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School of Psychology

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 464
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A study of a fit index for explanatory item response theory models

2019-12-05 , Handy, Heather

Likelihood ratio chi square tests for nested models are typically used to determine model significance. Multiple correlations of item difficulties estimated with the explanatory predictors are often used to provide further information about model quality. However, the regression approach is not statistically justifiable, since the effective sample size becomes the number of items. Applying explanatory item response theory (IRT) models is advantageous when designing and selecting items. A simulation study was conducted to compare an explanatory item response theory fit statistic, Δ2 (Embretson, 1997; 2016), to traditionally used fit indices (nested model likelihoods and limited information multiple correlations) for assessing model quality. Simulation conditions include varying test length, item difficulty and the number of predictors.

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Age-related changes in resolving proactive interference in associative memory

2019-11-27 , Corbett, Brittany L.

Previous research has found that older adults are more susceptible to proactive interference. This is likely due to age-related deficits in the PFC-mediated cognitive control processes recruited to resolve interference. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated if age-related deficits in PFC-mediated cognitive control processes underlie age-related differences in the resolution of proactive interference in an associative memory task. Young and older adults were tasked with remembering which associate (face or scene) objects were paired with most recently during study, under conditions of high, low or no proactive interference. Following scanning, participants’ memory was tested for varying levels of episodic detail about the pairings. Young and older adults were similarly susceptible to proactive interference. Memory for both the general target category and the specific target associate worsened as the level of proactive interference increased, with older adults having moderately worse memory for the specific target associate. Across age, the left-VLPFC showed increased recruitment for increasing levels of interference at encoding suggesting that older adults are able to spontaneously engage in post-retrieval selection to the same extent as young adults. At retrieval, older adults recruited the vmPFC more than young adults during remembered low interference trials but similarly recruited the vmPFC during remembered high interference trials. In line with the CRUNCH model, this suggests that older adults need to engage in more monitoring for low interference items, but engage in a similar amount of monitoring to young adults for high interference items, suggesting that successfully resolving high interference is equally difficult for both young and older adults.

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Measuring the effects of display design and individual differences on the utilization of multi-stream sonifications

2019-07-30 , Schuett, Jonathan Henry

Previous work in the auditory display community has discussed the impact of both display design and individual listener differences on how successfully listeners can use a sonification. This dissertation extends past findings and explores the effects of display and individual differences on listeners’ ability to utilize a sonification for an analytical listening task when multiple variables are presented simultaneously. This is considered a more complicated task and pushes listeners’ perceptual abilities, but is necessary when wanting to use sonifications to display more detailed information about a dataset. The study used a two by two between- subjects approach to measure the effects of display design and domain mapping. Acoustic parameters were assigned to either the weather or the health domain, and these mappings were either created by an expert sound designer or arbitrarily assigned. The acoustic parameters were originally selected for the weather domain, so those display conditions were expected to result in higher listener accuracy. Results showed that the expert mapped weather sonification led to higher mean listener accuracy than the arbitrarily mapped health display when listeners did not have time to practice, however with less than an hour of practice the significant main effects of design and domain mapping went away and mean accuracy scores increased to a similar level. This dissertation introduces two models for predicting listener accuracy scores, the first model uses musical sophistication and self-reported motivation scores to predict listener accuracy on the task before practice. The second model uses musical sophistication, self-reported motivation, and listening discrimination scores to predict listener accuracy on the sonification task after practice.

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WSC Podcast Episode 10: Job Crafting with Dorien Kooij

2019-06-19 , Lyndgaard, Sibley , Kooij, Dorien

Host, Sibley Lyndgaard, speaks with Dr. Dorien Kooij, Professor at Tilburg University School of Social and Behavioral Sciences about the benefits of job crafting and proactivity in the workforce as well as the potential benefits that these topics offer for older workers.

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Effects of Acute and Chronic Inflammation on Vasopressin Expression in the Paraventricular Nucleus of the Hypothalamus

2019-12 , Patel, Shivany

Inflammation can lead to a suite of behavioral changes known as sickness behaviors, which have been implicated in the etiology of chronic inflammatory disease. Here, we examine the role of acute and chronic induction of inflammation on vasopressin (AVP) expression in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN) of female mice. To test, adult female C57B6/J mice were injected with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) at two different dosages and schedules to induce acute (1.0mg/kg, once) and chronic (0.25mg/kg LPS, eight times) inflammatory responses. The acute dose has previously been demonstrated to induce sickness behaviors, as measured by the open field test and a social interaction test; however, these measures were unaffected by the chronic administration of LPS. AVP mRNA expression in the PVN was measured using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and fluorescent microscopy. Both the acute and chronic administration of LPS resulted in an increase in PVN AVP expression without a change in the area of this expression. This increase in AVP in the PVN occurred despite the lack of sickness behavior, suggesting that further work is necessary to characterize the role of AVP in the PVN in these chronic and acute inflammatory responses.

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WSC Podcast Episode 11: Motivating Volunteers with Steve Rogelberg

2019-08-16 , Fletcher, Keaton A. , Rogelberg, Steve

Host, Keaton Fletcher, speaks with Dr. Steve Rogelberg of the University of North Carolina - Charlotte's Belk College of Business. Rogelberg directs outreach initiatives focosuing on nonprofit organizational health and effectiveness. Here, he speaks about the Volunteer Assessment Program (VPA), a program designed to counsel nonprofits on how to deliver a better volunteer experience.

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Multimodal investigation of mind wandering and attention lapses

2019-07-24 , Godwin, Christine A.

The neuroscience of mind wandering has advanced appreciably over the past decade. By applying convergent methods that span self-reports, behavioral indexes, and neuroimaging, researchers have been able to gain an understanding of how the brain supports ongoing mentation that is unrelated to other tasks at hand. However, despite the complex processes that attention lapses can take, research in this field has often focused on simply dichotomizing mind wandering as either on-task or off-task. Furthermore, repeated use of tasks such as the sustained attention to response task (SART) to study mind wandering has constrained research and hampered generalizability. The current work addresses these issues by presenting a novel series of thought prompts that query several attention states and dynamics as participants perform the metronome response task (Seli et al., 2013). In Study 1, simultaneous recording of behavioral performance, fMRI, and pupil diameter allowed for a multimodal investigation of the neural correlates of attention lapses. In Study 2, task difficulty was manipulated in order to test the effect of cognitive load on attention lapses and performance. Results indicated unique behavioral and neural profiles for several attention states and found subtle but consistent differences between self-reported attention state and performance variability. In addition, cognitive load modulated task performance and, to a lesser extent, the frequency of dynamic states (e.g., spontaneous versus constrained attention) in manners consistent with previous theorizing (e.g., the context regulation hypothesis). However, not all measures dissociated across attention states. The results are discussed from the perspectives of mind wandering theories and frameworks, the function of the default mode network, and the importance of task context in the study of attention lapses.

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How Cognitive Load Difficulty Affects Cognitive Mapping and Individual Differences in Navigation

2019-12 , Churaman, Tanya

In order to study the effects of varying the levels of cognitive load and individual differences upon cognitive mapping, forty-eight young adults participated in this virtual navigation study. To compare different levels of cognitive load, half of the participants trained in an Abstract Virtual Environment (low cognitive load) while the other half trained in a Realistic Virtual Environment (high cognitive load). After the training, participants were exposed to a series of navigational and pointing tasks to analyze the effects of the training environments – the different levels of cognitive load. It was observed that Abstraction was beneficial to participants in the training phase for the pointing task. In addition, in the testing phase, there was a noticeable trend of Abstraction also being beneficial for some of the pointing and navigational tasks. However, in one of the navigational tasks in the testing phase, Abstraction was shown to be more beneficial to those with a high spatial working memory. Thus, a lower cognitive load via Abstraction can be beneficial to navigation and creating a cognitive map. Further research should be conducted in which varying levels of Abstraction (cognitive load) is combined with other visual design elements, such as Translucency, in order to analyze if a conjunction of other variables alongside with cognitive load could potentially increase spatial abilities in individuals.

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Understanding the perceptual segmentation of situations via event segmentation theory

2019-07-30 , Mumma, Joel Michael

The goal of the present studies was to understand how the cognitive mechanisms of Event Segmentation Theory (EST) might account the hierarchical structure of our representations of situations. According to EST, people maintain a hierarchy of “event models” of ongoing activity in working memory, which represent events unfolding simultaneously on different timescales. Event models continually try to predict the near future and are updated in response to prediction error. Updating an event model gives rise to our perception of a “boundary” between events and is what people report during event segmentation tasks. EST posits that the hierarchy of event models in working memory arises from the differential predictive accuracies of coarse-event models (e.g., of situations) and fine-event models (e.g., of shorter events occurring within situations). We tested this hypothesis by orienting participants to their event models of the situations or of the fine events in a narrative film, either by having them report each time a new situation or a new fine event began. Throughout the film, we also assessed their confidence and predictive accuracy at moments when both variables should depend on the event model being interrogated. Across two studies, we obtained novel support for the general mechanisms of EST but converging evidence that participants only maintained fine-event models of activity, even though we found that their segmentation of the film depended on their orientation. We propose that the fine-grained segmentation of activity may reflect the updating of fine-event models whereas coarser-grained segmentation may instead reflect how people group fine events online, rather than the updating of coarse-event models (e.g., of situations) per se.

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Evaluating the predictive ability of early autism risk screeners: A longitudinal follow up study of developmental progress and diagnostic outcomes

2019-07-18 , Justus, Sidni Alanna

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is now considered one of the most common developmental disabilities (Newschaffer et al., 2007). Over the past 20+ years, researchers have worked towards identifying early behavioral or physiological predictors of ASD so that early treatment and intervention can be implemented. These efforts include the development of rapid, behavior-based screeners (e.g., Rapid-ABC by Ousley, Arriaga, Abowd, & Morrier, 2013) to supplement or replace the commonly used parent-report methods (e.g., Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers) and lengthy behavioral and interview assessments (Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule; Autism Diagnostic Interview) that are considered the gold-standard for ASD screening and diagnosis. The present study explores how these different means of measuring early infant and toddler social communication and language behavior (i.e., parent-report via the M-CHAT vs. direct observation of behavior via the Rapid-ABC screener) collected at Time 1 correspond with later developmental progress and diagnostic outcomes as reported by parents in a semi-structured interview collected at Time 2. 56 parents of 57 children who previously participated in a study evaluating early infant ASD-risk behaviors when their children were 15-35 months of age participated in a follow-up phone interview about their child’s social communicative development and medical updates over the last 3-7 years. The results of the follow up interview with parents suggested there was fairly good correspondence with later autism diagnosis only for those children who showed Time 1 “at-risk” status from both parent-report and behavioral assessment. However, each individual form of assessment, considered on its own, did not have strong predictive ability in identifying children who went on to have an autism diagnosis. Qualitative interviews with parents revealed that some of the Time 1 “at-risk” children demonstrated other kinds of social or communication concerns, yet still, the correspondences were not tight as some false positives and missed negatives were present. Ultimately, this study did not identify a clear leader among the evaluated tools used for identifying autism risk in infancy and toddlerhood. It does point to the importance of converging data from multiple sources (behavioral assessments as well as parent-report screeners) so that no child who presents some autism-related behaviors is overlooked given the literature demonstrating that early intervention is critical for this population and other developmental disorders. It is possible that with a larger sample, we may have found support for one early risk assessment tool over another. Future infant/toddler studies that include a longitudinal follow up will help address this gap in research on Autism Spectrum Disorder.

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