Matching Items (1,063)
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
Incidental learning of sequential information occurs in visual, auditory and tactile domains. It occurs throughout our lifetime and even in nonhuman species. It is likely to be one of the most important foundations for the development of normal learning. To date, there is no agreement as to how incidental learning occurs. The goal of the present set of experiments is to determine if visual sequential information is learned in terms of abstract rules or stimulus-specific details. Two experiments test the extent to which interaction with the stimuli can influence the information that is encoded by the learner. The results of both experiments support the claim that stimulus and domain specific details directly shape what is learned, through a process of tuning the neuromuscular systems involved in the interaction between the learner and the materials.
ContributorsMarsh, Elizabeth R (Author) / Glenberg, Arthur M. (Thesis advisor) / Amazeen, Eric (Committee member) / Brewer, Gene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
There are several visual dimensions of food that can affect food intake, example portion size, color, and variety. This dissertation elucidates the effect of number of pieces of food on preference and amount of food consumed in humans and motivation for food in animals. Chapter 2 Experiment 1 showed that rats preferred and also ran faster for multiple pieces (30, 10 mg pellets) than an equicaloric, single piece of food (300 mg) showing that multiple pieces of food are more rewarding than a single piece. Chapter 2 Experiment 2 showed that rats preferred a 30-pellet food portion clustered together rather than scattered. Preference and motivation for clustered food pieces may be interpreted based on the optimal foraging theory that animals prefer foods that can maximize energy gain and minimize the risk of predation. Chapter 3 Experiment 1 showed that college students preferred and ate less of a multiple-piece than a single-piece portion and also ate less in a test meal following the multiple-piece than single-piece portion. Chapter 3 Experiment 2 replicated the results in Experiment 1 and used a bagel instead of chicken. Chapter 4 showed that college students given a five-piece chicken portion scattered on a plate ate less in a meal and in a subsequent test meal than those given the same portion clustered together. This is consistent with the hypothesis that multiple pieces of food may appear like more food because they take up a larger surface area than a single-piece portion. All together, these studies show that number and surface area occupied by food pieces are important visual cues determining food choice in animals and both food choice and intake in humans.
ContributorsBajaj, Devina (Author) / Phillips, Elizabeth D. (Thesis advisor) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Johnston, Carol (Committee member) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
ABSTRACT This thesis proposes that a focus on the bodily level of analysis can unify explanation of behavior in cognitive, social, and cultural psychology. To examine this unifying proposal, a sensorimotor mechanism with reliable explanatory power in cognitive and social psychology was used to predict a novel pattern of behavior in cultural context, and these predictions were examined in three experiments. Specifically, the finding that people judge objects that require more motor effort to interact with as farther in visual space was adapted to predict that people with interdependent self-construal(SC) , relative to those with independent SC, would visually perceive their cultural outgroups as farther relative to their cultural in-groups. Justifying this cultural extension of what is primarily a cognitive mechanism is the assumption that, unlike independents, Interdependents interact almost exclusively with in-group members, and hence there sensorimotor system is less tuned to cross-cultural interactions. Thus, interdependents, more so than independents, expect looming cross-cultural interactions to be effortful, which may inflate their judgment of distance to the out-groups. Two experiments confirmed these predictions: a) interdependent Americans, compared to independent Americans, perceived American confederates (in-group) as visually closer; b) interdependent Arabs, compared to independent Arabs, perceived Arab confederates (in-group) as closer; and c) interdependent Americans, relative to independent Americans, perceived Arab confederates (out-group) as farther. A third study directly established the proposed relation between motor effort and distance to human targets: American men perceived other American men as closer after an easy interaction than after a more difficult interaction. Together, these results demonstrate that one and the same sensorimotor mechanism can explain/predict homologous behavioral patterns across the subdisciplines of psychology.
ContributorsSoliman, Tamer (Author) / Glenberg, Arthur M. (Committee member) / Kwan, Sau (Committee member) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Conversion to Judaism has a long history, and changes in Jewish law for converts over the centuries have reflected changes in the relationship between the Jewish community and the larger societies within which Jews have lived. As American Jews now live in the most open society they have encountered, a split is developing between Orthodox and liberal Jewish rabbinic authorities in how they deal with potential converts. This split is evident in books written to advice potential converts and in conversion narratives by people who have converted to Judaism. For this project over 30 people who were in the process of converting to Judaism were interviewed. Their stories reflect the ways in which liberal Judaism has been affected by American ideals and values, including feminism and an emphasis on spiritual individuality.
ContributorsCohen, Mariam (Author) / Gereboff, Joel (Thesis advisor) / Woodward, Mark (Committee member) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Recognition memory was investigated for naturalistic dynamic scenes. Although visual recognition for static objects and scenes has been investigated previously and found to be extremely robust in terms of fidelity and retention, visual recognition for dynamic scenes has received much less attention. In four experiments, participants view a number of clips from novel films and are then tasked to complete a recognition test containing frames from the previously viewed films and difficult foil frames. Recognition performance is good when foils are taken from other parts of the same film (Experiment 1), but degrades greatly when foils are taken from unseen gaps from within the viewed footage (Experiments 3 and 4). Removing all non-target frames had a serious effect on recognition performance (Experiment 2). Across all experiments, presenting the films as a random series of clips seemed to have no effect on recognition performance. Patterns of accuracy and response latency in Experiments 3 and 4 appear to be a result of a serial-search process. It is concluded that visual representations of dynamic scenes may be stored as units of events, and participant's old
ew judgments of individual frames were better characterized by a cued-recall paradigm than traditional recognition judgments.
ew judgments of individual frames were better characterized by a cued-recall paradigm than traditional recognition judgments.
ContributorsFerguson, Ryan (Author) / Homa, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Brewer, Gene (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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
Description
The unpleasant bitter taste found in many nutritious vegetables may deter their consumption. While bitterness suppression by prototypical tastants is well-studied in the chemical and pharmacological fields, mechanisms to reduce the bitterness of foods such as vegetables remain to be elucidated. Here tastants representing the taste primaries of salty and sweet were investigated as potential bitterness suppressors of three types of Brassicaceae vegetables. The secondary aim of these studies was to determine whether the bitter masking agents were differentially effective for bitter-sensitive and bitter-insensitive individuals. In all experiments, participants rated vegetables plain and with the addition of tastants. In Experiments 1-3, sucrose and NNS suppressed the bitterness of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower, whereas NaCl did not. Varying concentrations of NaCl and sucrose were introduced in Experiment 4 to assess the dose-dependency of the effects. While sucrose was a robust bitterness suppressor, NaCl suppressed bitterness only for participants who perceived the plain Brussels sprouts as highly bitter. Experiment 5, through the implementation of a rigorous control condition, determined that some but not all of this effect can be accounted for by regression to the mean. Individual variability in taste perception as determined by sampling of aqueous bitter, salty, and sweet solutions did not influence the degree of suppression by NaCl or sucrose. Consumption of vegetables is deterred by their bitter taste. Utilizing tastants to mask bitterness, a technique that preserves endogenous nutrients, can circumvent this issue. Sucrose is a robust bitter suppressor whereas the efficacy of NaCl is dependent upon bitterness perception of the plain vegetables.
ContributorsWilkie, Lynn Melissa (Author) / Capaldi Phillips, Elizabeth D (Thesis advisor) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Johnston, Carol (Committee member) / Sanabria, Federico (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
ABSTRACT The major hypothesis tested in this research is that the psychological well-being and life satisfaction of elderly adult individuals can be predicted from religiosity (organizational and non-organizational religious beliefs and behaviors). The sample consisted of 142 adults between the ages of 65-90, with the majority in the 65-70 age group (48%) (SD = 1.176). The entire sample resides in the state of Arizona, in both urban and rural communities. Participants were administered a questionnaire which requested demographic information, and three instruments: the Duke University Religion Index (the DUREL), and the Affect Balance Scale and the Life Satisfaction Index - Z (LSIZ). Correlational and Multiple regression analyses were used to examine the relation between these adults' psychological well-being, life satisfaction and their religiosity. Independent t-tests were also used to examine possible sex, ethnic and religiosity effects on psychological well-being and life satisfaction. Findings revealed that psychological well-being and life satisfaction are higher when religiosity is higher, regardless of sex or ethnicity. These findings are consistent with those of previous research in this field.
ContributorsMoreno-Weinert, Inez (Author) / Moore, Elsie (Thesis advisor) / Nakagawa, Kathryn (Committee member) / Ladd, Becky (Committee member) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The unpleasant bitter taste found in many nutritious vegetables may deter people from consuming a healthy diet. We investigated individual differences in taste perception and whether these differences influence the effectiveness of bitterness masking. To test whether phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) `supertasters' also taste salt and sugar with greater intensity, as suggested by Bartoshuk and colleagues (2004), we infused strips of paper with salt water or sugar water. The bitterness rating of the PTC strip had a significant positive linear relationship with ratings of both the intensity of sweet and salt, but the effect sizes were very low, suggesting that the PTC strip does not give a complete picture of tasting ability. Next we investigated whether various seasonings could mask the bitter taste of vegetables and whether this varied with tasting ability. We found that sugar decreased bitterness and lemon decreased liking for vegetables of varying degrees of bitterness. The results did not differ by ability to taste any of the flavors. Therefore, even though there are remarkable individual differences in taste perception, sugar can be used to improve the initial palatability of vegetables and increase their acceptance and consumption.
ContributorsWilkie, Lynn Melissa (Author) / Phillips, Elizabeth D. (Thesis advisor) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Johnston, Carol (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012