Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Brainwaves, Memory, And Reward, Rebecca Mccune

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The development of effective educational curricula for enhancing learning involves the crucial consideration of effort and rewards. In the realm of education, teachers commonly employ rewards as motivational tools. Traditionally, these rewards are given to students as a recognition of their successful performance. However, a thought-provoking idea emerges: What if we were to extend rewards to students not solely based on accurate answers, but also on the effort they invest, even in cases where their actual response might be incorrect? Our study explores the potential impact of this approach on the way information is absorbed and subsequently retained, specifically focusing …

A Sociocognitive Perspective Of The Uncanny Valley, Andre Zamani

Summer Research

The “uncanny valley” is the effect of being ‘creeped out’ by things that are very close, but not quite, human (e.g., a ventriloquist dummy). Over the past two summers, I found that intranasal administrations of oxytocin, a hormone which affects attention to external social information, decreased participants’ reaction times when assessing uncanny valley stimuli, but did not affect their ratings of eeriness. Furthermore, oxytocin affected participants’ reaction times the most for stimuli rated to be intermediately eerie but altered their visual attention the most during the perception of stimuli rated to be either not eerie or very eerie. From these …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …