Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: working memory
- Creators: Amazeen, Eric
- Creators: Cooke, Nancy J.
Description
Although there are many forms of organization on the Web, one of the most prominent ways to organize web content and websites are tags. Tags are keywords or terms that are assigned to a specific piece of content in order to help users understand the common relationships between pieces of content. Tags can either be assigned by an algorithm, the author, or the community. These tags can also be organized into tag clouds, which are visual representations of the structure and organization contained implicitly within these tags. Importantly, little is known on how we use these different tagging structures to understand the content and structure of a given site. This project examines 2 different characteristics of tagging structures: font size and spatial orientation. In order to examine how these different characteristics might interact with individual differences in attentional control, a measure of working memory capacity (WMC) was included. The results showed that spatial relationships affect how well users understand the structure of a website. WMC was not shown to have any significant effect; neither was varying the font size. These results should better inform how tags and tag clouds are used on the Web, and also provide an estimation of what properties to include when designing and implementing a tag cloud on a website.
ContributorsBanas, Steven (Author) / Sanchez, Christopher A (Thesis advisor) / Branaghan, Russell (Committee member) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
There have been conflicting accounts of animation's facilitation in learning from instructional media, being at best no different if not hindering performance. Procedural motor learning represents one of the few the areas in which animations have shown to be facilitative. These studies examine the effects of instructional media (animation vs. static), rotation (facing vs. over the shoulder) and spatial abilities (low vs. high spatial abilities) on two procedural motor tasks, knot tying and endoscope reprocessing. Results indicate that for all conditions observed in which participants engaged in procedural motor learning tasks, performance was significantly improved with animations over static images. Further, performance was greater for rotations of instructional media that did not require participants to perform a mental rotation under some circumstances. Interactions between Media x Rotation suggest that media that was animated and did not require a participant to mentally rotate led to improved performance. Individual spatial abilities were found to influence total steps correct and total number of errors made in the knot tying task, but this was not observed in the endoscope task. These findings have implications for the design of instructional media for procedural motor tasks and provide strong support for the usage of animations in this context.
ContributorsGarland, T. B (Author) / Sanchez, Chris A (Thesis advisor) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Branaghan, Russel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Individual differences in working memory capacity partly arise from variability in attention control, a process influenced by negative emotional content. Thus, individual differences in working memory capacity should be predictive of differences in the ability to regulate attention in emotional contexts. To address this hypothesis, a complex-span working memory task (symmetry span) was modified so that negative arousing images or neutral images subtended the background during the encoding phase. Across three experiments, negative arousing images impaired working memory encoding relative to neutral images, resulting in impoverished symmetry span scores. Additionally, in Experiment 3, both negative and arousing images captured attention and led to increased hit rates in a subsequent recognition task. Contrary to the primary hypothesis, individual differences in working memory capacity derived from three complex span tasks failed to moderate the effect of negative arousing images on working memory encoding across two large scale studies. Implications for theories of working memory and attention control in emotional contexts will be discussed.
ContributorsWingert, Kimberly Marie (Author) / Brewer, Gene A. (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Eric (Committee member) / Killeen, Peter (Committee member) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Effects of Assisted Cycle Therapy on Short Term and Working Memory in Adolescents with Down Syndrome
Description
To examine the effect of an 8-week cycling intervention on short term and working memory in adolescents with Down syndrome (DS), participants were divided into Assisted Cycling Therapy (ACT), Voluntary Cycling (VC), or No Cycling (NC) groups. Forward and backward digit span assessments were administered prior to and after the intervention to evaluate short term and working memory respectively. 8 weeks of exercise via ACT showed a trend toward conventional levels of significance in the number of levels completed in the backward direction.
ContributorsSandoval-Menendez, Amber Melanie (Author) / Ringenbach, Shannon (Thesis director) / Amazeen, Eric (Committee member) / Blais, Chris (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The action of running is difficult to measure, but well worth it to receive valuable information about one of our most basic evolutionary functions. In the context of modern day, recreational runners typically listen to music while running, and so the purpose of this experiment is to analyze the influence of music on running from a more dynamical approach. The first experiment was a running task involving running without a metronome and running with one while setting one's own preferred running tempo. The second experiment sought to manipulate the participant's preferred running tempo by having them listen to the metronome set at their preferred tempo, 20% above their preferred tempo, or 20% below. The purpose of this study is to analyze whether or not rhythmic perturbations different to one's preferred running tempo would interfere with one's preferred running tempo and cause a change in the variability of one's running patterns as well as a change in one's running performance along the measures of step rate, stride length, and stride pace. The evidence suggests that participants naturally entrained to the metronome tempo which influenced them to run faster or slower as a function of metronome tempo. However, this change was also accompanied by a shift in the variability of one's step rate and stride length.
ContributorsZavala, Andrew Geovanni (Author) / Amazeen, Eric (Thesis director) / Amazeen, Polemnia (Committee member) / Vedeler, Dankert (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05