Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Measuring Neural Time Series Data In A Sensory Deprivation Tank, Jackson Gregory, Tian Lan, Uri Maoz, Amir Raz

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

We are interested in studying the neurological and physiological effects of the float pod, also known as REST therapy, or sensory deprivation tank. Float pods rely on the concept of depriving most senses (from sound and light to temperature and proprioception) in a pool filled with buoyant salt water at body temperature. While float pods are most commonly used in spa environments, we intend to look at the potential benefits of floating under the empirical lens. In this study, we aim to measure neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG). We intend to look at the different levels of relaxation and 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 …

Sherwood's "Creative Approaches To Cbt: Art Activities For Every Stage Of The Cbt Process" (Book Review), Julianne Burnett

The Christian Librarian

No abstract provided.

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 …

Does It Matter Whether You Or Your Brain Did It? An Empirical Investigation Of The Influence Of The Double Subject Fallacy On Moral Responsibility Judgments, Uri Maoz, Kellienne R. Sita, Jeroen J. A. Van Boxtel, Liad Mudrik

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Despite progress in cognitive neuroscience, we are still far from understanding the relations between the brain and the conscious self. We previously suggested that some neuroscientific texts that attempt to clarify these relations may in fact make them more difficult to understand. Such texts—ranging from popular science to high-impact scientific publications—position the brain and the conscious self as two independent, interacting subjects, capable of possessing opposite psychological states. We termed such writing ‘Double Subject Fallacy’ (DSF). We further suggested that such DSF language, besides being conceptually confusing and reflecting dualistic intuitions, might affect people’s conceptions of moral responsibility, lessening the …

The Effect Of Color On Time Perception And Task Performance, Jake Hensz, Max Hart, Melissa Banuelos, Chad Shire

STEM Student Research Symposium Posters

Program: BS in Psychological Science

IRB#: Pro2018000277

The current study investigates the relationship between color and time perception. Prior research suggests that red stimuli create a greater temporal distortion than other colors, and that the direction of the distortion (i.e. underestimation or overestimation) varies with context. Research also shows that red stimuli tend to have negative effects on performance in academic contexts, perhaps due to the psychological and physiological arousal. This study specifically investigates the effect of arousal on this relationship, being the first to investigate the relationship between red, time perception, arousal, and task performance on a concurrent task …

The Effects Of Language In Music On Memory, Cat Terrell

Undergraduate Theses

This thesis focused on the effect of both instrumental and vocal music on performance on cognitive tests designed to test memory in order to gain more insight into whether the presence of language in music affects memory. Four hypotheses were tested concerning the effect of music type, question type, the interaction of the two, and personal experience with music/music training on memory assessment performance. The study found no significant effect of background condition on memory assessment performance, a significant effect of question type on memory assessment performance, no significant effect of the interaction between background condition and question type on …

The Effects Of Cognitive Stimulation Of Instagram On Anxiety, Fear Of Missing Out, Memory, And Self-Esteem, Anna Destino

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

With the increasing use of social media in the daily lives of undergraduate college students, it is important to investigate the effects of social media on psychological well-being and cognitive function. Lillard and Peterson (2011) found that overstimulating children’s televisions shows, such as SpongeBob, negatively impacted children’s impulsive behaviors and attention. The current research focused on emerging adults and considered the effect of overstimulation of social media, specifically Instagram, on anxiety level, self-esteem, fear of missing out (FoMo), and memory. Participants were randomly assigned into either the control (coloring on an Ipad) or experimental (Instagram stimulation) group and after a …

The Limits Of Sociality, Johnna B. Mcgovern

Theses

There is a longstanding tradition in Western philosophy of emphasizing the capacity for reflection in theories about humans’ characteristic nature. In Talking to Ourselves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency, John Doris attempts to shift the focus to an emphasis on human sociality. Particularly, Doris argues that sociality, both implicitly and in the form of collaborative reasoning, is what makes humans best equipped for moral improvement. This collaborativism possesses a defining role in his account of agency and responsibility. This thesis attempts to gain an understanding of how sociality affects moral behavior and to argue that it is not conducive to agency …

The Epistemic And Psychological Mechanisms Perpetuating Racism Within The Criminal Justice System, Danielle Walker

Theses

Abstract

Many attempts have been made by philosophers, political activists, psychologists, historians, social advocates, and others to explain the mechanisms at play in the perpetuation and resulting manifestations of systemic and institutional racism. On one side of the debate there lies a theory that there is an epistemic failure at the root of racial bias towards Blacks, white ignorance, a collective amnesia regarding what has and does take place in society, as it pertains to their oppression and isolation, like the view of philosopher Charles W. Mills. According to Mills, this type of ignorance, or non-knowing, is a cognitive phenomenon …

Gender Differences In Adhd, Jillian Vogley

Honors Theses

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a learning disability that is very prevalent in today’s society. A closer look at this disability reveals that there are differences with males and females with regards to how the symptoms manifest. Females have a tendency to exhibit inattention whereas males are often hyperactive, which is much more obvious to others around them. This difference in symptoms has led to a drastic difference in terms of how ADHD is diagnosed and causes it to be underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed in females compared to males. The consequences that this delayed diagnosis may have on females can be severe. …

Verbatim And Gist Extraction Among University Colleges, Ashley Mcmillon

Undergraduate Research Conference

Fuzzy Trace Theory (FTT) posits that individuals use two different cognitive processes in encoding, storing, and retrieving information. One process (verbatim) encodes the details of the information, applying cost/benefit analysis when used for a decision. The other process (gist) encodes relational information extracted from the information and uses more intuition when applied to decisions. Often, use of one process over another can lead to different decisions. Further, there exists individual differences in the skill and preference for using these processes.

The current study examined whether differences in verbatim, and gist skill or preference would vary by university college (STEM, or …

The Art Of Learning, Richard Rolapp

Marriott Student Review

No abstract provided.

Increasing The Frequency Of Tutors' Reinforcement Of Compliance Behaviors, Sruthi Rameshkumar

Honors Theses

Abstract

Compliance behaviors occurring prior to the delivery of an instruction, such as handing over preferred items, making eye contact, and folding hands in the ready position help prepare students for success in discrete-trial training (DTT) interventions. These behaviors are usually taught in early intervention with a continuous reinforcement schedule, but once they are mastered, they are rarely revisited or maintained. Without intermittent reinforcement of these behaviors, they are likely to decrease in frequency and may lead to the use of restrictive or intrusive methods to gain compliance during DTT sessions. The current study used a multiple-baseline across participants design …

What Influences Language Impairement In Bilingual Aphasia? A Meta-Analytic Review, Ekaterina Kuzmina, Mira Goral, Monica Norvik, Brendan S. Weekes

Publications and Research

Patterns of language impairment in multilingual speakers with post-stroke aphasia are diverse: in some cases the language deficits are parallel, that is, all languages are impaired relatively equally, whereas in other cases deficits are differential, that is, one language is more impaired than the other(s). This diversity stems from the intricate structure of the multilingual language system, which is shaped by a complex interplay of influencing factors, such as age of language acquisition, frequency of language use, premorbid proficiency, and linguistic similarity between one’s languages. Previous theoretical reviews and empirical studies shed some light on these factors, however no clear …

Lexical Influence In Phoneme Perception With Non-Degraded And Spectrally-Degraded Speech, Jane Bradley Smart

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In speech perception tasks with ambiguous bottom-up information, lexical processes have been shown to influence listener responses, such as in phoneme categorization tasks (Ganong, 1980). Proponents of interactive theories of speech perception and spoken word recognition assert this influence is a top-down feedback mechanism that can affect bottom-up perceptual processes (e.g., McClelland & Elman, 1986). While robust influences on phoneme perception have been reported in multiple studies (Connine & Clifton, 1987; Ganong, 1980; Gow, Segawa, Ahlfors, & Lin, 2008; Pitt & Samuel, 1993; among others), some phonetic contrasts, particularly those that distinguish place of articulation, have been tested in very …

Cbt Plus Humor-Based Psychology Interventions: A Review Of The Research, Rachel Thompson

Psychology Capstone Projects

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been demonstrated to be one of the most popular and useful psychological interventions used today (Ellis & Harper,1975; Bredemeier, Beck, & Grant, 2018; Jaya, Ascone, & Lincoln, 2018). However, a limitation of CBT is that it pathologizes behavior. Positive psychology is a supplementary theory that focuses on increasing positive emotions during psychological interventions and does not pathologize behavior. A limitation of studying positive emotions is due to the overlapping relationships between positive emotions. Positive emotions are highly related and are difficult to measure individually as opposed to negative emotions. Humor, amusement/mirth, is an observable positive …

The Influence Of Aging, Gaze Direction, And Context On Emotion Discrimination Performance, Alyssa Renee Minton

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examined how younger and older adults differ in their ability to discriminate between pairs of emotions of varying degrees of similarity when presented with an averted or direct gaze in either a neutral, congruent, or incongruent emotional context. For Task 1, participants were presented with three blocks of emotion pairs (i.e., anger/disgust, sadness/disgust, and fear/disgust) and were asked to indicate which emotion was being expressed. The actors’ gaze direction was manipulated such that emotional facial expressions were depicted with a direct gaze or an averted gaze. For Task 2, the same stimuli were placed into emotional contexts (e.g., …

When A Stone Is Not A Stone: Memories Of Clerical Abuse, Charles V. Sords

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

From the fourth to the sixth grades, Charles V. Sords suffered traumatic sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. He suppressed these memories, yet the pain of what happened impacted every aspect of his life. As an adult, several strong, sensory experiences brought the truth of his childhood into focus. He confronted the Church—and the system that protected clerical criminals. This memoir is an account of childhood sexual abuse, the particularly shameful nature of being raped by priests, and how the Catholic Church’s method of handling this and similarly horrifying revelations has re-traumatized survivors.

Comparing The Effects Of Mental Workload Between Visual And Auditory Secondary Tasks During Laparoscopy, James P. Corcoran

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to test Wickens’ Multiple Resource Theory (MRT) by comparing performance and subjective workload on a visual-spatial secondary task with an auditory-spatial analog when paired with visual-spatial laparoscopic primary tasks. Two primary tasks were performed with a laparoscopic box trainer: a high workload task that consisted of transferring rings from one peg to another and a low workload task that consisted of grasping and placing large pencil erasers in a bowl. It was predicted that the visual-spatial secondary task would be more sensitive when paired with the laparoscopic primary task than the auditory analog. Findings …

Whose Drive Is It Anyway? Using Multiple Sequential Drives To Establish Patterns Of Learned Trust, Error Cost, And Non-Active Trust Repair While Considering Daytime And Nighttime Differences As A Proxy For Difficulty, Scott Mishler

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Semi-autonomous driving is a complex task domain with a broad range of problems to consider. The human operator’s role in semi-autonomous driving is crucial because safety and performance depends on how the operator interacts with the system. Drive difficulty has not been extensively studied in automated driving systems and thus is not well understood. Additionally, few studies have studied trust development, decline, or repair over multiple drives for automated driving systems. The goal of this study was to test the effect of perceived driving difficulty on human trust in the automation and how trust is dynamically learned, reduced due to …

Examining Validity Of Aha! Ratings As A Construct Of Insight, Ekaterina Y. Shurkova

Psychology Theses & Dissertations

Currently, there are two main views on insightful problem solving. Results of the studies supporting “business-as-usual” theory suggest that the processes involved in solving insight problems are the same as in analytical problem solving—slow, controlled, and effortful, while findings of the studies supporting the restructuring theory of insight suggest involvement of fast and automatic, one-trial-learning type of processes. The goal of the current study was to investigate the construct validity of the Aha! ratings, used in many studies as the measure of insight, by isolating its three components, effort, confidence, and suddenness, and examining their correlation with working memory span. …

Estimating Cognitive Workload In An Interactive Virtual Reality Environment Using Electrophysiological And Kinematic Activity, Christoph Tremmel

Biomedical Engineering Theses & Dissertations

As virtual reality (VR) technology continues to gain prominence in commercial, educational, recreational and research applications, there is increasing interest in incorporating physiological sensors in VR devices for passive user-state monitoring to eventually increase the sense of immersion. By recording physiological signals such as the electroencephalogram (EEG), electromyography (EMG) or kinematic parameters during the use of a VR device, the user’s interactions in the virtual environment could be adapted in real time based on the user’s cognitive state. This dissertation evaluates the feasibility of passively monitoring cognitive workload via electrophysiological and kinematic activity while performing a classical n-back task in …

Information Sampling, Judgment And The Environment: Application To The Effect Of Popularity On Evaluations, Gaël Le Mens, Jerker Denrell, Balázs Kovacs, Hülya Karaman

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

If people avoid alternatives they dislike, a negative evaluative bias emerges because errorsof under-evaluation are unlikely to be corrected. Prior work that analyzed this mechanismhas shown that when the social environment exposes people to avoided alternatives (i.e. itmakes them resample them), then evaluations can become systematically more positive. In this paper, we clarify the conditions under which this happens. By analyzing a simple learning model, we show that whether additional exposures induced by the social environment lead to more positive or more negative evaluations depends on how prior evaluations and the social environment interact in driving resampling. We apply these …

Evaluating Theories Of Bilingual Language Control Using Computational Models, Mark D. Lowry

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bilingual language control refers to how bilinguals are able to speak exclusively in one language without the unintended language intruding. Two prominent verbal theories of bilingual language control have been proposed by researchers: the inhibitory control model (ICM) and the lexical selection mechanism model (LSM). The ICM posits that domain-general inhibition is employed in order to suppress the unintended language’s activation. The LSM posits that inhibition is not used; rather a lexical selection mechanism targets only the intended language’s words. In order to better test the theories’ hypotheses, I developed computational models to estimate participants’ reaction times when naming in …

Phishing In Dark Waters: A Quasi-Experimental Approach With Evaluating Cyber-Security Training For End-Users, Jaclyn Martin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing amount of digital storage of personal and organizational data, there has been an increasing number of cyber-attacks, which has spurred much research on how to reduce phishing susceptibility. However, there are several gaps in the current research. There is little research on the effectiveness of different interventions on phishing susceptibility. There is no research on the differential impact of interventions on sensitivity (ability to detect phishing emails) and response bias (propensity to treat emails as threatening) or the influence of individual characteristics on phishing email training success. This study addresses these gaps using a quasi-experimental approach to …

Enhanced Explicit Vocabulary Learning Compared To Implicit Grammar Learning In Adults, Leah Brainin, Marc Joanisse

Western Research Forum

Compared to young children, the language learning process is much more difficult and less successful in adulthood. Little is known about how non-linguistic cognitive processes contribute to these age-dependent differences. We argue that language learning involves both explicit declarative memory processes to learn vocabulary and implicit procedural memory processes to learn grammatical patterns. In this preliminary study, we aimed to quantify the relative contribution of declarative versus procedural learning in adults via an artificial language learning task. Participants ages 18 to 29 heard novel singular and plural words associated with images of common objects. The grammar of the language consisted …

Reference Dependence In Bayesian Reasoning, Alaina N. Talboy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine aspects of the representational and computational influences on Bayesian reasoning as they relate to reference dependence. Across three studies, I explored how dependence on the initial problem structure influences the ability to solve Bayesian reasoning tasks. Congruence between the problem and question of interest, response errors, and individual differences in numerical abilities was assessed. The most consistent and surprising finding in all three experiments was that people were much more likely to utilize the superordinate value as part of their solution rather than the anticipated reference class values. This resulted in a …

Turning Down The Heat: Neural Mechanisms Of Cognitive Control For Inhibiting Task-Irrelevant Emotional Information During Adolescence, Marie T. Banich, Harry R. Smolker, Hannah R. Snyder, Jarrod A. Lewis-Peacock, Detre Godinez, Tor D. Wager, Benjamin L. Hankin

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Faculty Scholarship

One major question in the cognitive neuroscience of cognitive control is whether prefrontal regions contribute to control by upregulating the processing of task-relevant material or by downregulating the processing of task-irrelevant material. Here we take a unique approach to addressing this question by using multi-voxel pattern analysis, which allowed us to determine the degree to which each of the task-relevant and task-irrelevant dimensions of a stimulus are being processed in posterior cortex on a trial-by-trial basis. In our study, adolescent participants performed an emotion word – emotional face Stroop task requiring them to determine the emotional valence (positive, negative) of …