Matching Items (7)
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- All Subjects: Categorization (Psychology)
- All Subjects: Child Development
- Creators: Glenberg, Arthur
Description
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of partial exemplar experience on category formation and use. Participants had either complete or limited access to the three dimensions that defined categories by dimensions within different modalities. The concept of "crucial dimension" was introduced and the role it plays in category definition was explained. It was hypothesized that the effects of partial experience are not explained by a shifting of attention between dimensions (Taylor & Ross, 2009) but rather by an increased reliance on prototypical values used to fill in missing information during incomplete experiences. Results indicated that participants (1) do not fill in missing information with prototypical values, (2) integrate information less efficiently between different modalities than within a single modality, and (3) have difficulty learning only when partial experience prevents access to diagnostic information.
ContributorsCrawford, Thomas (Author) / Homa, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Mcbeath, Micheal (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Learning and transfer were investigated for a categorical structure in which relevant stimulus information could be mapped without loss from one modality to another. The category space was composed of three non-overlapping, linearly-separable categories. Each stimulus was composed of a sequence of on-off events that varied in duration and number of sub-events (complexity). Categories were learned visually, haptically, or auditorily, and transferred to the same or an alternate modality. The transfer set contained old, new, and prototype stimuli, and subjects made both classification and recognition judgments. The results showed an early learning advantage in the visual modality, with transfer performance varying among the conditions in both classification and recognition. In general, classification accuracy was highest for the category prototype, with false recognition of the category prototype higher in the cross-modality conditions. The results are discussed in terms of current theories in modality transfer, and shed preliminary light on categorical transfer of temporal stimuli.
ContributorsFerguson, Ryan (Author) / Homa, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Most people are experts in some area of information; however, they may not be knowledgeable about other closely related areas. How knowledge is generalized to hierarchically related categories was explored. Past work has found little to no generalization to categories closely related to learned categories. These results do not fit well with other work focusing on attention during and after category learning. The current work attempted to merge these two areas of by creating a category structure with the best chance to detect generalization. Participants learned order level bird categories and family level wading bird categories. Then participants completed multiple measures to test generalization to old wading bird categories, new wading bird categories, owl and raptor categories, and lizard categories. As expected, the generalization measures converged on a single overall pattern of generalization. No generalization was found, except for already learned categories. This pattern fits well with past work on generalization within a hierarchy, but do not fit well with theories of dimensional attention. Reasons why these findings do not match are discussed, as well as directions for future research.
ContributorsLancaster, Matthew E (Author) / Homa, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Chi, Michelene (Committee member) / Brewer, Gene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Early childhood environment is critical to subsequent physical health in children and is influenced by children's primary caregivers \u2014 typically mothers. Maternal stress, one aspect of a child's environment, may shape the functioning of the child's physiological stress response system, which has been linked to later health outcomes, including pain. The current study evaluated whether: 1) early maternal stress, defined as maternal depressive symptoms and low socio-economic status, predicts later child pain; 2) early maternal stress relates to later child daily cortisol output; and 3) child's cortisol output across the day mediates the relation between early maternal stress and child pain. Maternal stress was assessed via questionnaires at twin age 12-months. At twin age seven years, twins' salivary cortisol was collected three times per day for three days. At twin age nine years, twins rated how often they experienced stomach, headache, and back pain weekly or more frequently. Results of multilevel linear and logistic regression analyses showed that early maternal stress did not predict later children's daily cortisol output or extent of child pain. Therefore, findings were inconsistent with the proposed mediation model. However, there was a marginally significant negative relation between child daily cortisol output and later extent of child pain. Current findings suggest that functioning of the stress response system, reflected in cortisol output, may have implications for the development of child pain. Future work evaluating intensely stressful early environments may provide clues about the links between a child's early environment and the development of his/her stress response system.
ContributorsRoth, Winter Rayne Nicole (Author) / Davis, Mary (Thesis director) / Miadich, Samantha (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
Fast mapping is the initial link infants make between a word and its referent, and it is crucial to later processes of learning the meanings of words. Despite the importance of fast mapping, previous research has suggested that fast mapping is fragile, with infants being unable to retain words learned through fast mapping longer than five minutes. The current study tested the robustness of fast mapping by imposing task irrelevant interruptions on a fast mapping task. Forty-seven infants (14.7 \u2014 17.4 months old) were assigned to a No Interruption condition, a Posture Interruption condition, or a Visual Interruption condition, and they performed a fast mapping task in which a novel object was named in one trial. Videos of the infants were coded for accuracy of fast mapping and for attentional behaviors (looking behavior) during the task. We found that infants did not learn novel word-object pairings when interrupted, demonstrating that infants' fast mapping abilities are easily disrupted. Overall, there was no evidence that looking behaviors were affected by interruptions, or that they were correlated with accuracy. These findings suggest that fast mapping is fragile in young infants, and further research is required to determine the mechanisms for infant learning, and how infants transition from fast to slow mapping processes.
ContributorsSmith, Emily J (Author) / Benitez, Viridiana (Thesis director) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
A cornerstone of children’s socio-cognitive development is understanding that others can have knowledge, thoughts, and perceptions that differ from one’s own. Preschool-aged children often have difficulty with this kind of social understanding, i.e., they lack an explicit theory of mind. The goal of this dissertation was to examine the role mental state language as a developmental mechanism of children’s early understanding of their own mental states (i.e., their introspective ability). Specifically, it was hypothesized that (1) parents’ ability to recognize and appropriately label their children’s mental states and (2) children’s linguistic ability to distinguish between their mental states shapes the development of children’s introspective ability. An initial prediction of the first hypothesis is that parents should recognized differences in the development of children’s self- and other-understanding in order to better help their children’s introspective development. In support of this prediction, parents (N = 400, Mage = 58 months, Range = 28-93 months) reported that children’s understanding of their own knowledge was greater than children’s understanding of others’ knowledge. A prediction of the second hypothesis is that children’s linguistic ability to distinguish between and appropriately label their own mental states should determine their ability to make fined grained judgments of mental states like certainty. In support of this prediction, children’s (N = 197, Mage = 56 months, Range = 36-82 months) ability to distinguish between their own knowledge and ignorance states was associated children’s ability to engage in uncertainty monitoring. Together, these findings provide support for the association between children’s linguistic environment and ability and their introspective development.
ContributorsGonzales, Christopher Ryan (Author) / Fabricius, William V. (Thesis advisor) / Spinrad, Tracy (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Horne, Zachary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Categories are often defined by rules regarding their features. These rules may be intensely complex yet, despite the complexity of these rules, we are often able to learn them with sufficient practice. A possible explanation for how we arrive at consistent category judgments despite these difficulties would be that we may define these complex categories such as chairs, tables, or stairs by understanding the simpler rules defined by potential interactions with these objects. This concept, called grounding, allows for the learning and transfer of complex categorization rules if said rules are capable of being expressed in a more simple fashion by virtue of meaningful physical interactions. The present experiment tested this hypothesis by having participants engage in either a Rule Based (RB) or Information Integration (II) categorization task with instructions to engage with the stimuli in either a non-interactive or interactive fashion. If participants were capable of grounding the categories, which were defined in the II task with a complex visual rule, to a simpler interactive rule, then participants with interactive instructions should outperform participants with non-interactive instructions. Results indicated that physical interaction with stimuli had a marginally beneficial effect on category learning, but this effect seemed most prevalent in participants were engaged in an II task.
ContributorsCrawford, Thomas (Author) / Homa, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / McBeath, Michael (Committee member) / Brewer, Gene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014