Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Sleep Duration Is Associated With Caudate Volume And Executive Function, Nicole Jones

Honors Theses

The ineligible role of the caudate nucleus in sleep has been implicated throughout multiple scientific studies. Previous literature has shown that greater caudate volume is associated with longer habitual sleep duration in older adults- ranging from 55 years of age and up. However, the association between sleep duration and caudate volume remains unknown in the younger population. In this study, we examined the caudate volume in youth to older adults (10 to 85 years old) with a greater sample size (N=464) to increase statistical power. The volumetric size of the caudate nucleus showed significantly positive association with habitual sleep duration, …

The Effects Of Acute Exercise Intensity On Memory: State-Dependent Learning, Lauren E. Fuglaar, Rylie S. Mangold, Sierra N. Petty

Honors Theses

The Encoding-Specificity Paradigm states that memory recall will be enhanced when contextual factors are congruent between memory encoding and memory retrieval (i.e., state-dependent learning). However, minimal research has evaluated this paradigm in the exercise domain. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of acute exercise intensity on memory while considering these potential state-dependent effects. Forty-eight university students completed a within-subject experiment involving seven laboratory visits, during which they encoded a list of 15 words and were subsequently asked to free-recall as many of these words as possible. The encoding and retrieval phases were matched or mismatched by …

Using Imagery Practice To Improve Airline Pilot Situational Awareness, Brian Christopher Sajdak

Dissertations

Pilot error remains the primary cause of airline airplane accidents (Federal Aviation Administration, n.d.). Airline pilots have relied on Crew Resource Management and Threat Error Management to reduce or eliminate errors (Helmreich & Foushee, 2019). Unfortunately, the worldwide accident rate continues to increase (International Air Transport Association, 2021), demonstrating the need for further research into improving aviation safety. Current regulations do not require imagery training for airline pilots to improve situational awareness (Federal Aviation Administration, 2017a). Athletes and other professionals, such as musicians and medical professionals, use imagery to improve performance (Munzert et al., 2009). Imagery practice may improve the …

The Effects Of Color On Flavor, Tiffany S. Yoo

Honors Capstones

Color and its relation to flavor, is a complex cognitive phenomenon that researchers today are still trying to decipher. The present literature review is an examination of the history of color, process of color perception, the effects of additional factors such as saturation, the exploration of senses that may potentially contribute to perception itself, and the different modern theories suggested. The purpose of this project was to review, revise, and narrow down which theories can be deemed as accurate in terms of the amount of support addressed by modern literature. While a clear-cut answer was not concluded, three potential theories …

Directed Forgetting, Anna Case

Honors Theses

Directed forgetting (DF) is an adaptive process in which individuals engage in strategies to intentionally forget information. The prevailing strategy for DF is to engage in an effective mental context change after receiving the instructions to forget. We utilized a list-method DF manipulation under both experiments conducted and analyzed the ratio of words impaired from List 1 and enhanced from List 2. The two experiments conducted aimed to first confirm that an ineffective context change will not induce a DF effect, and secondly confirm an effective mental context change will induce a DF effect. Experiment one utilized thirty-nine university students …

Increasing Social Engagement In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Through Perspective Taking Skills Training, Robyn Devendorf

Educational Specialist, 2020-current

The current study sought to teach the perspective-taking skill, a behavior that may require training in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and contribute to an increased ability in children with ASD to engage socially. One-on-one perspective-taking intervention sessions between the examiner and a child identified with ASD took place over ten sessions. Sessions were structured with the guidance of the Social Thinking curriculum entitled, “You Are a Social Detective!”. A single-case design was employed, and results were reviewed through quantitative measures using teacher ratings on the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) at pre- and post-intervention. Additionally, use of the Goal …

John Glover: A Long Overdue Account Of His Productive Scholarship Methods, Kenneth A. Kiewra, Douglas Kauffman

Department of Educational Psychology: Faculty Publications

How are some scholars so productive? Kiewra and colleagues have interviewed about two dozen productive scholars over six studies to find out (Flanigan et al., 2018; Kiewra & Creswell, 2000; Kiewra et al., 2021; Kiewra et al., 2023; Patterson-Hazley & Kiewra, 2013; Prinz et al., 2020). Meanwhile, Bembenutty has also interviewed about 30 contemporary scholars to uncover their productivity pathways (Bembenutty, 2015, 2022). Absent from these interviews, though, is John Glover, the founding editor of Educational Psychology Review and one of the leading scholars of his time. Unfortunately, Glover’s time was brief. He died from a fallen tree in 1989 …

Sucrose Demand And Essential Value In Mice With Early-Life Exposure To Risperidone, Megan Federoff

LSU Master's Theses

Second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs), such as risperidone, are widely prescribed to children, but the long-term effects of SGA treatment are not well understood. This study investigated the impact of early-life risperidone treatment on sucrose demand in mice in adulthood. Mice were administered risperidone or vehicle from postnatal day (PND) 33 to 60 and trained in adulthood (>PND 120) to nose poke for a sucrose solution reinforcer. The fixed ratio (FR) value (the number of responses required to produce sucrose delivery; the “price” of sucrose) was varied from 1 to 45, and the resulting consumption versus FR value data were analyzed …

Playful Learning: The Disposition Of Architecture As Pedagogy, Alyssa Franklin

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Education is a vital foundation of a society. The standard of today’s school environment is built upon the pedigree of the factory schools from the nineteenth century. However, elementary age children require a flexible, engaging, and creative learning environment that the standard school environment does not provide. Learning is a dynamic and innovative action. Architecture should mirror the learning that it supports through providing spaces that allow for flexibility, engagement, accessibility, and attraction. Children are transformed by the spaces they are in, spaces that will leave lasting impacts on the cognitive development of the children, spaces that can be playful …

Feathered Friends: The Positive Effects Of Owning A Companion Bird, Nicole Lea

Psychology | Student Research Posters

Loneliness is an epidemic whose full impact is only recently receiving the attention it urgently demands. While many solutions are suggested, a time-tested remedy is a companion animal. People report as deep a connection with a companion animal as with the humans in their lives due to the pet’s unconditional love and consistency. While much research has been dedicated to studying companion animal-human bonds with emphasis on dogs and cats, little has been conducted on the less popular household pet, the companion bird, even though bird owners report that their pets show just as much unconditional love and affection as …

An Evaluation Of Distraction Correlations From Background Music On Working Memory Span, Ange-Dominique A. Akesse

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Past research has heavily studied the impact of background music on long-term memory (LTM), but the reason for these effects have not been heavily investigated. It is possible that errors in LTM come from encoding issues in working memory (WM), especially when participants are in the presence of background music. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between background music and working memory capacity. Additionally, this investigation aimed to seek clarity on the factors that could be responsible for such influences, whether it be a boosting or hinderance to working memory capacity (WMC). Because of this, …

Adverse Effects Of Early Exposure To Pornography And The Utilization Of Art Therapy, Meghan Potts

Art Therapy Counseling Final Research Projects

Pornography is not a new phenomenon in our culture or world. With the expansion of the affordability, accessibility, and anonymity of pornography, demand and consumption rates have also escalated, along with the adverse impact associated with this growth (Coopersmith, 2006 as cited by Dines, 2017). This two-year grant proposal seeks to focus its efforts on serving children, the population being exposed to this widespread phenomenon (Wright, Paul, et al., 2021). The full-time art therapist will carry out trauma-informed prevention and intervention methods to advocate for the mental and physical health of children in individual, relational, and community contexts. This will …

Zoom Fatigue: Case Presentation And Brief Review, Alan Lucerna, James Espinosa, Risha Hertz, Robin Lahr, James Lee

Rowan-Virtua Research Day

In this review, we discuss the phenomenon of what has been called Zoom Fatigue—a sense of fatigue as well as physical and emotional stress that can be associated with teleconferencing (especially long teleconferences with minimal breaks). The Zoom Fatigue Scale is discussed as well as various theories to explain the phenomenon. Some preventive strategies are discussed.

Hailey's Hearing Aids, Hailey Marie Garcia

Whittier Scholars Program

Individuals from the deaf and hard-of-hearing community are likely to experience more anxiety and depression due to defective cognitive, social, communicational, and emotional skills (Azizi et al., 2019). The word “disability” is embedded with historical negative connotations with phrases such as “deaf and dumb” because if they were deaf or mute then they were automatically labeled as inferior (Horovitz, 2007). Since the 18th century, the DHH community has been seen as incapable, even inhuman, hence the development of emotional deficiencies that bleed into one’s perception of society and their self esteem (Gallaudet, 1886).

How do you navigate a hearing world …

Enhancing The Battleverse: The People’S Liberation Army’S Digital Twin Strategy, Joshua Baughman

Military Cyber Affairs

No abstract provided.

Operationalizing Deterrence By Denial In The Cyber Domain, Gentry Lane

Military Cyber Affairs

No abstract provided.

Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy Through A Trust In Science Training Intervention, Nathan Dumessa

All Dissertations

Vaccine hesitancy is an ongoing public health issue that has been underscored by the COVID-19 pandemic and has implications for future pandemics and other vaccines. This research aimed to understand and address the factors associated with hesitancy. Study 1 was a correlational study that measured several factors that could predict vaccine hesitancy among Black and White participants recruited online (n = 364). Findings suggest that trust in science was the strongest predictor of attitudes towards the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, which in turn strongly predicted vaccine hesitancy. Study 1 established the direct and indirect relationships between several predictors of …

An Erp Measure Of Non-Conscious Memory Reveals Dissociable Implicit Processes In Human Recognition Using An Open-Source Automated Analytic Pipeline, Richard J. Addante, Javier Lopez-Calderon, Nathaniel Allen, Carter Luck, Alana Muller, Lindsey Sirianni, Cory S. Inman, Daniel L. Drane

Psychology Faculty Publications

Non-conscious processing of human memory has traditionally been difficult to objectively measure and thus understand. A prior study on a group of hippocampal amnesia (N = 3) patients and healthy controls (N = 6) used a novel procedure for capturing neural correlates of implicit memory using event-related potentials (ERPs): old and new items were equated for varying levels of memory awareness, with ERP differences observed from 400 to 800 ms in bilateral parietal regions that were hippocampal-dependent. The current investigation sought to address the limitations of that study by increasing the sample of healthy subjects (N = 54), applying new …

Exploring The Intersectionality Between Homelessness And Addiction: A Review, Antonia Miranda

Honors Projects

The homelessness crisis and drug epidemic have been, and continue to, ravage the nation in a manner that is both detrimental to society and humanity. The correlation between substance abuse and homelessness is enormous, though not necessarily causal. The conditions of being homeless coupled with the prevalence of mental illness drastically increases the susceptibility to substance abuse and addiction. On the other hand, addiction and substance abuse can contribute to someone entering homelessness. The intersectionality between the two is frequently ignored, yet critical to address. Informed by research regarding both conditions, the implications for public policy and reform are huge. …

Updating Of Protagonist Information In Narratives, Luke Mcclanahan

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of the present research was to further examine contested findings in the research literature surrounding the processes readers use to maintain and update their mental representation of contextual information in a text. Research indicates that whether information is directly relevant to the goal of a story’s protagonist influences whether it will be used as a basis for later validation (Levine & Kim, 2019; Levine & Klin, 2001; Lutz & Radvansky, 1997). Some prior research that indicates that participants fail to validate inconsistent contextual information (Albrecht & Myers, 1995; Smith et al., 2020; Smith & O’Brien, 2012) relies on …

Age-Of-Acquisition (Aoa) Impacts Spelling Error Detection : Evidence From An Online Proofreading Task, Madison Laks

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

During reading, words are processed faster if they are rated as being acquired early in life compared to later in life (i.e., age of acquisition effects; AoA). Given that the task demands for proofreading differ from reading, we investigated if AoA effects extend to an online proofreading task. Specifically, early- and late-acquired target words were embedded in sentence frames after being matched for a variety of potentially confounding variables, including word frequency, length, imageability, OLD-20, and familiarity (using the stimulus set from Juhasz & Sheridan, 2020). The participants rapidly proofread these sentences for spelling errors, and our results showed that …

Stimulus–Response Congruency Effects Depend On Quality Of Perceptual Evidence: A Diffusion Model Account, Blaine Tomkins

Psychology Faculty Publications

Individuals often need to make quick decisions based on incomplete or “noisy” information. This requires the coordination of attentional, perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral mechanisms. This poses a challenge for isolating the unique effects of each subprocess from behavioral data, which reflect the summation of all subprocesses combined. Sequential sampling models offer a more detailed examination of behavioral data, enabling us to separate decisional and non-decisional processes at play in a task. Participants were required to identify briefly presented shapes while perceptual (duration, size, location) and response features (location-congruent/-incongruent/-neutral) of the task were manipulated. The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) was used …

Understanding The Evolution Of Enforcement Systems In Resource Dilemmas, Devin M. Flener

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Theses

The effective management of resources on Earth is a pressing global social dilemma. An alternative solution to the traditional managing methods of these common pool resources is communal self-management facilitated through principles of restorative justice and developed through exploratory learning. We examined how communication, restorative justice techniques, and opportunity for exploratory learning impacted groups’ ability to develop a strong conceptual understanding of enforcement as well as an enforcement system in order to maintain an effective conservation strategy. Participants (N=288) were randomly assigned to 72 four-person groups in six separate conditions. Each group played nine rounds of a computer-simulated foraging task …

Rigid And Non-Rigid Images: Effects On Prospective Person Memory In Missing Persons Cases, Lauren Terry

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Every day in the United States, people are reported missing with the hopes that a recovery will be made using missing person alerts and the help of the public. This paradigm for finding missing persons hinges on the prospective memory of the individuals that see the missing person alert. Prospective person memory (PPM) is a form of event-based prospective memory wherein the “event” is a sighting of the missing person, and the associated action is reporting the sighting to authorities (Lampinen et al., 2009). PPM may be improved through increased facial recognition abilities. Previous research has indicated an increase in …

Memory For Metaphors: Verbatim Memory Held For Literal Sentences Vs. Metaphors, Taylor Suneson

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Certain literary features of text (metaphor, idiom, etc.) are said to be foregrounded, or stand out from the surrounding text. Prior research (Miall & Kuiken, 1994) demonstrates that foregrounded text slows readers down, which is consistent with attention being grabbed. Do features of literary text, more specifically metaphors, improve memory as a result of being foregrounded? The present study investigated the effect of reading metaphoric phrases on reading time, memory accuracy, and decision times. We predicted that when a textual phrase was read as a metaphor, verbatim memory would be better retained than when that same phrase was read as …

The Association Between Mobile Phone Use And Suicidal Ideation, Brendan Wolf

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Research suggests that suicidal ideation can increase among people who feel that they do not belong (i.e. thwarted belongingness) and who perceive themselves to be a burden on others (i.e. perceived burdensomeness). However, it is not known whether these risk factors for suicidal ideation are moderated by smartphone use and social media use. I hypothesized that the association of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness would be stronger at higher levels of mobile phone use and social media use. Undergraduate student participants (N = 81) were incentivized via class credit to participate in a two-week longitudinal study. They completed questionnaires about …

Lineups, Showups, And Simultaneous Showups: A Replication And Extension Of The Red Box Study, Lana Dranow

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

The reliability of eyewitness identification procedures and the following testimony in a court of law has been highly contested in recent decades. There are two main types of identification procedures most commonly used by law enforcement officers in the United States: lineups and showups. Prior research has indicated that lineups consistently yield the most accurate identifications due to the presence of fillers (plausible alternatives to a suspect) alongside the suspect when compared to showups. This is commonly attributed to two main theories- filler siphoning theory and diagnostic feature detection theory. In a study conducted by Colloff and Wixted (2020), researchers …

The Origins Of The Iraq War: The Role Of Anthrax In The Weapons Of Mass Destruction Claims, John P. Koenig

Student Theses and Dissertations

The 2001 Anthrax Attacks were a critical factor in the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) claims that sparked the Iraq War. Despite its significance, little systematic work has been done regarding the topic. Existing studies primarily focus on the role of the Military Industrial Complex and intelligence failures as the primary explanations for the origins of the Iraq War. These explanations are limited, as they rely on hindsight biases. This thesis contends that anthrax was the catalyst for WMD claims that sparked the Iraq War. The 2001 Anthrax Attacks reinforced the belief that Iraq harbored WMDs and posed a threat …

What Cognitive Processes Drive Attentional Bias, And How Does Stress Affect Them?, Colton L. Hunter

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Attentional biases toward or away from emotionally evocative stimuli have been well documented and related to clinical outcomes such as social anxiety. Some work has suggested that stress modulates attentional biases, but there are a number of inconsistencies in this literature regarding the direction of that modulation, highlighting a need to examine moderators of that effect. Sex differences in stress effects could potentially explain this inconsistency, as acute stress can affect males and females differently. It is also possible that stress differentially influences multiple component processes underpinning attentional bias, but these processes have not been well character, and to date …

The Influence Of Prediction Error Strength On Reconsolidation, Kevin D. Mohawk

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

It has been well established that consolidated memories can be reactivated and enter a labile state where they are once again vulnerable to modification. Reactivated memories, therefore, need to be restabilized or reconsolidated. Prediction error (PE) is one of the most common ways of reactivating consolidated memories, yet no studies have examined how varying the strength of PE influences reconsolidation. The present study aimed to determine if the strength of PE is an important factor for triggering reconsolidation and if so, how PE strength influences the reconsolidation process, whether through strengthening or weakening the memory. To vary PE strength, participants …