Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Examining Possible Perceptual Proxies Of Flow State, Devin Michael Gill

Theses and Dissertations

Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2002) define flow as an individual's deep engagement in an intrinsically rewarding activity. McGonigal (2011) suggests that video games are flow elicitors. If video games are flow elicitors, then spatial, agentic, and temporal perception required for game play may relate to flow in predictable manners. Over two experiments, a simple video game with contextual (i.e., implied friction) and conceptual (i.e., ambiguous stimulus labeled either bullet-train or house) manipulations was used to elicit flow. Effects of the manipulations were assessed trial-by-trial on two dimensions of flow (i.e., agency and temporal perception) and spatial planning, as well as an …

Developing & Describing The Use & Learning Of Conceptual Models For Integer Addition And Subtraction Of Grade 5 Students, Nicole Marie Wessman-Enzinger

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reports the results of a teaching experiment, which explored student thinking about integer addition and subtraction. Through the lens of commognitive theory (Sfard, 2008), interpreting negative integers as secondary intuitions (Fischbein, 1987), and employing teaching experiment methodology (Steffe & Thompson, 2000), this study was a first step in developing more robust descriptions of students' conceptual models for integer addition and subtraction. I investigated: (a) the conceptual models that students exhibited, (b) the various ways that students utilized conceptual models while learning about the addition and subtraction of integers, and (c), the ways that students' conceptions evolved over the …

Task-Switching In Bilinguals: Further Investigation Of The Bilingual Advantage, Jennifer M. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Recent research has suggested that speaking more than one language may lead to benefits across a variety of different cognitive tasks (Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009). This effect has been dubbed the Bilingual Advantage. It has been suggested that this advantage relates to more the development of greater efficiency with processes involved in task-switching. The current study used a task-switching task to investigate three of these processes: reconfiguration, monitoring, and inhibitory control processes.

Monolingual and bilingual participants were presented blocks of trials in which they had to either categorize words as either abstract or concrete, or pictures as human-made …