No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This study explores the flow experiences of collegiate athletes. NCAA Division I athletes and intramural athletes (N = 180) completed a series of measures on their flow experiences. Comparisons were made regarding the characteristics of flow, the perceived facilitators of flow, the frequency of flow experiences, and explored the role of perceived ability. Using a person by situation interaction framework, this study singles out perceived ability as a person factor and competitive level as a situational factor to more clearly examine flow experiences. Results indicated distinctions between the two groups. Mainly, the intramural athletes reported experiencing the merging of action and awareness, autotelic experience, transformation of time and having clear goals more frequently than the NCAA Division I athletes. No group differences were found for flow frequency or flow facilitators. Perceived ability was found to have a weak, but significant relationship with specific flow facilitators and characteristics.

No description available.

Most contemporary schizophrenia research indicates that a heritable neurointegrative deficit may be a vulnerability marker for schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Researchers often measure this deficit in terms of impaired attention on a vigilance task, the Continuous Performance Test (CPT). Impaired attention is found not only in floridly psychotic schizophrenics, but also in remitted schizophrenics, children biologically at risk for schizophrenia, and young adults psychometrically identified as at risk for schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Findings from these investigations provide a possible link in the diathesis-stress model of schizophrenia genesis. However, little research attention has been paid to the potential interactive effects that attentional impairments and interpersonal relations may have in determining susceptibility to active schizophrenic symptomatology. In this study, 703 undergraduates completed measures of interpersonal attachment, perceived relations with parents and peers in childhood, positive schizotypy (schizophrenism) and negative schizotypy (anhedonia). Based upon their schizotypy scores, 191 of these participants were selected to complete a version of the CPT that, by degrading visual stimuli and presenting them very briefly, rapidly produces decrements in vigilance. In a staggered random design, CPT participants were assigned to one of three motivational induction conditions designed either to increase intrinsic motivation, decrease intrinsic motivation, or to replicate the standard CPT protocol. Path modelling supported a bidirectional relationship between adult attachment and schizophrenism. For female participants, recalled relations with fathers and childhood peers, but not with mothers, predicted adult attachment: for males, recalled relations with mothers, fathers, and childhood peers all predicted adult attachment. Maternal and paternal relations had no direct relationship to schizophrenism, while childhood peer relations and adult attachment were substantially related to schizophrenism for both sexes. Using signal detection indices and growth curve analysis across six blocks of CPT performance, the motivational induction designed to increase intrinsic motivation was found to attenuate the decrement in vigilance across time, while the motivational induction designed to decrease intrinsic motivation was found to augment the vigilance decrement, compared to the standard CPT protocol. Perceptual sensitivity scores were lower for high schizotypy participants than for low schizotypy participants, such that anhedonic (negative) and schizophrenism (positive) schizotypy interacted to predict the most impaired performance. High schizotypy participants had lowered perceptual sensitivity scores throughout the CPT protocol, but did not show a more rapid decrement in vigilance compared to others. Participants who reported low levels of intrinsic motivation or positive emotion, or who demonstrated diminished persistence in a hand held dynometer task, also had lowered perceptual sensitivity scores. This relationship was most strong for self-reported intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation was unrelated to schizotypy, and there were no interactions between self-reported intrinsic motivation, schizotypy, and the experimental motivational inductions. High levels of motivation appeared to compensate partially for the impaired attentional performance associated with schizotypy. Contrary to expectations, no interactions between interpersonal attachment and attentional performance were predictive of schizotypal tendencies. Results indicate the importance of the experimental setting as an interpersonal occasion that can either support or undermine attentional performance. The substantial relationship between motivation and attentional performance indicates that future CPT research should include measures of motivation, and that schizophrenia-related deficits in attention may be at least partially eliminated by increasing intrinsic motivation. / This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded by Ciara Healy.

In some cases, as much as 9% of participants in self-report studies are extremely inattentive (Maniaci & Rogge, 2014). Previous researchers have dealt with this problem by removing inattentive participants from data analyses. A better solution would be to prevent inattentive responding. Self-Determination Theory may provide an effective approach to reducing inattentive responding, specifically by attempting to promote autonomous motivation in research participants. Providing participants with personalized feedback may increase participants’ autonomous motivation, which in turn may lead to more attentive responding. Study 1 showed that participants who are interested in feedback are more attentive throughout an online survey than participants who are not interested in feedback. The next goal was to show through experimental manipulation that emphasizing the opportunity to receive personalized feedback would decrease levels of inattentive responding and increase autonomous motivation. No significant difference occurred between groups in levels of inattention, nor in autonomous motivation. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Deciding what information we attend to has implications on our ability to remain valuable and productive in our respective academic and economic domains. This study investigated if attentional switching due to information technology interruptions would deplete resources in a unique way and impair performance on a response inhibition task. Three groups were compared on the Simon task after participants either did or did not receive interruptions during a self-regulation task. Unexpectedly, a larger Simon effect was found for participants who did not receive interruptions. These results conform to previous evidence showing sustained directed attention may result in depletion and effect subsequent inhibitory control. Although not supporting predictions, these results may provide a basis for further research, particularly because younger generations are developing in a more connected world than preceding generations. By understanding these differences, younger generations may better adapt to technological advances and leverage them to their advantage. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

A number of models of working memory have been proposed since the seminal work of Baddeley and Hitch (1974) on the Multiple Component Model (MCM). Subsequent MCM research focussed on developing a theoretical framework based on modality-specific stores that can operate in parallel during dual-tasking. The MCM can be contrasted with theories of working memory that assume an attention-based domain-general shared resource responsible for both short term retention as well as on-line cognition, such as the Time-Based Resource Sharing (TBRS) model (Barrouillet, Bernardin, & Camos, 2004; Barrouillet, Bernardin, Portrat, Vergauwe, & Camos, 2007). The TBRS model assumes that short-term memory is dependent on access to attention, and any diversion of attention results in increased forgetting. The model describes ‘refreshing’ as the process of serially bringing memory items briefly into the focus of attention. Barrouillet and colleagues have demonstrated in numerous studies that memory spans lower as the cognitive demand of the secondary task increases - findings that are incompatible with the MCM. However, Camos, Mora, and Oberauer (2011) found that both sub-vocal rehearsal (the verbal maintenance mechanism described in the MCM) and attention-based refreshing can be selectively employed by participants depending on task demands. Since TBRS methodology compares spans measured under different cognitive load levels that are the same for every participant, we were interested in whether ensuring that secondary task demand was set within each participant’s abilities would avoid ‘over-taxing’ the working memory system and reduce dual-task costs. Our initial investigations re-measured memory and processing spans under dual-task conditions with secondary tasks’ demand titrated according to each individual’s measured ability (Experiments 1 and 2, and Doherty & Logie, 2016). We found that memory span was unaffected when processing demand was titrated, but that processing performance was lower when memory load was set above participants’ span. Subsequent experiments (3-8) investigated the effect of setting memory and processing load ‘below span’, ‘at span’, and ‘above span’ on memory and processing accuracy during dual-tasking. Overall it was found that processing resources can be reallocated to support memory performance but memory resources cannot be reallocated to support processing performance. We interpret the results as evidence for specialised memory resources and rehearsal mechanisms that can be supplemented by attention-based processes once storage capacities are exceeded. Experiments 6-8 aimed to encourage the use of phonological- or attention-based rehearsal mechanisms for verbal short term memory by either introducing articulatory suppression (AS) or shortening available encoding time for memory items. It was found that participants exhibited shared-resource effects when they completed the dual-task under AS, suggesting a shift to attention-based rehearsal. When encoding time was limited participants’ memory performance during dual-tasking was unaffected by concurrent processing load, suggesting the use of a rehearsal method which did not require access to attention. Experiment 9 investigated whether participants could dynamically allocate attention to one task or the other, and found that while ‘priority’ tasks received no benefit, non-priority tasks exhibited a marked decrement in performance. We conclude that the perceived incompatibility between the MCM and attention-based theories of working memory such as the TBRS model may be more apparent than real, and suggest that future research should incorporate procedures and methodological considerations that take into account findings from both literatures.