Past research has shown that accessing a memory allows faster subsequent access to the memory activated as well as to related information (priming). There has been much research devoted to implicit category priming (unintentional priming of a category of information), but this research has not determined the number of categories that can be implicitly primed simultaneously. The goal of the present quantitative study was to address that gap. Twenty participants (ages 27-54 years, M=44 years), who volunteered through an online participant pool, were presented with 2 tasks over the Internet. A scrambled phrase task implicitly primed 5 unrelated categories and a lexical decision (LD) task measured the priming (mean time between tasks = 42 seconds). Resulting primed and unprimed LD response latency distributions were strongly, positively skewed, which obscured individual priming effects. Gaussian parameters were extracted to overcome this skew, and the distributions were created for analysis. Dunnett's multiple comparisons post-hoc test following a 1-way ANOVA showed that 2 of the 5 categories remained significantly primed. Follow-up research should determine the reliability of this value. This value, and its range (to be identified in follow-up studies) would provide a means for comparing lesson efficacy and teacher performance. The results of this research also replicate previous research demonstrating long-term implicit category priming.

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The brain is composed of multiple systems that interact during cognition and behavior. Concurrently performing two or more tasks that compete for processing from a common system resource typically results in decremented performance, referred to as interference, for one or more of the tasks as compared to single-task performance. This interference is a hallmark of the dual-task experimental design. The purpose of this experiment is to investigate the involvement of cerebellar cortex in trace eyeblink conditioning by utilizing the traditional dual-task design. Timed-interval finger tapping, a motor function mediated by the cerebellar cortex, and several different cognitive tasks representing dissociable distributed brain memory systems were co-administered with trace eyeblink conditioning. If cerebellar cortex is involved in trace eyeblink conditioning, then timed-interval finger tapping should significantly interfere with acquisition rate for conditioned responding. Performance variables from trace eyeblink conditioning were analyzed to investigate interference effects of timed-interval finger tapping and the various cognitive tasks. Results from a series of mixed model repeated measures ANOVAs indicate that the acquisition rate and magnitude of trace conditioning was not significantly reduced in the timed-interval tapping group compared to the control group, although participants did demonstrate evidence of inferior learning. This finding suggests that cerebellar cortex is not critically involved during acquisition of trace conditioning, however it is to be interpreted with caution as methodological and theoretical confounds may preclude a straightforward conclusion. / Psychology

This thesis presents research aimed at elucidating neurophysiological and neuropsychological correlates of two psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia and PTSD. Although psychiatric disorders are not traditionally known for featuring cognitive deficits, research over the past three decades has revealed that deficits in many aspects of cognitive functioning are present across a wide range of disorders. Here, we aim to further our understanding of these deficits and provide evidence of the clinical utility of neurophysiological correlates of cognitive dysfunction. The cause and course of cognitive deficits in PTSD is poorly understood, and an investigation of one potential explanatory mechanism, dissociative symptomatology, is presented in the first part of this thesis. Our results suggest that dissociative symptomatology plays a role in cognitive dysfunction in PTSD, as among the clinical variables tested (including PTSD symptomatology, dissociative symptoms, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms) dissociative symptoms were the only significantly correlated variables to cognitive dysfunction in a sample of combat-trauma exposed veterans with and without PTSD. In the second part of this thesis, we investigate the potential clinical utility of a neurophysiological biomarker for semantic processing deficits, the N400, in schizophrenia. Our results indicate that N400 measures are stable over a one week period and therefore may be clinically useful as a neurophysiological biomarker for semantic processing abnormalities in schizophrenia. Overall, these two studies contribute to our knowledge of cognitive deficits in psychiatric disorders and demonstrate their complexity as well as their potential to provide clinically useful tools to aid in the identification of novel treatments targeted at ameliorating cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and PTSD. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

The purpose of the study was to test whether it was possible to prime the participants to think more about the environment and thereby pay more attention to the green advertising signs then the red ones. To fulfill the purpose, the framing of a question that was constructed was: “is there a difference between group “primed” and group “non-primed” in which color they pay more attention to in advertising signs?”.  In order to be able to test the question, a questionnaire study was carried out with an experimental design where half of the participants had to read a text about the environment and half had to answer questions about which advertising signs they noticed first directly. The participants were collected through Facebook groups. The random samples that were taken consisted of 100 people. The results obtained from the collected data were done using a Chi-square test. The result showed that there was a significant difference between the groups in how they answered, “don’t know”. However, there was no significant difference between the groups in how they answered that they noticed green and red in the advertising signs.  Further discussion was made on how the environmental text that half of the participants read seems to have made them more uncertain in their choices and do not seem to want to choose any of the advertising signs. Can the results given indicate that the participants associate environment with not only green but also that consumption and advertising are often associated with a bad environment.

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The Internet has changed the way society communicates with one another. One of the organizations that utilize the Internet in order to communicate with their audience is universities. The imagery and information that is featured in the homepages of university websites can portray a certain perception of that university. Universities were found to be diverse in the ethnic background of the persons used for their homepage imagery. The way minority characters were found to be portrayed in gave a general idea of what exist within academia as to how they view and portray minority groups.

This study applies priming, framing, and exemplification theories to examine the ways in which photos published with a news story influenced readers’ judgments about the ethnicities of the people receiving emergency hunger services. Of particular interest were the perceptions of Caucasian respondents about minorities, and Hispanic perceptions about African Americans and other Hispanics. A sample of 506 college students was randomly assigned to read one of three versions of an online news article about emergency hunger services in Central Florida. One version included two photographs of African American adults receiving food at a food bank. The second version included two photographs of Hispanic adults receiving food at a food bank. The third version was text-only and included no photographs. All three articles included base-rate statistics of ethnicities using emergency hunger services. Results showed images influence the way Caucasians and Hispanics perceive those people suffering from hunger. Key findings included that Caucasians in the study were susceptible to Hispanic primes, which altered their views on their perceptions about the number of Hispanics receiving emergency food services. However, Caucasians’ perceptions of African Americans did not change. Additionally, Hispanic participants were affected by primes in such a way that limitations on societal advancement were perceived more strongly than those of the Caucasian participants. The difference between Caucasians’ stereotypes regarding African Americans and Hispanics is an interesting development. The role of priming stereotype in relation to social issues is discussed

This thesis examines the influence of morphological and identity priming to understand how repetition influences word recognition and novel word learning in first (L1) and second (L2) language adults. The following questions are addressed: How does morphological relatedness between repeated words influence (i) word recognition in natural reading and (ii) novel word learning? (iii) What interactions exist between word repetition and selective attention in novel word learning? Chapter 2 addresses question (i), finding little evidence of morphological priming effects (i.e., faster recognition of a word following a morphologically related word) in L2 reading, and none in L1. The effects of identity priming were ubiquitous in both groups. Chapter 3 examines question (ii) for L1 readers. Low-frequency base words (e.g., caltrop) and novel complex forms (e.g., caltroper) of those bases were primed by two repetitions of identical forms or alternate forms. Learning performance was consistently as good or better after identity priming than after morphological priming. However, orthographic and semantic learning for base forms was stronger in the morphological priming condition. Chapter 4 examines question (iii). Attention was manipulated by delivering attention-inducing instructions, while the control group received no instructions. Exposure was manipulated by embedding novel words either 2, 4, or 8 times. The presence of instruction led to a short-lived speed-up in eye-movements and faster recognition of novel words. Critically, L1 learners reached optimal performance in the post-tests earlier (after 4 exposures), while L2 learners’ performance continued to improve through more exposures. Overall, this thesis shows that morphological priming facilitated L2 visual word recognition and L1 novel word learning when a complex form is a prime, and the base form is a target. We discuss reasons for this asymmetric effect and these results in the framework of the theories of word learning and morphological processing. / Dissertation / Candidate in Philosophy