Thesis (PH. D.)--George Peabody college for teachers, 1930. / Cover-title. Without thesis note.

Inaug.-diss.--Göttingen.

Thesis (M.S.)--Villanova University, 2006. / Psychology Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., 1910 (143 leaves). / Reprinted from the American journal of psychology, April 1911, vol. XXII, p. 214-249.

The present experiment was conducted to discover if, within prescribed limits, the Woodworth and Wells Numbers Cancellation Test would measure distraction effects, age differences and sex differences. The procedure involved the administration of the test to four age groups of subjects. These age groups were nine, twelve, fifteen and eighteen-year-olds. The subjects were selected from public schools and junior and senior high schools in the Vancouver area. The total number of subjects involved was 361 grouped as follows: nine-year-olds— 85, twelve-year-olds—86, fifteen-year-olds—95, and eighteen-year-olds—95. The subjects, tested in small groups, were given a practice trial, immediately followed by a trial with traffic sounds and then a trial with music sounds, and finally, a trial in silence. This last trial was used as the control. A different numeral to be cancelled was used for each trial and these designated numerals were rotated for the sub-groups within each age group. The use of different numerals and their rotation was made to eliminate practice effects and positional habits as far as possible. The analysis of the data revealed age and sex differences while no distraction effects were apparent. Factors affecting the results may have been weakness of the distracting stimuli, habituation of the distractors, increased effort, or possibly the brevity of the test (two minutes). Earlier maturity of hand-eye co-ordination and reaction time in girls seems to account for the sex differences found. Age differences may be accounted for by greater familiarity with the material and test situations, and reduction in reaction time for the older subjects. The findings of this experiment may be summarized as follows: 1. The auditory distractions used had no statistically significant effects on the Woodworth and Wells Numbers Cancellation Test. 8. Performance on the Woodworth and Wells Numbers Cancellation Test consistently increased with age. 3. The performance of girls on the Woodworth and Wells Numbers Cancellation Test tended to be superior to that of boys. 4. The percentage error was inversely proportional to age for boys and girls on the Woodworth and Wells Numbers Cancellation Test. As a result of this experiment a number of problems for further research have been suggested. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

Humans live in a world rich in multisensory information. Often information reaching one sense is completely unrelated to information reaching another sense; that is, they are spatially and temporally incongruent. The goal of the research presented in this thesis was to elucidate the behavioral and neural bases of attention to incongruent audiovisual information. Five issues were addressed: (1) developing an appropriate behavioral paradigm to test bimodal attention, (2) understanding the role of crossmodal suppression in unimodal attention, (3) exploring the interaction of auditory and visual sensory cortex during bimodal selective attention, (4) exploring the role of fronto-parietal networks in bimodal selective attention, and (5) exploring the neural correlates of bimodal divided attention. Two different behavioral paradigms demonstrated that attended information was remembered better than unattended information. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed that crossmodal suppression of sensory cortex subserving a non-presented modality occurred consistently during unimodal attention tasks, and increased with attentional demand. During bimodal selective attention, activity was often enhanced in sensory cortex subserving an attended modality and suppressed in sensory cortex subserving an unattended modality, both compared to a bimodal passive baseline. This interaction depended in part on attentional demand and the nature of the stimulus information. No prefrontal regions were consistently activated by bimodal selective attention; however, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was recruited during one of the bimodal divided attention paradigms. Furthermore, temporary inactivation of the DLPFC using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) led to decreased bimodal divided attention performance using the same paradigm. However, using a different bimodal divided attention paradigm, DLPFC was not recruited and instead ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) showed task-induced deactivation. This divergence is explained by the unique requirements of the two bimodal divided attention paradigms. Overall, these findings provide improved understanding of how humans process and attend to multisensory information, and raise several questions for further investigation.

Inaugural dissertation--Bern. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [252]-254).

acase@tulane.edu / This work adopts an attention-based view to study boards of directors’ attention and its effect on CEOs’ attentional patterns from two perspectives: how the aggregate attention of directors relating to other firms may influence the attention of focal firms’ CEOs over time; and how this dynamic may be influenced by social, power and cognitive factors or dynamics. In so doing, it considers the influence of status and power differences between board members and CEOs, the number of reciprocal interlocks present in each boardroom, and boards members’ imported attentional homogeneity. General linear models analysis is carried out to test the hypotheses, measuring board and CEO attention through previously-validated, computer-assisted content analysis of letters to the shareholders of large companies. In broad terms, this study develops a novel construct, board imported attention, to present partial evidence that suggests a process by which CEOs’ attention is affected by the prior attentional focus of board members, resulting from their board or executive roles in other firms, and that this process may be affected by social and/or power relationships between boards and their CEOs. In light of the pervasiveness of boards with an increasing proportion of interlocked directors, these findings have implications for the corporate governance and managerial cognition literatures, allowing for a deeper understanding of the importance of the composition of boards in shaping the attentional patterns of CEOs. / 1 / Juan Vicente Romero McCarthy

No description available.

A growing body of literature has documented attention impairments in individuals with aphasia. This study extended that literature by examining the effects of lesion location (anterior versus posterior left hemisphere lesion) and nature of distractor task (nonverbal versus verbal) on aphasic individuals' performances of a variety of listening and speaking tasks under isolation, focused and divided attention conditions. Across tasks, conditions, and experiments, both anterior and posterior groups of aphasic individuals demonstrated greater disruption of language skills than a group of healthy individuals. Although it was initially hypothesized that the anterior group would display greater attention impairments than the posterior group, few differences were found; generally, the two aphasic groups performed similarly, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Independent of group, all individuals showed greater disruption of listening and speaking skills when the distractor task was verbal rather than nonverbal in nature. Performance decrements on most tasks were poorly predicted by severity of language impairment, time post-onset and other demographic characteristics of the aphasic individuals. Within a capacity framework of attention, the results of this study suggest that the attention impairments of aphasic individuals may reflect one or a combination of the following: decreased attentional capacity, inefficient attention allocation, or poor task-demand evaluation.