<p> Mothers&rsquo; socialization has been shown to impact prosocial tendencies in children. Discussions during joint book reading may provide a context to observe mothers&rsquo; strategies for evoking emotions. More specifically, mother-child talk about emotions, cognitive states, and inductive reasoning may enhance children&rsquo;s perspective taking about characters experiencing diversity. However, mothers may differ in their amount and type of talk if the characters in the story are from an in-group or out-group. While not all mothers may engage in these strategies during book reading, evoking sympathy in children has been shown to predict children&rsquo;s prosocial attitudes and behaviors toward others in need. The goal of this study was to explore mothers&rsquo; discourse strategies during a joint book reading task with first and second graders. Moreover, this study aimed to test whether reading and discussing a story about an in-group or out-group member differed and whether certain differences increased donating behavior and prosocial attitudes and from pre- to post-tests. In the main results, children&rsquo;s donations did not significantly increase from pre-test to post-test as hypothesized nor did donations differ between the in-group or out-group story condition. However, children&rsquo;s prosocial attitudes toward both in-group and out-group children improved equally from pre-test to post-test. Also as hypothesized, maternal discourse differed between story conditions. More specifically, there was an interaction between child gender and story condition where mothers with daughters used more emotion talk and cognitive state talk when discussing out-group members than did mothers with sons. Exploratory analyses revealed that mothers who used more emotion talk and inductive reasoning had children with lower prosocial attitudes when averaged across time of measurement toward both the in-group and out-group. Alternatively, children&rsquo;s trait sympathy predicted higher average donations and prosocial attitudes. Finally, children&rsquo;s civic identity scores predicted children&rsquo;s average prosocial attitudes and maternal discourse variables (i.e., emotion words, cognitive state words, and number of inductive sequences). Future research should continue to investigate the relationship between children&rsquo;s civic identity and maternal discourse, as this was the first study to explore the two. In conclusion, inducing sympathy in children may be an effective strategy for fostering more favorable attitudes toward other people in need regardless of their group identification. Additionally, individual child characteristics may predict children&rsquo;s inclination to help others in need; however, aspects of mothers discourse may hinder such prosocial tendencies with children if they induce personal distress.</p>

<p> Techniques to accurately measure situation awareness (SA) are important when designing systems that optimize operator performance. The two most prominent SA probe techniques vary based on screen visibility and situation pause during question presentation. The current study used four probe techniques based on all possible configurations of these factors. Air traffic control students controlled traffic in 10 scenarios that included all four probe techniques and a baseline no-probe condition across two degrees of automation. Probe questions varied on two levels of priority and specificity, creating four question types. Based on operator performance variations and subjective ratings, results support administration of probes with a visible screen and while the situation is paused. No method showed superior sensitivity to SA differences. Finally, the current study replicated findings that low priority information is offloaded to the environment and accessed as needed, supporting the situated approach towards SA.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, 1995. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-10, Section: B, page: 5806. Chair: Christine Zalewski.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: B, page: 1356. Adviser: Monica Fabiani. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 150-161) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: B, page: 3302. Adviser: Daniel J. Simons. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-117) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

<p> The purpose of this series of studies was to evaluate the extent to which a non-reinforcement based correlation training procedure could combine with a Yes/No evaluation method to establish and test for derived equivalent and spatial relations. In the first experiment, participants were trained stimulus pairs between A-B and B-C across three stimulus sets. Participants were subsequently tested using a Yes/No evaluative procedure of untrained B-A, C-B, A-C, and C-A relations. Experiment two utilized the same training structure as well as testing for the same derived relations, however used a complex semi-random trial structure. In both experiments 1 and 2 the majority of participants responded accurately to all of the possible tested derived relations. In experiment 3, the same training and testing procedure was employed to establish spatial relations. Tests for possible derived spatial relations were observed for the majority of participants. The three experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of a correlation training and Yes/No evaluation procedure that to date has not been reported in the derived relational responding literature. </p><p>

<p> Since Csikszentmihalyi identified the psychological experience of flow over 40 years ago, the experiences have been heralded as the optimum human function and prescriptive to high levels of well-being and quality of life. Csikszentmihalyi theorized that flow represented an autonomous reality that represented an altered state unlike any other human experience. Flow states emerged from intrinsically motivated behavior that represented a fragile balance between the level of enjoyment from novel task stimulation and a sense of self-efficacy required to meet the specific task demands. However, flow is not well understood and research is skewed toward to phenomenological investigations that described the nature of the experience and many of the significant variables of interest across a diverse range of activities. The lack of experimental exploration of flow has created fundamental research gaps. The general problem is that flow is predictive and related to positive psychological outcomes; however, current assessment methodologies and research have not provided the functional neuroanatomy involved. The purpose of this quantitative experimental study was to examine the hypofrontality theory that a flow state occurs concurrently with decreased cognitive activation in the frontal cortex (hypofrontality) during the flow phenomena. Participants consisted of expert piano players that were assessed for changes in alpha activity in the frontal cortex during a flow and non-flow condition. Results from the paired samples paired t-test conducted revealed there were statistically significant differences in alpha power in the experimental conditions (DV) versus the control conditions (IV; <i> M</i> = 93, <i>SD</i> = 105, <i>N</i> = 14), <i> t</i>(13) = 3.29, <i>p</i> = .006. These results supported the main hypothesis that there is increased alpha power in the frontal cortex during flow states. This finding provides the first empirically validated biomarker for a flow. These results will assist future research to understand flow experiences as a conceptually unambiguous variable.</p><p>

<p> One of the quintessential properties of the human semantic system is its ability to flexibly combine the meanings of smaller pieces into larger wholes. However, not all smaller conceptual pieces are created equal; concepts differ in the extent to which they can drive meaning composition. Some concepts can drive semantic composition by establishing relationships with other concepts, while others cannot. For example, we know the concept labelled by &ldquo;friend&rdquo; can drive composition, since one cannot be a friend without being <i>someone</i>&rsquo;s friend, while an animal can be a cat without standing in a similar relationship. We can thus divide the conceptual space of humans into two sections: relational concepts labelled by words like &ldquo;friend&rdquo;, and non-relational concepts like the one labelled by &ldquo;cat&rdquo;. </p><p> Evidence in favor of this division indicates that in early childhood humans are aware of the relationality of concepts (Smiley and Brown 1979; Mirman and Graziano 2012), and as we age, relational concepts remain extremely common in our lexicon, making up nearly half of the adult English vocabulary (Asmuth and Gentner, 2005; Gentner, 2005). Some relational words have been extensively studied by cognitive psychologists and formal linguists alike. One relatively mature set of investigations utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural basis of relational verb meaning, and finds that relational (i.e., transitive) verbs drive activity in left perisylvian cortical regions more than their intransitive counterparts (Meltzer-Asscher et al., 2015; Thompson et al., 2010, 2007; Bornkessel et al., 2005; Ben-Shachar et al., 2003). These investigations attribute this activity to verb-specific or event-specific information that is stored as part of the verb&rsquo;s conceptual representation. Some support for this comes from Binder and Desai 2011 that holds that the left AG is a main semantic hub that specializes in event processing. However, formal linguistic investigations suggest that relationality should be independent of verbhood or eventivity; it is an independent abstract property of some lexical items which enables them to establish relationships and drive semantic composition. The neural basis of relationality and whether it can be independent of verbhood and eventivity is still relatively underexplored. As relationality straddles the boundary between syntax and semantics, disentangling the contributions of various linguistic features, such as syntactic category, eventivity, and plurality to left AG activity becomes a crucial exercise&mdash;one that a linguist is uniquely poised to address. </p><p> A main candidate region for relational processing is the left Angular Gyrus (lAG), because prior literature suggests it is sensitive to at least some of the features that a region that processes relationality would be sensitive to. In addition to being implicated in tasks that probe the argument structure of verbs, the left AG was found to be the most consistently activated region across numerous semantic tasks in a recent, large-scale meta-analysis (Binder and Desai, 2011), prompting it to be dubbed a domain-general &rdquo;semantic&rdquo; hub (Bonner et al., 2013; Binder and Desai, 2011). Because of this, this dissertation reports the results of three MEG experiments and one computational experiment, and focuses on the left AG and surrounding perisylvian cortical regions, and uses Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate its role in relational processing. </p><p> Chapter 2 asks whether left AG tracks relationality, the eventivity of verbs, or a word&rsquo;s combinatorial context, and finds a main effect of relationality from 170&ndash;260 ms after the visual presentation of the target noun, and no other effects of the other factors, suggesting that it is indeed relationality and not eventivity (or context) that drives left AG argument structure findings. </p><p> Chapter 3 asks whether relationality effects could be driven by something other than the relationality of concepts, namely, by the quantity of concepts. In addition to being activated for numerous number-related tasks (see Dehaene et al. 2003 a.o., for a review), the left posterior perisylvian cortex has been found to be differentially active for plurals as opposed to for singulars (Domahs et al., 2012), suggesting that the lAG might track semantic information about plurality. Contrasting plural and singular nouns that vary in relationality, I replicate the relationality effect, and find no interaction with plurality, suggesting that, indeed, left posterior perisylvian relationality effects cannot be explained as a type of quantity processing. </p><p> Chapter 4 presents a filler experiment to the second experiment, which investigates the mass-count distinction and asks whether left AG activity is sensitive to countability and whether it interacts with plurality. I observed a main effect of countability (count nouns > mass nouns), in a broad swath of left hemisphere from 295&ndash;465 ms after noun presentation, and additionally observe a left frontal effect of plurality (bare nouns > plurals), paralleling what I found in Chapter 3. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.) </p><p>

<p> As adolescents transition to middle school, math confidence and performance declines (Eccles et al., 1993; Lee, Statuto, &amp; Kadar-Voivodas, 1983). These declines are typically attributed to social and maturational changes (Eccles, Lord, &amp; Midgley, 1991; Simmons &amp; Blyth, 1987). In this dissertation, I explore the hypothesis that low parent support for schoolwork is also responsible.</p><p> Latino-American adolescents are especially at risk for math difficulties. Maintaining adolescents&rsquo; engagement and performance in math are important goals for mothers because high levels of both are requisites for many professional careers. This dissertation will focus on Latino-American families to determine if mothers&rsquo; homework involvement is associated with changes in children&rsquo;s math-related outcomes across the transition to secondary school.</p><p> Parental involvement in math homework is assumed to mitigate declines in math performance during this transition. Cognitive models suggest that involved parents utilize scaffolding (Rogoff &amp; Gardner, 1984) and instruction to ensure math achievement (Pomerantz &amp; Moorman, 2010). Motivational models suggest that involved parents foster math engagement by bolstering child confidence, modeling management strategies, and promoting values that encourage children to work hard (Grolnick &amp; Slowiaczek, 1994; Simpkins, Fredricks, &amp; Eccles, 2015). However, empirical evidence in support of the importance of parents in math achievement is limited. While positive forms of involvement co-occur with better math outcomes (Bhanot &amp; Jovanovic, 2005; Rice et al., 2013), no studies have examined such associations longitudinally. Children who are uninterested in math may be more susceptible to the effects of parental homework involvement because they lack internal motivation for mastery that underlies performance in other children.</p><p> The present study examines the extent to which Latina-American mothers&rsquo; involvement in math homework is effective in preventing declines in child math-related outcomes (i.e., perceptions of math ability, etc) during the transition to middle school. Child math interest was postulated to moderate this association. Results indicated that low maternal homework involvement predicts worsening child math-related outcomes, but only for children who were intrinsically uninterested in math.</p><p> The findings hold important implications for parents, who must work to ensure that they remain engaged in their children&rsquo;s activities, especially if children appear uninterested in math.</p><p>

<p> The vigilance decrement is the decline in performance over time that characterizes tasks requiring sustained attention. Resource Theory proposes that the vigilance decrement is due to information processing assets that become depleted with use. Resource theorists must thus identify these assets and the process of how resources are depleted and replenished. The Microlapse Theory of Fatigue (MTF) identifies the resource that is depleted when performing a sustained attention task as the central executive attentional network. The depletion of the central executive network resource results in microlapses or brief gaps in attention that prevent the perception and processing of information. The MTF can explain various effects in the sustained attention literature regarding how resources are depleted. However, the MTF alone cannot explain the event rate effect or the motivation effect because it does not include replenishment mechanisms that can occur during a sustained attention task. To better understand the process of replenishment, participants were assigned to varying event rate and external motivation conditions in a novel paradigm that could measure the perceptual processing of a trial over time. These stages of processing included when participants looked at the first stimulus, looked at the second stimulus, and responded. In Experiment 1, it was found that the vigilance decrement was more severe for faster event rates, consistent with Resource Theory and counter to the MTF. In Experiment 2, the event rate effect was replicated, but unexpectedly, external motivation did not impact the vigilance decrement. In both experiments it was found that for the stages of processing that involved looking at the stimuli, more slowing was found as event rate increased. Additionally, more slowing was detected earlier in the processing of a trial than later. These results supported the process of microlapses inducing the vigilance decrement due to not having enough time to perceive, encode, and respond to stimuli, as described by the MTF. It was interpreted that the interaction between time-on-task and event rate was due to opportunistic breaks that occurred more frequently in slower event rate conditions. The finding that more slowing occurred earlier in processing was interpreted as evidence for internal rewards related to learning impacting the speed of processing a trial. To explain these findings, I propose the Microlapse Theory of Fatigue with Replenishment (MTFR) a process model similar to MTF, but that includes additional replenishment mechanisms related to opportunistic rest periods and internal rewards. The Microlapse Theory of Fatigue with Replenishment (MTFR) closely correlates to the empirical data and is an important step forward in the effort to build a comprehensive model of sustained attention.</p>