Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: Short-term Memory
- All Subjects: Visual perception--Psychological aspects.
- Creators: Robles-Sotelo, Elias
Description
Retrieving an item from memory can cause subsequent suppression of related items. This phenomenon, involving a procedure where participants retrieve category-exemplar pairs (e.g. FRUIT-orange), is known as Retrieval Induced Forgetting (RIF). Individuals who demonstrate greater amounts of RIF also exhibit greater working memory capacity (WMC). Reasoning ability is highly related to WMC, which may suggest that a similar relation exists between RIF and Reasoning ability. The goal of the present investigation was to examine this possibility. Rotation Span and a Letter Number task were used as indicators of WMC and a Cognitive Reflection Test was used to measure Reasoning ability. A significant RIF effect was found, but it did not significantly correlate with WMC or Reasoning ability. These results demonstrate the importance of designing a RIF task appropriately, selecting measures of Reasoning ability, and the theoretical accounts of the RIF effect. One possibility is that by not controlling for output interference, the obtained RIF effect cannot be reasoned to come from the executive control process as suggested by the inhibition account. Although this account is the chief explanation of the RIF effect, it has been challenged by alternative accounts and it remains unclear how the underlying mechanism of RIF is related to higher cognitive abilities.
ContributorsMaxwell, Joshua (Author) / Duran, Nicholas (Thesis advisor) / Hall, Deborah (Committee member) / Robles-Sotelo, Elias (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Magnocellular-Dorsal pathway’s function had been related to reading ability, and visual perceptual learning can effectively increase the function of this neural pathway. Previous researches training people with a traditional dot motion paradigm and an integrated visual perceptual training “video game” called Ultimeyes pro, all showed improvement with regard to people’s reading performance. This research used 2 paradigms in 2 groups in order to compare the 2 paradigms’ effect on improving people’s reading ability. We also measured participants’ critical flicker fusion threshold (CFFT), which is related to word decoding ability. The result did not show significant improvement of reading performance in each group, but overall the reading speed improved significantly. The result for CFFT in each group only showed significant improvement among people who trained with Ultimeyes pro. This result supports that the beneficial effect of visual perceptual learning training on people’s reading ability, and it suggests that Ultimeyes pro is more efficient than the traditional dot motion paradigm, and might have more application value.
ContributorsZhou, Tianyou (Author) / Nanez, Jose E (Thesis advisor) / Robles-Sotelo, Elias (Committee member) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Loss aversion manifests as a decision bias in which avoiding losses is preferred over acquiring rewards and can drastically alter an individual’s decision-making by overweighting potential losses relative to gains of equal magnitude. Consequently, individuals may require greater positive compensation to offset potential losses, exhibit contradictory choice preferences, or even avoid the decision entirely; and this behavior may be ascribed to an over-reliance on automatic, unconscious (intuitive) judgments rather than initiating analytic reasoning more capable of objectively evaluating outcomes.
Religion (specifically Christianity) is the topic of focus, as preliminary evidence suggests an individual’s intuitive inclinations positively correlate with and predict religious beliefs. Moreover, self-reported religious beliefs significantly differed as a function of inducing either intuitive or reflective mindsets. Therefore, the purpose of this experiment was to test the hypothesis that religious participants will display significantly greater levels of loss aversion than nonreligious participants.
This hypothesis extends from a previous study relating large-scale cultural and religious differences with loss aversion. While their results revealed religious orthodoxy strongly influenced loss aversion, the parameters elicited may be less stable as only two lottery questions were asked and religion was determined by cultural demographics. This study used the same design, but with a total of ten lotteries and a more detailed investigation into individual religious factors.
While loss aversion coefficients replicated the overall behavioral effect (Median θ = 2.6), independent sample, Mann-Whitney U tests did not yield any significant differences between Christian and Nonreligious participants (p > 0.05); nor did any of the religious factors examined account for a significant amount of variability.
This study attempted to add to current knowledge by further conflating the relationship between religiosity and adaptive decision strategies susceptible to errant and inconsistent behavior. While the hypotheses were unsupported, a null finding is still important, and future research re-testing this association or introducing causational designs may prove more fruitful in understanding these complex relationships.
Religion (specifically Christianity) is the topic of focus, as preliminary evidence suggests an individual’s intuitive inclinations positively correlate with and predict religious beliefs. Moreover, self-reported religious beliefs significantly differed as a function of inducing either intuitive or reflective mindsets. Therefore, the purpose of this experiment was to test the hypothesis that religious participants will display significantly greater levels of loss aversion than nonreligious participants.
This hypothesis extends from a previous study relating large-scale cultural and religious differences with loss aversion. While their results revealed religious orthodoxy strongly influenced loss aversion, the parameters elicited may be less stable as only two lottery questions were asked and religion was determined by cultural demographics. This study used the same design, but with a total of ten lotteries and a more detailed investigation into individual religious factors.
While loss aversion coefficients replicated the overall behavioral effect (Median θ = 2.6), independent sample, Mann-Whitney U tests did not yield any significant differences between Christian and Nonreligious participants (p > 0.05); nor did any of the religious factors examined account for a significant amount of variability.
This study attempted to add to current knowledge by further conflating the relationship between religiosity and adaptive decision strategies susceptible to errant and inconsistent behavior. While the hypotheses were unsupported, a null finding is still important, and future research re-testing this association or introducing causational designs may prove more fruitful in understanding these complex relationships.
ContributorsHowatt, Brian (Author) / Robles-Sotelo, Elias (Thesis advisor) / Vargas, Perla (Committee member) / Neal, Tess (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Performance on working memory (WM) and fluid intelligence tasks (gF) is often highly correlated. However, recent research by Shipstead, Harrison, & Engle (2016) has suggested that dissociable cognitive processes underlie performance on WM and gF tasks, such that WM task performance is contingent upon maintenance of relevant information while gF task performance is contingent upon disengaging from irrelevant information so that updating can occur. The aim of the current study was to test the proposal that the dopamine gating system, a neurological mechanism underlying information encoding and updating, is a plausible mechanism underlying the abilities identified by Shipstead and colleagues that are separately unique to WM and gF. Sixty-three participants completed a task that measured ability to maintain and update information, and is neurologically known to reflect functionality of the dopamine gating system during updating performance. The results indicate that individual differences in updating performance are predicted by gF, but not by WM. This suggests that the ability to disengage from irrelevant information is facilitated by distinct processes in the dopamine gating system, and is a distinguishing component of gF.
ContributorsNespodzany, Ashley (Author) / Burleson, Mary H (Thesis advisor) / Duran, Nicholas (Committee member) / Robles-Sotelo, Elias (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017