Cognition and Perception Commons^™

The Electrophysiology Of Written Informal Language, Taylor S. Blaetz

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Language is an essential component of human behavior. It is ubiquitous, but more importantly, it is malleable and it is constantly changing. Part of the dynamic nature of informal communication is the introduction and adoption of new linguistic elements. Online communication provides a window into this informal public discourse; therefore, it may be useful for testing hypotheses about the processes underlying the acquisition and use of new words. The comprehension of informal language may lead to an understanding of how these new informal words are integrated into our mental lexicon. The current study was an electroencephalographic (EEG) investigation of the …

Dynamic Tactile Information Is Sufficient For Precise Curvature Discrimination, Jacob R. Cheeseman

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Our tactile perceptual experiences occur when we interact, actively and passively, with environmental objects and surfaces. Previous research has demonstrated that active manual exploration enhances the tactile perception of object shape. Nevertheless, the factors that contribute to this enhancement are not well understood. The present study evaluated the ability of 14 older adults to discriminate curved surfaces by actively feeling objects with a single index finger and by passively feeling objects that moved relative to a restrained finger. The curvature discrimination thresholds obtained for passive-dynamic touch were significantly lower than those that occurred during active-dynamic touch. This result demonstrates that …

The Clinical Utility Of The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System: A Clinician's Perspective, Ashley Gunterman

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) is the first performance-based measure of adult attachment to be developed. The purpose of the measure is to provide a clinical understanding of an adult client's attachment status and associated coping mechanisms. The AAP is a relatively new measure that has yet to be examined from a utility perspective. In the current study, seven psychologists completed a structured survey in order to identify their perspectives of the AAP and its utility as a clinical instrument. A phenomenological qualitative analysis of the data was conducted to derive themes about the AAP and its clinical …

Development Of A Psychological Assessment Battery To Measure Client Beliefs About The Effectiveness Of Psychotherapy, Christopher Peavey

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

The author attempted to develop a brief scale to measure clients' beliefs about the effectiveness of psychotherapy. The study is an early pilot study to determine if the scale can predict therapy outcomes. While the scale did differ significantly between clients who were active in therapy and those who were not, higher scores on the instrument were not indicative of greater involvement. Possibilities for future research to refine the instrument are discussed.

The Relationship Between Self-Determination And Client Outcomes Among The Homeless, Samuel M. Hanna

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This paper has attempted to determine if there is a significant relationship between self-determination and client outcomes among the homeless. The study has been based upon the conceptual framework set forth in Self-Determination Theory. The purpose of the study was to explore the relationship between self-determination and client outcomes among the homeless. Using a data collection instrument, based on empirically validated instrumentation, clients from several homeless service providers in the City of San Bernardino were assessed for the level of self-determination and autonomy support they experience within these agencies. Outcome measures included such things as whether the client was going …

An Analysis Of The Impact Of Emotional Literacy Instruction On At-Risk Students, Shannon H. Garcia

Dissertations

This study examined the impact of social-emotional literacy instruction for at-risk adolescents ages 13 to 18 at the high school level. Of particular interest is the impact of social-emotional literacy instruction on at-risk youth Grades 9-12 in secondary high schools’ 8-week-long social-emotional literacy class through Project AWARE, particularly in the areas of suspension, expulsion, attendance, connectivity, attitude toward school, resiliency, and relational aggression rates; the data were analyzed using archival data and teacher interview. Project AWARE, the social-emotional literacy intervention examined in this study, educates and provides mentorship for at-risk students, while also providing a group educational component on relationships …

Fatalism, Diabetes Management Outcomes, And The Role Of Religiosity, Vincent Berardi, John Bellettiere, Orit Nativ, Slezak Ladislav, Melbourne Hovell, Orna Baron-Epel

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

This study aimed to determine whether fatalistic beliefs were associated with elevated levels of glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) and to establish the role of religiosity in this relationship. A cross-sectional survey was conducted on a sample of 183 Jewish adults with diabetes visiting a large medical center in northern Israel. Self-administered questionnaires assessed level of religiosity, fatalistic beliefs, diabetes management behaviors, and demographic/personal characteristics; laboratory tests were used to measure HbA1c. Multivariate regression indicated that fatalism was significantly associated with HbA1c (β = 0.51, p = 0.01). The association was no longer statistically significant after including self-reported religiosity in the …

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, The Primary Motor Neuron Disease, Jacob P. Naumann

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a degenerative neurological disease that damages nerve cells in the brain, in particular the neurons that are involved in voluntary muscle movements. Internationally the disorder is also known as Charcot’s disease and motor neuron disease. In the United States, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease, motor neuron disease, and more colloquially ALS. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is the most prominent of the five motor neuron diseases, distinguishing itself from the others through degeneration of both upper motor neurons (UMN) and lower motor neurons (LMN) respectively. The “Father of neurology” Jean-Marie Charcot founded …

Image Segmentation Using Fuzzy-Spatial Taxon Cut, Lauren Barghout

MODVIS Workshop

Images convey multiple meanings that depend on the context in which the viewer perceptually organizes the scene. This presents a problem for automated image segmentation, because it adds uncertainty to the process of selecting which objects to include or not include within a segment. I’ll discuss the implementation of a fuzzy-logic-natural-vision-processing engine that solves this problem by assuming the scene architecture prior to processing. The scene architecture, a standardized natural-scene-perception-taxonomy comprised of a hierarchy of nested spatial-taxons. Spatial-taxons are regions (pixel-sets) that are figure-like, in that they are perceived as having a contour, are either `thing-like', or a `group of …

‘Edge’ Integration Explains Contrast And Assimilation In A Gradient Lightness Illusion, Michael E. Rudd

MODVIS Workshop

In the ‘phantom’ illusion (Galmonte, Soranzo, Rudd, & Agostini, submitted), either an incremental or a decremental target, when surrounded by a luminance gradient, can to be made to appear as an increment or a decrement, depending on the gradient width. For wide gradients, incremental targets appear as increments and decremental targets appear as decrements. For narrow gradients, the reverse is true. Here, I model these phenomena with a two-stage neural lightness theory (Rudd, 2013, 2014) in which local steps in log luminance are first encoded by oriented spatial filters operating on a log-transformed version of the image; then the filter …

A Linearized Model For Flicker And Contrast Thresholds At Various Retinal Illuminances, Albert Ahumada, Andrew B. Watson

MODVIS Workshop

Watson and Ahumada (1992 SID) predicted flicker thresholds for bright displays using a temporal contrast sensitivity function (TCSF). Under the assumptions that the falling limb of the TCSF is linear at all retinal illuminations and that the Ferry-Porter law can be extended to supra-threshold levels, the thresholds for any of the three variables (frequency in Hz, log10 contrast, and retinal illuminance in log Trolands) can be predicted from the other two from a linear model with four parameters.

The Bounded Log-Odds Model Of Frequency And Probability Distortion, Hang Zhang, Laurence T. Maloney

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

A Signal Detection Experiment With Limited Number Of Trials, Tadamasa Sawada

MODVIS Workshop

Signal detection theory has been well accepted in vision science to measure human sensitivity to stimuli in a Psychophysical experiment. The theory is formulated so that the measured sensitivity is independent from a response bias (criterion). The formulation is based on an assumption that number of trials in the experiment is infinite but this assumption cannot be satisfied in practice. The assumption came from two normal distributions used in the formulation. The distributions respectively represent a set of signal trial and that of noise trials in the experiment. In this study, I will show how the violation of the assumption …

Testing The Bayesian Confidence Hypothesis, Wei Ji Ma, Ronald Van Den Berg

MODVIS Workshop

Asking subjects to rate their confidence is one of the oldest procedures in psychophysics. Remarkably, quantitative models of confidence ratings have been scarce. The Bayesian confidence hypothesis (BCH) states that an observer’s confidence rating is monotonically related to the posterior probability of their choice. I will report tests of this hypothesis in two visual categorization tasks: one requiring rapid categorization of a single oriented stimulus, the other a deliberative judgment typically made by scientists, namely interpreting scatterplots. We find evidence against the Bayesian confidence hypothesis in both tasks.

A Conceptual Framework Of Computations In Mid-Level Vision, Jonas Kubilius, Johan Wagemans, Hans P. Op De Beeck

MODVIS Workshop

The goal of visual processing is to extract information necessary for a variety of tasks, such as grasping objects, navigating in scenes, and recognizing them. While ultimately these tasks might be carried out by separate processing pathways, they nonetheless share a common root in the early and intermediate visual areas. What representations should these areas develop in order to facilitate all of these higher-level tasks? Several distinct ideas have received empirical support in the literature so far: (i) boundary feature detection, such as edge, corner, and curved segment extraction; (ii) second-order feature detection, such as the difference in orientation or …

Two Correspondence Problems Easier Than One, Aaron Michaux, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

Computer vision research rarely makes use of symmetry in stereo reconstruction despite its established importance in perceptual psychology. Such stereo reconstructions produce visually satisfying figures with precisely located points and lines, even when input images have low or moderate resolution. However, because few invariants exist, there are no known general approaches to solving symmetry correspondence on real images. The problem is significantly easier when combined with the binocular correspondence problem, because each correspondence problem provides strong non-overlapping constraints on the solution space. We demonstrate a system that leverages these constraints to produce accurate stereo models from pairs of binocular images …

Binocular 3d Motion Perception As Bayesian Inference, Martin Lages, Suzanne Heron

MODVIS Workshop

The human visual system encodes monocular motion and binocular disparity input before it is integrated into a single 3D percept. Here we propose a geometric-statistical model of human 3D motion perception that solves the aperture problem in 3D by assuming that (i) velocity constraints arise from inverse projection of local 2D velocity constraints in a binocular viewing geometry, (ii) noise from monocular motion and binocular disparity processing is independent, and (iii) slower motions are more likely to occur than faster ones. In two experiments we found that instantiation of this Bayesian model can explain perceived 3D line motion direction under …

Effects Of Digitally Enhanced Learning Tasks On Cognitive Functioning, Reyn Yoshiura

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Are brain-training applications effective? In recent years the popularity of brain training programs, such as Lumosity, Brain Age, Big Brain Academy and Elevate has increased significantly. These programs assert that the consistent use of their program can potentially result in increases in cognitive function. The current body of cognitive research shows that these programs train working memory; due to its integral part in general cognition. This research compared the effectiveness of digitally enhanced working memory tasks, versus active control groups for improvements on measures of cognitive functioning. It was hypothesized that the digitally enhanced working memory tasks would have greater …

Computational Modeling Of Depth-Ordering In Occlusion 
Through Accretion Or Deletion Of Texture, Harald Ruda, Gennady Livitz, Guillaume Riesen, Ennio Mingolla

MODVIS Workshop

Understanding the depth-ordering of surfaces in the natural world is one of the most fundamental operations of the primate visual system. Surfaces that undergo accretion or deletion (AD) of texture are always perceived to behind an adjacent surface.

An updated ForMotionOcclusion (FMO) model (Barnes & Mingolla, 2013) includes two streams for computing motion signals and boundary signals. The two streams generate depth percepts such that AD signals together with boundary signals generate a farther depth on the occluded side of the boundary. The model fits the classical data (Kaplan, 1969) as well as the observation that moving surfaces tend to …

Spatially-Global Integration Of Closed Contours By Means Of Shortest-Path In A Log-Polar Representation, Terry Kwon, Kunal Agrawal, Yunfeng Li, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

See the one page PDF with abstract and images.