abstract: Safe headway learning plays a core role in driving education. Traditional safe headway education just use the oral and literal methods to educate drivers the concept of safe headway time, while with the limitation of combining drivers subject and situational domains for drivers to learn. This study investigated that whether using ego-moving metaphor to embody driver's self-awareness can help to solve this problem. This study used multiple treatments (ego-moving and time-moving instruction of safe time headway) and controls with pretest experimental design to investigate the embody self-awareness effect in a car-following task. Drivers (N=40) were asked to follow a lead car at a 2-seconds safe time headway. Results found that using embodied-based instructions in safe headway learning can help to improve driver's headway time accuracy and performance stability in the car-following task, which supports the hypothesis that using embodied-based instructions help to facilitate safe headway learning. However, there are still some issues needed to be solved using embodied-based instructions for the drivers' safe headway education. This study serves as a new method for the safe headway education while providing empirical evidence for the embodied theories and their applications. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Applied Psychology 2016

Common visualisation techniques such as bar-charts and scatter-plots are not sufficient for visual analysis of large sets of complex multidimensional data. Technological advancements have led to a proliferation of novel visualisation tools and techniques that attempt to meet this need. A crucial requirement for efficient visualisation tool design is the development of objective criteria for visualisation quality, informed by research in human perception and cognition. This thesis presents a multidisciplinary approach to address this requirement, underpinning the design and implementation of visualisation software with the theory and methodology of cognitive science. An opening survey of visualisation practices in the research environment identifies three primary uses of visualisations: the detection of outliers, the detection of clusters and the detection of trends. This finding, in turn, leads to a formulation of a cognitive account of the visualisation comprehension processes, founded upon established theories of visual perception and reading comprehension. Finally, a psychophysical methodology for objectively assessing visualisation efficiency is developed and used to test the efficiency of a specific visualisation technique, namely an interactive three-dimensional scatterplot, in a series of four experiments. The outcomes of the empirical study are three-fold. On a concrete applicable level, three-dimensional scatterplots are found to be efficient in trend detection but not in outlier detection. On a methodological level, ‘pop-out’ methodology is shown to be suitable for assessing visualisation efficiency. On a theoretical level, the cognitive account of visualisation comprehension processes is enhanced by empirical findings, e.g. the significance of the learning curve parameters. All these provide a contribution to a ‘science of visualisation’ as a coherent scientific paradigm, both benefiting fundamental science and meeting an applied need.

Researchers have identified inadequate sleep duration as one of the factors contributing to global obesity. The purpose of this study was to test a hypothesis deduced from a new sleep-duration-based evolutionary theory claiming that sleep extension in response to lengthening night duration in early fall evolved into a behavioral marker of an approaching winter; this adaptive trait was theorized to produce adiposity gain in White men in response to sleep extension. The hypothesis was that White Americans would show a greater increase in the age-adjusted fat mass index per unit of sleep duration compared to that of Black Americans. Data were part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) study between 2005 and 2010. The multiple regression analysis did not support the study hypothesis. The results indicated that habitual sleep duration had no effect on the annual rate of adiposity gain in White men, while in Black men, longer sleep was associated with significantly higher annual rates of adiposity gain. Implications for social change include the case for population-specific antiobesity interventions in Black men, including closer monitoring of sleep duration in order to prevent adverse habitual sleep extension and to improve time budgeting for physical exercise.

Previous research using violation-of-expectation paradigms suggests that very young infants have a good understanding of unobserved physical events. Yet toddlers appear to lack this knowledge when confronted with the door task, a visuospatial reasoning task which parallels ones used in the habituation/looking time studies. Many studies have been conducted in an effort to determine why toddlers perform poorly on the door task yet the answer remains unclear. The current study used a correlational approach to investigate door task performance from both psychological (executive function), and neuroscience (prefrontal cortex) perspectives. Children between the ages of 2 ½ - 3 years were tested on the standard door task as well as four other tasks. Three of the tasks were believed to activate prefrontal cortex: the three boxes-stationary, a spatial working memory task; the three boxes-scrambled, a non-spatial working memory task; and the three pegs task, an inhibitory control task. The fourth task was a recognition memory task which had been previously linked to the medial temporal lobe. Only a single task, the three pegs task, was found to correlate with door task performance (r = .510, p

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<p>The best category to describe this thesis is:</p> <p>Pedagogy and Applieded Cognitive Psychology</p> / <p>This thesis discusses two experiments that investigated the effective use of text and images in multimedia instruction. Experiment 1 examined efficient methods of multimedia design based on theoretical principles concerning how words and images influence information processing. Computer-based lectures were presented to university students containing visual elements including redundant text, non-redundant text, images, and the speaker’s image. Lectures with redundant text and audio produced poorer comprehension in comparison to lectures with non-redundant text and images. Non-redundant text and images enhanced learning, and accurate assessments of understanding. Experiment 2 implemented a more controlled design using four computer-based lectures with only two variable manipulations: text (redundant vs. non-redundant) and image (present vs. absent). The speaker’s image was removed from the design in Experiment 2 due to its lack of influence on learning in Experiment 1. Redundant text lectures produced the poorest comprehension, but only when images were absent. Contrary to common belief, these experiments demonstrate that redundant text is not an effective visual aid. Additionally, this thesis discusses future research investigating cognitive explanations for text and image effects in multimedia learning.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

<p>Successful navigation requires an accurate mental spatial representation of the environment that can be updated during movement. Experiments with animals and humans have demonstrated the existence of two forms of spatial representation: egocentric (observer-centered) and allocentric (environment-centered). Unfortunately, specifically how humans use these two systems is not well understood. The current dissertation was focused on providing evidence differentiating human use of egocentric and allocentric spatial reference frames, specifically examining the characteristics and contributions from body-based sources. Two empirical chapters are presented that include experiments involving two common spatial tasks. In Chapter 2, updating of feature relations within a room-sized environment was examined by having observers provide directional judgments to learned features with respect to an imagined orientation that was either congruent or incongruent with their physical orientation. The information available for updating the physical orientation was manipulated across experiments. Performance differences between congruent and incongruent conditions demonstrated the reliance on egocentric representations for updating, and differentiated body- and knowledge-based components of the egocentric updating process. The specificity of the body-based component was examined in Chapter 3 by having observers detect changes made to a tabletop spatial scene following a viewpoint shift resulting from their movement, scene rotation or both. The relation between the extent of observer movement and the magnitude of the experienced viewpoint shift was manipulated. Change detection performance was best when the extent of observer movement most closely matched the viewpoint shift, and declined as the match declined. Thus, body-based cues contributed specific information for updating self-to-feature relations that facilitated scene recognition. Throughout the course of the research program it has become clear that humans rely on egocentric representations to complete these tasks, and sensory and motor modalities involved in self-motion are integrated for updating spatial relations of novel environments.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)