This dissertation engages in two major hypotheses regarding infants' naïve theory of social relationships. First, it proposes that infants may apply a domain-specific understanding to represent and reason about social groups defined by affiliation amongst their members. Second, it argues that infants may have an understanding of the causal role that behavioral conformity plays in promoting affiliation, and that this understanding may help to determine how infants reason about the coalitional social groups referred to in the first hypothesis. Experiments across three chapters address different aspects of these hypotheses. The experiments in Chapter 2 ask whether infants selectively use coalitional groups to make certain sorts of behavioral inferences, in contrast to the inferences they draw regarding other animate and inanimate categories. The experiments in Chapter 3 investigate the role of similarity of appearance in infants' representations of coalitional groups. Finally, the experiments in Chapter 4 look at how infants evaluate behavioral conformity and what they think it indicates about the attitudes of conformers and their targets. Chapter 5 synthesizes this work and discusses how it might apply to the study of imitation in both developmental and comparative fields. / Psychology

The relationship between language and thought has long been a topic of interest and controversy in cognitive science. In this dissertation, I address one aspect of this issue: when is language present during internal thought? Simple introspection tells us that we sometimes use inner speech, but is this the exception or the rule? Using eye-tracking measures, we investigated whether infants, children and adults implicitly activate verbal labels while silently looking at pictures of objects. In the first study, 4-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults completed a working memory task. While the two older age groups spontaneously chose a verbal encoding strategy for the pictoral stimuli, the 4-year-olds did not, suggesting a late emergence for implicit language use. The second study, however, challenges this conclusion as we find evidence for spontaneous implicit verbal activation in 24-month-old infants during free-viewing of pictures of familiar objects. The final study provides a more detailed look at the nature of the implicit verbal representations that are activated in adults during visual image processing. Unlike the 24-month-old infants, and unlike adults engaged in a working memory task, adults in this visual image processing task did not robustly activate phonological representations but did show some evidence of lexical activation, perhaps at a more abstract level of representation. Taken together, these results suggest that: 1) even very young children spontaneously engage inner speech, 2) adults and children use implicit verbal labeling in different ways, and 3) different tasks can evoke different levels of implicit verbal activation. / Psychology

Visual memory holds in mind details of objects, textures, faces, and scenes. After initial exposure to an image, however, visual memories rapidly degrade because they are transferred from iconic memory, a high-capacity sensory buffer, to working memory, a low-capacity maintenance system. How does visual memory maintenance work? This dissertation builds the argument that the maintenance of short-term visual memories is analogous to the act of breathing: it is a dynamic process with a default behavior that explains much of its usual workings, but which can be observed, overridden, and controlled. Chapter 1 shows how the act of trying to remember more information causes people to forget faster and to remember less ("load-dependent forgetting" and "overreaching"). It then shows how the paradigm of evolution can be applied to the problem of maintenance, with memories competing over a limited memory-supporting commodity, explaining these effects. Chapter 2 presents experiments on metamemory, the ability of people to observe and make decisions about their own memories. The experiments isolate a component of metamemory that monitors a memory's quality as it degrades over time. Chapter 3 connects memory to metamemory, drawing on work from reinforcement learning and decision theory to liken the problem of memory maintenance to that of an agent who sequentially decides what to prioritize in a partially observable mind. / Psychology

Often overlooked in the study of theory of mind (ToM) development, the understanding of motivational states, such as goals and desires, is both an important capacity in its own right and also a likely precursor to more advanced social and cognitive skills. This dissertation explored infants' and toddlers' reasoning about agents' motivational states, linking those representations to the domains of language and prosocial development. Parts I and II of the dissertation asked about toddlers' abilities to use representations of others' motivational states to guide helping behaviors. Part I used a spontaneous helping paradigm with two goal objects, one previously liked and the other disliked. Three- but not 2-year-olds helped appropriately by giving an actor her desired object, reflecting prosocial concern for others' specific desires at age 3. Part II probed the understanding of goals and helping of 14- and 24-month-olds. After establishing that toddlers encode simple reaching actions as goal-directed, a series of 4 experiments using an object-giving paradigm investigated toddlers' abilities to use goal representations to guide helping. The results indicate that 24- but not 14-month-olds used representations of prior goals to inform their helping behaviors; 14-month-olds were capable of using only current goals to guide helping. Part III of the dissertation asked whether there is continuity in the developmental relationship between language and ToM by investigating links between toddlers' understanding of motivational states and their vocabulary size. Experiment 1 found no correlation between the vocabulary size of typically hearing toddlers and their performance on tasks measuring motivational state understanding. Experiment 2 compared the same motivational state understanding of typically hearing toddlers and deaf toddlers with smaller vocabularies, finding no differences in performance between groups. The results of these experiments indicate that the link between language and false belief that is present at age 4 does not extend to motivational state reasoning in the toddler years. Together the findings of this dissertation highlight important limits and boundary conditions on young children's reasoning about motivational states. Further research is needed into the developmental trajectory and mechanisms of theory of mind reasoning. / Psychology

<p> Although gratitude may seem straightforward, it is a complex construct comprised of cognitive, emotional and behavioral elements. Gratitude has been presented as a positive psychological character trait, coping response, attitude, moral virtue, emotion, and habit (Emmons, McCullough, &amp; Tsang, 2003), and significant overlap exists among these definitional presentations (Lambert, Graham, &amp; Fincham, 2009). Despite definitional limitations, promising evidence indicates that gratitude can help survivors positively process and cope with trauma and contribute to the post-trauma recovery experience (Kashdan, Uswatte, &amp; Julian, 2006; Vernon, Dillon, &amp; Steiner, 2009). Yet, there is a lack of research examining how gratitude is expressed in psychotherapy with those who have experienced trauma. </p><p> The purpose of the current study was to qualitatively explore expressions of gratitude by psychotherapy clients who were trauma survivors. A deductive coding system was used, based on existing gratitude literature that allows researchers to comprehensively examine different types of gratitude. This study also compared gratitude expressions that took place during trauma and non-trauma discussions, which is an area of research that had not been examined. </p><p> In contrast to existing assessment and research, the findings from this study revealed that clients tended to express gratitude infrequently, in a <i> Narrow</i> manner or in a manner that was <i>Not Otherwise Specified </i>. Findings revealed that client expressions of gratitude were captured by four of the nine proposed coding categories: personal gratitude, gratitude for specific benefits received from a higher power, gratitude expressions that are not otherwise specified, and generalized gratitude as an attitude, in order of frequency. </p><p> It is hoped that the current study will contribute to the definition, understanding and measurement of gratitude in therapy. By demonstrating the extent that gratitude is utilized in psychotherapy with clients who have experienced trauma, the results of this study can be used as a baseline from which to compare results of future studies that evaluate the effects of training therapists in gratitude interventions. This study may also help therapists develop a deeper understanding of a gratitude that emerges as a result of trauma, which can potentially inform their use of gratitude in future assessment and treatment. </p>

<p> Emerging adulthood is recognized as a growing developmental stage that varies within and across cultures. Existing research generally characterizes this period as one of identity exploration, instability, self-reflection, and optimism. For many in this cohort, life events that were once organized into a stable sequence such as entering the workforce, marriage, and having children are increasingly a highly individualized and somewhat unstructured trajectory. This lack of structure provides opportunities and potential challenges to those transitioning from adolescence to adulthood. To this end, experiential acceptance may be an important target skill for intervention in guiding emerging adults through this tumultuous period. </p><p> Experiential acceptance is multiply defined in the literature, but is generally understood to be a present-focused approach that encourages a willingness to engage with one&rsquo;s moment-to-moment experience, nonjudgment of moment-to-moment experiencing, and nonattachment to thoughts or feelings. This focus may be useful for both therapists to use as an intervention tool in helping clients to form an integrated sense of self; a developmental task that is predictive of mental health in young adults. Despite the apparent fit between experiential acceptance and the emerging adult age range, no studies to date have explored experiential acceptance as an intervention with this population. </p><p> Accordingly, the purpose of the current study was to qualitatively explore how therapists facilitate experiential acceptance with emerging adult clients. A sample of 5 client-therapist pairs from community counseling centers was selected, and two videotaped therapy sessions for each participant pair were analyzed. Inductive content analysis was employed, using open coding and abstraction methodology to create a hierarchy of themes. Results indicated that experiential acceptance, overall, was rarely employed by trainee therapists in psychotherapy sessions with emerging adults. The one parent theme that emerged across participants was termed Increasing Awareness. Comments aimed at increasing flexibility in thinking were also observed, but not across participants. It is hoped that this study will provide foundational information on experiential acceptance use in psychotherapy with emerging adults, which could be used to promote more attention to skill and theory integration in clinical training and spur future research on experiential acceptance use in therapy-as-usual.</p>

Although a broad range of neuropsychological deficits have been reported to occur in patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome (OSAS), few studies have examined the executive functions in this patient group. The executive functions provide conscious control of the more basic cognitive functions and play an important role in daily living. They include capacities such as concept formation, planning, cognitive flexibility and resistance to interference. This study compared the performance of groups of moderate and severe OSAS patients with a group of unaffected individuals (N=24), on five tests of executive functioning. Two indices of sleep disordered breathing, sleep fragmentation and . hypoxemia, obtained from overnight polysomnography, were respectively used to categorise participants. ID patients with severe OSAS, executive function deficits were evident, while in those with moderate OSAS these abilities appeared largely intact. Further analyses revealed that the observed findings could not be attributed to differences in vigilance. These results suggest a discontinuity in the manifestation of executive function deficits between moderate and severe OSAS patients. There may be a threshold of OSAS severity, which if exceeded, impairments tend to occur. The magnitude of the impairment in patients with severe OSAS may be sufficient to interfere with daily cognitive functioning. Further research is needed both to replicate these findings and to establish the underlying pathogenesis of these deficits. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.

It is argued in Chapters 1 to 4 that in cognitive psychology in general, and in the disciplines of language acquisition and cognitive development in particular, there is substantial benefit to be derived from distinguishing between two representational systems, one system being deployed in long-established or highly-practiced functions, and the second deployed in novel tasks, or where difficulties interrupt the first system. It is also argued that the proper subject of cognitive development is the second of these systems. Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned in different ways with the origins of language in the individual, in particular with the question of what innate knowledge of language might be justified. It is concluded that many questions regarding innate knowledge remain open, and that a source in human evolution for knowledge of language is no more likely than sources in individual or social development. In Chapter 7 it is argued that representational drawing emerges late in the 4th year of life, and some new techniques are described for studying early representational drawing. Following these treatments of external systems of representation, Chapter 8 offers a general developmental theory of forms of representation, extending Piaget's insight that mental representation is co-extensive with thought, and that the main axis of cognitive development is the content of thought and representation. Chapters 9 to 12 apply this theory to the representation of belief and desire, and of extrinsic and intrinsic qualities of objects, by 11/2 to 4 year-old children. Chapter 13 introduces a new method for analyzing the free classification task, a task sometimes used to assess children's ability to think about intrinsic qualities, and applies this method to various data sets. Chapter 14 applies these insights and results to the problem of characterizing concepts and concept development and favourably discusses the idea that more precise knowledge of this aspect of development may help to explain certain features of early language acquisition.

Various writing devices are designed to serve specialized purposes or “functions” to aid readers in their processing of a text. For example, an index lists important topics in the book and allows the readers to quickly locate the pages relevant to a particular topic. The purpose of this study was to learn what mature readers know about various functional devices. Two experiments were conducted to learn what readers know about functional devices in texts. Experiment 1 investigated readers’ knowledge about functional writing devices and Experiment 2 examined readers’ beliefs about the relevance of functional writing devices in various reading situations. At the end of the experiments, a list of functional writing devices and their respective usage was created from the results of Experiment 1 & 2. The information obtained could be useful for education purposes and also future studies on the effects of function identifying signals on cognition.

<p> People with intellectual disabilities (ID) struggle with social interactions that are vital to the development of a high quality of life. Although evidence exists to support the use of technology as cognitive aids for youth with ID, little exists on the use of common hand-held devices for social support. The use of such devices has the potential to level the playing field in adult social roles, helping people with ID make and keep relationships. It is unclear how applications like video chatting might be used to support transition-age youth with ID in adult social roles. Using a framework of modeling (i.e., social learning), generalization across settings (i.e., ecological systems), and self-determination, this single-case study was developed to learn the effect of direct instruction of youth with ID on initiation of and responses to others in adult social roles while using common hand-held devices. Three participants, selected from 9 youth participating in a structured social skills class, were taught to initiate interaction and respond to initiations made by others with modeled support in self-selected adult social settings. Visual analysis of graphed data showed generally increased initiations and responses. Percent of nonoverlapping data (PND) and percent of all nonoverlapping data (PAND) found varied effect size from one participant to the next. Quality of interactions had mixed results across participants. The results found these 3 transition-age youth with ID to be quite adept in their use of common hand-held devices, and they all used them successfully to access support. These findings suggest that the use of well known devices may increase the number of people who can provide social support, reduce the cost of devices and live supports, and reduce the of stigma of having a paid staff shadowing the individual.</p>