examine the relationship between music exposure and autobiographical memory specifically. A pool of electronic …

The Giver: Vision & Memory, Alexander J. Dontre

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

A memory hole is the banishment of problematic thoughts. We exile that which we prefer not to exist. Enter the perilous Memory Hole: The Psychology of Dystopia, to explore a legion of social and psychological themes through the lens of dystopian literature. The crushing fist of 1984 annihilating thoughts from existence as a means of persuasion. The exquisite seduction of addiction as an agent of control in Brave New World. Incineration of the written word to bask in the embers of peace of mind in Fahrenheit 451. Each chapter weaves in and out of the dystopian realms forged …

Memoir Dataset: Quantifying Image Memorability In Adolescents, Gal Almog, Yalda Mohsenzadeh

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Every day, humans observe and interact with hundreds of images and scenes; whether it be on a cellphone, on television, or in print. Yet a vast majority of these images are forgotten, some immediately and some after variable lengths of time. Memorability is indeed a property intrinsic to all images that can be extracted, as well as predicted. While memory itself is a process that occurs in the brain of an individual, the concept of memorability is an intrinsic, continuous property of a stimulus that can be both measured and manipulated. We selected images from the MemCat data set that …

Exercise, Cognition, And Cannabis Use In Adolescents, Ileana Pacheco-Colón

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Heavy and/or chronic cannabis use has been associated with neurocognitive impairment and decline, often in domains such as memory and executive functioning. On the other hand, exercise has been linked to positive effects on brain and cognitive health across the lifespan, as well as to better substance use outcomes. Despite this, little is known about the ways in which exercise could help prevent or ameliorate adverse cannabis-related outcomes among adolescents.

Through three separate studies, the current dissertation examines interrelations among exercise, cognition, and cannabis use in children and adolescents in an effort to determine whether exercise can prevent or ameliorate …

Attention Capture By Episodic Long-Term Memories: Evidence From Eye Movement Data, Allison Eleanor Nickel

Theses and Dissertations

Successfully navigating the world on a moment-to-moment basis requires the interaction of multiple cognitive processes. Therefore, studies that examine when and how these fundamental processes interact can provide important insights into how we behave. Many studies indicate that long-term memory can facilitate search for a target object (e.g., contextual cueing), however, the ways in which long-term memory might capture attention and disrupt goal-directed behavior have not been well studied. In five experiments, questions about whether encoded objects might capture attention, even when they are task-irrelevant, were addressed. Each experiment began with an encoding phase, where participants were instructed to commit …

Isolating Item And Subject Contributions To The Subsequent Memory Effect, Jihyun Cha

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The subsequent memory effect (SME) refers to the greater brain activation during encoding of subsequently recognized items compared to subsequently forgotten items. Previous literature regarding SME has been primarily focused on identifying the role of specific regions during encoding or factors that potentially modulate the phenomenon. The current dissertation examines the degree to which this phenomenon can be explained by item selection effects; that is, the tendency of some items to be inherently more memorable than others. To estimate the potential contribution of items to SME, I provided participants a fixed set of items during encoding, which allowed me to …

The Relationship Between Cognitive And Neural Bases Of Metamemory Judgments, Alexandra M. Gaynor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metamemory monitoring, the process of making subjective assessments of the status of one’s own memory, is crucial to guiding behavior and effective learning. Past cognitive research has shown that subjective confidence judgments are inferential in nature, and based on cues available at the time of the judgment. When confidence is based on cues that are related to objective memory performance, metamemory accuracy is high. However, past studies have shown that metamemory monitoring tends to be inaccurate because individuals base their confidence on information that is not predictive of memory success, such as the fluency with which items were encoded during …

Social Contact Patterns Can Buffer Costs Of Forgetting In The Evolution Of Cooperation, Jeffrey R. Stevens, Jan K. Woike, Lael J. Schooler, Stefan Lindner, Thorsten Pachur

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Analyses of the evolution of cooperation often rely on two simplifying assumptions: (i) individuals interact equally frequently with all social network members and (ii) they accurately remember each partner's past cooperation or defection. Here, we examine how more realistic, skewed patterns of contact—in which individuals interact primarily with only a subset of their network's members—influence cooperation. In addition, we test whether skewed contact patterns can counteract the decrease in cooperation caused by memory errors (i.e. forgetting). Finally, we compare two types of memory error that vary in whether forgotten interactions are replaced with random actions or with actions from previous …

The Impact Of Delay On Retrieval Success In The Parietal Memory Network, Nathan Anderson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent work has identified a Parietal Memory Network (PMN), which exhibits regular patterns of activation during memory encoding and retrieval. Among these characteristic patterns, this network displays a strong “retrieval success” effect, showing greater activation for correctlyremembered studied items (hits) compared to correctly-rejected novel items (CRs). To date, most relevant studies have used short retention intervals. Here, we ask if the retrieval success effect seen in the PMN would remain consistent over a delay. Twenty participants underwent fMRI while encoding and recognizing scenes. Greater activity for hits than for correctly-rejected lures within PMN regions was observed after a short delay …

Is Cooperative Memory Special? The Role Of Costly Errors, Context, And Social Network Size When Remembering Cooperative Actions, Jeffrey R. Stevens, Tim Winke

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Theoretical studies of cooperative behavior have focused on decision strategies, such as tit-for-tat, that depend on remembering a partner’s last choices. Yet, an empirical study by Stevens et al. (2011) demonstrated that human memory may not meet the requirements that needed to use these strategies. When asked to recall the previous behavior of simulated partners in a cooperative memory task, participants performed poorly, making errors in 10–24% of the trials. However, we do not know the extent to which this task taps specialized cognition for cooperation. It may be possible to engage participants in more cooperative, strategic thinking, which may …

Perceiving Oldness In Parietal Cortex: Fmri Characterization Of A Parietal Memory Network, Adrian Gilmore

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The manner in which the human brain recognizes certain stimuli as novel or familiar is a matter of ongoing investigation. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of how this may be accomplished. More specifically, work contained herein focuses on a recently described "parietal memory network" (PMN; Gilmore et al., 2015) that shows opposite patterns of activity when perceiving novel or familiar stimuli: deactivating in response to novelty, and activating in response to familiarity. Critically, our understanding of this network is based on explicit memory tasks, in which subjects are deliberately instructed to learn or remember …

Recognition Training For Faces Across Age Gaps, William Blake Erickson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Face recognition is a problem that has theoretical and applied value. However, the fact of facial aging is rarely addressed in research and unmentioned in the major theories of face recognition. Facial aging also has ramifications for missing persons and fugitive cases, confounding attempts by law enforcement to recover these people whose last known images are years or decades out of date. This dissertation reports three studies aimed at measuring baseline age-gap recognition ability and testing various training regimens designed to increase accuracy rates for this unique kind of recognition task.

Reflections Of The Social Environment In Chimpanzee Memory: Applying Rational Analysis Beyond Humans, Jeffrey R. Stevens, Julian N. Marewski, Lael J. Schooler, Ian C. Gilby

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

In cognitive science, the rational analysis framework allows modelling of how physical and social environments impose information-processing demands onto cognitive systems. In humans, for example, past social contact among individuals predicts their future contact with linear and power functions. These features of the human environment constrain the optimal way to remember information and probably shape how memory records are retained and retrieved. We offer a primer on how biologists can apply rational analysis to study animal behaviour. Using chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as a case study, we modelled 19 years of observational data on their social contact patterns. Much …

Cortisol Levels And Voltage Conditions Of College Students, Adriana Steffens

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

There is a limited research base on low voltage brain conditions, which are characterized by electrical activity being measured at below 20 microvolts. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between saliva cortisol levels and voltage using an EGG in a college student population. Illuminating this relationship is important to inform how low voltage conditions can affect daily memory and cognitive functioning of undergraduate college students that may be a result of stress. The college student population may be vulnerable to the low voltage condition because of stress from the transition between teenage and adult life and …

Targeted Training Of The Decision Rule Benefits Rule-Guided Behavior In Parkinson’S Disease, Shawn W. Ell

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

The impact of Parkinson’s disease (PD) on rule-guided behavior has received considerable attention in cognitive neuroscience. The majority of research has used PD as a model of dysfunction in fronto-striatal networks, but very few attempts have been made to investigate the possibility of adapting common experimental techniques in an effort to identify the conditions that are most likely to facilitate successful performance. The present study investigated a targeted training paradigm designed to facilitate rule learning and application using rule-based categorization as a model task. Participants received targeted training in which there was no selective-attention demand (i.e., stimuli varied along a …

The Effects Of Handedness And Bilateral Saccadic Eye Movements On False Alarms In Recognition Memory, Lisa Weinberg

Psychology Honors Projects

Handedness can be used as a marker for interhemispheric interaction, which can produce memory benefits. Bilateral saccadic eye movements can be used to manipulate levels of interhemispheric interaction. This study measured the effects of handedness and bilateral saccadic eye movement on memory using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. This study predicted a memory advantage for left-handers and mixed-handers without eye movements and an advantage for right-handers with the eye movements. The results do not support these predictions but do suggest that handedness is a factor in episodic memory performance. The analyses for this study were run using A’ to compare false alarm …