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- All Subjects: Psychology, Experimental
- All Subjects: Reading--Psychological aspects.
- Creators: Robles-Sotelo, Elias
Description
Political party identification has an immense influence on shaping individual attitudes and processes of reasoning to the point where otherwise knowledgeable people endorse political conspiracies that support one's political in-group and simultaneously disparage an out-group. Although recent research has explored this tendency among partisans, less is known about how Independents respond in comparison. Previous research fails to identify the Independent as a unique type of voter, but rather categorizes this group as ostensibly partisan, not a separate phenomenon to investigate. However, most Independents purport neutrality and, by recent polls, are becoming a substantial body worthy of concerted focus. Many questions arise about who Independents really are. For example, do all who identify as Independent behave in a similar manner? Are Independents ideologically different than what is represented by a partisan label? Is the Independent category a broad term for something entirely misunderstood? A thorough investigation into the greater dynamics of the political environment in the United States is an enormous undertaking, requiring a robust interdisciplinary approach beyond the focus and intent of this study. Therefore, this study begins the journey toward understanding these phenomena; do Independents, as a whole, uniformly respond to statements about political conspiracy theories? To explore these possibilities, explicit responses are bypassed to evaluate the implicit appeal of political conspiracy theories. An action dynamics (mouse-tracking) approach, a data rich method that records the response process, demonstrates Independents are not in fact a homogeneous group, but rather seem to fall into two groups: non-partisan leaning and partisan leaning. The analysis exposes that relative to the baseline and control stimuli: (1) Non-leaning Independents reveal an increased susceptibility to implicitly endorse bi-partisan directed conspiracy theories when compared to leaners. (2) Republican-leaners demonstrate a stronger susceptibility to endorse right-wing aligned conspiracy theories (against Barack Obama), similar to Republican partisans. (3) Democrat-leaners, unlike Democrat partisans, do not demonstrate any particular susceptibility to implicitly endorse either right/left-wing aligned conspiracy theories (against Barack Obama or George W. Bush). Drawing from major theories from social, political, and cognitive psychology will contribute to an understanding of these phenomena. Concluding remarks include study limitations and future directions.
ContributorsJohnson, Chelsea (Author) / Duran, Nicholas D (Thesis advisor) / Robles-Sotelo, Elias (Committee member) / Hall, Deborah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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