A large body of research has identified that one of the major factors influencing decisions about automation use is operator's trust. Studies have shown that operator trust can be affected by individual differences in expectancy. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether operators with an expectancy that automation is trustworthy are better at calibrating their trust to changes in the capabilities of the automation. We also investigated why this individual difference affects calibration. In a baggage screening task 176 participants searched for weapons in 200 x-ray images of luggage. Participants were assisted by an automated decision aid exhibiting different levels of reliability. Measures of expectancy that automation is trustworthy were used in conjunction with subjective measures of trust and of perceived reliability to identify individual differences in trust calibration. We found that operators with high expectancy that automation is trustworthy were more sensitive to changes (both increases and decreases) in automation reliability, and that this difference was caused by attributing errors to the situation rather than the automation.

Aging is typically associated with declining mental abilities, most prominent for some forms of memory. There are, however, large inter-individual differences within the older population. Some people experience rapid decline whereas others seem almost spared from any adverse effects of aging. This thesis examined the neural underpinnings of such individual differences by using longitudinal observations of episodic memory change across 15-20 years, combined with structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. Study I found significant correlations between volume and activity of the hippocampus (HC), and memory change over a 6-year period. That is, individuals with decline in HC function also had declining memory. In contrast, Study II showed that successfully aged individuals, who maintained high memory scores over 15-20 years, had preserved HC function compared to age-matched elderly with average memory change. The successful agers had HC activity levels comparable to those of young individuals, as well as higher frontal activity. Study III revealed that individual differences in memory ability and brain activity of elderly reflect both differential age-related changes, and individual differences in memory ability that are present already in midlife, when age effects are minimal. Specifically, memory scores obtained 15-20 years earlier reliably predicted brain activity in memory-relevant regions such as the frontal cortex and HC. This observation challenges results from previous cross-sectional aging studies that did not consider individual differences in cognitive ability from youth. Collectively the three studies implicate HC and frontal cortex function behind heterogeneity in cognitive aging, both substantiating and qualifying previous results from cross-sectional studies. More generally, the findings highlight the importance of longitudinal estimates of cognitive change for fully understanding the mechanisms of neurocognitive aging. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>

<p>In recent years, there has been increasing scientific interest in the biological basis of emotion. By characterizing the neural and genetic basis of affective functioning, new research has the potential to contribute to our scientific understanding of both typical social development and aberrant trajectories for emotional disorders. The four studies detailed here investigated the biological substrates of affective functioning from a multiple-levels-of-analysis perspective in order to understand potential interactions of genes, the brain, personality and behavior in emotion. The first study examined the relationship between personality and the ways in which individuals look at faces. Results indicated a robust positive correlation between the personality trait of neuroticism and the amount of time spent looking at the eyes of faces, especially the eyes of fearful faces. A follow up study found that subjects high in neuroticism also fixated most on fearful faces placed within an array of objects. This effect remained strong even when controlling for negative mood state. The second study involved an experimental manipulation of activity in the face processing system of individuals with autism. The results showed that by manipulating visual scanpaths to involve increased fixation on the eye region of a face, the hypoactivation of the amygdale and fusiform gyri, an established characteristic of social brain functioning in autism, was temporarily reversed. A third study investigated the neural correlates of emotion regulation across development using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Results revealed increases in anterior cingulate to amygdale connectivity during episodes of regulatory demand. Magnitude of ACC activity was correlated with both age and levels of fearful temperament in children. Finally, the last study integrated the results of previous experiments and illustrated interactions among a common polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene (5HTTLPR), brain activity, personality, and visual scanpaths. Results contribute to the growing body of literature characterizing the development of individual differences in the perception, feeling, and regulation of emotion. In addition, these findings have the potential to inform our understanding of abnormal emotional development by detailing a complex system in which genetic vulnerability produces increased attention to emotionally arousing aspects of the environment through differential brain activation.</p> / Dissertation

Research has focused on the potential cognitive determinants of individual and developmental differences in intelligence. Two competing views influenced by information-processing theory propose important roles for the constructs of working memory capacity and perceptual speed, respectively. This study aimed to clarify the relationship between these constructs by examining the performance of younger adults who were high and low in working memory capacity on an experimental version of traditional perceptual speed tasks. The results suggested that working memory capacity is important for performance on perceptual speed tasks because of the attention and memory demands of these tasks. Eye-tracking measures corroborated the behavioral data, which suggest that individual differences on perceptual speed tasks are the result of individual differences in working memory capacity in healthy, younger adults.

The purpose of this study was to explore and investigate perceptions and needs of the primary school teachers&rsquo / in 4th and 5th grade public schools in Yenimahalle and &Ccedil / ankaya districts related to the teaching and assessment methods based on individual differences in science and technology classes. Furthermore this study investigated the teachers&rsquo / perceptions on new science and technology curriculum in Turkey and their perceptions on individual differences. The research type of this study include survey, causal-comparative, and also qualitative research in nature which are non-experimental research methods. The study was conducted in the 2005-2006 academic year in Ankara. Three data collection methods were used to collect data from primary school teachers. First, a needs assessment questionnaire was administered on 155 primary school teachers. Then, the researcher carried out in depth interviews with 13 primary school teachers. Furthermore an observational case study including video typing in two science and technology classes was carried out. Quantitative part of the study was analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics by using SPSS (e.g., frequences, percentage analysis, and analyses of variance). Qualitative part of the study was analyzed by using qualitative methods (Generating categories, themes, patterns and coding the data). The findings from quanitative and qualitative data indicated that primary school teachers have various needs to apply teaching and assessment methods based on individual differences related to knowledge, experience, students, parents, administrators, resources, opportunities, time, and science books. Also teachers mostly use new approaches in new Science and Technology Curriculum such as individual presentations.

In the current study, it was aimed to explore young adults&rsquo / communication technology preferences in friendships. With this aim, two survey studies were conducted on university students. In the first study 178 students and in the second study 343 students were surveyed. The findings of both studies demonstrated that (a) face-to-face communication was the most preferred communication,(b) preference for face-to-face communication was positively associated to preference for auditory communication, and negatively associated to preference for written communication, (c) several individual difference variables contributed to relative preferences for face-to-face over mediated communication in negative situations. General &lsquo / ndividual difference variables in relation to Relative Preferences were found to fit into a two-factor higher-order structure. The higher order constructs were Social Openness (the factors tapping to individuals&rsquo / motivation to engage in interpersonal interactions even when those interactions are challenging) and Individuated Functioning (the factors tapping to individuals&rsquo / motivation for personal growth). Relative Preference increased with increases in Social Openness and in Individuated Functioning. Communicaiton-specific individual difference factors underling the associations among Social Openness, Individauted Functioning and Relative Preferences were explored. Results suggested that Social Openness &ndash / but not Individuated Functioning- was indirectly linked to Relative Preferences via Perceived Difficulty of Communication Situations (Study1) / Social Openness was indirectly, and Individuated Functioning was both directly and indirectly linked to Relative Preferences via Difficulty in Handling Negative Situations (Study 2). Theoretical and practical implications of studies were discussed considering the previous literature.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 191-207).

Purpose: This thesis examines the effect of listener characteristics (i.e., cognition and vocabulary) and language-based factors (i.e., lexical frequency and phonological similarity) on speech recognition accuracy in adverse listening conditions. Method: Fifty listeners (40 females and 10 males) aged 18-33 years and with normal hearing (puretone thresholds ≤ 20 dB HL, 0.25-8 kHz) participated. They completed a speech perception experiment, which required listeners to repeat back non-sensical English phrases presented at a variety of signal-to-noise ratios (-5, -2, +1, and +4 dB SNRs). In addition, all listeners undertook assessments of vocabulary knowledge (PPVT-IV) and cognition (WAIS -IV). The primary dependent variable was individual content word recognition accuracy, and results were analysed using binomial mixed effects modelling. Results: Listeners demonstrated variability in their speech recognition abilities, and their vocabulary and cognitive scores. Statistical analysis revealed that listener-based factors affected word recognition. Listeners with faster processing speed and larger working memories exhibited higher word recognition accuracy. Surprisingly, listeners with higher non-verbal intelligence scores exhibited lower word recognition accuracy. Vocabulary knowledge interacted with SNR, such that as the listening conditions became more favourable, listeners with larger receptive vocabularies identified more words correctly. Similarly, main effects were also present for language-based factors. The more phonologically distinct a word was, the more likely it was to be correctly identified; higher frequency words were more likely to be accurately recognised. In addition, higher frequency words were identified more accurately at higher SNR levels. Finally, listener- and language-based factors interacted. The positive effect of working memory on word recognition was reversed as word frequency increased; on the other hand non-verbal intelligence’s negative influence on word recognition was reversed as word frequency increased. Conclusion: In the current cohort, listener and language-based factors interacted in the process of word recognition in noise. These results provide an insight into the underlying speech recognition mechanisms in adverse conditions. Further understanding of how these listener differences affect an individual’s speech processing may lead to the development of improved signal processing techniques and rehabilitation strategies.

Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) (De Bot, Lowie, & Vespoor 2007; Larsen-Freeman 1997, 2007; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron 2008; Dörnyei 2009; and van Lier 2000) represents a scientific paradigm shift derived from the fields of physics, engineering and theoretical mathematics that attempts to solve real-world scenarios that do not respond to scientific reductionism, otherwise known as ‘analysis’. The purpose of this dissertation is to (re)frame foreign language learning/use as a dynamical process that that involves interplay among what Dörnyei (2009) terms the language, the agent and the environment. More specifically, this dissertation presents a quasi-experimental, psycholinguistic study that looks at the interface between language (in this case the talk that resulted from NS-NNS interactions) and agent (as defined by a set of personal traits, or Individual Differences [IDs], including motivation, attitudes, personality and aptitude) in order to answer the research question: Do IDs vary in conjunction with language learning/use, and if so, how? Eight tutored Spanish learners were followed over the course of 16 weeks during which time they participated in 8 chat sessions with a native Spanish-speaker. Their ID profiles were measured immediately before and after each session and sessions with significant pre- to post-session ID shifts were analyzed to determine to what extent such shifts correlated with certain types of talk and/or think-aloud sequences. Results indicated that all participants’ pre- and post-interactional ID profiles fluctuated measurably and significantly, even within the span of a single interaction. Moreover, those sessions with significantly positive ID shifts were qualitatively different in terms of language-related episodes (LREs), conversation management/pragmatic markers, and metacognition from those with significantly negative ID shifts. Other unexpected findings revealed, for example, that LREs (especially NS-initiated LREs) negatively impacted motivations and attitudes and, therefore, the language-learning process itself. Taken together, the results of this study indicate that the agent’s IDs and their (inter)language co-emerge; that is to say, they evolve simultaneously and in response to one another. Moreover, this study suggests that DST can indeed be quasi-experimentally applied to the study of SLA, thus necessitating further development in DST-oriented methodologies and research questions. / text

This study investigated the hypothesis that universal psychological adaptations produce personality variation when individuals differentially face adaptive problems that shifted the cost-benefit tradeoffs of alternative personality strategies in ancestral environments. The current research tested the hypothesis that psychological adaptations calibrate individual differences in neuroticism as a functional response to social exclusion. If psychological adaptations produce neuroticism in response to social exclusion, and heritable components of individuals' social partner value influence their likelihood of being excluded, then individual differences in social partner value should yield heritable differences in neuroticism. Three conceptually distinct sub-studies tested hypotheses derived from this conceptual framework. Sub-study 1 tested the relationship between individuals' mate value, social exclusion, and neuroticism. Individuals' mate value exhibited both a direct effect on neuroticism and an indirect effect through the experience of social exclusion. Sub-study 2 investigated sexual jealousy as a specialized class of neuroticism in response to infidelity. As predicted, individuals' mate value predicted the likelihood of their partners' infidelity and their own mate guarding behavior. Sub-study 3 manipulated the threat of infidelity to test for functional shifts in neuroticism in response to relationship exclusion. Participants read vignettes describing their mates' certain fidelity, uncertain fidelity, and certain infidelity, and wrote what they would think, feel, say, and do in response to each scenario. An independent sample assessed participants' personalities based on these cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses. As predicted, participants' neuroticism tracked relationship exclusion; participants' neuroticism levels increased with infidelity threat. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that a universal psychological mechanism adaptively calibrates neuroticism levels in response to relationship exclusion; the certain absence or presence of the adaptive problem of relationship exclusion should deactivate or activate anti-exclusion mechanisms in all individuals. Above this situational effect, under conditions of uncertain infidelity -- in which the threat of infidelity would have ancestrally varied with men's (but not women's) mate value -- men's mate value predicted their neuroticism. Together, these findings support the hypothesis that humans possess psychological adaptations that functionally calibrate neuroticism levels. More broadly, they highlight the heuristic value of an evolutionary adaptationist framework for the study of personality and individual differences. / text