Bibliography : leaves 190-209. / xii, 209 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 1995

Bibliography: p. 209-233. / xi, 233 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 29 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Over the last 50 years, psychologists have developed a range of frameworks for similarity modelling, along with a large number of numerical techniques for extracting mental representations from empirical data. This thesis is concerned with the psychological theories used to account for similarity judgements, as well as the mathematical and statistical issues that surround the numerical problem of finding appropriate representations. It discusses, evaluates, and further develops three widely-adopted approaches to similarity modelling: spatial, featural and tree representation. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Psychology, 2003?

In daily life, both animals and humans are often faced with the task of returning to previously visited locations. In many cases, an organism must be able to (1) establish a directional frame of reference and (2) determine location based on surrounding cues in order to solve this problem. Moreover, successful navigation is generally thought to rely on how an organism learns and uses the metric relationships between various locations in its environment. This thesis examines various factors that affect the way animals encode and use metric information in their environment, both to orient and to navigate. A transformation approach is used to determine what aspects of metric information are learned and/or preferred. Additionally, this thesis follows a comparative approach in order to examine similarities and differences among species. In chapter 2, I show that two closely related species of chickadees differently use geometric and featural information when establishing a directional frame of reference. I suggest that ecological factors, but not rearing condition, affect the way that chickadees preferentially use metric or featural information to orient. In chapter 3, I used a similar paradigm to show that a pre-existing directional frame of reference can interact with rats’ use of metric cues to navigate. More specifically, chapter 3 shows that experience gained through training procedures affects the way that rats use metric information in a navigation task. Chapter 4 expands upon this idea, and shows that pigeons encode directional metric differently based on their past experience. Finally, in chapter 5, I examined the flexibility of use of metrics by comparing how search strategies of human adults and children can change based on a goal’s proximity to an edge. To summarize, this thesis shows that use of metric information is malleable and situation-specific and can be affected by a variety of factors including ecology, past experience and boundary information.

A subsumption-based mobile robot is extended to perform cognitive tasks. Following directions, the robot navigates directly to previously unexplored goals. This robot exploits a novel architecture based on the idea that cognition uses the underlying machinery of interaction, imagining sensations and actions.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Robert F. Simons, Dept. of Psychology. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2006. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Terry Ackerman, Robert Henson; submitted to the School of Education. Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-125).

Thesis (M. Med. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

This paper investigates how belief, social power, and ideology work together to create the subjectivities and social structures that guide our behaviour. Phenomena such as cognitive shortcuts, memory, bias, empathy, and dissonance are used to trace the effects of power and ideology on social construction and role-taking behaviour. Research on mass opinion in the United States is then used to identify the effects of information and salience on construction. Different conceptions of ideology and interest, drawn from the work of Hume, Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, and others were referenced to explore the larger social dynamics of ideas and structures. Academic, ethical, and democratic implications are investigated at different points. The paper concludes by connecting parenting style to moral development in order to find strategies for resisting the tendency towards institutional behaviour.

The objectives were to explore cognitive function in older adults with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) through two studies: 1) a pilot study involving the metabolic stress of glucose ingestion and the environmental stress of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) environment and 2) an fMRI study exploring the neural mechanisms through hippocampal and prefrontal functional imaging during memory and executive functioning tasks. In T2DM subjects, environmental stress produced greater impairment in memory performance and metabolic stress produced overestimation of memory performance, with similar executive functioning, relative to healthy subjects (pilot study). T2DM subjects also sowed reduced hippocampal and greater prefrontal activation compared to healthy subjects (fMRI study). Moreover, the metabolic stress caused greater hippocampal and prefrontal activation in healthy subjects relative to placebo (fMRI study). These results indicate plausible neural mechanisms behind T2DM- and stress-associated cognitive impairments that can be used for future improvements in cognitive retention and rehabilitation.

Visual information is processed by two separate visual pathways. One is the magnocellular visual pathway (M-pathway), which carries high temporal frequency information but low spatial frequency information. The other is the parvocellular visual pathway (P-pathway), which carries low temporal information but high spatial information. Kveraga and colleagues (2007) presented participants with high and low spatial frequency images and found that participants made faster and more accurate categorization responses to the low spatial frequency images. They hypothesized this was due to low spatial frequency “gist” information being rapidly carried by the M-pathway. Using diffuse light and hand posture manipulations, we replicated the advantage for low spatial frequency (LSF) images in both experiments, and also found a larger advantage for LSF information when biasing the M-pathway (using hand posture). We were unable to inhibit the M-pathway using red diffuse light. Thus, it does appear “gist” processing is uniquely carried by the M-pathway.