<p> Techniques to accurately measure situation awareness (SA) are important when designing systems that optimize operator performance. The two most prominent SA probe techniques vary based on screen visibility and situation pause during question presentation. The current study used four probe techniques based on all possible configurations of these factors. Air traffic control students controlled traffic in 10 scenarios that included all four probe techniques and a baseline no-probe condition across two degrees of automation. Probe questions varied on two levels of priority and specificity, creating four question types. Based on operator performance variations and subjective ratings, results support administration of probes with a visible screen and while the situation is paused. No method showed superior sensitivity to SA differences. Finally, the current study replicated findings that low priority information is offloaded to the environment and accessed as needed, supporting the situated approach towards SA.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, 1995. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-10, Section: B, page: 5806. Chair: Christine Zalewski.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: B, page: 1356. Adviser: Monica Fabiani. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 150-161) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: B, page: 3302. Adviser: Daniel J. Simons. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-117) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> The purpose of this series of studies was to evaluate the extent to which a non-reinforcement based correlation training procedure could combine with a Yes/No evaluation method to establish and test for derived equivalent and spatial relations. In the first experiment, participants were trained stimulus pairs between A-B and B-C across three stimulus sets. Participants were subsequently tested using a Yes/No evaluative procedure of untrained B-A, C-B, A-C, and C-A relations. Experiment two utilized the same training structure as well as testing for the same derived relations, however used a complex semi-random trial structure. In both experiments 1 and 2 the majority of participants responded accurately to all of the possible tested derived relations. In experiment 3, the same training and testing procedure was employed to establish spatial relations. Tests for possible derived spatial relations were observed for the majority of participants. The three experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of a correlation training and Yes/No evaluation procedure that to date has not been reported in the derived relational responding literature. </p><p>

A chance finding revealed that a boy with no measurable spatial ability and a history of possible neurological trauma could not draw a plan of his house. As emotionally disturbed children were also inferior in the task, it was hypothesized that they too might have some neurological dysfunction. A test of drawing a plan of a house was constructed as a means of testing this hypothesis. In the course of the item selection, developmental features were noticed, which suggested that children's skill in plan drawing was associated with the growing awareness of projective and euclidian space as elucidated by Piaget. Problems in comprehending walls as divisions of a total space were probably not particular to this 3D space, but could also be found in 2D space. A sex difference in favour of the boys was a constant finding, but when the effects of experience and teaching were explored, the earlier supposition of an innate and possibly neurological difference was modified, and one mediated by personality variables seemed to fit the facts more appropriately. Introspection as to the nature of the task suggested that spatial ability might be involved, but a factor analysis, using the scores of clinic children, revealed that the Plan test loaded also on verbal and visuomotor factors. The extent to which this result can be generalized to normal and older populations is limited by the samples psychiatric disorder, its young age and inadequacies of the battery of tests forming the factor structure. Contrary to expectations and to findings on other visuo-motor tests, hemiplegic children did not show a specific disability on this test, nor was there any support for the hypothesis that children with left hemisphere damage would score higher than those with right hemisphere damage. Clinic children with reactive and neurotic disorders scored lower on the test than non-clinic children. There was also some association with neuroticism on the NMP1, but not with the Rutter or Rotter scales of maladjustment. As a test it was reliable and the results were not influenced by previous experience or teaching, except those of a few individual girls. Concurrent and construct validity with emotional disturbance was established. The initial hypothesis that this test might reveal a disability common to children with a psychiatric disorder and to those with neurological dysfunctions was not supported.

<p> Since Csikszentmihalyi identified the psychological experience of flow over 40 years ago, the experiences have been heralded as the optimum human function and prescriptive to high levels of well-being and quality of life. Csikszentmihalyi theorized that flow represented an autonomous reality that represented an altered state unlike any other human experience. Flow states emerged from intrinsically motivated behavior that represented a fragile balance between the level of enjoyment from novel task stimulation and a sense of self-efficacy required to meet the specific task demands. However, flow is not well understood and research is skewed toward to phenomenological investigations that described the nature of the experience and many of the significant variables of interest across a diverse range of activities. The lack of experimental exploration of flow has created fundamental research gaps. The general problem is that flow is predictive and related to positive psychological outcomes; however, current assessment methodologies and research have not provided the functional neuroanatomy involved. The purpose of this quantitative experimental study was to examine the hypofrontality theory that a flow state occurs concurrently with decreased cognitive activation in the frontal cortex (hypofrontality) during the flow phenomena. Participants consisted of expert piano players that were assessed for changes in alpha activity in the frontal cortex during a flow and non-flow condition. Results from the paired samples paired t-test conducted revealed there were statistically significant differences in alpha power in the experimental conditions (DV) versus the control conditions (IV; <i> M</i> = 93, <i>SD</i> = 105, <i>N</i> = 14), <i> t</i>(13) = 3.29, <i>p</i> = .006. These results supported the main hypothesis that there is increased alpha power in the frontal cortex during flow states. This finding provides the first empirically validated biomarker for a flow. These results will assist future research to understand flow experiences as a conceptually unambiguous variable.</p><p>

<p> One of the quintessential properties of the human semantic system is its ability to flexibly combine the meanings of smaller pieces into larger wholes. However, not all smaller conceptual pieces are created equal; concepts differ in the extent to which they can drive meaning composition. Some concepts can drive semantic composition by establishing relationships with other concepts, while others cannot. For example, we know the concept labelled by &ldquo;friend&rdquo; can drive composition, since one cannot be a friend without being <i>someone</i>&rsquo;s friend, while an animal can be a cat without standing in a similar relationship. We can thus divide the conceptual space of humans into two sections: relational concepts labelled by words like &ldquo;friend&rdquo;, and non-relational concepts like the one labelled by &ldquo;cat&rdquo;. </p><p> Evidence in favor of this division indicates that in early childhood humans are aware of the relationality of concepts (Smiley and Brown 1979; Mirman and Graziano 2012), and as we age, relational concepts remain extremely common in our lexicon, making up nearly half of the adult English vocabulary (Asmuth and Gentner, 2005; Gentner, 2005). Some relational words have been extensively studied by cognitive psychologists and formal linguists alike. One relatively mature set of investigations utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural basis of relational verb meaning, and finds that relational (i.e., transitive) verbs drive activity in left perisylvian cortical regions more than their intransitive counterparts (Meltzer-Asscher et al., 2015; Thompson et al., 2010, 2007; Bornkessel et al., 2005; Ben-Shachar et al., 2003). These investigations attribute this activity to verb-specific or event-specific information that is stored as part of the verb&rsquo;s conceptual representation. Some support for this comes from Binder and Desai 2011 that holds that the left AG is a main semantic hub that specializes in event processing. However, formal linguistic investigations suggest that relationality should be independent of verbhood or eventivity; it is an independent abstract property of some lexical items which enables them to establish relationships and drive semantic composition. The neural basis of relationality and whether it can be independent of verbhood and eventivity is still relatively underexplored. As relationality straddles the boundary between syntax and semantics, disentangling the contributions of various linguistic features, such as syntactic category, eventivity, and plurality to left AG activity becomes a crucial exercise&mdash;one that a linguist is uniquely poised to address. </p><p> A main candidate region for relational processing is the left Angular Gyrus (lAG), because prior literature suggests it is sensitive to at least some of the features that a region that processes relationality would be sensitive to. In addition to being implicated in tasks that probe the argument structure of verbs, the left AG was found to be the most consistently activated region across numerous semantic tasks in a recent, large-scale meta-analysis (Binder and Desai, 2011), prompting it to be dubbed a domain-general &rdquo;semantic&rdquo; hub (Bonner et al., 2013; Binder and Desai, 2011). Because of this, this dissertation reports the results of three MEG experiments and one computational experiment, and focuses on the left AG and surrounding perisylvian cortical regions, and uses Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate its role in relational processing. </p><p> Chapter 2 asks whether left AG tracks relationality, the eventivity of verbs, or a word&rsquo;s combinatorial context, and finds a main effect of relationality from 170&ndash;260 ms after the visual presentation of the target noun, and no other effects of the other factors, suggesting that it is indeed relationality and not eventivity (or context) that drives left AG argument structure findings. </p><p> Chapter 3 asks whether relationality effects could be driven by something other than the relationality of concepts, namely, by the quantity of concepts. In addition to being activated for numerous number-related tasks (see Dehaene et al. 2003 a.o., for a review), the left posterior perisylvian cortex has been found to be differentially active for plurals as opposed to for singulars (Domahs et al., 2012), suggesting that the lAG might track semantic information about plurality. Contrasting plural and singular nouns that vary in relationality, I replicate the relationality effect, and find no interaction with plurality, suggesting that, indeed, left posterior perisylvian relationality effects cannot be explained as a type of quantity processing. </p><p> Chapter 4 presents a filler experiment to the second experiment, which investigates the mass-count distinction and asks whether left AG activity is sensitive to countability and whether it interacts with plurality. I observed a main effect of countability (count nouns > mass nouns), in a broad swath of left hemisphere from 295&ndash;465 ms after noun presentation, and additionally observe a left frontal effect of plurality (bare nouns > plurals), paralleling what I found in Chapter 3. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) </p><p>

<p> Visual search has been extensively studied in the laboratory, yielding broad insights into how we search through and attend to the world around us. In order to know if these insights are valid, however, this research must not be confined to the sanitized imagery typically found within the lab. Comparatively little research has been conducted on visual search within naturalistic settings, and this gap must therefore be bridged in order to further our understanding of visual search. Based on the results of Experiment 1, Experiment 2 was conducted to test three common effects observed in previous studies of visual search: the effects of background complexity, target-background similarity, and target-distractor similarity on response time. Results show that these hypotheses carry over to the natural world, but also that there are other effects present not accounted for by current theories of visual search. The argument is made for the modification of these theories to incorporate this naturalistic information. </p><p>

abstract: ABSTRACT Learning a novel motor pattern through imitation of the skilled performance of an expert has been shown to result in better learning outcomes relative to observational or physical practice. The aim of the present project was to examine if the advantages of imitational practice could be further augmented through a supplementary technique derived from my previous research. This research has provided converging behavioral evidence that dyads engaged in joint action in a familiar task requiring spatial and temporal synchrony end up developing an extended overlap in their body representations, termed a joint body schema (JBS). The present research examined if inducing a JBS between a trainer and a novice trainee, prior to having the dyad engage in imitation practice on a novel motor pattern would enhance both of the training process and its outcomes. Participants either worked with their trainer on a familiar joint task to develop the JBS (Joint condition) or performed a solo equivalent of the task while being watched by their trainer (Solo condition). Participants In both groups then engaged in blocks of alternating imitation practice and free production of a novel manual motor pattern, while their motor output was recorded. Analyses indicated that the Joint participants outperformed the Solo participants in the ability to synchronize the spatial and temporal components of their imitation movements with the trainer’s pattern-modeling movements. The same group showed superior performance when attempting to freely produce the pattern. These results carry significant theoretical and translational potentials for the fields of motor learning and rehabilitation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Psychology 2015