A series of experiments explored the nature of the memory representation of numerical information. Two distributions were presented to each subject as three-digit numbers paired with distribution labels. Three stimulus presentation conditions were used in Experiment 1: a rapid serial presentation as used in Malmi and Samson (1983); a task which requires the subject to retype each stimulus item; and a classification task in which the subject must supply the category name when presented with the stimulus number. In Experiment 1, subjects estimated the averages of the distributions they were presented. In Experiment 2, subjects classified an additional 40 items, chosen to enable discrimination between two classes of models of memory representation. Subjects in Experiment 3 made estimates of the frequency of scores per decade for each distribution. The results strongly favor the category density model (Fried and Holyoak, 1984), a model which assumes that the subject abstracts distributional information and uses a default 'normal' distribution to organize the incoming information. The Nosofsky (1988) exemplar similarity model did not predict subject classification behavior or subject frequency estimation as accurately as the category density model. Reasons for these findings are discussed.

Four different tasks were used to investigate if readers reinstate information which is no longer in focus when it is needed to resolve a break in causal coherence. In five experiments an inference condition was included in which passages contained a causal coherence break which could be resolved by reinstating a backgrounded concept. In Experiment 1, the results of a recognition task provided evidence that readers were able to integrate the targeted cause more easily with the inference version than the control version of the passage, either because of processes occurring while reading or at the time of test. In Experiments 2 and 3, the results of a word naming task provided evidence that the backgrounded cause was reactivated during reading in the inference condition after encountering the coherence break. In Experiment 4, the results of a reading time measure suggested that readers did not only reactivate a single concept, but used this concept to form a new proposition which acted as a cause for the action in the focal sentence. The causal link was maintained in working memory. According to the results of the recall test in the final experiment, the causal link was also included in the long-term memory text representation. The results were interpreted as support for a fast, direct access, "resonance" process rather than a slow, deliberate search.

Translating thoughts into sentences involves planning at several levels of representation (e.g., conceptual, syntactic, phonological). An adequate theory of speech production must specify the principles governing planning at different levels of representation, including the scope of planning for a given level and the relations among levels. In three experiments, I investigated referential and phonological planning in a naturalistic speaking task. In the central experiment, subjects described to a listener simple events involving objects displayed on a computer screen. On each trial, line drawings of four objects were presented simultaneously, each on a background square of a different color. One of the pictures jumped next to one of the other pictures and then jumped back to its original position. The subject's task was to describe to a listener what had happened, using the verb "bumped" and having been told that the listener had the same display but without the movement. An example utterance was "The cat bumped the motorcycle." Subjects' utterances were tape-recorded for later analysis. Two factors were manipulated: First, whether a color adjective was needed to distinguish an object involved in the event from an identical, but differently colored, object in the display, and, second, whether the names for the objects were short (one syllable) or long (three or more syllables). The ambiguity manipulation varied the complexity of planning at the message level, and the length manipulation varied phonological encoding (longer words take longer to prepare). The pattern of initiation times and within-sentence delays provided evidence for the following conclusions: (1) The speaker's decision to initiate speech depends on having achieved a certain stage in planning, which can vary from task to task (the Transparency Assumption). (2) In the most natural of the experimental tasks, initiation depended on retrieving the phonology of the subject noun, even when it was preceded by an adjective, consistent with a proposed Lexical Head Principle for initiation. (3) The scope of planning during speech depends on available mental capacity, not on the structure of the utterance--complexity early in an utterance decreased the amount of upcoming material that could be planned concurrently.

<p> The vigilance decrement is the decline in performance over time that characterizes tasks requiring sustained attention. Resource Theory proposes that the vigilance decrement is due to information processing assets that become depleted with use. Resource theorists must thus identify these assets and the process of how resources are depleted and replenished. The Microlapse Theory of Fatigue (MTF) identifies the resource that is depleted when performing a sustained attention task as the central executive attentional network. The depletion of the central executive network resource results in microlapses or brief gaps in attention that prevent the perception and processing of information. The MTF can explain various effects in the sustained attention literature regarding how resources are depleted. However, the MTF alone cannot explain the event rate effect or the motivation effect because it does not include replenishment mechanisms that can occur during a sustained attention task. To better understand the process of replenishment, participants were assigned to varying event rate and external motivation conditions in a novel paradigm that could measure the perceptual processing of a trial over time. These stages of processing included when participants looked at the first stimulus, looked at the second stimulus, and responded. In Experiment 1, it was found that the vigilance decrement was more severe for faster event rates, consistent with Resource Theory and counter to the MTF. In Experiment 2, the event rate effect was replicated, but unexpectedly, external motivation did not impact the vigilance decrement. In both experiments it was found that for the stages of processing that involved looking at the stimuli, more slowing was found as event rate increased. Additionally, more slowing was detected earlier in the processing of a trial than later. These results supported the process of microlapses inducing the vigilance decrement due to not having enough time to perceive, encode, and respond to stimuli, as described by the MTF. It was interpreted that the interaction between time-on-task and event rate was due to opportunistic breaks that occurred more frequently in slower event rate conditions. The finding that more slowing occurred earlier in processing was interpreted as evidence for internal rewards related to learning impacting the speed of processing a trial. To explain these findings, I propose the Microlapse Theory of Fatigue with Replenishment (MTFR) a process model similar to MTF, but that includes additional replenishment mechanisms related to opportunistic rest periods and internal rewards. The Microlapse Theory of Fatigue with Replenishment (MTFR) closely correlates to the empirical data and is an important step forward in the effort to build a comprehensive model of sustained attention.</p>

<p> <b>Background:</b> Perception of changes in physiological arousal is theorized to form the basis for which the brain labels emotional states. Interoception is a process by which individuals become aware of physiological sensations. Lowered emotional awareness has been found to be associated with lower interoceptive awareness. Alexithymia is a personality trait associated with lowered emotion recognition ability which affects 10-20% of the university student population in Western countries. Research suggests that being made aware of one&rsquo;s heartbeat may enhance emotional awareness. <b>Objective(s): </b> The present study attempted to enhance emotion recognition abilities directly via an experimental interoceptive manipulation in order to decrease levels of alexithymia. It had three aims: 1) To examine whether exposing individuals to the interoceptive sound of their own heart beat could illicit changes in their emotion recognition abilities,2) To examine whether higher emotion recognition abilities as a result of listening to one&rsquo;s own heartbeat differed by alexithymia group, and 3) if higher interoceptive awareness was associated with higher RME scores during the own heartbeat sound condition. <b>Methods: </b> 36 participants were recruited from an introductory psychology class at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Participants completed lab-based tests of emotion recognition followed by questionnaires assessing alexithymia and interoceptive abilities. During the lab-based test of emotion recognition, participants were subjected to an interoceptive manipulation by listening to three sounds (in random order): own heartbeat, another person&rsquo;s heartbeat, and footsteps. To test aim 1, a repeated-measures ANOVA examined differences in emotion recognition scores during the various sound conditions (i.e., no sound, own heartbeat, other heartbeat, footsteps). For evaluating aim 2, a two way 3 x 4 RM ANOVA tested for differences in RME scores by sound condition when individuals were alexithymic, possibly alexithymic and not alexithymic. Aim 3 was examined using correlations between the attention to body and emotion awareness subscale scores separately with RME score for own heartbeat. <b>Results:</b> Contrary to predictions, RME performance did not vary according to body sound condition, <i>F</i> (3, 105) =.53, p = .67, <i>&eta;</i>&sup2; = .02. A significant interaction was seen between alexithymia category and RME scores during the interoceptive sound conditions, <i>F</i> (6, 99) = 2.27, p = .04, <i>&eta; </i>&sup2; = .12. However, post-hoc analyses did not reveal significant differences between specific alexithymia categories and RME scores. A significant positive relationship was seen between RME during own heartbeat and being able to pay attention to the body (<i>r</i> (36) = .34, p = .05, <i> R</i>&sup2; = .11). <b>Discussion:</b> Our results suggest that more attention was directed toward facial emotions when subjects listened to their own heartbeat but this increase did not result in measurable changes in RME performance. <b>Limitations:</b> Although using a within-subjects design potentially increased statistical power, a between-subjects design with random assignment could have eliminated the effects of repeated measurement and condition order. <b>Implications:</b> The most novel of these findings was that individuals paid more attention to the emotional stimuli when hearing their own heartbeat. More research is needed to understand if the interoceptive sound manipulation may aide in improving other cognitive functions or earlier steps in the emotion process. Future research using other measures of interoception and attention are necessary to confirm the result.</p>

The evaluation of creative ideas is a special case of judgment and decision making. It is difficult to objectively evaluate creative products because most people possess an internalised model of creativity which is usually neither verbalised nor explicitly defined. Also, one of the main assessment dimensions of creativity, originality varies as a function of the evaluator's previous experience. For these reasons, previous research has provided practical rather than theoretical grounds for studying the evaluation process. The present thesis examines the conceptual basis on which people evaluate creative ideas. The aim is to identify factors and conditions which enhance the detection of creative ideas. A novel paradigm was created to test how creativity-related features influence the assessment of creativity. In six experiments, experts' and non-experts' judgment was examined regarding urban design. Two experiments established the expert ratings of the stimuli. Further two experiments explored the extent to which non-experts relied on four features (originality, utility, scalability, and riskiness) for judging the creativity of novel project ideas while the level of motivation was controlled. Overall, the findings show that non-experts' creativity judgment relied on all four characteristic features. Their ratings of the features predicted a substantial part of the variance in the creativity ratings. In another experiment, the effect of providing explicit task-related information was tested. Such information did not make a solid difference in the creativity ratings. A final experiment assessed the differences between making relative and absolute judgments about creativity. There was a large overlap between the selection of best and worst ideas regardless of which way the judgment was made. In conclusion, non-experts were found to possess a robust internal model of creativity and not to make random choices. Experts and non-experts were found to judge creativity vastly differently, they only agreed that utility is the most important criterion.

<p> This study sought to determine whether using video stimuli instead of traditional static stimuli would produce better recognition rates of the seven universal human emotions. In an online experiment, native English-speaking respondents were shown either photographs or video clips of actors performing these seven emotions, with particular focus on contempt, which has proven difficult for native English speakers to recognize reliably. Results showed that video did not produce better recognition rates for contempt or any other universal emotion. The results do not mean that the use of video stimuli in emotion judgment research is better or worse than using traditional still images, but it does indicate how video stimuli might be expected to perform in future studies.</p>

<p> Two studies tested hypotheses regarding the idea that humor promotes cognitive flexibility. Two components of humor are argued to promote cognitive flexibility. First, the positive emotion associated with humor may enhance cognitive flexibility. Second, the processing of humor may exercise complex cognitive processing, thus making similar processing more efficient on subsequent tasks. Participants in Experiment 1 read humorous sentences or one of two types of non-humorous sentences. Participants in Experiment 2 viewed captioned images that varied in the presence of positivity and incongruity. Results of both studies do not support the idea that humor promotes cognitive flexibility, nor do they show evidence that humor promotes cognitive flexibility because of the positive emotion or incongruity associated with it. Explanations for the failure to find support for hypotheses focus on the stimuli used in non-humor conditions and the stimuli and method of measuring cognitive flexibility. Alternative methods of testing the hypotheses are also offered, such as investigating sense of humor as a personality trait, using different types of humor and a different method of measuring cognitive flexibility. This project hoped to provide elementary evidence for the notion that humor is beneficial for health, but did not do so. It is hoped that future research can elucidate the relationship between humor and health.</p>

<p> This paper is an integral inquiry that serves as an introduction into motivation and creativity from a transpersonal perspective. By focusing on intrinsic motivation, which can be defined as the enjoyment of and interest in an activity for its own sake, this paper posits that engaging in creative expression can act as a transcendent function that facilitates individualization and a progressive unfolding towards self-actualization. Supporting evidence shows that fully intrinsic-motivated immersion into non-objective tasks, such as engaging in creative expression, can result in a peak or flow experience. In turn, this experience can be a transcendent function that facilitates the processes involved with individualization and self- actualization.</p>

This thesis contains a set of empirical investigations, which explore a fundamental issue in human communication, namely the functional significance of iconic hand gestures that accompany speech. Some researchers argue that these iconic gestures function for the speaker to facilitate lexical retrieval from the mental lexicon (e.g. Butterworth and Hadar, 1989; 1997). An alternative theory is that these iconic gestures are to do with the communication of information from a speaker to a listener (e.g. McNeill, 1985; 1992). This important debate forms the basis of the current research. The research reported in this thesis was found to provide little evidence for the lexical access theoretical position but provide important supporting evidence for the argument that iconic gestures are essentially communicative. It has shown convincingly that information about the world out there is encoded into speech and gesture and seems to provide a substantial body of evidence that iconic gestures do indeed convey semantic information to respondents. It has also shown that some iconic gestures are more communicative than others and that the occurrence of these gestures is affected by certain identifiable properties of talk. One of the strengths of the current research is that it is now more precisely known what semantic information is actually received by respondents from gesture and hence this research provides a much better insight into how the linguistic and gestural codes interact in the communication of meaning. The research reported in this thesis suggests that those researchers who neglect iconic gesture in their study of how language is used in eveiyday life are missing a major component of the process of human communication.