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Full-Text Articles in Experimental Analysis of Behavior

The Power Of Words: Unpacking Language's Role In Educational Inequities, Zara Yokohama, Liz Beccari, Malcolm Jasmin May 2024

The Power Of Words: Unpacking Language's Role In Educational Inequities, Zara Yokohama, Liz Beccari, Malcolm Jasmin

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

The language used to describe racial disparities in education may inadvertently influence how we address them. Framing such disparities as “achievement gap” rather than as “inequality in educational outcomes” assumes a deficit thinking mindset, shifting focus from the structural injustices contributing to education disparities to individuals, resulting in decreased prioritization of racial equity (Quinn & Desruisseaux, 2022). We aim to replicate this prioritization effect, specify the language driving the effect, and examine the impact of frames on perceptions of how to achieve racial equity. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions framing racial equity concerns as: a racial achievement gap, racial …


Opioid System's Potential Involvement In Ketamine's Cognitive And Antidepressant-Like Effects In Rats, Fan Zhang Jan 2024

Opioid System's Potential Involvement In Ketamine's Cognitive And Antidepressant-Like Effects In Rats, Fan Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

Depression stands as one of the most pervasive mental health challenges worldwide, including the United States. Conventional antidepressants typically display a delayed onset of therapeutic action (4-8 weeks) and lack efficacy in a substantial portion of patients (over 40% of depressed patients are treatment-resistant). The dissociative anesthetic ketamine, which is a glutamatergic N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonist, has emerged as a promising novel treatment due to its rapid and prolonged antidepressant effects, and it is especially beneficial for treatment-resistant depression. Nevertheless, the precise neurochemical mechanisms underlying ketamine’s antidepressant properties remain elusive, hampering the development of safer and more efficacious treatments. The present …


Sex Differences In Stress Reactivity, Brain Morphology, And Oxytocin In The Hypothalamus Of The Gray Short-Tailed Opossum (Monodelphis Domestica), Esperanza I. Zacarias, Daniela Rodriguez, Alexandra Chalons, Sasawan Heingraj, Nicole Altamirano, Joseph Rafac, John L. Vandeberg, Mario Gil Oct 2023

Sex Differences In Stress Reactivity, Brain Morphology, And Oxytocin In The Hypothalamus Of The Gray Short-Tailed Opossum (Monodelphis Domestica), Esperanza I. Zacarias, Daniela Rodriguez, Alexandra Chalons, Sasawan Heingraj, Nicole Altamirano, Joseph Rafac, John L. Vandeberg, Mario Gil

Research Colloquium

Understanding the effects of stress on behavior and cognition is important due to its impact on mental health and wellbeing (Schneiderman et al. 2005). Translational animal research can contribute to the development of new treatments that can improve therapeutic outcomes and our understanding of the neurobiology of stress. In the present study, we complement behavioral stress reactivity with immunohistochemical localization of oxytocin in the hypothalamus, a neuropeptide that regulates stress (Neumann & Slattery, 2016). Oxytocin has potential therapeutic use for mental health disorders (Neumann & Slattery, 2016), and the effects of oxytocin seem to be sexually dimorphic (Love, 2018). Using …


Selfies And The Self: The Influence Of Instagram Posting On Self And Cognition, Giovanni Castillo Jul 2022

Selfies And The Self: The Influence Of Instagram Posting On Self And Cognition, Giovanni Castillo

Theses

Research on Social Networking Sites (SNS) has shown a variety of both beneficial and detrimental psychological and cognitive outcomes associated with high frequency usage. We conducted an online study consisting of a series of questionnaires and a working memory task to explore the relationship between Instagram use intensity and cognition. The present study first investigated the relationship between Instagram (IG) use intensity, rumination, and cognitive failures. We randomly assigned participants into a selfie-posting, selfie-sending, or likes/comments reporting condition to determine whether selfie-posting behavior affects working memory performance. While we did not find significant associations between IG use intensity, rumination, and …


The Influence Of Parental Psychological Control On Offspring Anxiety Symptomatology: A Cognitive Model, Yu Ping Wong Jul 2022

The Influence Of Parental Psychological Control On Offspring Anxiety Symptomatology: A Cognitive Model, Yu Ping Wong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Parental control has often been purported to be a risk factor for offspring anxiety. Recent studies however, identify that a particular dimension of control - parental psychological control - is an especially important contributor to anxiety. However, the mechanisms behind this relationship remain unknown. Thus, in this study, we seek to bridge this gap in the literature by examining whether a cognitive mechanism underlies this relationship. Drawing on Beck's model of emotional disorders, we propose that control- related beliefs and negative automatic thoughts would serially mediate the influence of psychological control on anxiety symptoms. Moreover, we sought to examine the …


Facts From Fiction: Packaging Misinformation, Angel Ray Houts May 2021

Facts From Fiction: Packaging Misinformation, Angel Ray Houts

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Previous research established that readers learn both accurate and inaccurate information from fictional stories. The current study explored factors that might moderate the impact of misinformation. Participants read fictional stories that contain three assertions; the first two were labeled as set-up assertions, and the last were labeled as the critical assertion. First, there was a manipulation of plausibility of information within the stories by presenting either assertions with truthful information, assertions with small lies (plausible misinformation), or assertions with big lies (implausible misinformation). Second, there was manipulation of reliability of the fictional stories by presenting big lies or truthful information …


Using Object-Choice Tasks To Investigate Sensory Perception In Sunda Pangolins (Manis Javanica), Joshua Dipaola May 2020

Using Object-Choice Tasks To Investigate Sensory Perception In Sunda Pangolins (Manis Javanica), Joshua Dipaola

Theses and Dissertations

Pangolins are one of the most heavily poached, yet least understood mammals in the world. In this study, we used an object-choice task to assess the ecological relevance and use of sensory information in Sunda pangolin foraging behavior. This is the first controlled experiment on pangolin behavior to our knowledge.


Evaluating The Construct Validity Of The Peak Comprehensive Assessment: Measuring Language And Cognition, Nicole Rae Mcdonald May 2020

Evaluating The Construct Validity Of The Peak Comprehensive Assessment: Measuring Language And Cognition, Nicole Rae Mcdonald

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to conduct a pilot investigation of the internal construct validity of the four modules of the PEAK Comprehensive Assessment (PCA). The PCA has been developed through robust research over the past five years (Dixon et al. 2017) and is designed to evaluate language and cognitive skills of individuals with developmental disabilities, including neurodevelopmental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder. Although the PCA contains four modules exemplifying four distinct learning processes (Direct Training, Generalization, Equivalence, and Relational Learning), these four processes may represent one singular learning construct, described loosely as “executive functioning” or “cognitive …


How Instruction, Math Anxiety, And Math Achievement Affect Learning A Novel Math Task: Evidence For Better Instruction, Amy Jane Mcauley Dec 2018

How Instruction, Math Anxiety, And Math Achievement Affect Learning A Novel Math Task: Evidence For Better Instruction, Amy Jane Mcauley

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The primary goal of this paper is to test how math anxiety, achievement, and instruction affect learning a novel math task. Currently, most research measures achievement and math anxiety on previously learned tasks. A two-part study was proposed to measure the effects of math anxiety on learning modular arithmetic (MA), a novel math task that involves subtraction and division. Participants of varying degrees of anxiety and achievement were randomly assigned to either a specific or vague instruction condition. Participants were either taught how to solve the task or given minimal information about how to solve the task. Before moving on, …


The Neural Basis Of Human Female Mate Copying: An Empathy-Based Social Learning Process, Jin-Ying Zhuang, Xiaoqing Ji, Zhiyong Zhao, Mingxia Fan, Norman P. Li Nov 2017

The Neural Basis Of Human Female Mate Copying: An Empathy-Based Social Learning Process, Jin-Ying Zhuang, Xiaoqing Ji, Zhiyong Zhao, Mingxia Fan, Norman P. Li

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural basis of human female mate copying.Consistent with previous mate copying effects, women's attractiveness ratings for target males increased significantlygreater after the males were observed paired with romantic partners versus ordinary friends, and this wasmainly accounted for by males being paired with attractive romantic partners. Attractiveness ratings for male targetswere lower when they were paired with an attractive opposite-sex friend. The fMRI data showed that the observationallearning process in mate copying recruited brain regions including the putamen, the inferior frontal gyrus, themiddle cingulate, the SMA, the insula, and the thalamus …


Effects Of Age, Task Type, And Information Load On Discrimination Learning, Morgan E. Brown Jul 2016

Effects Of Age, Task Type, And Information Load On Discrimination Learning, Morgan E. Brown

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The feature positive effect (FPE) is a phenomenon in discrimination learning by which learning occurs more quickly when the presence (Feature positive; FP), rather than absence (Feature negative; FN) of a stimulus indicates a response should be made. Although the FPE has been extensively corroborated, a reversal, or feature negative effect (FNE), has been found when a target stimulus comes from a smaller set of stimuli (Fiedler, Eckert, & Poysiak, 1988). Age differences in FP and FN learning indicate that older adults perform more poorly than young adults on both FP and FN tasks, and are likely related to decline …


Falsely Remembered Words As Explicit Primes: Combining A False Memory Paradigm With A Priming Task, Lori A. Hughes Apr 2011

Falsely Remembered Words As Explicit Primes: Combining A False Memory Paradigm With A Priming Task, Lori A. Hughes

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for BSU Honors Program.


Speeded Retrieval Abolishes The False Memory Suppression Effect: Evidence For The Distinctiveness Heuristic, C. S. Dodson, Amanda C. Gingerich Jan 2005

Speeded Retrieval Abolishes The False Memory Suppression Effect: Evidence For The Distinctiveness Heuristic, C. S. Dodson, Amanda C. Gingerich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

We examined two different accounts of why studying distinctive information reduces false memories within the DRM paradigm. The impoverished relational encoding account predicts that less memorial information, such as overall famililarity, is elicited by the critical lure after distinctive encoding than after non-distinctive encoding. By contrast, the distinctiveness heuristic predicts that participants use a deliberate retrieval strategy to withhold responding to the critical lures. This retrieval strategy refers to a decision rule whereby the absence of memory for expected distinctive information is taken as evidence for an event’s nonoccurrence. We show that the typical false recognition suppression effect only occurs …


Why Distinctive Information Reduces False Memories: Evidence For Both Impoverished Relational-Encoding And Distinctiveness Heuristic Accounts, Amanda C. Gingerich, C. S. Dodson Jan 2004

Why Distinctive Information Reduces False Memories: Evidence For Both Impoverished Relational-Encoding And Distinctiveness Heuristic Accounts, Amanda C. Gingerich, C. S. Dodson

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Two accounts explain why studying pictures reduces false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (J. Deese, 1959; H. L. Roediger & K. B. McDermott, 1995). The impoverished relational-encoding account suggests that studying pictures interferes with the encoding of relational information, which is the primary basis for false memories in this paradigm. Alternatively, the distinctiveness heuristic assumes that critical lures are actively withheld by the use of a retrieval strategy. When participants were given inclusion recall instructions to report studied items as well as related items, they still reported critical lures less often after picture encoding than they did after word encoding. …


The Effect Of Stimulus Complexity On Retrieval Of Information From Memory, George M. Delegans Jan 1973

The Effect Of Stimulus Complexity On Retrieval Of Information From Memory, George M. Delegans

All Master's Theses

Eighteen subjects performed an item-recognition task, involving memorized lists of 1, 2, and 3 nonsense forms, at one of 2 levels of stimulus complexity. Analyses of reaction times as a function of set size and serial position suggested that (a) when the memorized list consisted of simple figures, subjects engaged in a serial exhaustive search, and (b) when the memorized items were complex, the assumption of a simple serial search was untenable.