It has been shown that there exists a relationship between levels of metacognitive ability and estimation of personal ability for largely verbally-based tasks, where those with lessened facility for the task tend toward overestimation of their aptitude relative to their peers (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). This study examines this effect for a task of mechanical ability for volunteer participants (n = 69), where participants were given an abbreviated form of the Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test (BMCT) to establish a level of competency. Following the administration of the BMCT, the participants were then asked to speculate on the hypothetical grade for their performance, as well as the relationship between their hypothetical grade, and the grades of others. Participants then "tutored" a hypothetical student on the solution to one of the problems found on the BMCT, and their explanations were coded for degree of bias towards confirmation versus disconfirmation that was utilized in the problem solving. It was found that females' basic ability had a greater range than males', and females on the high and low ends of competency made greater use of confirming strategies in their problem solving. This is indicative of the overall observed interaction effect between Gender, Perceived Relative Competence, and Actual Competence observed in this study.

Through the years, the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm has demonstrated to be a useful method of observing false memories from semantically related word lists. The present study was conducted fully online and measured memory performance dependent on categorization of words by using groups, as well as dragging words across the page as a form of interaction. In a 2 (Categorized, Non-Categorized) x 2 (Interactive, Non-Interactive) between-subject factorial experiment, 56 undergraduate students were shown 18 different lists of 15 associative words to be studied, one list at a time. Participants were given a free recall test immediately after studying each individual list. Participants also performed a recognition test after having studied and recalled all 18 lists, which consisted of 216 items; half of the words were presented throughout the studied lists, and the other half consisted of the 18 critical lure words as well as several other distractor items from a subset of word lists. It was hypothesized that participants in both the categorization and interaction condition would show the highest levels of accurate memory recall and recognition compared to those who were simply given a list to review. Findings did not support this hypothesis indicating no clear differences between participants who categorized (or not) or interacted with the lists (or not). High probabilities were found for words ranked as highly falsely recalled and low probabilities were found for those ranked towards the bottom, much like the findings in Stadler et al., (1999).

This thesis seeks to explore how young women's body esteem is influenced by their beliefs about ambivalent sexism and stigma consciousness. In this study, a sample of 168 undergraduate female students at the University of Central Florida were asked to complete an online battery containing six psychological measures. The measures in this study included measures of body esteem and objectified body consciousness, perception and attitudes toward sexism, experiences with sexist events, and stigma consciousness. The results showed an association between higher body esteem and higher beliefs in benevolent sexism, and no relationship was found between hostile sexism and body esteem. As expected, body consciousness was positively correlated with stigma consciousness and women who experienced more sexist events had higher stigma consciousness. Additionally, regression models predicting body esteem based on hostile sexism, benevolent sexism, and stigma consciousness were only significant for benevolent sexism. These findings suggest further research to explore body esteem in relation to sexism and stigma consciousness. The results of this study can help highlight the importance of a cultural context when addressing female body esteem issues.

This study was designed to examine qualitative data regarding gender and age differences about significant life events that are recalled when music is remembered. Two groups of participants were recruited, younger adults (M = 19.78, SD = 4.99) and older adults (M = 49.31, SD = 8.72). Data were collected by creating a survey and allowing participants to choose whichever songs, from their own experience, they like and asking them to list detailed memories that are attached to the song. Using the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (2015) software, data was coded into categories of word count, positive and negative emotions, and how sociable words are. On average, young adults (M = 18.66, SD = 13.39) use more words when recalling their musical memories than older adults (M = 15.09, SD = 8.86). Data also suggests that young women (M = 9.76, SD = 4.91) use less words that are ranked as social than older women (M = 13.44, SD = 6.25). The impact of this study sheds some light on how music influences the memories of our culture, our society, and our self.

<p>Holistic processing has been deemed a crucial part of human face processing. There are three tasks that are indexes of holistic processing and each is used by many researchers for the purposes of demonstrating that either their participants have intact holistic processing or that holistic processing is impaired or missing. The tasks that demonstrate holistic processing are the face inversion, composite face, and the whole-part tasks. In this dissertation, I evaluate the hypothesis that holistic processing is important for face identification. A secondary hypothesis that is evaluated is whether the three indexes of holistic processing are related and whether they are tapping the same underlying process. Chapter 2 tests the first hypothesis in a large group of young adults and shows that the composite face effect (an index of holistic processing) is not related to accuracy on two identification tasks. Chapter 3 tested both hypotheses and showed that none of the holistic indexes are related to one another and they are unrelated to face identification accuracy. In Chapter 4, a large group of older adults are tested on the composite face task and a face identification task, similar to Experiment 2 from Chapter 2. Unlike the results for young adults, older adults show a significant positive correlation between the composite face effect and identification accuracy even though older adults perform worse on the identification task.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>I examined the development of sensitivity to two fundamental aspects of Western musical pitch structure, key membership and harmony, which can be acquired without formal training. In Chapter 2 (Experiment 1), I describe the novel and engaging behavioural task that I designed in order to study a younger age group than in previous research. On each trial, children watched videos of puppets playing unfamiliar piano melodies and chord sequences, in which one puppet’s music conformed to Western pitch structure and the other’s did not. Children judged which of the two puppets played the best song. Five-year-olds demonstrated sensitivity to key membership but not harmony, whereas 4-year-olds demonstrated sensitivity to neither. However, event-related potential (ERP) responses to a subset of the stimuli (Experiment 2) showed evidence of implicit sensitivity to both key membership and harmony in 4-year-olds. These components differed from the typical response elicited in older children and adults, but were consistent with other studies showing similar immature components in young children. In Chapter 3, I found that 4- and 5-year-old children demonstrated behavioural sensitivity to both key membership and harmony in a less demanding task than was used in Chapter 2, specifically, in a familiar song. In Chapter 4, I compared children who were or were not taking music lessons and found that musical experience accelerated enculturation to musical pitch structure. Together, these findings indicate that under some circumstances even 4-year-old children demonstrate behavioural sensitivity to Western musical pitch structure, that implicit processes show sensitivity to Western musical pitch structure before this knowledge is demonstrated behaviourally, and that intensive musical experience accelerates musical acquisition.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Neural responses to anticipatory coarticulatory cues were investigated across systematically varying phonological conditions. Congruent or incongruent subphonemic information was placed between an initial consonant and a vowel in a consonant-vowel- consonant (CVC) spoken word (Archibald & Joanisse, 2011). Due to physical and temporal differences across sound classes, the objective was to investigate whether coarticulatory information would be processed differently across controlled manipulations of onset (fricative vs. stop) and vowel type (height vs. backness). Event- related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a printed-word/spoken-word matching paradigm, in which participants indicated whether a visual prime stimulus and a spoken word matched/mismatched. The “Phonological Mapping Negativity” (PMN) component provides strong evidence that the use of coarticulatory information in speech recognition varies in strength and timing as a function of onset type (fricative vs. stop) and vowel height (high vs. low). Coarticulatory cues were more readily perceived in spoken word beginning with fricatives than with stops. Similarly, subphonemic variations were more easily detected in low vowels than in high vowels. Observed perceptual and temporal differences are interpreted to reflect variations in subphonemic and phonological processing.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

<p>Human vision has an incredible ability to translate light reaching the retinae into a coherent, three-dimensional representation of the outside world in a fraction of a second. Much research has been devoted to understanding how local orientation information is integrated to form global contours and shapes -– a crucial step in visual processing. This dissertation describes experiments examining how contour and shape perception are affected in healthy aging.</p> <p>Chapter 2 examined contour grouping at low contrast and in the absence of distracters. Unlike younger subjects, older subjects did not benefit from co-alignment of local orientations with the contour’s outline, suggesting that grouping by orientation co-alignment is impaired in older age in low contrast. Chapters 3 and 4 examined the effects of aging on the ability to detect and discriminate high-contrast contours embedded in a dense field of distracters, as real life situations often require detecting objects among clutter, such as a snake hiding among tall grass. Results showed that older adults require significantly more time to discriminate contours in clutter, especially for less salient contours. Moreover, increasing the relative density of background clutter had a greater detrimental effect on older, compared to younger, subjects. However, aging did not seem to affect the ability to group contours across a range of spatial distances, or the sensitivity of contour integration to orientation misalignment. Lastly, Chapter 5 examined the influence of local orientation information on the perception of a contour's shape. Results revealed that older and younger subjects perceived the shape of a sampled contour in the same way, even when the contour's orientation and position information were in conflict. These findings indicated that the integration of orientation and position information in shape perception does not change with age.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>The goal of this study was to elucidate whether articulations of visual-speech are processed phonologically, and in the same manner as auditory-speech. Phonological processing, measured through the amplitude of the Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN), was compared across three conditions using the electroencephalogram (EEG). Planned polynomial contrasts compared conditions of related and unrelated linguistic stimuli versus a non-linguistic control stimulus. A significant Site x Condition polynomial trend at posterior sites (Pz and Oz) during the N400 tine window revealed that the unrelated condition was most negative in amplitude, an N400-like deflection in the control condition reached similar negative amplitude, while the related condition was the most positive. A significant quadratic trend of PMN amplitude differentiated between the linguistic conditions and the non-linguistic control at site Fz, but did not differentiate the related and unrelated linguistic conditions from each other. These results support a conclusion that non-lexical speech-like and gurning motions of the lips are treated differently than articulations of a meaningful nature. Moreover, the PMN response patterned similarly in the linguistic conditions, compared to the non-linguistic control, indicating phonological processing. The prediction that PMN amplitude will distinguish visual-speech events congruent or incongruent to a phonologically constrained context was not supported.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

<p>Music, like language, is a universal means of communication unique to humans, and the overlap of music and linguistic cognitive and neurological processes is well established. Performers and listeners alike are drawn to music as an avenue of emotional expression, as music is recognized for its rich emotional content. The study of affective priming indicates the communication of emotion-based concepts: stimuli that are related by affect give rise to response facilitation, an effect not observed to stimuli that are unrelated by affect. The measure of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) reveal, with exquisite temporal accuracy, that music clearly conveys emotion concepts in a manner commensurate to written language and prosody. To date, ERP studies of affective priming with music have involved written language and prosody, and have focused on the N400, an indication of semantic cognitive integration. The current study is the first to measure ERP responses in an affective priming paradigm of music and speech. In addition to the N400, the current study is the first of its kind to measure the N300, indicating cognitive categorization and the P300, reflecting recognition. Three sets of analyses – based on categorically correct responses, behaviourally correct responses and subjective responses – reveal N300 and N400 affective priming effects, corresponding to deliberate cognitive categorization and conceptual integration, respectively.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)