Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Developmental Variation In Children's Acquisition Of Metrical Structure: How Early Treatment Of Stressless Syllables Can Inform Phonological Theory, Clifford S. Jones

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The present study uses 26 color photos to elicit a total of 14 words conforming to a very specific pattern: a stressless syllable word-initially, followed by a stressed syllable, and at most one more stressless syllable. This was found to be a particularly difficult metrical structure for the two- and three-year old participants to produce in an adult-like manner. Based on the findings that a fairly reliable (if language-particular) order of acquisition is observable for contrasts of both place and manner of articulation, the case is made for a system of six emergent features, which may be characterized as combinable …

Intelligent Tutoring For Interviewing To Detect Deception: Can Investigators Be Trained To Attain And Detect Accurate Cues To Deception?, Justin Albrechtsen

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The present study examined whether investigators can be trained to elicit and detect cues to deception. The study included two training conditions and a control condition. Participants in the virtual Human Intelligent Tutoring System (vHITS) conditions completed a training program for deception detection and investigative interviewing. The primary components of this training were one-on-one interaction with a virtual human and tutoring tailored to specific participant responses. Participants in the Computer Based Training (CBT) conditions completed a comparable training program for deception detection and investigative interviewing. However, this program provided a more passive training environment with no interaction between student and …

Two Sides Of The Same Coin: Biculturalism, Cultural Ideologies, And Perceptions Of Cultural Change, Stephanie Ann Quezada

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Ethnic minorities are adopting a bicultural identity to simultaneously identify with their heritage culture and mainstream American culture. While much research has investigated the extent to which ethnic majority and minority groups differentially respond to cultural ideologies, bicultural reactions to cultural ideologies remain uninvestigated. Bicultural individuals' differential endorsement of cultural ideologies has critical implications for implementation of assimilation and multiculturalism in multicultural societies. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to test the extent to which the salience of cultural identity predicts bicultural individuals' endorsement of assimilation and multicultural ideologies. Identity saliency was manipulated for bicultural Latino Americans and …

The Role Of Generation And Monitoring Processes In Governing The Paradoxical Effects Of Retrieval On Memory For Faces, Kyle Joseph Susa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Verbal descriptions of faces can at times impair and at other times facilitate subsequent face identification accuracy. Three experiments were conducted from a retrieval-based theoretical perspective to determine the underlying cognitive processes that can account for these paradoxical findings. Results demonstrated that the verbal description-identification relationship is analogous to other domains of memory where an initial retrieval of memory can have both positive and negative effects on subsequent retrieval attempts. Results of Experiment 1 showed that verbal facilitation is a product of self-generated descriptions that enrich the semantic encoding of the original memory trace. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that …

Effects Of Concurrent Task Performance On Object Processing, Gabriela Durán

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Most research on visual object identification focus on the bottom-up processes of the visual what? and where? pathways. However, such research has not been able to fully account for many visual abilities (e.g., identifying an object among many other objects and across changing conditions). Neurological evidence has shown that feedback from high-level areas (i.e., top-down processing) makes object processing more efficient. However, there are no behavioral studies that have tested this. Thus, four experiments used a concurrent n-back task to occupy higher-level areas and tested its effects on visual object processing relative to a number-repetition control task.

Experiment 1 examined …

Attention Allocation And The Variability Of The Stereotype Priming Effect, Katherine R. White

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The stereotype priming effect is assumed to be a rather uniform and robust effect. However, a closer look at the existing literature suggests that the `standard' stereotype priming effect may be more susceptible to variability than originally believed. In the present study, we sought to demonstrate that the stereotype priming effect displays significant variability in strength depending upon the level of attention allocated to the stereotype feature of interest. Participants were assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: a lexical decision task (LDT) condition, a pre-primed LDT condition, and a gender categorization condition. It was predicted that the stereotype priming effect …

A Study Of Possible Pre-Cognitive Advantages Of Bilingualism, Marisela Gutierrez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Past research has suggested that second language acquisition has a beneficial effect on the development of inhibitory control processes in children and adults. This has been referred to as the "bilingual advantage" and is most commonly quantified using the Simon task. Whether the bilingual advantage extends to precognitive mechanisms has not yet been examined. The goals of this study were to examine the bilingual advantage in university students; and to examine whether the bilingual advantage extends to the precognitive filtering mechanism of sensorimotor gating. It was predicted that, as compared to monolinguals, bilingual university students would have greater inhibitory control, …

Getting To Know You: The Effects Of Familiarity And Time On Social Perception, Clarissa Arms Chavez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A new direction in social perception research is developed. The present research explored the impact of familiarity and time on social perception processes based on cognitive neuroscience models, social categorization models, and memory consolidation constructs. Familiarity was manipulated within an exposure task and time was manipulated by testing participants both 2-6 hr and 48 hr after the exposure task. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of familiarity and time on the argument of the automaticity of social categorization and associated stereotypes by testing the argument with two separate tasks. Experiment 1a tested the influence of familiarity and time on associated stereotypes …

Does Type Of Stimulus Influence Task-Irrelevant Evaluative Categorization Processes?, Guadalupe Corral

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The effect of stimulus type on task-irrelevant evaluative categorization was examined in two separate studies by using the P3 component from event-related brain potentials. The first study presented idiosyncratic stimuli consisting of individuals that were rated by participants as either positive or negative within sequences of pictorial and verbal stimuli. The second study presented sequences of novel and familiar stimuli consisting of previously normed unattractive and neutral individuals. It was hypothesized that pictures would elicit task-irrelevant evaluative categorization processes and so would novel stimuli (relative to words and familiar stimuli, respectively). Task-irrelevance was examined by assessing P3 peak amplitude to …

The Distinctiveness Effect In Fingerprint Identification: How The Role Of Distinctiveness, Information Loss, And Informational Bias Influence Fingerprint Identification, Jessica L. Marcon

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Fingerprint misidentification has become a concern for legal professionals, especially after the high profile misidentification of Brandon Mayfield as the Madrid train bomber and the first fingerprint related DNA exoneration of Stephen Cowans. The current studies examined how humans perceive the distinctiveness of fingerprints, whether distinctiveness effects found in face perception research are evident in fingerprint identification, and whether there are conditions under which the distinctiveness effect can be eliminated. Experiment 1 examined the distinctiveness effect and information loss, while Experiment 2 investigated the distinctiveness effect and its interaction with information loss and informational bias. In Experiment 1, results showed …

The Effects Of Psychopathy And Machiavellianism On Cognitive Dissonance, Ashley Anne Murray

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Psychopathic traits include a lack of guilt, a lack of remorse, callousness and antisocial behaviors such as impulsivity and aggression. The current study examined the effects of psychopathic traits as measured by the Psychopathic Personality Inventory - Revised: Short Form (PPI-R: SF; Lilienfeld & Widows, 2005) and the Levenson Primary and Secondary Psychopathy Scales (LPSP; Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995), and of Machiavellianism (MACH), as measured by the MACH-IV (Christie & Geis, 1970), on cognitive dissonance in a sample of 164 participants. The induced compliance paradigm of cognitive dissonance was implemented by instructing each participant to complete a boring task …

The Effect Of Facial Resemblance On Alibi Credibility And Final Verdicts, Claudia Ochoa

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine an extra-legal variable that may affect the credibility of a defendant and the alibi corroborator's testimonies. In this study, the facial appearance of the alibi corroborator was manipulated to resemble the defendant or the trial judge to different degrees using facial morphing software. Participants serving as mock jurors provided verdicts for a trial summary and rated the credibility of an alibi corroborator. It was hypothesized that as the facial resemblance shared between an alibi corroborator and a defendant increased, the less credible the alibi corroborator's testimony would be perceived, resulting in an …

The Effects Of Using A Scripted Or Unscripted Interview In Forensic Interviews With Interpreters, Nicole Pruss

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The current study set out to replicate and expand the results of a study by Pruss (2007) which found that information is lost when interviews are conducted through interpreters. In the present study, Viewers (i.e., mock eyewitnesses) fluent in Spanish watched a video of a burglary and then were interviewed in Spanish about what they had seen. Half of Viewers were randomly assigned to be interviewed by an English-speaking Interviewer through a bilingual Interpreter (Interpreter condition), and the other half were randomly assigned to be interviewed directly by a Spanish speaking Interviewer with no Interpreter (No Interpreter condition). Within each …

Developing Lexical Competition Resolution Mechanisms Through Reading Experiences, Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The goal of the present study was to investigate whether competition resolution mechanisms are improved throughout a student's college years. For this purpose, I bilingual participants with a range in the number of college credits completed (e.g., freshmen to seniors) were recruited. Participants were presented with sentences that biased the less frequent, or subordinate meaning of an ambiguous word (e.g., novel, fast) (e.g., novel: something new; fast: to not eat). The ambiguous word was either a Spanish-English cognate (e.g., novel/novela) or a noncognate control (e.g., fast). These sentences were followed by target words that, on critical trials, were related to …

The N400 Erp: Semantic Vs. Evaluative Incongruities, Jennifer Hilda Taylor

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this research was to utilize both behavioral (response times) and psychophysiological measures (ERPs - N400 & Pre-response Positivity) to uncover the cognitive mechanism responsible for the evaluative priming effect (spreading activation vs. response competition) by controlling for semantic influences. This research project examined the evaluative incongruity effect by controlling for semantic influences in two separate studies. The first study kept semantic associations among word pairs completely random, while the second study controlled for semantic associations by either pairing words from the same semantic category (e.g., animal-animal) or from different semantic categories (e.g., animal-person). Participants completed an evaluative …