<p>People are always at risk of making errors when they attempt to retrieve information from memory. An important question is how to create the optimal learning conditions so that, over time, the correct information is learned and the number of mistakes declines. Feedback is a powerful tool, both for reinforcing new learning and correcting memory errors. In 5 experiments, I sought to understand the best procedures for administering feedback during learning. First, I evaluated the popular recommendation that feedback is most effective when given immediately, and I showed that this recommendation does not always hold when correcting errors made with educational materials in the classroom. Second, I asked whether immediate feedback is more effective in a particular case—when correcting false memories, or strongly-held errors that may be difficult to notice even when the learner is confronted with the feedback message. Third, I examined whether varying levels of learner motivation might help to explain cross-experimental variability in feedback timing effects: Are unmotivated learners less likely to benefit from corrective feedback, especially when it is administered at a delay? Overall, the results revealed that there is no best “one-size-fits-all” recommendation for administering feedback; the optimal procedure depends on various characteristics of learners and their errors. As a package, the data are consistent with the spacing hypothesis of feedback timing, although this theoretical account does not successfully explain all of the data in the larger literature.</p> / Dissertation

No description available.

The Royal Navy's main—but not only—weapon at the beginning of the First World War was the Grand Fleet, whose pre-war title was the Home Fleet. The Home Fleet was brought into being in April 1907 after a controversial and confusing series of communications between Sir John Fisher at the Admiralty, the Cs-in-C. of the three main battle fleets, and Admiral Francis Bridgeman, who was Fisher's choice to command the new organization. The initial motive for this reorganization was a financial one: the new Liberal government demanded economies in naval expenditure on top of those introduced by Fisher for the now-ousted Conservatives. During the internal discussions on the proposed Home Fleet in the fall of 1906, three new motives were introduced: 1) A desire to improve on the existing reserve force structure. 2) Furtherance of a trend towards centralized Admiralty control of war operations replacing the previous independence of fleet and station commanders. 3) The shift from a primarily anti-Dual Alliance strategic posture to a primarily anti-German one. This combination of financial and strategic motives would set the stage for future Admiralty policy throughout the remainder of the Prewar Era. The developments related to these motives ensured the Home Fleet would not remain in its initial form for long. Attacks on the Home Fleet from within the Navy resulted in the accelerated demise of the Navy's previous first-line organization in home waters, the Channel Fleet, and shifting geostrategic paradigms reduced the importance of theatres outside the North Sea. Despite efforts by advocates of both those who wished to reduce naval expenditure and advocates of new technologies such as the submarine, the dreadnought-based Home Fleet remained the principal defence of the realm in July 1914, and was likely to remain so into the immediate future.

This thesis aims to explore the interface between scientific and technical translation (STT) and cognitive linguistics (CL), placing particular emphasis on the translationally relevant phenomena of explicitation and implicitation. The two concepts are regarded as potential indicators of translational text-context interaction, which may be of specific importance in the knowledge-intense field of STT and which can be modelled within the CL framework. Parallel to the microscopic attempt to give a coherent account of explicitation and implicitation in STT from a CL perspective, the thesis follows a macroscopic approach that aims to highlight the wider potential which cognitive linguistics holds for the field of scientific and technical translation. Translationally relevant elements of the CL framework include a coherent and cognitively plausible epistemological basis that explains the stability of scientific knowledge, the concept of common ground, which can be used to model the shared knowledge of specialized discourse communities, the field of cognitive semantics, which has developed tools for modelling the organization and representation of specialized knowledge, and the concept of linguistic construal, which allows the description of various linguistic aspects of STT (explicitation and implicitation among them) from a cognitively plausible perspective. The first part of the thesis takes a macroscopic perspective, being concerned with scientific and technical translation, cognitive linguistics, the philosophical grounding of the two fields and their interface. The perspective is then narrowed down to the two specific phenomena of explicitation and implicitation, which are reconceptualized in cognitive linguistic terms so as to fit into the overall framework of the thesis. The interface between STT and CL is then illustrated in a qualitative corpus-based investigation of explicitation and implicitation as indicators of text-context interaction in translation. The qualitative discussion of the results of the corpus analysis then brings together the theoretical strands of the thesis.

Elderly subjects are known to perform less well than young subjects on laboratory tests of recall from episodic memory. Although the elderly report increased difficulty in recalling information from semantic memory, experimental attempts to demonstrate this deficit are equivocal. It is suggested that studies which use multiple choice tests to measure recall from semantic memory fail to find age-related deficits because the tests provide cues to aid in recall, a procedure known to reduce age-related differences in recall from episodic memory. When time to retrieve a single item of information from semantic memory is measured, some studies show an age-related deficit while others do not. When episodic recall is tested using categorized lists, the elderly show recall deficits largely because they access fewer categories than do young subjects. Semantic cues increase the number of categories recalled by the elderly subjects more than for young subjects in such tasks, Since studies with young subjects show that recall both from categorized lists and from a taxonomic category (a semantic recall task) proceeds via temporal clusters of related items, it was hypothesized that elderly subjects would show increased difficulty in accessing clusters of related items in a semantic recall task, just as they do in recall of categorized lists. Further, it was hypothesized that semantic cues would reduce the time taken by the elderly to access sequential clusters of information from semantic memory. In one experiment, healthy, well-educated young (ages 19-21) and old (ages 67-72) subjects were required to perform a Bousfield task: to generate examples from two taxonomic categories, foods and animals, for 15 minutes. The slope-difference algorithm, a procedure developed by Gruenewald and Lockhead, was used to categorize each subject's inter- item times (IIT's) into times between temporal clusters (BIIT's) and times between items within temporal clusters (WIIT). In a second experiment, a group of old subjects were given semantic differential labels as cues for recall on one of their two experimental trials. Results for the first experiment showed no age effect on mean BUT, number of clusters, or average cluster size for recall of food items. There were also no age effects during the first 5 minutes of recall of animals. Later in the task old subjects had longer mean BIIT's for animals than did young subjects. The differences appeared to result because old subjects tended to report primarily mammals, while young subjects reported birds, fish, reptiles/amphibians, and insects as well, A trend toward slower mean WIIT's for old subjects was attributed to slower vocalization rates. Thus, Experiment 1 failed to demonstrate age- related differences in time to access successive clusters of related items in semantic memory or in the rate at which items in a cluster are emitted. Higher repetition rates observed for the old subjects do support an age-related deficit in recognition. In the second experiment, only half the subjects reported that the semantic -differential cues were helpful in finding new items. No effect of cuing was observed for the food category. Cuing did significantly reduce mean BIIT for animals during the last 5 minutes of recall. However, the actual effect of cuing on number of clusters produced was minimal. It was suggested that more practice with the cues might have led to higher cue usage and a greater impact on BIIT. / This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded by Ciara Healy.

Recent work in the area of social cognition has increasingly addressed the manner in which cognitive processes are affected by relatively long-term individual differences in the salience of certain social stimuli over others. The present set of studies explores the effects of differences in the relative personal importance of behavior domains on autobiographical memory and memory for frequency of occurrence — areas of memory deployed in day-to-day adaptation to the environment. Behavior domains of high and low personal importance were preassessed by means of questionnaire. In the autobiographical memory study, subjects were cued for positive, negative, rare, and commonplace personal memories in high and low importance domains. Memory dates and recall latencies were also collected. Subjects then evaluated their memories in terms of 18 attributes, including emotional and imagistic vividness, confidence of recall, pleasantness, frequency of rehearsal, and self-descriptiveness. In the frequency of occurrence study, each subject was presented with a list of 90 words that included target words representing his or her high and low importance domains. Whereas nontarget words varied in frequency, all domain words were presented with equal frequency. In the memory test, subjects were presented with pairs of target words and were asked to indicate which word in the pair had appeared most frequently. Subjects also ranked the frequency with which they have encountered domain words in various real-life social contexts. The autobiographical study yielded a large number of significant findings, many of them higher order interactions. In general, personal importance was found to mediate the effects of other variables on memory attributes; for instance, subjects judged positive memories as more descriptive of self than negative memories, but only in the case of high importance domains of behavior. Personal importance was also found to affect frequency estimates. Despite identical presentation frequencies, subjects estimated that high importance words were presented significantly more frequently in the list than were low importance words. Personal importance also had significant effects on estimates of frequency of encounter with domain words and behaviors in real-life contexts. The present findings underscore the need to examine further the impact of individual differences in the meaningfulness of stimuli on social cognitive and memorial processes. / This thesis was digitized as part of a project begun in 2014 to increase the number of Duke psychology theses available online. The digitization project was spearheaded by Ciara Healy.

The work covered in this thesis concerns automatic analysis of correctness of parallel programs running under relaxed memory models. When a parallel program is compiled and executed on a modern architecture, various optimizations may cause it to behave in unexpected ways. In particular, accesses to the shared memory may appear in the execution in the opposite order to how they appear in the control flow of the original program source code. The memory model determines which memory accesses can be reordered in a program on a given system. Any memory model that allows some observable memory access reordering is called a relaxed memory model. The reorderings may cause bugs and make the production of parallel programs more difficult. In this work, we consider three main approaches to analysis of correctness of programs running under relaxed memory models. An exact analysis for finite state programs running under the TSO memory model (Paper I). This technique is based on the well quasi ordering framework. An over-approximate analysis for integer programs running under TSO (Paper II), based on predicate abstraction combined with a buffer abstraction. Two under-approximate analysis techniques for programs running under the TSO, PSO or POWER memory models (Papers III and IV). The latter two techniques are based on stateless model checking and dynamic partial order reduction. In addition to determining whether a program is correct under a given memory model, the problem of automatic fence synthesis is also considered. A memory fence is an instruction that can be inserted into a program in order to locally disable some memory access reorderings. The fence synthesis problem is the problem of automatically inferring a minimal set of memory fences which restores sufficient order in a given program to ensure its correctness. / UPMARC

No description available.

Our planet currently faces an environmental crisis. Thus, understanding how to persuade people to donate their time and money to environmental organizations has become an ever-pressing concern. Prior research has shown that personality factors such as the behavioural inhibition system (BIS) and the behavioural activation system (BAS) along with promotion and prevention orientations can interact with message frame (i.e, gain- versus loss-framing) to induce regulatory or affective fit, thereby increasing the persuasiveness of the message (e.g. Higgins, 2000; Updegraff, Sherman, Luyster, & Mann, 2007). I propose and test the hypothesis that self-esteem will also interact with message frame to increase persuasion, even when BIS/BAS and promotion/prevention are controlled. I test this hypothesis in two experiments (Ns = 828 and 1614). In each study, participants completed a series of questionnaires assessing BIS/BAS, promotion/prevention, and self-esteem and then read either a gain- or loss-framed environmental message. Then participants completed a memory test concerning the message content. Finally, they completed a donation task in which they apportioned a lump sum of money to five different charities, including one environmental charity. Contrary to my hypotheses, there was no interaction between self-esteem and message frame in either study. However, participants in the loss-framed condition donated more money to the environmental charity than did participants in the gain-framed condition, and this difference was explained by participants' greater memory for the loss-framed message. Moreover, the second experiment demonstrated that participants also reported stronger intentions to behave pro-environmentally when they had donated money to the environmental charity. Thus it appears that loss-framed messages are more effective at persuading people to donate time and money to environmental causes. Due to the paucity and mixed-results of research on gain- and loss-framing in the environmental field, my research can help contribute to the few studies on this topic. The practical application of these results may prove useful to environmental charities and organizations. / Graduate / 2017-12-16 / 0451

This thesis focuses upon five novelists – B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, and Christine Brooke-Rose – whose works during the 1960s and early 1970s (Marwick’s “Long Sixties”) represent a unique approach to formal innovation; an approach contemporaneously labelled as “experimental”. A number of attempts have been made to categorise and group these texts with varying levels of success. Utilising new archive research, this thesis aims to unpack for the first time the personal relationships between these writers, their relationship to the historical moment in which they worked, and how these contextual elements impacted upon their experimental novels. The thesis is broken into six chapters; a long introductory chapter in which the group is placed in context and five chapters in which each writer’s career is reassessed individually. The B.S. Johnson chapter focuses upon how shifting class formations during the post-war era impact upon the writer’s sense of class consciousness within his texts. The Eva Figes chapter encounters her novels through the consideration of her contribution to feminist criticism and the impact of the Second World War. The Alan Burns chapter investigates the impact of William Burroughs upon British experimental writing and the politics of physical textual manipulation. The Ann Quin chapter engages with experimental theatre and new theories of being appearing in the Sixties which palpably inform her work. The Christine Brooke-Rose chapter reassesses her four novels between 1964 and 1975 in relation to the idea of “experimental literature” proposed in the rest of the thesis in order to argue its fundamental difference from the postmodernism Brooke-Rose practices in her novels after 1984. Overall, by presenting the “experimental” novelists of the Sixties in context this thesis argues that a unity of purpose can be located within the group in spite of the heterogeneity of aesthetics created by each individual writer; overcoming the primary challenge such a grouping presents to literary scholars.