Cognitive Science Commons^™

Stop Blaming My Users: Illumination Of The Technocentric Mythos Bias, Ervin H. Frenzel, Richard Lightcap

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

 Abstract -This conceptual essay addresses the need for systemic and systematic transdisciplinary analytical techniques within cybersecurity and technical security. This conceptual essay is contingent upon recognition that cybersecurity is not simply technical in nature, it does not need an adversary, and more importantly it is based upon systems engineering and systems thinking.  The essay contributes a socio-technical attribution chain and field-specific ontology/taxonomy which distinguish user-triggered events from root causes, latent conditions, technical debt, validation failures, governance failures, and attribution bias before assigning responsibility to end users. It systematically defines an ontology inclusive of developer technical debt, organizational debt arising from …

The Role Of Rhyme In Children’S Word Learning, Tengwen Fan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Rhyme increases the phonological similarity of phrases individuals hear and enhances recall from working memory. The present study explores whether rhyme aids word learning in children and examines the underlying neural mechanisms through which rhyme facilitates word learning. Thirty-four children between 6 and 8 years old completed a word learning task where they were exposed to 15 nonwords (NWs), four times each, in the sentence-final position as their EEG was recorded. Participants were randomly assigned to either a Rhyme or No-Rhyme group, where the NWs rhymed or did not rhyme with a prime real word in the sentence, respectively, during …

(Un)Easily Writing The Future, Stuart Moulthrop, Judith Pintar, John G. Mcdaid

ELO (un)supervised 2026

General Abstract: This panel brings together three experienced digital writers who have recently begun to explore Language Models and transformers in creative and academic practice.  Each of us will comment on recent experience and projects, reflecting on how these technologies alter the way we think of ourselves as writers and teachers.

[1] Judith Pintar, "The Non-applicability of Wishing due to Lack of Capacity".

Pintar will discuss her experience of facilitating Gemini AI in a Rogerian therapy session with an Eliza bot written in the Inform programming language. The session is occasionally interrupted with a meta-conversation with Gemini regarding its responses. …

Distributed Impressions: How Multiple Minds Come Together To Shape Person Perception, Lindsey J. Tepfer

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Moments after perceiving another person, we immediately infer a wealth of information about them. Despite the complexities within our social environments, we distill an incredible magnitude of details available to us into compressed representations of other people’s minds and mannerisms. Yet research has focused largely on mapping isolated stimuli—divorced from its messy context—to the spontaneous impressions they provoke. As a result, there are many unanswered questions about how our judgments are influenced by the rich and noisy social world we inhabit. Here, I’ve leveraged two paradigms to investigate how impression formation and updating may operate when the constraints of the …

Improving Urban Search And Rescue Team Coordination Through Adaptive Context Awareness, Daniel Reyes Duran

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Modern multi-agent Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) operations heavily rely on mobile geospatial Common Operating Pictures (COPs) to maintain team coordination and Situational Awareness (SA). However, the proliferation of high-frequency sensor telemetry at the tactical edge has introduced a data saturation paradox challenge: while information theoretically drives informed decision-making, unmanaged data surges induce increased operator cognitive overload and alert fatigue on mobile End-User Devices (EUDs), while downstream data-broadcasting models inherently strain edge processing and viewport environments.

To resolve these constraints, this dissertation presents a context-aware Value of Information (VoI) data-management framework integrated directly with a custom, event-driven Android Team Awareness …

Governing Algorithmic Attention: Attention Safeguard Models And The Cognitive Attentional Standard As System Level Interventions In Human Computer Interaction, Behavioral Economics, And Artificial Intelligence, Delante Clark

Graduate Scholarship and Creative Works

Algorithmic recommendation systems and interface designs shape attention by combining visually salient cues with uncertain reward timing and low friction interaction. These conditions can sustain anticipatory checking, extend time on task, and reduce natural disengagement points through patterns such as infinite scrolling and autoplay. This paper synthesizes research across neuroscience, human computer interaction, behavioral economics, and artificial intelligence to argue that attention capture is a predictable outcome of incentive driven design rather than an individual failure of self regulation. It advances the Attention Safeguard Models and the Cognitive Attentional Standard as system level interventions that regulate exposure conditions, pacing, and …

The Readiness Reset: Sleep, Stress, And Pain Management For Tactical Performance, Lauren Fried

Tactical & Occupational Performance Conference

Tactical professionals operate in high-demand environments where sleep disruption, chronic stress, and persistent pain are often normalized, but these factors significantly affect readiness, resilience, and long-term performance. This session explores how sleep, stress, and pain interact at the physiological and neurological levels to influence decision-making, recovery, injury risk, and operational effectiveness in first responders and military personnel.

Participants will gain a deeper understanding of how nervous system regulation, circadian rhythms, and pain perception affect both physical and cognitive performance under stress. Drawing on current research and applied human performance principles, this session highlights practical, field-applicable strategies that tactical professionals and …

Determinants Of Corporal Punishment And Severe Physical Punishment In Egypt: A Mixed-Methods Analysis For Child Protection Policy, Marwa Moustafa Nassef

Theses and Dissertations

Corporal punishment (CP) and severe physical punishment (SPP) remain a major public health, child rights, and child protection policy concern. In Egypt, despite legislative reforms, survey-weighted analysis of the 2021 Egypt Family Health Survey (EFHS) 2021 (CAPMAS, 2022) reveals prevalence rates of 60.5% for CP and 27.4% for SPP among children aged 1–14 (author’s calculations using EFHS-2021, n=7623), yet evidence distinguishing the determinants of routine corporal punishment from escalation to severe physical punishment remains limited in low- and middle-income contexts. Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework, this mixed-methods study identifies key drivers of CP and its escalation to SPP among Egyptian …

What Could Be Done Vs. What Was: How Temporal Framing Affects Representations Of Possibility, Noah Chapman Prescott

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

When making decisions for ourselves or predicting what others will do, we face the challenge of figuring out which of the infinite possible actions to consider in the first place. The space of possibilities considered, often called a “modal space”, has been shown to reflect both what people think is likely and what they think is valuable. The present work investigates how these modal spaces change with a difference in temporal orientation (what an agent could do vs. what they did do) and grammatical perspective (considering a scenario in the first- vs. the third-person). The findings suggest that both these …

Toward An Account Of Visual Aesthetic Experience In Multimodal Large Language Models, Batuhan Saridede

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly mediate visual culture, far less is known about how MLLMs themselves evaluate aesthetic value and how those evaluations shift under different beliefs about authorship. This thesis investigates how three commercial MLLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) appraise visual artworks across six dimensions: liking, beauty, profundity, worth, narrativity, and intentionality. Using a balanced dataset of 100 artworks, half human-generated and half AI-generated, with representational and abstract works equally represented, each model evaluated every image under four provenance conditions: unspecified origin, inferred origin, assumed AI origin, and assumed human origin. Results show that representationalism in visual …

Seeing Through Similar Eyes: How Social Identity Shapes Reinterpretation Of Ambiguous Stimuli, Eli Bailit

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

Identical sensory input can lead to a variety of subjective experiences and interpretations. In the face of such ambiguity, we often turn to our social context. Does the identity of the person providing an alternative interpretation to an ambiguous stimulus impact someone’s likelihood to adopt it? This study examined whether perceived interpersonal similarity modulates reinterpretation of ambiguous visual stimuli. Thirty Dartmouth undergraduates completed a modified “MadLibs” paradigm in which they generated initial interpretations of ambiguous photographs, indicated their confidence in their interpretations, then decided how much to update those interpretations upon viewing an alternative sourced from an individual of varying …

Category Learning Under Verbal Interference, Yawen Xue

Cognitive Science Senior Theses

What happens to cognition when you disrupt language? What does language actually do as a representational medium for cognition? Much literature shows a facilitative role of language on categorical thinking. This work specifically examines the role of language in category learning using a verbal interference paradigm. I ran two experiments where participants learned to distinguish between two novel categories of bugs while under conditions of verbal or visuospatial interference. In Experiment 1, category membership was determined by an XOR rule; in Experiment 2, category membership was determined by an AND rule.

In Experiment 1, participants on average did not succeed …

Investigating Individual And Group Level Mediators Of Fear Acquisition, Rachel S. Lese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to discriminate between cues predictive of threat vs. safety (fear acquisition) and subsequently update fear responding when contingencies change (fear extinction) is crucial to survival for all organisms. While these processes have been the subject of intense experimental scrutiny for several decades, most human fear learning studies have focused primarily on extinction learning and fear recovery processes, with less focus on fear acquisition itself. Indeed, researchers typically aim to minimize variability during fear acquisition in order to rule out differences in extinction being driven by variability during the initial learning phase. Thus, experimental protocols are often optimized to …

Reducing The Complexity Of The Experimental Design Attenuates Trait-Level Effects In Threat Safety Discrimination Learning, Justin M. Lazzarino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trait measures of negative emotionality have sometimes been shown to play a role in shaping threat learning, but findings are mixed. For example, Johnson et al (2023) showed that the inhibitory and prospective subscales of the Intolerance for Uncertainty Scale (IUS) were associated with diminished and enhanced threat-safety discrimination, respectively, during the acquisition phase of a Pavlovian fear conditioning task. This finding was subsequently replicated in an independent sample (Kinney-Petrucha, 2024, unpublished). However, these findings and other trait-level fear acquisition effects have not been consistently observed in the broader fear learning literature. Variation in the complexity of or uncertainty inherent …

Evaluation Of Neuroplastic Changes In Psychological Intervention And Contemporary Treatments Of Depression, Taylor Severance

Dissertations

Major depressive disorder is one of the most prevalent mental health disorders worldwide. There is a vast range of treatment options for depression, with varying levels of effectiveness. Recent treatments for depression have expanded, increasing alternative treatments, and it is unknown which treatments have the largest impact on depression. This research was designed to examine the treatments of depression, with a focus on psychotherapy and contemporary treatments such as ketamine, psilocybin, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. A literature review was conducted to assess treatment outcomes and neuroplastic changes in these interventions, as well as combinations of the interventions. Data were evaluated …

Temporal Integration In Music And Aesthetic Judgments: Assessing Musical Taste Through A Transformer-Based Approach, Sophia M. Senderak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Music unfolds over time, requiring listeners to integrate information moment by moment to make aesthetic judgments. Although we know that music is likely processed on multiple timescales, it is not known which musical features contribute to short versus long timeframes. This study examined whether a computational measure of temporal integration could help explain aesthetic responses to music. Participants (N = 28) listened to 32 sixty-second clips of classical and electronic music, and continuously rated their enjoyment with a dial. After listening, they then gave an overall liking judgment for each clip. To quantify temporal integration, we derived an integration measure …

An Inferential Analysis Of Lexical Networks, Christopher D. Gravelle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lexical networks are graphs where words are treated as nodes, and relations between words are treated as edges. The adoption of lexical networks in psycholinguistics is impeded by a lack of readily available inferential methods, which limits work to purely descriptive analyses with little ability to make inferences about what variables account for lexical network structure. The current research explores the use of latent space network models as a method for analyzing lexical networks. Latent space network models are latent variable regression models, which model the presence or strength of edges by estimating pairwise distances between nodes in a latent …

Three-Dimensional Shape Cues Affect Human And Artificial Recognition Systems Differently, Mikayla Cutler, Luke D. Baumel, Joseph Tocco, William Friebel, George K. Thiruvathukal, Nicholas Baker Dr.

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Humans and neural networks use shape and texture information differently. While humans weigh shape heavily in their ultimate classification decision, neural networks are more biased towards texture cues. Many tests of shape vs. texture bias have focused on shape recognition from an object’s external contour. However, shape information is also conveyed through internal contours, shading, and attached shadows, especially when an object is viewed from noncanonical perspectives. Using models from ShapeNet, we created datasets of 120,000 texture-substituted images of objects from many viewpoints with and without shading and attached shadows. We tested humans’ and several neural networks’ ability to classify …

Generative Ai And Student Engagement, Motivation, And Learning: Exploring The Use Of Generative Ai In Higher Education Online Courses, Jeffrey L. Simmons

Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The rapid emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT in higher education has left many institutions unprepared to assess their potential benefits and risks. This mixed-methods study examined how ChatGPT and Google’s NotebookLM were integrated into online course development and delivery at a small private nonprofit university in California, and assessed their perceived impact on student engagement, motivation, and learning.

Data were collected from post-course Likert-scale surveys completed by students across three online master’s-level courses and from pre-course prediction surveys by instructors in the two NotebookLM courses. Quantitative analyses included one-sample t-tests against a …

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …