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This study was intended to assess the generality of a particular type of cognitive structure characteristic, that of integrative complexity. Pursuant of this, the theories of H. M. Schroder and O. J. Harvey were com- pared, and their respective measures administered to 440 students (Ss) of both sexes from three different southern schools. The theoretical analysis suggested that Schroder's theory is more truly structural in nature, and is more powerful in that it is more easily and obviously applicable to a broad range of cognitive domains. Harvey's position is much more firmly grounded on the content of the interpersonal domain. Both theories claim that the characteristic of cognitive structure which is most important in determining cognitive complexity is not differentiation, or an increase in the dimensionality, of the cognitive domain, but the subsequent integration of the differentiated components. Unfortunately, neither theorist is able to define integration so as to clearly distinguish it from a dimensional position. Here again, however, Schroder's theory seems to be the stronger, since it is at least explicit enough that the locus of difficulty can be precisely identified. Further, even if Schroder is un- able to define adequately the integration concept, his theorizing suggests the importance of the possibility of super- and sub-ordinate relationships among dimensions. Results of the testing were as follows: (a) As expected, the respective measures of cognitive integration were non-significantly correlated with each other, (b) Both measures of integration were significantly correlated with such measures of intelligence as vocabulary, abstract thinking, and SAT verbal and mathematical scores, (c) Sex differences in the scores may exist, although the pattern is not clear, (d) Other sample characteristics may affect the distribution of scores, e.g. large intelligence differences, socioeconomic differences, etc. On the other hand, Negroes are not ipso facto inferior to Caucasians, even when the latter enjoy a 100- point advantage on SAT averages. Nor are Southern whites inferior to Northern whites, at least when both are of superior intellectual ability. (e) Reliability, as estimated by coefficient alpha, is satisfactory for Harvey's measure and unsatisfactory for Schroder's, (f) The distribution of scores is such that for both measures complex Ss are rare, so pools of Ss must be tested in order to obtain adequate numbers of complex Ss. This is more a problem in attempting to apply Schroder than Harvey, largely because Schroder has often not bothered to study middle-range Ss, so their characteristics are unknown. Schroder's variable (especially) is essentially inapplicable to an unscreened group of subjects. Overall, Schroder's theory seems more promising than Harvey's. Suggestions were made for improving the reliability and distribution of scores. Additionally, a translation of Schroder's theory into dimensional terminology was attempted, and some important implications of his position for the dimensional orientation were discussed. / 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.

The goals of this study were to investigate the effects of anxiety and intelligence upon proficiency in concept formation, On the basis of an extension of Spence’s theory of anxiety and performance to incorporate intelligence as a variable, it was predicted that anxiety and intelligence would have interactive effects on proficiency in concept formation. This expectation was based on the assumptions that the effects of anxiety on proficiency would interact with those of task difficulty, and that task difficulty was a function of the intelligence of the subject as well as the intrinsic complexity of a task. Specifically, It was expected that if task complexity was held constant, higher levels of anxiety would facilitate concept formation for high Intelligence subjects and impair concept formation for low intelligence subjects. The subjects were 56 male students enrolled in introductory psychology who scored in the extreme quartiles on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale. The high and low anxiety groups were each divided into high and low intelligence groups by splitting them at the median intelligence score for the total group. This procedure yielded four experimental groups designated HiA-HiIQ, LoA-’HiIQ, HiA-LoIQ, and LoA-LoIQ. All subjects were given two concept formation tasks, derived from those developed by Bruner, and required to deduce the attributes which constituted the concept from information provided as follows: the attributes included in the concept were deducible primarily by comparing negative instances of the concept to an initial positive instance, whereas the attributes not included in the concept were deducible by comparing positive instances to the initial positive instance. The necessary information was provided within the first nine instances; four additional redundant instances were given. After the subjects had examined each instance, they were required to report their conclusions about the concept by recording either 1) that they knew the attribute was included in the concept (I), or 2) that they knew the attribute was not included (N), or 3) that they did not know whether the attribute was or was not included (?). The subjects’ reports were scored correct or erroneous by comparing them to the report that could be correctly deduced from the information given by the instances presented. The results for correct r snorts of knowledge of attribute inclusion showed that, as predicted, anxiety facilitated the concept formation proficiency of high intelligence subjects, and interfered with the concept formation proficiency of low intelligence subjects. This finding was explicated by examining the subjects’ erroneous reports, erroneous reports were divided into six error types depending upon the report made by the subject as compared to the report that co Id be correctly deduced. Interactive effects of anxiety and intelligence were found only for those types of erroneous reports in which the information given established that an attribute either was (I) or was not (N) included in the concert but the subject made the wrong one of these two reports. The fact that this effect was found for only this kind of error was interpreted to be consistent with the extended theory of anxiety and performance. Additional findings showed that high intelligence subjects and low intelligence subjects tended to make different types of errors in concept formation. For the first task only, high intelligence subjects made more erroneous reports than did low intelligence subjects of the type in which they reported that they did not know about the inclusion of an attribute in the concept(?), when they could have deduced that it was included (I). Low intelligence subjects made many more errors than high intelligence subjects of the type in which they reported that an attribute was included in the concept (I), when the information had not established whether or not it was included (?). / 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.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University

Pas de résumé / This thesis is dedicated to the problem of training and integration strategies of several modalities (visual, textual), in order to perform an efficient Visual Concept Detection and Annotation (VCDA) task, which has become a very popular and important research topic in recent years because of its wide range of application such as image/video indexing and retrieval, security access control, video monitoring, etc. Despite a lot of efforts and progress that have been made during the past years, it remains an open problem and is still considered as one of the most challenging problems in computer vision community, mainly due to inter-class similarities and intra-class variations like occlusion, background clutter, changes in viewpoint, pose, scale and illumination. This means that the image content can hardly be described by low-level visual features. In order to address these problems, the text associated with images is used to capture valuable semantic meanings about image content. Moreover, In order to benefit from both visual models and textual models, we propose multimodal approach. As the typical visual models, designing good visual descriptors and modeling these descriptors play an important role. Meanwhile how to organize the text associated with images is also very important. In this context, the objective of this thesis is to propose some innovative contributions for the task of VCDA. For visual models, a novel visual features/descriptors was proposed, which effectively and efficiently represent the visual content of images/videos. In addition, a novel method for encoding local binary descriptors was present. For textual models, we proposed two kinds of novel textual descriptor. The first descriptor is semantic Bag-of-Words(sBoW) using a dictionary. The second descriptor is Image Distance Feature(IDF) based on tags associated with images. Finally, in order to benefit from both visual models and textual models, fusion is carried out by MKL efficiently embed. [...]

Thesis--M.A., University of Hong Kong. / Typewritten.

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Arts