Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Psychological and Brain Sciences the Dept. of Cognitive Science, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 19, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: B, page: 7870. Advisers: John K. Kruschke; Jerome R. Busemeyer.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Counseling and Educational Psychology, 2005. / Adviser: Donald J. Cunningham. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 18, 2006). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-02, Section: A, page: 0486.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Drexel University, 2007. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-141).

<p> James Hillman (1972) declared, &ldquo;What the psyche has experienced during the past seventy years in analytical therapy should also be possible for it wherever it goes&rdquo; (p. 5). As a life coach&mdash;someone who starts from a place of curiosity&mdash;I became curious. Did this mean that the imaginal practices of depth psychology could be used within a life coaching container? Could imaginal practices such as Jung&rsquo;s active imagination and Hillman&rsquo;s personifying work in a life coaching partnership? What benefits might life coaching clients gain through creating a connection with psychic figures? What would a life coach&mdash;or a depth psychologist&mdash;need to merge these two ways of engaging with individuals, both in terms of training and resources? And, finally, what does each profession&mdash;life coaching and depth psychology&mdash;obtain from such a merger? Using the methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology, I entered into a six-session soul-centered coaching partnership with three participants. Each took part in six sessions designed to develop their psychological creativity while experiencing a coaching relationship. Factoring in my own observations, as well as the personal accounts of the participants, I found that imaginal practices positively impacted participants&rsquo; abilities to connect with and move through their life transitions. This merging of the two professions would require life coaches to undergo extensive learning in depth psychology, and depth psychologists to acquire professional coaching skills, but this study holds forth promise for a blending of the two fields. </p><p>

<p>RL has been transformative for neuroscience by providing a normative anchor for interpreting neural and behavioral data. End-to-end RL methods have scored impressive victories with minimal compromises in autonomy, hand-engineering, and generality. The cost of this minimalism in practice is that model-free RL methods are slow to learn and generalize poorly. Humans and animals exhibit substantially improved flexibility and generalize learned information rapidly to new environment by learning invariants of the environment and features of the environment that support fast learning rapid transfer in new environments. An important question for both neuroscience and machine learning is what kind of ``representational objectives'' encourage humans and other animals to encode structure about the world. This can be formalized as ``representation feature learning,'' in which the animal or agent learns to form representations with information potentially relevant to the downstream RL process. We will overview different representational objectives that have received attention in neuroscience and in machine learning. The focus of this overview will be to first highlight conditions under which these seemingly unrelated objectives are actually mathematically equivalent. We will use this to motivate a breakdown of properties of different learned representations that are meaningfully different and can be used to inform contrasting hypotheses for neuroscience. We then use this perspective to motivate our model of the hippocampus. A cognitive map has long been the dominant metaphor for hippocampal function, embracing the idea that place cells encode a geometric representation of space. However, evidence for predictive coding, reward sensitivity, and policy dependence in place cells suggests that the representation is not purely spatial. We approach the problem of understanding hippocampal representations from a reinforcement learning perspective, focusing on what kind of spatial representation is most useful for maximizing future reward. We show that the answer takes the form of a predictive representation. This representation captures many aspects of place cell responses that fall outside the traditional view of a cognitive map. We go on to argue that entorhinal grid cells encode a low-dimensional basis set for the predictive representation, useful for suppressing noise in predictions and extracting multiscale structure for hierarchical planning.

<p> Overgeneral memory (OGM) is a phenomenon of reduced autobiographical memory specificity observed in major depressive disorder (MDD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Individuals demonstrating OGM tend to describe past events generally rather than specifically recalling single memory occurrences. Research shows that OGM is perpetuated by three mechanisms: capture in the memory hierarchy due to trait rumination (CaR), functional avoidance of specific memory retrieval (FA), and impaired executive control (X), which together make up the CaR-FA-X model of OGM. Research on the CaR-FA-X model has historically looked at each mechanism in isolation. The current research aimed to compare the contributions of all three mechanisms to a measure of OGM, as well as to investigate possible interactions between the mechanisms, and compare the contributions of the CaR-FA-X model to those of an encoding predictor. Psychometric data on the three CaR-FA-X mechanisms, autobiographical memory specificity, cognitive attributional style, and mental health were collected from 107 undergraduate psychology students via online surveys, then analyzed in a hierarchical linear regression model. Executive control explained significant unique variance in OGM, with rumination making an indirect contribution. No other anticipated contributions from the CaR-FA-X model or memory encoding were observed. Methodological issues in non-clinical and computerized OGM research are highlighted.</p><p>

<p> Emotional Reaction of Experiencing Crisis in Virtual Reality (VR)/360&deg; Immersive technology is being used to provoke emotion and move millions of people to action. Because organizations and filmmakers are exploring more ways to use the immersive technology of VR and 360-degree video to evoke emotion, it is important to investigate what emotional reactions are experienced. Both VR and 360&deg; fall under the category of immersive media and the terms are used interchangeably in this study. NVivo 11 is used for the analysis of 1,700 Twitter texts between the years 2015 and 2017 after people view the crisis <i> Clouds Over Sidra</i> in VR/360&deg;. The appraisal theory of emotion serves as the framework to explore the interpretation of the subject&rsquo;s emotional reactions. Sentiment and thematic analysis reveal (a) an increase in empathy, (b) reports of emotional reactions including feelings of sadness, grief and anger, (c) greater understanding of the crisis (d) intentions to act related to the crisis, (e) importance of VR/360&deg; for educational use, and (f) the power of VR/360&deg; and its ability to alter fields of education, humanitarian work, and politics. This study finds the immersive experience of viewing a crisis in VR/360&deg; generates a range of highly emotional reactions. It is an important goal to understand the role VR/360&deg; plays in generating emotional reactions and behavioral change, particularly in view of the accelerating development of emotional VR/360&deg; content and people&rsquo;s access to immersive technology. </p><p>

<p> The human brain is an ongoing dynamic system not activated by experience but nudged from intrinsic activity into new network configurations during perception and learning. Ongoing neural activity during rest is assumed to reflect these intrinsic dynamics in a relatively closed system state. Traditionally, inter-regional connectivity in this system is measured by obtaining time-locked correlations in BOLD activity using fMRI. It is well documented, however, that neural activity unfolds across time and is not isolatent to some reference point. </p><p> This exploratory study is a theoretical analysis of how a lagged analysis of resting state dynamics in fMRI could represent persistent representations of knowledge in the neocortex. A novel procedure using both surface based maps and independent component analysis (ICA) is applied to a small group of 54 adolescents. The ICA methods appear to reveal lagged structures with different information than traditional resting state analysis. The group level results are symmetrical between hemispheres and may represent high level perceptual systems.&nbsp;</p><p> The components obtained from this exploration are then used to attempt understand how these knowledge systems in neocortex frame mind-wandering frequency when reading aloud in a subset of 38 individuals. The results did not correlate with any known neural systems related to mind wandering, but the methods here are unique. One of the identified components shows significant difference in the lag structure of the occipital cortex as a function of mind wandering frequency during oral reading. This demonstrates that it may be worth exploring the timing in visual system to understand why individuals mind wander when reading aloud. Reverse inference is used to interpret results and suggest future approaches.</p><p>

<p> This thesis seeks to explore the effects of food and food focus on the cognitive phenomenon of boundary extension (BE). BE occurs when people are asked to remember pictures. It is an error of commission that takes place within milliseconds and results in people reporting the picture they previously saw with wider boundaries than it actually had. Although much research points toward the automaticity of this effect, other studies indicate that picture characteristics and individual differences among participants can moderate BE. To test for how pictures of food and the individual difference of food focus impact boundary ratings, participants completed the Power of Food Scale as a measure of food focus and then rated pictures pairs depicting food and nonfood objects for how close-up or far away the second image in each pair (i.e., target pictures) was as compared to the first. They also gave a confidence rating for the boundaries they reported. BE was measured using four picture conditions: two involving identical pictures (i.e., close-close and wide-wide) and two involving non-identical pictures (i.e., close-wide and wide-close). As predicted, participants produced boundary ratings indicative of BE. Less expected was that participants reported target food pictures as closer than target nonfood pictures when the first member of the picture pair was shown at a wide angle. As for the individual difference of food focus, follow-up analyses revealed that participants with high food focus showed greater BE than participants with low food focus in response to food pictures; however, this difference was only found to be significant for identical trials. It could be that people with high levels of food focus automatically engage in higher levels of food avoidance such that the boundary extension pattern is exaggerated. Potential clinical implications for the findings as related to eating disorders are discussed.</p><p>

<p> This thesis explores schizophrenia from a depth psychological and neuropsychological perspective with the goal of contributing to understanding the experience of schizophrenia and improving its treatment, thereby helping to relieve the helpless feelings of both people in the counseling room. It addresses the research question: How can schizophrenia be explained as a metaphor for the experience of an inability to tolerate the conflicting dichotomies between The Real and The Imaginary? Using an alchemical hermeneutic methodology, the research weaves together the author&rsquo;s clinical work with Lacanian theory, the work of psychoanalyst Darian Leader, Jungian analyst James Hillman&rsquo;s concept of pathologizing, and the trauma theory of Donald Kalsched. Drawing on these theorists and current neuroscientific findings, the author works toward an equilibrium between the conscious and unconscious mind in a dialogical process of finding and giving meaning to the experience of schizophrenia through metaphors and the alchemy of language.</p><p>