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The first goal of this study is to test the prediction that children who perceive similarity between a novel physical event and the real world will be more likely to express belief in the reality of a novel character involved in the event than children who do not perceive such similarity. The second goal is to test the effects of familiarity on similarity judgements, reality status beliefs, and their association. In this study, children ages 4 and 6 years were visited 5 times and were repeatedly told about a novel character performing either a highly similar, moderately dissimilar, or a highly dissimilar physical event. Their similarity judgements and reality status judgements were solicited on days 1 and 5. Results revealed high rates of association between similarity and reality status beliefs for the highly similar and moderately dissimilar events but low levels of association for the highly dissimilar event on day 1. With repeated exposure, children’s positive similarity judgements increased for the highly dissimilar event leading to higher rates of association. / text

<p> Medical diagnosis is a complex task, that requires integrating several sources and types of information: a patient's description of their symptoms, lab results, and perhaps even 'gut feelings' regarding potential diagnoses. From a cognitive psychology perspective, diagnosis is a type of categorization and as such has been typically divided into processes that are deliberate, rule oriented, and available to conscious control (often called analytic processing) and processes that are rapid, outside of conscious awareness, and typically based on similarity (often referred to as non-analytic processing).</p> <p> Traditionally, similarity has referred to whole-case similarity between a current and previously encountered case. However, this pattern matching to an entire previous case does not differentiate between diagnostic and non-diagnostic information, a distinction that is made clear in the rules taught to medical professionals. Since medicine does rely extensively on diagnostic rules, the research presented in this thesis will examine the effect of similarity of features relevant to the application of a diagnostic rule as well as the effect of similarity from patient identity, which is mnemonically salient but diagnostically irrelevant.</p> <p> The work presented in this thesis specifically examines the role of similarity in the categorization, or diagnostic decisions of novices. Medical students start training with the best available rules, standard diagnostic rules likely to be used in future practice. In the experiments reported in this thesis, participants are trained to competence on diagnostic rules using prototypical written case vignettes of simplified psychiatric diagnoses. Participants then evaluate cases in which clinical information supports two possible diagnoses, but in which either diagnostic features or diagnostically irrelevant identity information is similar to those seen in training. The results of these experiments indicate a strong reliance on familiar of rule-relevant symptom descriptions (i.e. similarity within the application of a diagnostic rule), supporting an adaptive role of similarity within the application of an analytical decision rule. Further, the influence of familiar diagnostically irrelevant information (i.e. similarity within the context of patient identity) demonstrates the maintenance of non-diagnostic information within memory, and the possibility of matching to a previous exemplar on rule-irrelevant features. Familiarity, whether diagnostically relevant or not, increases the probability that clinically relevant features are mentioned in support of a diagnosis, which may indicate the disambiguation of features following previous experience with that feature, and a strong influence of familiar but non-diagnostic information on the interpretation of features.</p> <p> This thesis supports a model of medical decision making in which there is an effect of similarity to previous instantiations of clinically relevant features. That is, similarity is a basic component of decision making that is not limited to matching on entire previous instances. Previous research has suggested that analytic and non-analytic reasoning are competing or fundamentally separate processes, whereas the demonstration of similarity within the application of a diagnostic rule suggests that not only is similarity an adaptive strategy for learners, but the differentiation between similarity based and rule based processes may be less clear than previously suggested.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Episodic memory, the ability to store and retrieve information from our past, is at the very heart of human experience, underpinning our identity and relationship with the world. Episodic memory is not a unitary phenomenon: in dual-process theory, researchers draw a distinction between familiarity, a rapid and automatic sense of oldness to a previously encountered stimulus ("I know that face"), and recollection, the reactivation of additional context from a particular episode ("We met at the York conference"). A fundamental objective in the study of human memory is to ground recollection and familiarity in neural terms. This requires accurately measuring the contribution of each from behavioural data, which in turn relies on an accurate characterisation of recollection. This thesis introduces a novel source retrieval task to demonstrate that recollection has two critical, and fiercely contested, properties: it is thresholded, i.e. it can fail completely, and successful recollection is graded, i.e. it varies in strength. The consequences of this characterisation are explored. Firstly, familiarity and recollection are functionally separable retrieval mechanisms. Secondly, the models currently used to measure the contribution of each are generally flawed, and a corrected model is described which better fits, and explains, the extant data. Finally, the frequency of recollection is shown to be dissociable from its strength, a result which links behavioural data more strongly than before to a neurocomputational account of episodic memory, and which suggests a relationship between the representational overlap of memory traces and their retrieval. This thesis necessitates a change in the way behavioural memory data is modelled, and consequently the interpretation of evidence underpinning neuroanatomical accounts of memory experience. Significantly, however, it also moves the field beyond a long-running debate and provides a deeper dual-process framework with which to address outstanding questions about the relationship between, and neural basis of, episodic memory processes.

The aim of this research is to highlight the factors and barriers that render mobile phone users averse to using their mobile handsets as an internet platform in Jordan. Three studies were conducted to achieve the aim of the conducted research of this PhD thesis. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were used in all studies. Data was collected from the participants using questionnaires, open-ended questions and sketching techniques. Firstly, mobile internet usage in Jordan was explored in its wider sense. On the basis of these results, the second study compared PC and mobile internet use. This comparison resulted in the preference of PC internet rather than mobile internet. The study covered many aspects such as usability, familiarity, achievement and satisfaction in dealing with both mobile and stationary tools internet. The third study was divided into two sections. The first part required participants to design (using a sketching technique) a mobile application with regard to handling a critical issue (car violations), to establish the possibility for internet users in Jordan to perform tasks on a mobile platform that they currently perform on stationary internet tools. The second part of the study was an evaluation of this prototype application. The results revealed that the application was found to be very easy and useful by the participants of the study. They added that they would benefit from using such applications in their lives. There was an observed issue of security and trust related to the payment option provided as an option in the application. Participants were cautious and declined to use any ―untrusted‖ method of payment. In addition to lacking trust in e-commerce, participants lack trust and confidence in online payment methods, and stated that they would not recommend the payment option to anyone. Finally, the outcome of the study showed that the application is a novel idea in Jordan, and it is very easy to handle and use. Participants commented that it was easy to interact with the mobile application in order to complete different tasks. The key benefit of the application for participants lies in saving time, by avoiding long queues at the Traffic Department.

Group coordination is a universal feature of social life. Animals form social groups for a variety of reasons, including predator evasion and more efficient foraging, and individuals living in social groups must coordinate their activities in order for groups to function. Consequently, the factors that facilitate or impede group coordination are of great interest in understanding the lives of social animals. Familiarity between individuals has well-documented effects on group coordination, with familiar groups outperforming unfamiliar ones in predator evasion, foraging, and cohesion. Individuals also generally prefer to coordinate with familiar conspecifics over unfamiliar ones. Despite these advantages, the mechanisms through which familiarity might aid group coordination are poorly understood. Similarly, the individual personalities of group members have well-documented effects on group performance: bold individuals are more likely to be 'leaders' and determine the direction of group movements, and groups comprised of individuals of differing personalities outperform groups of all bold or all shy individuals. While the effect of individual personalities on group behaviour has been recorded extensively, the ways in which individuals affect each other's behaviour are still poorly documented. In particular, active interactions where one individual can directly affect the behaviour of others have received limited attention, as it is difficult to distinguish such actions from passive effects. I used two systems to investigate how individual behaviours can lead to group coordination. In three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), well-established boldness assays allowed me to assess the effects of personality and familiarity on 1) coordination between pairs of fish; I found that individuals in unfamiliar pairs exhibited coordination patterns consistent with their individual personalities, with bold individuals more likely to leave cover independently, while in familiar pairs, individuals behaved in ways seemingly unrelated to their boldness scores. I also investigated how personality and familiarity affect 2) group coordination and individual performance in a problem-solving paradigm. I found that familiarity, relative individual personality, and group mean personality interact to affect individual foraging success, and that group cohesion was affected by the interaction of group familiarity and group mean personality. These results suggest that individual characteristics can impact the behaviour of groups, and that the characteristics of an individual's group can in turn affect an individual's behaviour and success. In the Bronze Cory catfish (Corydoras aeneus), I described a novel tactile interaction style termed 'nudging' that individuals use during group coordination. I investigated 3) the effect of familiarity on nudging and coordination in pairs and triplets. These results show that nudging can be used to overcome the disadvantages of familiarity, which has important implications for how communication can underlie group coordination in the absence of familiarity. I then investigated how 4) nudging affects group coordination following a flight response to a potential threat. I demonstrated that nudging leads to a higher likelihood of group cohesion and longer group flight times. This shows how active interactions can mediate group responses and affect the ecologically relevant scenario of predator evasion. Finally, I investigated 5) the development of this nudging behaviour. My results show that Bronze Cory catfish larvae develop toleration for tactile stimulation with age alongside their propensity to nudge conspecifics. This suggests that Bronze Cory catfish larvae require social feedback to develop appropriate responses to nudges from conspecifics and supports the important role of nudging in Bronze Cory catfish sociality. The presence of active interactions in the Bronze Cory catfish` modifies the way that social behaviour manifests in this species and has great potential for further questions about social behaviour and group functioning.

The present study tested the hypothesis that distractor-based facilitation of visual search occurs because familiar distractors are processed and rejected in groups. We recorded participants’ eye movements during a visual search task to determine if familiar distractors were associated with an increased average distance between fixations and distractors. The study provided convergent evidence of a strong relation between search efficiency and distractor familiarity, wherein the distance between fixations and distractors increases with the efficiency of search. Further examination of eye movements suggested that the grouping of familiar distractors resulted in an efficient scanning of the search display by increasing the area of the display effectively processed during each fixation and therefore reducing the need to fixate individual distractors.

The present study tested the hypothesis that distractor-based facilitation of visual search occurs because familiar distractors are processed and rejected in groups. We recorded participants’ eye movements during a visual search task to determine if familiar distractors were associated with an increased average distance between fixations and distractors. The study provided convergent evidence of a strong relation between search efficiency and distractor familiarity, wherein the distance between fixations and distractors increases with the efficiency of search. Further examination of eye movements suggested that the grouping of familiar distractors resulted in an efficient scanning of the search display by increasing the area of the display effectively processed during each fixation and therefore reducing the need to fixate individual distractors.

The purpose of this study was to identify the effect of background music in a retail setting on Generation Y students’ shopping behaviors by using the Mehrabian-Russell environmental psychology model. the study examined the impact of genre, volume, and song familiarity on purchase intention, as well as whether these musical factors would produce a change in mood. the influence of involvement with shopping on in-store music was also examined. a total of 251 students completed pre- and post-shopping surveys at the University of North Texas’ Follett Bookstore. Participants were all between 18 and 35 years of age (Generation Y). the surveys aimed to capture the participants’ entry and exit mood as well as information such as level of shopping involvement and intentions, musical awareness, overall shopping experience, and basic demographics. a positive mood change was found between entry and exit among those who were somewhat familiar and not at all familiar with the music, and entry mood affected overall shopping experience. There was a positive correlation between exit mood and the overall experience, and a negative correlation between exit mood and the amount of money spent.