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We have investigated the experience of individuals at play to better understand how narrative is constructed by collaboration in pretend object play. Our study was conducted with dyads that would play together in two distinct play sessions, with each session being video recorded. Each dyad was shown the video in a retrospective protocol collection. We utilized Grounded Theory as a means of developing and testing hypotheses based on the recorded play session. This process is meant to reveal information about how individual player cognition and interaction develops narrative during pretend play. This paper presents initial findings related to narrative development in collaborative pretend object play with the ambition to use these and future analyses to create intelligent agents capable of pretend play. Present findings demonstrate the construction of narrative and collaborative play is crafted through the making and accepting of play-advancing offers, similar to scene-advancing offers found in improvisational acting.

Jazz improvisation represents one of the more impressive examples of human creative behavior, but as yet there has been little systematic investigation of its cognitive bases. The results of three studies that this investigation comprises illustrate the optimizations of thinking and behavior that underlie the capacities of skillful jazz improvisers, enabling them to meet the demands of improvised performance effectively and efficiently. Studies 1 and 2 provide evidence of a process for generating and controlling musical ideas that improvisers can enact with little conscious mediation. In Study 1, this was demonstrated by the ability of experienced improvisers to generate well-formed improvised solos during dual-task conditions, in which they allocated attentional resources to a secondary nonmusical task. In Study 2, the contributions of nonconscious processes to jazz improvisation were inferred from experienced improvisers’ descriptions of their intentions for upcoming music during improvised solos. Their descriptions contained almost no explicit details of the music they were about to play; v inexperienced improvisers, contrastingly, conceived of upcoming music largely in terms of its specific details (e.g., note selection, the quotation of licks). Study 3 examines the perceptions of two musicians performing as a duo, both serving at different times as soloist and accompanist. Here, the soloist’s attention was focused on the developmental and associative implications of his musical ideas, whereas the accompanist’s attention was devoted primarily to assessing the aesthetic and logistical implications of the soloist’s part while remaining vigilant for opportunities to directly interact. The findings in these studies illustrate the extent to which expert jazz musicians acquire and refine procedures for generating well-formed musical ideas at a minimal cognitive cost. The efficiency of the improvisational process was evidenced by the limited demands that generating novel music placed on the skilled improvisers’ attention, and in the abstract relationship between experts’ musical intentions and the specific actions they produced in bringing their intentions to fruition. / text

Two experiments investigated how the cues of attractiveness, masculinity, and averageness contribute independently or jointly to elicit 6- and 12-month-old infants' attention toward male faces. In Experiment 1, infant interest in high vs. low attractive male faces depended on the masculinity of the face pair (i.e., infants looked longer at high relative to low attractive, low masculine male faces and looked longer at low relative to high attractive, medium masculine male faces), and infant interest in high vs. low masculine male faces depended on the infant's age (i.e., 12-month-olds, but not 6-month-olds, looked longer at low relative to high masculine male faces). In Experiment 2, infants looked longer at low relative to high masculine male faces only when the faces within the pair differed in both masculinity and attractiveness, and female infants looked longer at a low masculine averaged male face than low attractive, high masculine male faces. Although the combined pattern of results suggested that infant interest might be directed more toward low than high masculine male faces, particularly high attractive, low masculine male faces, the face pairings within which the longer looking occurred differed across the two studies. To ensure that these somewhat different results were not due to infants' inability to discriminate among the faces used in the studies, a third study demonstrated that infants at both ages could clearly differentiate among the faces used in the first two studies. The similarity of low masculine male faces to female faces is discussed as a possible reason for infant interest in these types of faces, and methodological differences between the first two studies are discussed as possibly accounting for the slightly different pattern of results. The results have implications for the development of attractiveness and masculinity stereotypes for male faces, and how well findings from the infant face perception literature generalize from female to male faces. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Psychiatry / Master / Master of Philosophy

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