<p> Discrepant findings in past research have led to two competing hypotheses regarding threat&rsquo;s effect on political ideology: the worldview defense and the conservative-shift hypotheses. According to the former, supported by terror management theory (TMT), threat will cause liberals to become more liberal and conservatives to become more conservative (political polarization). According to the latter, supported by system justification theory (SJT) and the theory of political conservatism as motivated social cognition, threat will cause liberals to become more conservative, and conservatives either to become more conservative or to remain at their current level of conservatism. To pit these two hypotheses against one another in a single experiment, it was tested whether making participants&rsquo; political views salient might influence the way that threat affects political views. It was predicted that when liberals wrote about their liberal views and when conservatives wrote about their conservative views, to make their political views more salient, threat would lead to greater political polarization. This was predicted because past TMT research has shown that threat will lead to a more fervent adherence to salient values, not to all aspects of a worldview. Thus, the salience of people&rsquo;s political views should make them more likely to adhere to them following threat. On the other hand, it was predicted that in the control condition, all participants would become more conservative. This appears likely because of abundant past evidence that threat leads to greater conservatism and because threat tends to activate brain areas that are also associated with conservatism. It was, furthermore, predicted that threat might make liberal participants, but not conservative participants, less likely to participate in politics, because past research has shown that liberals will withdraw from participation in politics when they are more authoritarian, and threat tends to make people behave more like authoritarians. The former hypothesis was not supported; in fact, the only effect found was that conservatives became more liberal under threat, a finding that has no precedent in the literature. However, there was partial support for the latter hypothesis: both liberals and conservatives showed less of an intent to participate in politics following threat.</p><p>

Two studies were undertaken in order to investigate the effect of different forms of error feedback and error framing in learning a complex novel task. The experimental task in both studies was a computer-based simulation of a group management situation. After each of the 12 trials, all participants received feedback about their performance on that trial. Participants receiving signal error feedback were also advised as to where they had made errors. Participants receiving diagnostic feedback were told how they could have achieved optimum performance on the previous trial. Learning, performance, strategy, exploration and depth of processing were measured during the task. Self-report measures of self-efficacy, self-set goals, satisfaction and intrinsic motivation were taken after the first six trials and again after all 12 trials were completed. In study 1, detailed diagnostic feedback was associated with better performance than feedback which simply signaled where an error had been made, or feedback that did not identify errors. Diagnostic feedback facilitated the development and use of effective problem-solving strategies and discouraged trial-and-error exploration of the problem space. In this research, exploration was found to be negatively associated with learning and performance. Learners??? self-efficacy moderated the effects of error feedback: learners with high self-efficacy showed high levels of performance regardless of the level of information that the feedback provided but for those with low self-efficacy, detailed diagnostic feedback was essential for the learning process. In the second study, positive error framing (error management) was investigated as a possible means of making signal error feedback more valuable in learning. However while positive error framing was associated with more exploration as expected, it also produced poorer strategies and worse performance than negative error framing (error avoidance instructions). Participants who used good learning strategies instead of exploration performed well despite impoverished feedback. Self-efficacy moderated the impact of error framing: positive error framing helped those with low self-efficacy, but for those with higher self-efficacy it was of more value to encourage error avoidance than error tolerance. The findings show important interactions between error framing, error feedback and learner characteristics.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 10, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Adviser: Alan R. Dennis.

Thesis--Gothenburg. / Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-165).

This research is concerned with texture: a source of visual information, that has motivated a huge amount of psychophysical and computational research. This thesis questions how useful the accepted view of texture perception is. From a theoretical point of view, work to date has largely avoided two critical aspects of a computational theory of texture perception. Firstly, what is texture? Secondly, what is an appropriate representation for texture? This thesis argues that a task dependent definition of texture is necessary, and proposes a multi-local, statistical scheme for representing texture orientation. Human performance on a series of psychophysical orientation discrimination tasks are compared to specific predictions from the scheme. The first set of experiments investigate observers' ability to directly derive statistical estimates from texture. An analogy is reported between the way texture statistics are derived, and the visual processing of spatio-luminance features. The second set of experiments are concerned with the way texture elements are extracted from images (an example of the generic grouping problem in vision). The use of highly constrained experimental tasks, typically texture orientation discriminations, allows for the formulation of simple statistical criteria for setting critical parameters of the model (such as the spatial scale of analysis). It is shown that schemes based on isotropic filtering and symbolic matching do not suffice for performing this grouping, but that the scheme proposed, base on oriented mechanisms, does. Taken together these results suggest a view of visual texture processing, not as a disparate collection of processes, but as a general strategy for deriving statistical representations of images common to a range of visual tasks.

Two studies were undertaken in order to investigate the effect of different forms of error feedback and error framing in learning a complex novel task. The experimental task in both studies was a computer-based simulation of a group management situation. After each of the 12 trials, all participants received feedback about their performance on that trial. Participants receiving signal error feedback were also advised as to where they had made errors. Participants receiving diagnostic feedback were told how they could have achieved optimum performance on the previous trial. Learning, performance, strategy, exploration and depth of processing were measured during the task. Self-report measures of self-efficacy, self-set goals, satisfaction and intrinsic motivation were taken after the first six trials and again after all 12 trials were completed. In study 1, detailed diagnostic feedback was associated with better performance than feedback which simply signaled where an error had been made, or feedback that did not identify errors. Diagnostic feedback facilitated the development and use of effective problem-solving strategies and discouraged trial-and-error exploration of the problem space. In this research, exploration was found to be negatively associated with learning and performance. Learners??? self-efficacy moderated the effects of error feedback: learners with high self-efficacy showed high levels of performance regardless of the level of information that the feedback provided but for those with low self-efficacy, detailed diagnostic feedback was essential for the learning process. In the second study, positive error framing (error management) was investigated as a possible means of making signal error feedback more valuable in learning. However while positive error framing was associated with more exploration as expected, it also produced poorer strategies and worse performance than negative error framing (error avoidance instructions). Participants who used good learning strategies instead of exploration performed well despite impoverished feedback. Self-efficacy moderated the impact of error framing: positive error framing helped those with low self-efficacy, but for those with higher self-efficacy it was of more value to encourage error avoidance than error tolerance. The findings show important interactions between error framing, error feedback and learner characteristics.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Computer Science and the Dept. of Cognitive Science, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 13, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: B, page: 5071. Advisers: Mike Gasser; Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of Political Science, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 24, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-157). Also issued in print.

Thesis (M.S.)--Michigan State University. Interdepartmental Physical Sciences, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 27, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-53). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Syracuse University, 2008. / "Publication number: AAT 3323088."