Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

A Randomized Trial Examining The Effects Of Parent Engagement On Early Language And Literacy: The Getting Ready Intervention, Susan M. Sheridan, Lisa Knoche, Kevin A. Kupzyk, Carolyn P. Edwards, Christine A. Marvin

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

Language and literacy skills established during early childhood are critical for later school success. Parental engagement with children has been linked to a number of adaptive characteristics in preschoolers including language and literacy development, and family-school collaboration is an important contributor to school readiness. This study reports the results of a randomized trial of a parent engagement intervention designed to facilitate school readiness among disadvantaged preschool children, with a particular focus on language and literacy development. Participants included 217 children, 211 parents, and 29 Head Start teachers in 21 schools. Statistically significant differences in favor of the treatment group were …

Mechanisms For Decisions About The Future, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Evolutionary and psychological perspectives on decision making remain largely separate endeavors. The bounded rationality approach integrates these two perspectives by focusing on simple, plausible mechanisms of decision making and the cognitive capacities needed to implement these mechanisms. Decisions about the future provide a class of decisions that lend themselves to a bounded rationality approach. Though many different mechanisms may exist for making decisions about the future, only a subset of these mechanisms actually require a representation of the future. The bounded rationality approach helps focus on the cognitive capacities and decision mechanisms that are necessary for a full understanding of …

Enhancing The Ability Of Adults With Mild Mental Retardation To Recognize Facial Expression Of Emotions, Juna Michel

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

A critical element in the development of interpersonal skills is the ability to recognize facial expressions. However, in persons with mild mental retardation (PMR), social interactions based on the recognition of others' emotional states may be compromised. Guided by the theory of mind, which allows one to make inferences on someone's mental states, differentiate facts from friction, and process others' beliefs and intentions, this study determined if emotion training impacted future emotion recognition scores in a PMR population and whether the variables of gender, age, and baseline Facial Expression of Emotions Stimuli and Test (FEEST) scores predicted changes in emotion …

A Test Of An Evolutionary Theory Of Adiposity Gain Induced By Long Sleep In Descendants Of European Hunter-Gatherers, Oleksiy Chadyuk

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Researchers have identified inadequate sleep duration as one of the factors contributing to global obesity. The purpose of this study was to test a hypothesis deduced from a new sleep-duration-based evolutionary theory claiming that sleep extension in response to lengthening night duration in early fall evolved into a behavioral marker of an approaching winter; this adaptive trait was theorized to produce adiposity gain in White men in response to sleep extension. The hypothesis was that White Americans would show a greater increase in the age-adjusted fat mass index per unit of sleep duration compared to that of Black Americans. Data …

Neural Mechanisms Of Interference And Storage In Vibrotactile Working Memory, Tyler D. Bancroft

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Vibrotactile working memory has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Substantial research into the neural correlates has been conducted, especially using single-cell paradigms in non-human primates (Romo & Salinas, 2003). The vibrotactile working memory system uses a relatively simple neural code for the representation of stimuli, making it possible to determine when stimulus information is present in the various cortical areas thought to be involved. In humans, vibrotactile working memory displays properties (such as overwriting mechanisms of interference) that make it an ideal system for testing general theories of working memory. In the present study, we demonstrate that vibrotactile working …

How Leaders Think: Measuring Cognitive Complexity In Leading Organizational Change, Iva Vurdelja

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The ability to lead complex organizational change is considered the most difficult leadership responsibility. Habitual linear thinking based on sequential procedural decision making is insufficient when responding to ambiguous and unpredictable challenges and interpreting systemic variables in the context of unforeseen problems, risks, and invisible interrelationships. The purpose of this exploratory multiple case study was to expand our understanding of the structure of the thinking employed by executive leaders as initiators and enablers of complex, large-scale organizational change. The researcher integrated knowledge of adult cognitive development and organizational leadership to examine the higher forms of reasoning abilities required for dealing …

Readers’ Knowledge Of Functional Devices, Hung-Tao Chen

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Various writing devices are designed to serve specialized purposes or “functions” to aid readers in their processing of a text. For example, an index lists important topics in the book and allows the readers to quickly locate the pages relevant to a particular topic. The purpose of this study was to learn what mature readers know about various functional devices. Two experiments were conducted to learn what readers know about functional devices in texts. Experiment 1 investigated readers’ knowledge about functional writing devices and Experiment 2 examined readers’ beliefs about the relevance of functional writing devices in various reading situations. …

Bilingual Homonym Disambiguation At The Discourse Level, Yvette Aguilar Baca

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of global context and local context on the time course of activation of cognate homonyms for bilingual readers. Of interest was whether meaning frequency, context, and cross-language activation modulated the time course of activation of the subordinate meaning of cognate homonyms. Also, whether the subordinate bias effect would be altered or even eliminated by the combined influence of such contextual factors and cross-language activation. Eye movements of Spanish-English bilinguals were measured using an eye-tracking device while they read English paragraphs. The paragraphs contained cognate homonyms (e.g. novel/novela), cognate non-homonyms (e.g. …

Resilience Factors Affecting The Readjustment Of National Guard Soldiers Returning From Deployment, D. Patricia Tackett

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Following the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, there has been increased utilization of the Reserve Components (RC) by the military to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Service members in the National Guard and Reserve (NG/R) represent approximately 40% of the forces involved in these conflicts. Current research indicates that NG/R personnel and their families may be at greater risk to deployment stressors than their Active Component counterparts. Estimates for the development of mental health problems including PTSD among returning RC personnel, range as high as 42%. The focus of this study was to advance the …

Indentifying And Understanding User Preferences In Generic Planning Tools, Grisel Ventura

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Planning is an important cognitive work activity. To support this complex task, the development of planning tools is important to support people during decision-making and problem-solving tasks. Nowadays, a large number of manual and electronic tools support this complex activity; manual and electronic planning tools aid people in creating strategies for effective work performance. However, there is limited information on the design of generic planning tools people use for their activities, and why people choose to use the planning tool they do. Some examples of generic tools for planning are calendars, checklists, agendas, etc.

To answer this question, this research …

A Conceptualization Of Treatment Stigma In Returning Veterans, Jason B. Flick

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The dissertation project combines three theoretical models that inform conceptualizations of the origins, manifestations, and consequences of stigma: the Social Psychological model (SPM), the Sociological model (SM), and the Cognitive-behavioral model (CBM). These models merge into a single, integrative lens, through which stigma can be examined on both cultural and individual levels. This lens is then applied to the cultural and individual manifestations of the stigma of seeking psychological treatment experienced by veterans who have served in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). Through this lens, an understanding of the inception, maintenance, and effects of this treatment …

The Role Of Cross-Language Activation In Syntactic Ambiguity, Li-Hao Yeh

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

There is much evidence demonstrating that bilinguals activate lexical representations from both of their languages in a non-selective manner even in sentence context. Comparatively less research has examined the extent to which bilingual lexical representations interacts with syntactic processing in sentence context. The purpose of this study is to examine whether bilinguals' cross-language lexical activation could influence their resolution of syntactic ambiguity (e.g. relative clause attachment). Proper attachment of relative clauses (RC) to noun phrases is critical for accurate interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences. For instance, the sentence The robber shot the secretary of my husband who goes to work …