Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Linguistics, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 10, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Advisers: David B. Pisoni; Kenneth J. de Jong.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Lehigh University, 2009. / Adviser: Michael J. Gill.

Since its inception in the early 1970s, the minimal group paradigm (MGP) has proved a popular method of testing intergroup phenomena. In addition, the paradigm supplied early evidence that led to the formation of Tajfel and Turner's (1979, 1986) Social Identity Theory. The original studies utilizing the MGP were developed to find a baseline intergroup situation that produced ingroup favoritism. Later minimal group studies confirmed a mere categorization effect--that is, simply categorizing subjects into one of two groups, even on a trivial basis, was enough to bring on discriminatory behavior. The present study seeks to clarify the mere categorization phenomenon. A minimal group scenario in some ways represents an intergroup environment in which discrimination is fostered. It is suggested that subjects who believe they will have to justify their allocation decisions to others will be less likely to exhibit ingroup-favoring behavior. In addition to typical minimal group findings of discrimination under non-accountable conditions, results also show that the presence of accountability eliminates discrimination under conditions of high ingroup status and majority ingroup standing. Discriminatory behavior is revived when the ingroup is in a numerical minority.

Cognitive-experiential self-theory maintains that there are two principal ways of processing information. The first is in a rational mode; the second is in an experiential (emotional) mode. Previous research has demonstrated that when participants are motivated to process information experientially, they tend to rely on heuristic cues in their decision making. However, when participants are motivated to think in a rational mode, they devote greater attention to the information presented to them, and make more accurate decisions. This may have an impact on legal decision making. Attorneys in personal injury trials often attempt to present their case in a manner directed at either rational or emotional processing, under the assumption that emotional jurors will be supportive of the plaintiff while rational jurors will be supportive of the defendant. However, in an attempt to motivate emotional processing attorneys may inadvertently activate heuristic cues that have an impact on juror decision making, such as the defendant attractiveness bias (previous research has demonstrated that attractive defendants receive more lenient sentences than unattractive defendants). The hypothesis that an attractiveness-leniency effect would occur when individuals were in an experiential mode, but not when they were in a rational mode was tested. Mock jurors were put into either an experiential or rational mode through the use of a number of materials and trial evidence. They were then presented with a photograph of a defendant who was either high or low in physical attractiveness. Following this, a transcript of a personal injury trial and relevant jury instructions were presented. Finally, participants rendered verdicts on a number of measures including monetary damages, liability verdicts, and assessments of negligence. The results indicated that an attractiveness-leniency effect was operative when individuals were in an experiential mode, but not when they were in a rational mode. However, this effect appears to be limited to variables that are emotionally oriented, rather than ones that require analytic reasoning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential implications of cognitive-experiential self-theory on juror decision making in a variety of related areas.

The present study addresses a core issue in the study of speech perception, the question of how stable phonological representations are accessed from an inherently variable speech signal. In particular, the research investigates the perception of accented English speech by native and non-native listeners. It is known from previous research that foreign-accented speech is harder for native listeners to process than native-accented speech. The reason for this lies in not only qualities of the input (deviation from native production norms, for example) but also in qualities of the listener. Specifically, listeners' speech perception systems are tuned from an early age to pay attention to useful distinctions in the language environment but to attenuate differences which are not useful. This quality of the listeners' speech processing system suggests that in addition to being native speakers of a language or languages, we are also native listeners. However, what is a liability for native listeners (non-native input) may be a benefit for non-native listeners. When the foreign accent is derived from a single language shared between the speaker and the listener, application of native-language processing strategies to the accented input may result in more efficient processing of the input. The experiments in this dissertation address this possibility. In an experiment involving Dutch listeners processing Dutch-accented and American English-accented sentence materials, a reaction time advantage was observed for the mutually-accented materials. Experiments testing the main hypothesis with native Spanish-listening participants showed a different pattern of results. These participants, who had more experience with English overall that the Dutch participants, performed similarly to native-listening controls in displaying faster verification times for native accented materials than mutually-accented materials. These experiments lead to the conclusion that native-like listening, as assessed by the sentence verification paradigm employed in these experiments, can be achieved by non-native listeners. In particular, non-native listeners with little experience processing spoken English benefit from hearing input produced in a matching accent. Non-native listeners with sufficiently more experience processing spoken English, however, perform similar to native listeners, displaying an advantage for native accented input.

Smells are being included as key components of product offerings in an ever increasing number of product categories. However, this practice is guided only by intuitive beliefs that the addition of smells might lead to richer brand identities, help brand preference etc. This is because olfaction research in marketing is in its infancy while studies in branding have focused on strategies to extend a brand's existing equity rather than on issues relating to the initial formation of brand knowledge structures. Thus, there is little understanding of the processes that govern consumer learning of products that involve olfactory in addition to visual and verbal elements. This research examines the role of smells vs. visual/verbal elements in the encoding process of such multimodal brands. Our primary focus is on exploring the effects of congruency among the various elements on the derivation of olfactory associations and learning of the brand. Subjects in the study were exposed to fictitious brands of bath oils and asked to rate the appeal of each brand. Subjects examined the triads of brand elements (i.e., smells, colors and labels) in one of two sequences and the combinations that represented each brand differed based on various congruency conditions. Subjects then undertook a recognition task that was devised to test their learning of the associations between the brand elements. The results suggest that visual/verbal elements play a dominant role in shaping encoding of the product offering. Visual/verbal associations were learned quite easily, regardless of congruency. By contrast, associations between the odors and the labels or colors were learned more accurately when the relevant pair was congruent. Further, the labels and colors seemed to guide the learning of smells. Thus, when the smell was the sole incongruent element and the visual/verbal cues consistently pointed in a different direction, the odor was aligned with the other elements. Consequently, overall brand learning was contingent on the number of congruent cues that were present to assist in the derivation of olfactory associations. These findings provide guidelines to marketers faced with various branding decisions relating to product offerings that incorporate smells.

This study explores the underlying cognitive structure of a small number of bilinguals, seeking to determine whether or not it is cognitively possible to develop symmetrically conceptual mediation between the two languages of a bilingual. Previous research has consistently found asymmetries in response and priming times in experiments with bilinguals. The pattern of these asymmetries and the conditions under which they were obtained, have motivated the development of the current model of bilingual representation and processing, the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) of Kroll and Stewart (1994). Level of proficiency has been an important factor in explaining the asymmetric connections posited by this model, arguing that the more proficient bilinguals become, the more heavily they rely on conceptual mediation between the two languages. This account implies that a bilingual who began learning both languages from early childhood would develop a fully, conceptually mediated system of language interconnection. This symmetry in lexical architecture would be reflected in symmetric, as opposed to asymmetric priming effects in cross-language tasks. In order to test this prediction, a series of single-subject, cross-language experiments were conducted with three native, and two non-native Chinese-English bilinguals. Masked priming was used in both lexical decision and episodic recognition tasks. It was reasoned that if the hypothesized asymmetric structure of the RHM is truly a consequence of proficiency, that the native bilinguals would show symmetric priming effects, and the non-natives asymmetric effects. On the other hand, if the asymmetric structure of the RHM is not a consequence of proficiency, both native and non-native bilinguals would show asymmetric priming effects. Among both the native and later-learning bilinguals, a consistent pattern of asymmetric priming was found in lexical decision utilizing the same presentation procedures which produced within-language priming. Cross-language episodic recognition tasks followed the same asymmetric pattern of priming. These results suggest that the levels and types of interconnection between a bilingual's two lexicons, while affected by proficiency, are not absolutely determined by it. It is concluded that the development of symmetrical conceptual mediation between the two languages of a bilingual may not be possible.

False memories are an important problem in many spheres of life. It is necessary to identify what kinds of memory processes cause them in order to prevent their negative consequences. This study confirmed most of fuzzy-trace theory's assumptions about the type of memory processes that underlie spontaneous and implanted false memories (Brainerd and Reyna, in press). Following the MISINFORM model's procedures, 131 university Mexican students listened to a list of words and took two recognition tests (immediate and one-week delayed). Testing lists included four types of targets and four types of distractors. Targets were: (1) control, (2) repeated/nonmisinformed, (3) nonrepeated/nonmisinformed, and (4) repeated/misinformed. Distractors were: (1) control-related distractors, (2) misinforming-related distractors that supplanted targets during misinformation-RD1, (3) misinforming related distractors presented with their instantiating targets during misinformation- RD2, and (4) unrelated distractors. Analysis of variance of hits and false alarms showed the misinformation and mere-memory testing effects. Stochastic dependency analyses found neither persistence of true nor of false memories. MISINFORM analyses showed that true memories are due to identity judgments about targets, spontaneous false memories are due to false identity and similarity judgements about related distractors, and implanted false memories are due to false identity judgments about misinforming related distractors and nonidentity judgments about misinformed targets. MISINFORM also showed that targets cue the retrieval of verbatim memories, related distractors cue the retrieval of gist memories about targets, and misinforming distractors cue verbatim memories of misinformation.

Three experiments examined how humans make same-different judgments of simultaneously presented letter pairs using the entire English alphabet, in two tasks: a letter category task in which pairs of letters in different letter cases (instances) belonged to the same (e.g., "X x") or different (e.g., "X o") letter category; and a letter instance task in which pairs of letters in the same letter category belonged to the same (e.g., "X X") or different (e.g., "X x") letter instance. Three experiments used these two tasks to present letter pairs in different arrangements: Experiment 1, centrally to both cerebral hemispheres; Experiment 2, laterally to either the left or right cerebral hemisphere; Experiment 3, laterally to either different hemispheres or to the same hemisphere. The roles of nominal identity (letter names), orthographic identity (how letter graphemes correspond to letter phonemes), and abstract visual-form identity (letter categories) were investigated by examination of letter confusability. The results indicate that visual and not nominal identity is used to perform the letter category task. In addition, women (but not men) used orthographic identity to solve the letter category task during some conditions of all three Experiments. A new kind of analysis indicates that, across-sex, letter category predicts 82% of the variance in response latency to same-category judgments, but only 14% of the variance in response latency to same -instance judgments, functionally dissociating form-invariant (category) and form-variant (instance) visual information. Women (but not men) use form-invariant (category) information when making different-instance judgments--even when such information is insufficient for solving that task--and consequently, women's cerebral asymmetries are shifted and their interhemispheric communication of information is selectively impaired (relative to men) when this information conflicts with that necessary to solve the task. Thus, the kind of information, rather than the number of cognitive processes , determines how processing is lateralized and integrated across the cerebral hemispheres in letter matching tasks. Comparisons of presentations to both and single hemispheres indicate that hemispheric dominance is dissociated from hemispheric asymmetry as a function of sex-dependent attentional strategy and informational conflict in interhemispheric interaction.

The "signals approach" is an articulation of signal detection theory (SDT) as a model of decision-making in behavioral ecology. Though previous models of decision-making have taken into account variation in the quality of resources among which choices are made, variation in cues that signal quality has remained unaddressed. Treating stimuli as signals, accounting for stimulus variation as a source of uncertainty, reveals that such variation can have significant consequences on choice behavior. The signals approach functions alongside traditional models to produce a more full understanding of decision making. Here, I apply SDT in novel ways to predator response to aposematic prey, mimicry, discrimination learning, and sexual selection. Using data from existing literature, I show that the signals approach offers an account of predator response to aposematic prey alternative to traditional explanations based on associative learning. The mistakes that predators make may be better characterized as "false alarm" attacks rather than due to poor associative learning. Under SDT, the number of false alarms is expected to rise as aposematic prey abundance rises from rare to moderate levels. This increase in attacks is contrary to expectations based on associative learning, wherein the mistakes are expected to decrease or remain constant. SDT explains otherwise enigmatic empirical data. I develop a novel expression of SDT by questioning the "integrated signals" assumption. Changing this assumption extends the applicability of signal detection theory, providing a model of generalization and discrimination learning. This model is contrasted to associative learning and yields a novel explanation of the "peak shift" phenomenon. Peak shift can be characterized as a directional preference for novel stimuli under conditions of signal uncertainty. In flower discrimination learning experiments designed within a signal detection framework, bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) demonstrated peak shift. Peak shift has the potential to act as an agent of selection; pollinator selection of flower morphology and sexual selection of exaggerated traits provide examples. As a model of decision-making, signal detection theory can yield insight into receiver (e.g., predator) choice behavior and the consequences of that choice behavior on the subsequent evolution of the signals (e.g., prey appearance) upon which decisions are made.