Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-168).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-168).

This study investigated Gollwitzer's mindset theory in the context of romantic relationships. One-hundred and sixty-eight students involved in a dating relationship were asked either to deliberate about or to think of implementing a goal not related to their relationship (e.g., finding a summer job) or a goal related to their relationship (e.g., moving in with their romantic partner). All participants subsequently completed assessments of current affect, perceptions of partner and of optimism for the future of the relationship. In line with Taylor and Gollwitzer (1995), thinking about implementing a decided goal not related to the relationship was found to increase positive affect and relationship illusions compared to non-relationship goal deliberation. In contrast, among those in the relationship mindset conditions, deliberation was found to elicit greater relationship illusions compared to goal implementation. These results help to delineate between effects of relationship specific and non relationship specific mindsets on relationship appraisals.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1967. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

The main aim of this study was to identify those elements in a child's home background that assist him to become schoolready. The secondary, though closely related aims were to determine whether significant cognitive and linguistic differences existed between schoolready and non-schoolready children. The study, moreover, sought to establish whether the parents of these two groups of children differed in their views about the manner in which children should be reared. The sample of children comprised the following two groups: (a) The Preschoolers, who were due to enter Class i in 1990 had had approximately one year's preschool experience. On the basis of the results of a test of schoolreadiness, these children were divided further into two groups - a "schoolready" group and a "non-schoolready group". Each of these groups comprised thirty children. (b) The Non-Preschoolers, who were also due to enter Class i in 1990, but lacked preschool experience. These children were divided into a "schoolready" and a "non-schoolready" group on the same basis as the Preschoolers. Each group comprised twenty children. Cognitive ability was tested by means of the Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices and language ability by means of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The results of this study highlighted the role of the home as perhaps the single most important educational agency in a child's early years. A stimulating home environment plays an important part in helping the child to become schoolready. The following aspects were found to be particularly influential in this process: low educational level of the parents, poor housing, low income and poor reading habits of parents. A second major finding of this study was that children who had had preschool experience were better equipped to meet the demands of the formal school situation. Moreover, cognitive development is highly dependent upon the kind of verbal interactions between parents and child, and this, in turn, has a marked impact on the child's scholastic performance. The study also revealed that the parents of non-schoolready children are, by and large, more authoritarian in their relationship with their children and in their views about how children should be reared. The report ends with an indication of various steps that can be taken to promote schoolreadiness among preschool children. It is suggested that the implementation of these steps would lead to a smaller number of non-ready six-year- olds seeking admission to Class i at the beginning of each year. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1990.

Attentional set-shifting tasks, consisting of multiple stages of discrimination learning, have been widely used in animals and humans to investigate behavioural flexibility. However, there are several learning criteria (e.g., 6-correct-choice-in-a-row, or 10-out- of-12-correct) by which a subject might be judged to have learned a discrimination. Furthermore, the currently frequentist approach does not provide a detailed analysis of individual performance. In this PhD study, a large set of archival data of rats performing a 7-stage intra-dimensional/extra-dimensional (ID/ED) attentional set- shifting task was analysed, using a novel Bayesian analytical approach, to estimate each rat's learning processes over its trials within the task. The analysis showed that the Bayesian learning criterion may be an appropriate alternative to the frequentist n- correct-in-a-row criterion for studying performance. The individual analysis of rats' behaviour using the Bayesian model also suggested that the rats responded according to a number of irrelevant spatial and perceptual information sources before the correct stimulus-reward association was established. The efficacy of the Bayesian analysis of individual subjects' behaviour and the appropriateness of the Bayesian learning criterion were also supported by the analysis of simulated data in which the behavioural choices in the task were generated by known rules. Additionally, the efficacy was also supported by analysis of human behaviour during an analogous human 7-stage attentional set-shifting task, where participants' detailed learning processes were collected based on their trial-by-trial oral report. Further, an extended Bayesian approach, which considers the effects of feedback (correct vs incorrect) after each response in the task, can even help infer whether individual human participants have formed an attentional set, which is crucial when applying the set-shifting task to an evaluation of cognitive flexibility. Overall, this study demonstrates that the Bayesian approach can yield additional information not available to the conventional frequentist approach. Future work could include refining the rat Bayesian model and the development of an adaptive trial design.

The consequence of many psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia, is an impairment in ‘executive functioning'; an umbrella term for several cognitive processes, including the focussing and shifting of attention and the inhibition of responding. The ability to form an ‘attentional set' involves learning to discriminate qualities of a multidimensional cue, and to subsequently learn which quality is relevant, and therefore predictive of reward. According to recent research, the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and possibly the adjacent zona incerta (ZI) may mediate the formation of attentional set. Dysregulation of the STN as a result of Parkinson's disease contributes to characteristic motor symptoms, and whilst deep-brain stimulation of this region may treat gross motor impairments, it may also impair cognition. The work in this thesis aimed to expand our understanding of the mechanisms of attentional set-formation, and the role of the STN in this process. This thesis evaluates new methods for examining set-formation in the attentional set-shifting task; rather than inferring this behaviour solely from the cost of shifting set, modifications to the task design in Chapters 3 & 4 explored several hypotheses designed to exploit a deficit in this behaviour. Chapter 6 revealed that inhibition of this region with designer receptors leads to a disruption in attentional selectivity, which compromises the ability to form an attentional set. This manifested as an inability to parse relevant information from irrelevant, and instead, animals learned the stimuli holistically. The findings in this thesis also suggested that reversal and attentional shifting processes do not operate independently, but rather in a hierarchy, and that consequently, the STN is a region that may be crucial in selecting appropriate responses during associative learning that leads to the formation of an attentional set.

Lesions of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) alleviate the cardinal signs of idiopathic as well as MPTP-induced Parkinson's disease in primates. For this reason, the STN is a target for clinical treatment of Parkinson's disease using deep brain stimulation. Despite its small size, the STN plays a vital role in the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic network. However, the functional features of the STN have yet to be fully uncovered. The research presented in this thesis examines the functions of the STN by measuring behavioural changes resulting from STN lesions in rats performing executive abilities. In the first experiment, a ‘signal change' reaction time task was developed and the performance of humans and rats was compared. The main findings were that although humans and rats used different strategies in the task, the task did challenge the ability to inhibit unwanted responses. In the second and third experiments, the effects of bilateral lesions of the STN on performance of two variants of the ‘signal change' task were examined. Rats with the STN lesions were able to inhibit responses when under stimulus control, but were less able to inhibit responses that were not under stimulus control. In the final experiment, the effects of lesions of the STN on inhibitory control in a nonmotor, cognitive domain were examined. Rats with STN lesions were not impaired on reversal learning, suggesting intact inhibition of previously rewarded responses. The rats with STN lesions did show impairments in selective attention which resulted in an inability to form an attentional set. Together, these findings challenge the conventional view that the STN simply plays a global inhibitory role. Rather, the contribution of the STN to inhibitory control is more complex and neither the motor nor the cognitive effects of the lesions are easily explained simply as a failure of inhibition.