Matching Items (7)
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- All Subjects: decision-making
- All Subjects: mild traumatic brain injury
- Creators: Azuma, Tamiko
Description
Military veterans have a significantly higher incidence of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), depression, and Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared to civilians. Military veterans also represent a rapidly growing subgroup of college students, due in part to the robust and financially incentivizing educational benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The overlapping cognitively impacting symptoms of service-related conditions combined with the underreporting of mTBI and psychiatric-related conditions, make accurate assessment of cognitive performance in military veterans challenging. Recent research findings provide conflicting information on cognitive performance patterns in military veterans. The purpose of this study was to determine whether service-related conditions and self-assessments predict performance on complex working memory and executive function tasks for military veteran college students. Sixty-one military veteran college students attending classes at Arizona State University campuses completed clinical neuropsychological tasks and experimental working memory and executive function tasks. The results revealed that a history of mTBI significantly predicted poorer performance in the areas of verbal working memory and decision-making. Depression significantly predicted poorer performance in executive function related to serial updating. In contrast, the commonly used clinical neuropsychological tasks were not sensitive service-related conditions including mTBI, PTSD, and depression. The differing performance patterns observed between the clinical tasks and the more complex experimental tasks support that researchers and clinicians should use tests that sufficiently tax verbal working memory and executive function when evaluating the subtle, higher-order cognitive deficits associated with mTBI and depression.
ContributorsGallagher, Karen Louise (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis advisor) / Liss, Julie (Committee member) / Lavoie, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Previous research from Rajsic et al. (2015, 2017) suggests that a visual form of confirmation bias arises during visual search for simple stimuli, under certain conditions, wherein people are biased to seek stimuli matching an initial cue color even when this strategy is not optimal. Furthermore, recent research from our lab suggests that varying the prevalence of cue-colored targets does not attenuate the visual confirmation bias, although people still fail to detect rare targets regardless of whether they match the initial cue (Walenchok et al. under review). The present investigation examines the boundary conditions of the visual confirmation bias under conditions of equal, low, and high cued-target frequency. Across experiments, I found that: (1) People are strongly susceptible to the low-prevalence effect, often failing to detect rare targets regardless of whether they match the cue (Wolfe et al., 2005). (2) However, they are still biased to seek cue-colored stimuli, even when such targets are rare. (3) Regardless of target prevalence, people employ strategies when search is made sufficiently burdensome with distributed items and large search sets. These results further support previous findings that the low-prevalence effect arises from a failure to perceive rare items (Hout et al., 2015), while visual confirmation bias is a bias of attentional guidance (Rajsic et al., 2015, 2017).
ContributorsWalenchok, Stephen Charles (Author) / Goldinger, Stephen D (Thesis advisor) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Hout, Michael C (Committee member) / McClure, Samuel M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
An increasing number of veterans are transitioning from military service to college. Critical to academic success is the process of decision-making, which previous research has found to be influenced by a variety of factors including anxiety and working memory (WM). Many service-related conditions often influence anxiety and WM, and given the high prevalence of these conditions among veterans, the present study aimed to analyze the effects of working memory and anxiety on decision-making behavior in U.S. Military Veterans. Participants completed a large test battery including tasks assessing WM skills (Symmetry Span Task), anxiety (Beck Anxiety Inventory), and decision-making (Iowa Gambling Task). The study results indicated that WM and anxiety both play roles in decision-making performance in young military veterans. High anxiety is related to increased avoidance of adverse outcomes in decision-making for U.S. Military Veterans, while lower working memory span is associated with greater risk-taking behavior. This study provides both functional and clinical implications into areas of possible intervention that need to be assessed in military veterans, as well as modifications to these assessments that need to be made in order to appropriately measure decision-making behavior. Future work will be done in order to more effectively analyze the adverse impacts of service-related conditions and the ways in which intervention can be implemented in order to minimize these effects.
ContributorsTully, Mckayla Lynne (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis director) / Gallagher, Karen (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Department of Speech and Hearing Science (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
By providing vignettes with manipulated scientific evidence, this research examined if including more or less scientific detail affected decision-making in regards to the death penalty. Participants were randomly assigned one of the two manipulations (less science and more science) after reading a short scenario introducing the mock capital trial and their role as jury members. Survey respondents were told that a jury had previously found the defendant guilty and they would now deliberate the appropriate punishment. Before being exposed to the manipulation, respondents answered questions pertaining to their prior belief in the death penalty, as well as their level of support of procedural justice and science. These questions provided a baseline to compare to their sentencing decision. Participants were then asked what sentence they would impose \u2014 life in prison or death \u2014 and how the fMRI evidence presented by an expert witness for the defense affected their decision. Both quantitative and qualitative measures were used to identify how the level of scientific detail affected their decision. Our intended predictor variable (level of scientific detail) did not affect juror decision-making. In fact, the qualitative results revealed a variety of interpretations of the scientific evidence used both in favor of death and in favor of life. When looking at what did predict juror decision-making, gender, prior belief in the death penalty, and political ideology all were significant predictors. As in previous literature, the fMRI evidence in our study had mixed results with regards to implementation of the death penalty. This held true in both of our manipulations, showing that despite the level of detail in evidence intended for mitigation, jurors with preconceived notions may still disregard the evidence, and some jurors may even view it is aggravating and thus increase the likelihood of a death sentence for a defendant with such brain abnormalities.
ContributorsBerry, Megan Cheyenne (Author) / Fradella, Hank (Thesis director) / Pardini, Dustin (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
The purpose for creating this thesis project is to discover the effects that options have on consumer behavior and satisfaction, and to determine whether or not more options are a good thing. In exploring these questions, Information Measurement Theory (IMT), a theory founded by Dr. Dean Kashiwagi which relies on understanding natural laws to help minimize decision-making and risk, was utilized to draw conclusions. IMT illustrates that any given situation can only have one unique outcome, and minimizing decision-making in turn leads to reduced stress. The more information an individual has for the given situation, the better he/she can predict the outcome. The concepts of IMT, specifically the ideal that more decision-making leads to higher stress, were utilized to illustrate that more options naturally leads to more decisions and as a result more decision-makers will feel greater stress and less satisfaction. To conduct this research we explored two different segments of consumer markets. The first branch of our research was comprised of analyzing the differences in operations and menu structures of different fast food chains, most specifically In-N-Out and McDonald's and how these differences affect customer satisfaction. The other branch of our research involved reviewing phone case ratings based on Amazon reviews for a number of different phone types with varying popularity to gauge consumer satisfaction. Our results found that while both In-N-Out and McDonald's are successful companies, In-N-Out ranked consistently higher in customer satisfaction. Furthermore, a large portion of this satisfaction can be attributed to In-N-Out's simplistic menu structure which limits the amount of options and therefore decisions that a customer must make. Similarly, our study of phone cases found that for phone models where less case options are offered, customers rated their cases higher on a scale of 1-5 stars regardless of brand or the number of reviews. Through a combination of IMT and our research we were able to conclude that less options does indeed lead to higher consumer satisfaction.
ContributorsBrandt, Lawrence (Co-author) / Spiller, Ryan (Co-author) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Thesis director) / Kashiwagi, Jacob (Committee member) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Department of Management (Contributor) / Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The present study examined the effects that mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) has on an individual’s episodic memory by looking at participants’ abilities to recall stories both immediately after being verbally told and after a delay. Thirty-seven participants were sorted into a control group (N=27) and a mTBI group (N=10) and then given the Wechsler Memory Scale’s two subtests, Logical Memory I and Logical Memory II. Logical Memory I consists of two verbally given stories in which the participant immediately retells the story to the assessor with as much detail and original vocabulary as they can remember. Logical Memory II has the participants, without prior knowledge, retell the same two stories after a thirty-minute delay. Once recorded, researchers transcribed and scored the participants’ story recalls, gathering data on what errors, correct ideas, and vocabulary the participants made and remembered. The data was then analyzed through an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), looking at the interaction of Story (of the two stories that the participants were told), Group (whether mTBI or control) , and Delay (whether it was the immediate or delayed recall). Trends in the data show that participants with a history of mTBI do more poorly than the control group proving that memory is affected by acquired brain injury and that further studies to examine how and why this is the case are needed.
ContributorsAndrews, Chaley (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis director) / Ratiu, Ileana (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Health Solutions (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
Adults with a history of traumatic brain injury (TBI) often show deficits in executive functioning, which include the ability to inhibit, switch, and attend to task relevant information. These abilities are also essential for language processing in bilinguals, who constantly inhibit and switch between languages. Currently, there is no data regarding the effect of TBI on executive function and language processing in bilinguals. This study used behavioral and eye-tracking measures to examine the effect of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) on executive function and language processing in Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, thirty-nine healthy bilinguals completed a variety of executive function and language processing tasks. The primary executive function and language processing tasks were paired with a cognitive load task intended to simulate mTBI. In Experiment 2, twenty-two bilinguals with a history of mTBI and twenty healthy control bilinguals completed the same executive function measures and language processing tasks. The results revealed that bilinguals with a history of mTBI show deficits in specific executive functions and have higher rates of language processing deficits than healthy control bilinguals. Additionally, behavioral and eye-tracking data suggest that these language processing deficits are related to underlying executive function abilities. This study also identified a subset of bilinguals who may be at the greater risk of language processing deficits following mTBI. The findings of this study have a direct impact on the identification of executive function deficits and language processing deficits in bilinguals with a history mTBI.
ContributorsRatiu, Ileana (Author) / Azuma, Tamiko (Thesis advisor) / Goldinger, Stephen D (Committee member) / Liss, Julie M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015