<p> Mothers&rsquo; socialization has been shown to impact prosocial tendencies in children. Discussions during joint book reading may provide a context to observe mothers&rsquo; strategies for evoking emotions. More specifically, mother-child talk about emotions, cognitive states, and inductive reasoning may enhance children&rsquo;s perspective taking about characters experiencing diversity. However, mothers may differ in their amount and type of talk if the characters in the story are from an in-group or out-group. While not all mothers may engage in these strategies during book reading, evoking sympathy in children has been shown to predict children&rsquo;s prosocial attitudes and behaviors toward others in need. The goal of this study was to explore mothers&rsquo; discourse strategies during a joint book reading task with first and second graders. Moreover, this study aimed to test whether reading and discussing a story about an in-group or out-group member differed and whether certain differences increased donating behavior and prosocial attitudes and from pre- to post-tests. In the main results, children&rsquo;s donations did not significantly increase from pre-test to post-test as hypothesized nor did donations differ between the in-group or out-group story condition. However, children&rsquo;s prosocial attitudes toward both in-group and out-group children improved equally from pre-test to post-test. Also as hypothesized, maternal discourse differed between story conditions. More specifically, there was an interaction between child gender and story condition where mothers with daughters used more emotion talk and cognitive state talk when discussing out-group members than did mothers with sons. Exploratory analyses revealed that mothers who used more emotion talk and inductive reasoning had children with lower prosocial attitudes when averaged across time of measurement toward both the in-group and out-group. Alternatively, children&rsquo;s trait sympathy predicted higher average donations and prosocial attitudes. Finally, children&rsquo;s civic identity scores predicted children&rsquo;s average prosocial attitudes and maternal discourse variables (i.e., emotion words, cognitive state words, and number of inductive sequences). Future research should continue to investigate the relationship between children&rsquo;s civic identity and maternal discourse, as this was the first study to explore the two. In conclusion, inducing sympathy in children may be an effective strategy for fostering more favorable attitudes toward other people in need regardless of their group identification. Additionally, individual child characteristics may predict children&rsquo;s inclination to help others in need; however, aspects of mothers discourse may hinder such prosocial tendencies with children if they induce personal distress.</p>

A retrieval disruption construal of suppression during directed forgetting (DF) was examined. It was argued that it is often difficult to distinguish between retrieval disruption, response disruption, and differential rehearsal interpretations of DF effects. To circumvent the problem of response disruption, two types of tests--exclusive (i.e., interference) and implicit--were used. To circumvent the problem of differential rehearsal, incidentally studied items and a list segregation instruction were utilized. Intraserial cuing (i.e., cuing by item sets) was used in all four experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, the exclusive test was stem-cued recall and the implicit test was stem completion. In Experiment 1, unique stems (i.e., stems that did not share words across study lists) were used. A DF effect was found only in the exclusive test and only with intentionally studied items. It was argued that a methodological artifact obscured the DF effect in the incidentally studied items. In Experiment 2, repeated stems (i.e., stems that shared words across study lists) were used. The use of repeated stems allowed intrusion rates to be measured. A DF effect was again found only in the exclusive test, but this time in both intentionally and incidentally studied items. In Experiment 3, only a free recall exclusive test was used. A DF effect was found only in the intrusions. Again, it was possible that a methodological artifact obscured the DF effect in the exclusive test. In Experiment 4, Jacoby's (1991) exclusive recognition test was utilized. One half of the subjects was instructed to emphasize accuracy and the other half was not so instructed. A speed-accuracy tradeoff was observed such that the uninstructed group was faster, but displayed a relatively large number of "new"-old errors. In the uninstructed group, a DF effect was observed, but this effect was reversed across semantic and structural study conditions. A DF effect was not found in the instructed group. These findings were interpreted as support for the hypothesis that retrieval disruption affects the use of contextual information normally associated with target information in memory (e.g., Kihlstrom & Evans, 1979).

This study investigated the presence of the framing bias in children's probabilistic decision-making. Under investigation was whether children would frame when presented with problems analogous to those known to elicit framing in adults. Prospect theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1979) was pitted against fuzzy-trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 1990) to determine which provided a better explanation of children's decision-making. Preschoolers, second-, and fifth-graders were asked to make choices in a probabilistic situation across various levels of probability and expected values of outcome. It was expected that the amount of framing would increase with age.

The purposes of this research were to: (1) determine the dependence of vernier acuity upon specific spatial frequency channels; (2) determine the effect of stimulus position in the central 2 deg arc upon vernier acuity thresholds; (3) investigate the relationship between binocular, monocular, and dichoptic vernier acuity; (4) evaluate the effect of the subjective task upon vernier acuity thresholds; and, (5) determine the differences between using absolute thresholds and difference thresholds as measures of vernier acuity. / Vernier acuity thresholds were found to be a function of both spatial frequency (0.5-20 cpd) and grating contrast (0.25-0.65). Thresholds were higher with low spatial frequency grating ($<$2 cpd), and the low spatial frequency grating thresholds were most affected by reduced levels of contrast. Vernier acuity mechanisms appear to utilize information over a wide range of spatial frequencies. / Monocular vernier acuity thresholds were found to vary with the stimulus position, with stimulus in the nasal hemifield resulting in lower thresholds than presentation in the temporal hemifield. Binocular vernier acuity was well predicted from the monocular vernier acuity by a probability summation model, suggesting independence between the monocular inputs. / In general, stimulus detection resulted in lower thresholds than stimulus classification (i.e., offset direction), particularly at low spatial frequencies. Difference thresholds were consistently lower than absolute thresholds, and they showed smaller variations with stimulus manipulation than absolute thresholds. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-10, Section: B, page: 4598. / Major Professor: Mark A. Berkley. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1988.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 38-04, Section: B, page: 1929. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1976.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Psychology, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-01, Section: B, page: 0570. Adviser: James Townsend. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed Feb. 22, 2007)."

Thesis (Ph. D.) in Psychology--University of Maine, 2003. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-110).

Perceptual Centers (P-centers) refer to that phenomenon in a word that must be regularly spaced in time with respect to other P-centers in a sequence of words in order for the sequence to sound isochronous (Morton, Marcus, and Frankish, 1976). The P-centers of monosyllables have been found to be affected by the phonetic makeup of the syllable itself (Marcus, 1981; Fowler and Tassinary, 1981; Cooper, Whalen, and Fowler, 1986). In general, the longer a particular segment within a syllable (initial consonant, vowel, or final consonant), the later the syllable's P-center. This P-center is equidistant from the surrounding P-centers of other words. For example, if words are set in time to a metronome, their P-centers would align with the metronome beat since the beats are equidistant from each other. This thesis examines what determines the P-center locations within disyllabic English words (American dialect). Consonant lengths and stress patterns (foot type) are evaluated for their effects on the words' P-centers in a series of six production experiments. The results indicate that, like monosyllables, consonant length has a major effect on the location of disyllabic words' P-centers. And, initial consonants have a greater effect on their words' P-centers than either medial or final consonants. This finding supports Morishima's (1994) Onset-Tail model that was developed for Japanese disyllables. In addition to demonstrating the consonant length P-center effect in English disyllables, this thesis will also show that the disyllable's foot type affects its P-center. The interword intervals preceding trochees will be shown to be longer than those preceding iambs (a P-center effect). Therefore, the overall results of this thesis suggest that the P-centers of disyllables are affected by both their prosodic structure and their individual consonant lengths. The implications of this joint effect on words' P-centers will then be considered in light of the isochrony, timing, and slot literatures.

This dissertation addresses the problem of assessing the image quality of reconstructed images. It adopts the framework of objective assessment of image quality set forth by Barrett (Barrett, 1990). This approach to image quality specifies image quality as the ability to perform some task of interest using the image data. The analysis of image reconstruction begins by specifying the imaging chain as a series of noisy transformations that ultimately lead to some sort of inference about the object being imaged. Each step of the imaging chain is identified with a physical process in the creation of an image or the subsequent use of the image to perform a task of interest. After development of the imaging chain, the dissertation focuses on various parts of the chain needed to analyze image reconstruction. One area necessary for investigating image reconstruction is understanding the propagation of noise in the imaging chain through to the reconstructions. This work focuses on first- and second-order statistical properties realized as a mean reconstruction and a reconstruction covariance matrix. The analysis then turns to the task of signal-known-exactly (SKE) detection where the statistical properties of the reconstructed images are used to obtain formulas for the observer SNRs for a variety of detection strategies, referred to as model observers. A number of psychophysical experiments have been conducted with the dual purpose of testing factors that influence human detection performance and providing a set of data for assessing the ability of different model observers to predict human performance. The experiments are divided into "filtered-noise" studies that simulate the entire reconstruction process, and "tomographic-reconstruction" studies that reconstruct simulated data vectors using two well-known reconstruction algorithms. The human observer performance in the psychophysical studies is then compared to that of the model observers. Some results of these comparisons are a generally high level of human performance, and a generally good agreement between human observer performance and the performance of a channelized Hotelling observer with a particular model of internal noise.