Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Relationships Among Specific Types Of Trait Mindfulness, Need For Cognitive Closure, And Affect, Kelly Parker

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Mindfulness has a multitude of benefits including, but not limited to, increasing one’s positive affect, decreasing stress, lowering blood pressure, protecting against depression and reducing chronic pain. The pre-existing literature on mindfulness unanimously suggests that mindfulness relies on self-regulating functions to improve overall well-being but lacks information regarding which specific emotion-regulating characteristics may play a role in determining mindfulness tendencies. The present research investigated whether or not an individual’s trait mindfulness is correlated with one’s need for cognitive closure (NFC) and how these measures relate to positive and negative affect. A total of 328 participants, recruited from the University of …

Teen Stress And The High School Experience: Fostering The Adaptive Abilities To Survive And Advance, William P. Dewitt

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose if this study is to examine the stress experience of teenagers during their high school years. The study uses existing research to identify causes of stress and stress- management techniques and then gathers students’ perceptions through surveys and a group interview to provide student voice on the issue of stress.

Recent nation-wide efforts have been made in schools to provide more supports for the social and emotional well-being of students, but despite these efforts, stress levels of high school students remain elevated. Understanding the ways in which students identify stress and the adaptive abilities they use to manage …

Differential Patterns Of Theta Activation Underlying Various Cognitive Control Strategies, Jarrod Eisma

Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this study, EEG was recorded from 157 participants at the University of Arkansas as they performed three computer tasks that tested inhibitory control (Go/Nogo Task), proactive and reactive control (AX-Continuous Performance Task), and resolving response conflict (Global/Local Task- modified Flanker Task). Time-frequency analysis (ERSP) was the primary focus of this study, in order to take advantage of the temporal and frequential characteristics of EEG recordings. The ERSPs and following statistical analysis showed significantly higher midfrontal theta band (4-8 Hz) power values for target trials (those that required more cognitive control) than control trials, which indicated that the procedure was …

Perceptual Characterization: On Perceptual Learning And Perspectival Sedimentation, Anthony Holdier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In her analysis of perspectival effects on perception, Susanna Siegel has argued that perceptual experience is directly rationally assessable and can thereby justify perceptual beliefs, save for in cases of epistemic downgrade or perceptual hijacking; I contend that the recalcitrance of known illusions poses an insurmountable problem for Siegel’s thesis. In its place, I argue that a model of perceptual learning informed by the dual-aspect framework of base-level cognitive architecture proposed by Elisabeth Camp successfully answers the questions motivating Siegel’s project in a manner that avoids such issues.

The Feedback-Related Negativity Is A Time-Dependent Brain Mechanism That Facilitates Aversive Learning: Implications For The Reinforcement Learning Frn Hypothesis, Eric Rawls

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Organisms encode rewarding and aversive experiences through reinforcement learning, capitalizing on prediction errors (PEs), which adapt action strategies over time. Computational theories are explicit that PE signals should update action weights continuously over the course of a behavioral task, an important time-dependent variation that is eschewed in traditional neuroscience studies that average over large numbers of trials. I examined variation in reaction times and feedback-locked cortical activity over time as a function of PE to critically examine theories indicating that PE signals drive time-dependent learning. We recorded EEG while participants completed a novel reinforcement task that varied prediction error on …

Components Of Mindfulness Training: Impacts On Attention And Affect, Maximilian Fey

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The literature on mindfulness supports a distinction between two components of non-judgmental acceptance and directed attention. The present research analyzed whether there are distinct differences in attentional capabilities or affect between mindfulness inductions which differed in either including only directed attention or directed attention and non-judgmental acceptance. I hypothesized that the acceptance component of mindfulness would increase participants sustained attentional capabilities relative to a control condition; furthermore, I hypothesized that the non-judgmental acceptance component of mindfulness would lead to significant increases in positive affect and decreases in negative affect relative to control. Lastly, I hypothesized that an individual difference measure …

Like Me, Do What I Say, & Think About My Influence: The Effects On Witness Choosing And Metacognition, Brittany Race

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Confidence can be a strong predictor of accuracy if circumstances are ideal (Wixted & Wells, 2017), but ideal circumstances are not always present. As such it is important to understand ways to ameliorate potentially negative effects on eyewitness metacognition. Rapport building, though seen as an important element of police/witness interaction (Vallano et al., 2015), can lead to some potentially negative memory effects (Wright et al., 2015). Additionally steering, or the process of directing a witness toward a particular suspect, can increase false identifications. Recently the researcher has developed a paradigm meant to better calibrate confidence by reinstating the context of …

How Does Alcohol Intoxication Impair Risk Detection Of Sexual Assault? Testing An Integration Of Alcohol Myopia And Social Information Processing Theories, Alexander James Melkonian

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sexual assault among young adults is a highly prevalent public health concern. Alcohol is often implicated as a risk factor for sexual assault through its impairing effects on an individual’s ability to process and respond to social cues in the environment. The effect of alcohol myopia can result in greater focus of attention on salient environmental cues. The relationship between alcohol intoxication and resulting behavior may depend on what type of information is most salient. The current study examined the effects of alcohol on social information processing as it relates to sexual assault risk detection. Method: Participants were 48 young …

Implicit Bias And The Boundaries Of Belief: A Single-Representational Dual-Attitude Account Of Implicit Attitudes, Austin Dakota Synoground

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since their inception, implicit attitudes have been defined as associative mental states, separate from beliefs, which are considered to be propositional in nature. Recently, several philosophers have challenged this distinction, arguing that implicit attitudes are actually unconscious beliefs. In turn, I argue that the attitudes detected by current experimental paradigms are blind to distinctions between implicit attitudes, which I define as the products of an associative learning mechanism, and unconscious beliefs, which are the products of a propositional learning mechanism. Specifically, I argue for a single-representational dual-attitude account of implicit bias.

Music, Language, And Rhythmic Timing, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neural, perceptual, and cognitive oscillations synchronize with rhythmic events in both speech (Luo & Poeppel, 2007) and music (Snyder & Large, 2005). This synchronization decreases perceptual thresholds to temporally predictable events (Lawrance et al., 2014), improves task performance (Ellis & Jones, 2010), and enables speech intelligibility (Peelle & Davis, 2012). Despite implications of music-language transfer effects for improving language outcomes (Gordon et al., 2015), proposals that shared neural and cognitive resources underlie music and speech rhythm perception (e.g., Tierney & Kraus, 2014) are not yet substantiated. The present research aimed to explore this potential overlap by testing whether music-induced oscillations …

Familiarization Through Ambient Images Alone, Nia Imani Gipson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The term “ambient images” has begun to show up in much of the current literature on facial recognition. Ambient images refer to naturally occurring views of a face that captures the idiosyncratic ways in which a target face may vary (Ritchie & Burton, 2017). Much of the literature on ambient images have concluded that exposing people to ambient images of a target face can lead to improved facial recognition for that target face. Some studies have even suggested that familiarity is the result of increased exposure to ambient images of a target face (Burton, Kramer, Ritchie, & Jenkins, 2016). The …

Effects Of Genre Tag Complexity On Popular Music Perception And Enjoyment, Lauren Shepherd

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popular online streaming platform Spotify added over 1400 genre tags in the last two years. Despite that numerous artists and composition competitions claim to seek projects that “transcend the traditional notion of genre,” the industry has only added more complex and mystifying genre labels. This dichotomy between artists and industry ignores the effects these labels have on consumers. Do more complex genre tags enhance the listening experience for the average consumer by providing additional information about what they are about to hear? The current research seeks to examine the effects of the granularity of genre tags on popular music …

Effects Of Critical Reflection On University Students’ Cognitive Achievement In Agricultural Mechanization, Patterson P. Hilaire

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Experiential learning continues to play a vital role in agricultural education and mechanization laboratories (Shoulders & Myers, 2013). An essential component of experiential learning is critical reflection. Critical reflection helps students process and construct meaning from laboratory experiences. A study conducted by Shoulders and Myers (2013) revealed that only 15.4% of the agricultural educators the researchers interviewed incorporated reflective practices laboratory experiences. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of critical reflection on students’ achievement following five agricultural mechanization laboratory activities. The results from this study revealed that critical reflection had a consistently positive effect on immediate …

Electrophysiological Correlates Of Visual Object Category Formation In A Prototype-Distortion Task, Stephanie Marie Long

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In perceptual learning studies, participants engage in extensive training in the discrimination of visual stimuli in order to modulate perceptual performance. Much of the literature in perceptual learning has looked at the induction of the reorganization of low-level representations in V1. However, much remains to be understood about the mechanisms behind how the adult brain (an expert in visual object categorization) extracts high-level visual objects from the environment and categorically represents them in the cortical visual hierarchy. Here, I used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural mechanisms involved in object representation formation during a hybrid visual search and prototype …

The Role Of Dialect Words In Children’S Social Decisions, Madison Rose Myers-Burg

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent research suggests that young children are capable of distinguishing between phonetically dissimilar spoken accents, yet have difficulty distinguishing between phonetically similar accents (Wagner, Clopper, & Pate, 2013). The present study aimed to determine whether the presence of dialect-specific vocabulary enhances young children’s ability to categorize speakers. Participants completed four training trials in which they were familiarized with photos of two children: one of whom used American English labels for test objects and one of whom used British English labels. After training trials, participants completed eight test trials in which they were asked to infer which target child would use …

Values Vs. Self-Interest As Determinants Of Attitudes: Through A Construal Level Theory Lens, (Sometimes) Self-Interest Wins, Austin D. Eubanks

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The present study (n = 335) attempted to conceptually replicate Hunt, Kim, Borgida, and Chaiken (2010) with a high-powered design to investigate whether values and self-interest differentially impact attitudes depending on psychological distance. Participants were assigned to complete a task that made self- or other-focused values more accessible, then indicated their attitudes about a student fee increase at a university to fund scholarships the participants would not be eligible to receive (thus going against their own financial self-interest for the well being of someone else). The memo describing the fee increase was manipulated such that the increase would be occurring …

Long-Term Focus Of Attentional Biases, Garrett Pollert

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Prior research regarding attentional biases, or patterns of visual attention, have focused on attention over the initial second when exposed to pictoral food stimuli. This manuscript reviews the literature regarding attentional biases in overweight/obese individuals over this timeframe for the two previously defined components of attentional bias (attentional orientation and attentional maintenance). A new component is proposed, called “attentional re-engagement,” defined as the pattern of attentional shifts towards target stimulus types over longer periods of time. Overweight/Obese and Normal-weighted participants were recruited and engaged in an Extended Dot Probe task, wherein attentional orientation, maintenance, and re-engagement were assessed using the …

The Role Of Attention And Memory In Prospective Person Memory, Kara Nicole Moore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I examined the role of memory and attention in prospective person memory. Prospective person memory involves being on the lookout for a person with the goal of completing some task (i.e., contacting the authorities) upon encountering the person. Success at prospective person memory tasks in lab and field based studies is rather low (i.e., less than 10% of people report encountering the person). In the current study the prospective person memory task involved a simulated search for a missing person. I manipulated attention to the missing person and strategic monitoring, which involves being in retrieval mode and searching for cues. …

From Foster Care To College: Student Stories Of Success, Tory Nicole England

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the different factors that empower young adults that were in foster care to be successful in a college environment. It has been documented that foster youth have significant challenges during secondary education (Conger & Rebeck, 2001; Geenen & Powers, 2006). Due to these challenges, foster youth attend and graduate higher education at a lower rate than their peers. The perspectives of foster youth currently enrolled in higher education is critical to determining which factors and programs have helped with their educational success. Five participants completed semi-structured interviews about their secondary education, …

People Change: Impression Management Influences Autobiographical Memories, Holly Elizabeth Cole

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the results of an experiment that tested a new impression management strategy, termed memory enhancement, and the long-term implications of using memory enhancement. People often share the events that occur in their everyday lives to others in the form of stories. This research was designed to determine if people will alter the way they share previous events to create a specific impression. It is possible that using the impression management strategy of memory enhancement will create long lasting changes to the actual memory of the event. This was tested in an experiment in which participants were put …

Fitting Eyewitness Identification And Confidence To A Diffusion Model Of Processing, Brittany Nicole Race

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

It is necessary to better serve justice to understand the mechanisms behind eyewitness identification and reports of confidence. The material contained within attempt to fit eyewitness identification to a diffusion model of processing, RTCON (Ratcliff & Starns, 2009). Participants saw eight mock crime videos and were then tasked with using eight showups or eight lineups to identify the suspects within the video. Half of the presentations were target present and half were target absent. Additionally, participants were either presented with biased or unbiased instructions. Strangely, unbiased lineups led to higher hit rates which is contrary to most findings in the …

Familiarity Bias: Examining A Cognitive-Affective Mechanism Underlying Ideological Support For The Status Quo, John C. Blanchar

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

It is well established that people like familiarity over novelty. Because that which is most familiar is frequently indicative of the way things are, favoring familiarity should create a psychological advantage for the status quo. In two studies, I tested the hypothesis that familiarity bias—susceptibility to the mere-exposure effect whereby attitude objects receive increasingly favorable evaluations due to repeated sensory experience—is foundational to ideological support for the status quo. In Study 1, individual variation in familiarity bias predicted greater Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Existential threat was experimentally manipulated via the salience of international terrorism in Study 2, but was unsuccessful due to …

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.

An Inquiry Into The Distinction Between Belief And Imagination, Maxwell M. Gatyas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Theories of mind typically see belief and imagination as distinct cognitive attitudes. While most admit that imagination is belief-like in many ways—e.g. in its capacity to guide action, cause emotional responses, and aid in decision-making processes—the popular view is to separate the two attitudes when constructing a theory of mental architecture. The similarities are not enough for theorists to admit that the two attitudes are indistinct. Imagination, then, is construed as an “analogue” of belief, similar in many ways, but nevertheless fundamentally different. In what follows I examine these methods of distinguishing between belief and imagination. My method of examination …

The Effect Of Spoiler Types On Enjoyment, Sussana Oad

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

The belief that story spoilers are irksome is prevalent in society. However, prior research (Leavitt & Christenfeld, 2011, 2013) has found that spoilers increase enjoyment of short stories, while two follow-up studies (Johnson & Rosenbaum, 2015; Levine, Betzner, & Autry, in press) have failed to confirm these results and, in fact, found the opposite result – that spoilers decrease enjoyment. While these differential results are puzzling, they may be explained by the different spoilers types used in these studies. Therefore, in the present research, we examined whether the discrepant results were due to the spoiler types employed by using all …

The Role Of Sharing And Information Type In Children's Categorization Of Privileged And Conventional Information, Helana Girgis

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Categorization is an essential part of our daily lives and an integral part of humans’ ability to function and interact within society. There are large bodies of research that document children’s categorization in domains such as natural kinds, artifacts and human kinds. One domain that has not been investigated is children’s ability to categorize different types of information; specifically conventional information, shareable to others with no restrictions, and privileged information, shareable to only a few. Study 1 investigated 4- and 5-year-olds and adults’ ability to categorize conventional and privileged information. All participants correctly categorized both types of information equally well …

On The Evolutionary Origins Of Religious Belief, Robert Duane Howard

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Religious belief is a byproduct of evolutionarily designed cognitive mechanisms. The ubiquity of religious belief and experience across human cultures is explained by our common human psychology; our domain-specific cognitive mechanisms give rise, collectively, to the phenomenon of byproduct religious belief/experience. In this thesis, I will examine what I call religion-generating cognitive mechanisms, and I will argue that byproduct raw god-beliefs are developed by cultures into refined god-beliefs. These refined god-beliefs are co-opted by evolutionary processes and are cultural adaptations. My conception of “religious belief” in terms of raw and refined god-beliefs allows a disambiguation of the term “religion,” and …

The Effects Of Alcohol On The Interpretation Of Social And Emotional Cues: A Field Study Of College Student Drinking, Emotion Recognition, And Perceptions Of A Hypothetical Sexual Assault, Alexander James Melkonian

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Alcohol use and abuse among emerging adults is highly correlated with increased risk for sexual victimization. Alcohol myopia theory has been used to explain impairments in Social information processing resulting in decreased attention to environmental Social cues including risk factors for sexual assault as well as facial emotional recognition. Those with deficits in Social information processing may be at particular risk for the misperception of salient risk factors for sexual assault by victims, perpetrators, and bystanders when intoxicated. In this naturalistic field study, participants who had been consuming alcohol were recruited to engage in tasks of facial emotion recognition and …

A Manipulation Of Cognitive Restriction And Goal-Conflict: Mechanisms Underlying The Disinhibition Effect Of Eating Behavior, Kayla D. Skinner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

People are often faced with a self-control dilemma whenever the attainment of a long-term goal would come at the expense of an alluring temptation. The goal-conflict model of eating (Stroebe, van Koningsbruggen, Papies, & Aarts, 2013) suggests that restrained eaters (i.e., chronic dieters) experience self-regulation failure (e.g., overeating, or disinhibition) due to inner competing goals of eating enjoyment and weight control. The current study examined these concepts in a sample of people classified as unrestrained eaters (N = 123), allowing for an investigation of restricted cognitive focus as a causal mechanism of disinhibited eating. A 2 (restraint condition: restriction, intuitive …

A Descriptive Study Of The Use Of Neurofeedback In Counseling, Khwlah Jamil Al-Ansari

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines neuro-counseling in the mental health field and the concept of neurofeedback training (NFB) as an intervention in the counseling profession. Numbers of studies have indicated that NFB may be effective in the field of counseling. The purpose of this survey study is to explore the use of neurofeedback in the field of counseling.

Additionally, the study used a quantitative descriptive survey research method and descriptive statistics. The survey was sent to members of the American Counseling Association (ACA), and 93 professionals participated. The majority of the sample was licensed professional counselors, professionals with a degree in counseling, …