Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Focus On Hyperfocus: How Adhd Symptoms Impact Difficulty With Disengagement And Inattention, Cameron Mckendrick

Honors Theses

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder marked by patterns of inattention and hyperactivity. Hyperfocus (HF) is a concept that has heavily been associated with ADHD; however, it is not part of any diagnostic criteria and the literature pertaining to HF is rather underdeveloped. The present study adds to existing research by examining how HF differentially impacts ADHD populations compared to non-ADHD populations. The three main hypotheses explored in this paper are that ADHD positively predicts HF in the moment, HF in the moment negatively predicts inattention in the moment, and that the correlation between HF and …

Peoples’ Perception Of Race-Based Microaggressions As A Function Of Their Background And Beliefs, Emily Huesman

Honors Theses

This current study’s aim was to further address microaggressions and how people perceive these “micro” aggressions based on Political identification, support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and their beliefs surrounding White privilege. Recent literature has shown that racial discrimination in any form can be incredibly detrimental to mental health, however, this study addresses the every-day microaggressions and subtle forms of racism that Black people experience every day and delves further into why these “smaller” forms of racism might not be addressed. This study used a Qualtrics survey to obtain both qualitative and quantitative data on peoples’ beliefs surrounding the …

Hometown Diversity And Race Essentialism: The Role Of Interracial Friendship Quality, Junming Zhang

Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate associations between high-quality interracial

friendships and race essentialism among college students who perceived differing levels of racial diversity in their hometowns. Participants, who were recruited from a small, private university in the southeastern United States, included 84 juniors and seniors who reported having at least one other-race close friend. Participants completed a web-based survey about their hometown diversity, friendship quality, and race essentialism. Results from multiple regression analyses revealed two significant interaction effects between hometown diversity and two measures of interracial friendship quality: intimate disclosure and affection. Findings indicated that higher intimate …

Does Adhd Strengthen The Relationship Between Depression/Anxiety And Avoidance?, Ryan Wigginton

Honors Theses

Objective: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a diagnosis often

comorbid with depression and anxiety-related disorders. Research is also indicative of a relationship between ADHD, depression, anxiety, and avoidance-related behaviors. I hypothesize that the relationship between ADHD and avoidance will be moderated by symptoms of depression and anxiety in neuro-typical college students that have not received a clinical mental health diagnosis. Method: 101 college students at the University of Richmond attended a baseline visit with a research assistant and completed baseline scale measures for symptoms of ADHD, depression, generalized anxiety, and avoidance. I used multiple regression and Hayes’ PROCESS program to analyze …

Classical Conditioning Of Cognitive States, Arthur Burns

Neuroscience Honors Papers

Classical conditioning has been a fundamental concept and practice throughout the history of psychology. While classical conditioning traditionally seeks to elicit target behaviors in correlation to specific stimuli, we sought to do the same with cognitive states in place of behaviors. Specifically, we wanted to determine the effectiveness of conditioning states of cognitive arousal in human participants in conjunction with cues presented in a designed learning task. We designed a cognitive task specifically for this research, referred to as “the Tone Pitching Task”, which utilized a combination of working memory and mental processing in order to elicit cognitive arousal and …

Psilocybin Psychotherapy With Acceptance And Commitment Therapy: A Potential Treatment For Social Anxiety Disorder, Elliot Sandberg

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

Individuals diagnosed with social anxiety disorder (SAD) require effective therapeutic interventions. Due to the nature of SAD, individuals tend to not seek care for their treatment, leading to the continuation of avoidance behaviors that significantly impact their daily existence. Psilocybin psychotherapy has the potential to lead to significant changes in the personality structure of individuals as well as reducing anxious responses to their environment in a relatively short period of time. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can serve as the ideal therapeutic backing to psilocybin as it emphasizes mindfulness and psychological flexibility, both of which aid in the therapeutic mechanisms …

The Influence Of Clutter On Target Prevalence And Decision Making During Visual Search, Brandon Eich

LSU Master's Theses

Participants are sensitive to target prevalence effects in visual search. Low prevalence of targets leads to increased miss rates and shorter response times, and high prevalence of targets leads to increased false alarm rates and longer response times. These effects have been explained using the Multiple-Decision Model (MDM), in which two decisions impact performance during serial visual search. The first decision is whether an inspected item is a target. The second decision is whether the search should be ended with a target-absent response. Target prevalence influences these decisions, evidenced by changes in miss rate, false alarm rate, and response time. …

Mirror Tracing: The Effect Of Different Shapes On Transfer Performance, Jillian Brennan

The Compass

No abstract provided.

The Connection Between Body Modification And Personality, Taylor Shoemaker

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

Previous research has been inconsistent in its findings regarding the associations between body modifications (e.g., piercings, tattoos, augmentation, scarification, split tongue) and the Big Five personality traits (i.e., openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism). All traits have been found to be significantly correlated with body modification in at least one study, but their significance differed from study to study. The purpose of the current study was to examine the associations between body modification and each domain of personality concurrently to add to the literature surrounding differences between modified and unmodified individuals. To participate in this study, participants were asked …

Facial Recognition As It Relates To The Obstruction Of Holistic Processing By Partial Occlusion, Karen B. Raymond

Honors College Theses

Facial recognition is an important cognitive function in communication and is how we process, remember, and recall facial information. Research concerning processing styles and their effects on facial recognition accuracy is a prominent subject within the field of cognitive psychology. Holistic processing and featural processing have been experimentally manipulated in various ways with an aim to determine which of these processing styles would aid with accurate recognition. The current study is a replication of a previous study that examined the effects of masks on face information processing and recognition. This study assesses the effects of partial occlusion on face information …

Manipulating Image Luminance To Improve Eye Gaze And Verbal Behavior In Autistic Children, Louanne Boyd, Vincent Berardi, Deanna Hughes, Franceli L. Cibrian, Jazette Johnson, Viseth Sean, Eliza Delpizzo-Cheng, Brandon Mackin, Ayra Tusneem, Riya Mody, Sara Jones, Karen Lotich

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Autism has been characterized by a tendency to attend to the local visual details over surveying an image to understand the gist–a phenomenon called local interference. This sensory processing trait has been found to negatively impact social communication. Although much work has been conducted to understand these traits, little to no work has been conducted to intervene to provide support for local interference. Additionally, recent understanding of autism now introduces the core role of sensory processing and its impact on social communication. However, no interventions to the end of our knowledge have been explored to leverage this relationship. This work …

Dark Faces In White Spaces: The Effects Of Skin Tone, Race, Ethnicity, And Intergroup Preferences On Interpersonal Judgments And Voting Behavior, Patrizia Chirco, Tonya M. Buchanan

Student Published Works

Across three experimental studies, we explored how a political candidate's intersections of skin tone, race, and ethnicity affect voting preferences and interpersonal judgments (e.g., warmth, trustworthiness, expertise). Study 1 assessed whether White participants would favor a light-skinned (vs. dark-skinned) African American candidate. Study 2 investigated participant (White vs. non-White) voting preferences based on the interaction between candidate race/ethnicity and relative skin tone (lighter vs. darker). In Study 3, we examined the influence of candidate race/ethnicity on voters’ preferences as well as the accuracy and impact of memory for candidate skin tone. Supporting our hypotheses, White participants generally held more negative …

The Mental Noise Hypothesis: A Relation Between Neuroticism And P3 Latency Variance In A Stroop-Style Reaction Time Task, Jeremy Lawrence

All NMU Master's Theses

Neuroticism is a relatively stable personality dimension characterized by tendencies to experience negative thoughts and affect. Its empirically related outcome measures range from anxiety and mood disorders to increases in mortality. Traditional theories of neuroticism, link the construct to greater threat sensitivity, however, these conceptions fail to account for certain salient features of neuroticism, such as negative affect in threat benign environments. The mental noise hypothesis posits that neuroticism results from a more variable mental control system, with support coming from behavioral, psychometric, and neuroimaging paradigms. To assess whether this more chaotic mental control system would variably disrupt the stimulus …

Academic Procrastination In College Students, Samantha Mortensen

Senior Honors Theses

Academic procrastination has become a prevalent issue facing students, especially college-aged students. There is a large body of research investigating the reasons behind academic procrastination and why it continues to be a growing problem for students. Researchers want to understand why procrastination affects most college students when it is associated with many long-term negative implications. Following this problem, there have been several studies conducted in hopes of finding a solution to help students procrastinate less. While there has been research about possible treatment options, there has been a lack of research specifically targeting the important predictors of procrastination. In this …

Situational Factors Shape Moral Judgments In The Trolley Dilemma In Eastern, Southern, And Western Countries In A Culturally Diverse Sample, Bence Bago, Andree Hartanto, Lucas E. Tiong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychological and situational factors (for example, the intent of the agent or the presence of physical contact between the agent and the victim) can play an important role in moral dilemma judgements (for example, the trolley problem). Our knowledge is limited concerning both the universality of these effects outside the United …

Further Investigating Suggestibility And False Memory, Angelina M. Blanchette

Honors College Theses

This study investigated suggestibility in the context of effects of misinformation on memory. In the current study, participants viewed a video followed by comprehension questions followed by two sets of true/false questions and then the same set of comprehension questions including information in the true/false questions that was inconsistent with the video and comprehension questions negatively affected memory compared to the control condition. These findings are discussed in terms of theories relating to how misinformation affects memory.

Color And Memory, Hanna Vafiades, Alyssa Stephens, Tanner Clark, Sydney Susano

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

Effects of Color on Working Memory Performance

Primary Investigator: Hanna Vafiades

Associate Investigators: Tanner Clark, Sydney Susano, Alyssa Stephens

The intersection of color and working memory is a fascinating but inconclusive domain of cognitive psychological research. Some studies have demonstrated that the color black is found to be the least stimulating in terms of attention and memory (Meacham 2005), whereas colors found in nature are effective in facilitating attention and memory in young children (Dutta & Baruah, 2018). Another study found that only images or image descriptions in grayscale are better for memory tasks and that color memory is poor …

Visuomotor Rotation Adaptation And Workspace Manipulation: A Behavioral And Cognitive Emphasis, Reuben N. Addison

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This is a three-study dissertation in which we aimed to broaden our knowledge of the mechanisms contributing to a 45° clockwise visuomotor adaptation by including variations in workspace. We provide behavioral and in one study physiological outcomes as evidence to support our conclusions. In the first experiment, we observed the adaptation of movement parameters such as pathlength, movement time, resultant velocity, and normalized jerk across groups trained with rotated visual feedback with both the left and right hands. Workspace location and hand differentially affected movement trajectory length. The group that practiced the task with their nondominant, left hand showed larger …

Cognitive Insights And Implications Of Singing: Actions, Proprioception, And Perception In Vocal Performance., Juanita Leal

Graduate Student Research Symposium

Studies in vocal performance have suggested the interdependence of cognitive reactions and performative proprioception. This interdependence indicates an introspective self-evaluation process during the act of musical performance. When affected by singers’ judgment of vocal production, self-evaluation and perceptive processes potentially change due to implicit competitive roles in the music performance environment.

In this project, I delve deeper into the ways the brain recognizes aspects of vocal sounds, how it reacts to the process of singing, and how it can identify them as its own In two different environments: the controlled practice space and the variable performance space. By reflecting on …

Executive Function In The Classroom, Dr. Kaylin Coody Coody

National Youth Advocacy & Resilience Conference

Do you have students in your classroom who have difficulty with working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility? These are indicators of struggling with executive function. This session will cover the brain-implications and concrete strategies to work with students at all grade levels.