Over recent years, evidence has been accumulating in favour of the importance of long-term information as a variable which can affect the success of short-term recall. Lexicality, word frequency, imagery and meaning have all been shown to augment short term recall performance. Two competing theories as to the causes of this long-term memory influence are outlined and tested in this thesis. The first approach is the order-encoding account, which ascribes the effect to the usage of resources at encoding, hypothesising that word lists which require less effort to process will benefit from increased levels of order encoding, in turn enhancing recall success. The alternative view, trace redintegration theory, suggests that order is automatically encoded phonologically, and that long-term information can only influence the interpretation of the resultant memory trace. The free recall experiments reported here attempted to determine the importance of order encoding as a facilitatory framework and to determine the locus of the effects of long-term information in free recall. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of word frequency and semantic categorisation over a filled delay, and experiments 3 and 4 did the same for immediate recall. Free recall was improved by both long-term factors tested. Order information was not used over a short filled delay, but was evident in immediate recall. Furthermore, it was found that both long-term factors increased the amount of order information retained. Experiment 5 induced an order encoding effect over a filled delay, leaving a picture of short-term processes which are closely associated with long-term processes, and which fit conceptions of short-term memory being part of language processes rather better than either the encoding or the retrieval-based models. Experiments 6 and 7 aimed to determine to what extent phonological processes were responsible for the pattern of results observed. Articulatory suppression affected the encoding of order information where speech rate had no direct influence, suggesting that it is ease of lexical access which is the most important factor in the influence of long-term memory on immediate recall tasks. The evidence presented in this thesis does not offer complete support for either the retrieval-based account or the order encoding account of long-term influence. Instead, the evidence sits best with models that are based upon language-processing. The path urged for future research is to find ways in which this diffuse model can be better specified, and which can take account of the versatility of the human brain.

Attention defines our mental ability to select and respond to stimuli, internal or external, on the basis of behavioural goals in the presence of competing, behaviourally irrelevant, stimuli. The frontal and parietal cortices are generally agreed to be involved with attentional processing, in what is termed the 'fronto-parietal' network. The left parietal cortex has been seen as the site for temporal attentional processing, whereas the right parietal cortex has been seen as the site for spatial attentional processing. There is much debate about when the modulation of the primary visual cortex occurs, whether it is modulated in the feedforward sweep of processing or modulated by feedback projections from extrastriate and higher cortical areas. MEG and psychophysical measurements were used to look at spatially selective covert attention. Dual-task and cue-based paradigms were used. It was found that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), in particular the SPL and IPL, was the main site of activation during these experiments, and that the left parietal lobe was activated more strongly than the right parietal lobe throughout. The levels of activation in both parietal and occipital areas were modulated in accordance with attentional demands. It is likely that spatially selective covert attention is dominated by the left parietal lobe, and that this takes the form of the proposed sensory-perceptual lateralization within the parietal lobes. Another form of lateralization is proposed, termed the motor-processing lateralization, the side of dominance being determined by handedness, being reversed in left- relative to right-handers. In terms of the modulation of the primary visual cortex, it was found that it is unlikely that V1 is modulated initially; rather the modulation takes the form of feedback from higher extrastriate and parietal areas. This fits with the idea of preattentive visual processing, a commonly accepted idea which, in itself, prevents the concept of initial modulation of V1.

In solving everyday problems or making sense of situations, people interact with local resources, both material and cultural (Kirsh, 2009a). Through these interactions with the world, thinking emerges from within and beyond the boundaries of the mind. Traditional frameworks specify that problem solving proceeds from initial state to goal state through the transformation of a mental representation of the problem by the retrieval and manipulation of symbols and rules previously stored in memory. Information garnered through bodily actions or from transactions with the world is considered to be a passive input. As a result, classical models of cognitive psychology frequently overlook the impact of the interaction between an individual and the environment on cognition. The experiments reported here were designed to inform a different model of problem solving that included the ubiquitous nature of interactivity in daily life by examining problem solving using artefacts. This research programme began with two experiments using an analytical problem, namely the river-corssing task. These experiments offered a platform to investigate the role of interactivity in shaping and transforming the problem presented. However, the problem space in the river-crossing task is relatively narrow and the research programme proceeded to three further experiments, this time using mental arithmetic tasks where participants were invited to complete long sums. These problems afford a much larger problem space, and a better opportunity to monitor how participants' action shape the physical presentation of the problem. Different task ecologies were used in the five experiments to contrast different levels of interactivity. In a low interactivity condition, solvers relied predominantly on internal mental resource; in a high interactivity condition participants were invited to use artefacts that corresponded to key features of the problen in producing a solution. Results from all experiments confirmed that increasing interactivity improved performance. The outcomes from the river-crossing experiments informed accounts of transferm as it was revealed that attempting the problem initially in a low interactivity condition followed by the high interactivity condition resulted in the most efficient learning experience. The conjecture being that learning of a more deliberative nature was experienced in the low interactivity version of the problem when followed by the opportunity to showcase this learning through the enactment of moves quickly in a second attempt that fostered as high level of interactivity. The mental arithmetic experiments revealed that a high level of interactivity not only produced greater accuarcy and efficiency, but participants were also able to enact different arithmetic knowledge as they reconfigured the problem. In addition, the findings indicated that: maths anxiety for long additions could be mitigatd through increased interaction with artefacts; trajectories for problem solving and the final solutions varied across differing interactive contexts; and the opportunity to manipulate artefacts appeared to diminish individual differences in mathematical skills. The varied task ecologies for the problems in these experiments altered performance and shaped differing trajectories to solution. These results imply, that in order to establish a more complete understanding of cognition in action, problem solving theories should reflect the situated, dynamic interaction between agent and environment and hence, the unfolding nature of problems and their emerging solutions. The findings and methods reported here suggest that a methodology blending traditional quantitative techniques with a more qualitative ideographic cognitive science would make a substantial contribution to problem solving research and theory.

This thesis involves an investigation of the value of traditional and self-generated fairy tales for children's educational and emotional development. The study draws on theories of analytical psychology and on models derived from structuralism. An analysis of two Icelandic traditional fairy tales, Golden Tooth and The Story of Princess Pussycat, is undertaken on a psychological and a narrative level. A comparison is made between the narrative structure of the tales and the structure of psychic processes identified in them. The study is taken further with an analysis of eleven fantasy tales generated during a field study by a group of ten to eleven year old Icelandic children. The mode of expression of the tales is also compared to the style, motifs, notion of time, setting, and characters, as they appear in traditional Indo-European fairy tales. The variants of the two traditional fairy tales analysed originate from Fljötshlic' a region in the south of Iceland. A study of the background, upbringing and personality of four women, who shared and brought further the story telling tradition in this area, is undertaken with the aim of throwing light on the nature of fairy tales and their transmission. The study suggests that patterns operating in the process of individuation, that is differentiation, transformation and integration, are embedded in the structure of traditional fairy tales. Furthermore it is proposed that this theory can be expanded to tales of fantasy generated by children of today. It is argued that the manifestation of these patterns in fairy tales embodies qualities that invite a creative operation in the interaction of children's conscious and unconscious psyche, thus simultaneously stimulating their directed and undirected modes of thinking, which is essential for the development of the creative, individual personality

The Tower of London (TOL) task has been widely used as a measure planning ability in cognitive and neuropsychological settings.  In the current study, healthy participants used different planning manipulations to preplan a sequence of moves to match a set of discs to a goal set, then to execute the moves following the plan.  The effect of different planning manipulations and trial (puzzle) types on accurate performance was explored across the four experiments in the current study.  The effect of the concurrent think aloud at different stages of the planning process in the TOL task was investigated in experiment 1.  The results showed that think aloud did not disrupt or enhance performance in the TOL task.  The effect of trial difficulty and the contribution of fluid intelligence to planning were explored in experiment 2.  Trial type had a greater effect on planning, moving and solving the task with the minimum number of moves.  Participants with high fluid intelligence tended to be faster in their planning, recall and execution of their planned moves, and solved the most demanding trial with fewer moves than did their counterparts.  The contributions of working memory and intellectual ability in solving a more demanding task such as the Tower of Hanoi (TOH), and its correlation with the Tower of London were examined in experiment 3.  The TOL and TOH tasks correlated significantly but only in terms of execution time.  It was found that higher intellectual ability and better spatial memory capacity contributed to some aspects of performance on the two Tower tasks.  In terms of the TOH task, the results revealed that prolonged planning time in  the demanding 5-TOH problem was associated with higher intellectual ability.  Moreover, the better ability to estimate the minimum number of moves required to solve the 5-TOH problem might be attributable to a higher intellectual ability and greater spatial memory capacity.

No description available.

In Comparison to other psychological topics, research into humour is relatively limited, despite humour being a ubiquitous phenomenon and an important coping tool. The few studies that have been performed have mainly adopted the approach of quantifying humour using psychometric measures. The inconsistent findings of these studies prompted the starting point of this thesis, which replicates a study testing the stress moderating effects of humour according to various psychometric measures. This replication, which produced nonsignificant results, raised important questions on the effectiveness of this methodology and initiated a shift from a positivist to a constructivist paradigm, which subsequently shaped the focus of the thesis. The thesis presents a study of people's use of humour as a means of coping with stress and difficulty, using reversal theory as a conceptual framework. The intention was to generate a deeper and more coherent understanding of the processes underlying coping humour and to work towards developing a theory of coping humour based on experiential evidence. The method of approach was an empirical, qualitative investigation and analysis within a constructivist paradigm. The main data presented are interviews in which the discussion of coping humour experiences was encouraged. A repeated content analysis, guided by the principles of grounded theory, was essential in uncovering layers of meaning in the phenomenological data. This led to an interpretative account of coping humour, expressed in the form of a model. The model of coping humour contains six dynamically interacting elements, which offer a criterion for coping humour to work effectively. The model's constituent elements expand existing theories of humour by giving them greater depth and coherence. Furthermore, the model can operate as an interpretative framework, accommodating the unique variation of each episode of coping humour. The main contribution of this thesis is to provide a model of coping humour that offers a working theory substantiated by experiential evidence that is both generative and evolving. A further contribution is to highlight weaknesses within current measures of humour, and to offer suggestions for improvement based on the more realistic and meaningful portrayal of humour that has been generated.

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to lead to a further understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying object feature binding in the human brain. The focus is on information processing and integration in the visual system and visual shortterm memory. From a review of the literature it is clear that there are three major competing binding theories, however, none of these individually solves the binding problem satisfactorily. Thus the aim of this research is to conduct behavioural experimentation into object feature binding, paying particular attention to visual short-term memory. The behavioural experiment was designed and conducted using a within-subjects delayed responset ask comprising a battery of sixty-four composite objects each with three features and four dimensions in each of three conditions (spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal).Findings from the experiment,which focus on spatial and temporal aspects of object feature binding and feature proximity on binding errors, support the spatial theories on object feature binding, in addition we propose that temporal theories and convergence, through hierarchical feature analysis, are also involved. Because spatial properties have a dedicated processing neural stream, and temporal properties rely on limited capacity memory systems, memories for sequential information would likely be more difficult to accuratelyr ecall. Our study supports other studies which suggest that both spatial and temporal coherence to differing degrees,may be involved in object feature binding. Traditionally, these theories have purported to provide individual solutions, but this thesis proposes a novel unified theory of object feature binding in which hierarchical feature analysis, spatial attention and temporal synchrony each plays a role. It is further proposed that binding takes place in visual short-term memory through concerted and integrated information processing in distributed cortical areas. A cognitive model detailing this integrated proposal is given. Next, the cognitive model is used to inform the design and suggested implementation of a computational model which would be able to test the theory put forward in this thesis. In order to verify the model, future work is needed to implement the computational model.Thus it is argued that this doctoral thesis provides valuable experimental evidence concerning spatio-temporal aspects of the binding problem and as such is an additional building block in the quest for a solution to the object feature binding problem.

This thesis reports seven experiments which investigate what determines where the eyes move during reading. Specifically, the experiments examine what kinds of linguistic information can influence where words are first fixated and refixated. Experiment 1 showed that fixations landed nearer to the beginning of words in which the initial letter sequence was misspelled, compared to when the words were spelled correctly. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the effects of misspellings on saccade programming can not be explained by lexical non-foveal preprocessing, and therefore the results of Experiment 1 must be due to preprocessing of the orthographic familiarity of word initial letter sequences. These results were confirmed in Experiment 4, which showed that first fixations landed nearer to the beginning of correctly spelled words with orthographically irregular, compared to orthographically regular, initial letter sequences. Furthermore, Experiment 5 showed that these effects held for sentences presented in upper case text. Furthermore, Experiments 6 and 7 demonstrated that the influence of orthography on saccade programming was independent of foveal processing difficulty. These results are most consistent with an attraction based explanation in which preprocessing of orthography, independent of processing load, influences the word length and launch site based saccade programme to produce a small shift in the preferred viewing position in the direction of the orthographic irregularity. The results also show that linguistic processing can influence the direction and length of refixation saccades. Furthermore, although preprocessing of orthography can influence saccade programming, the results provide no consistent evidence for an influence of orthography on prior fixation durations or probabilities. These results indicate that there is independent processing of when and where the eyes move. The absence of robust "parafoveal-on-foveal" effects provides no support for parallel processing models of reading.