Three studies examined context effects on solving probability problems. Variants of word problems were written with cover stories which differed with respect to social or temporal schemas, while maintaining formal problem structure and solution procedure. In the first of these studies it was shown that problems depicting schemas in which randomness was inappropriate or unexpected for the social situation were solved less often than problems depicting schemas in which randomness was appropriate. Another set of two studies examined temporal and causal schemas, in which the convention is that events are considered in forward direction. Pairs of conditional probability (CP) problems were written depicting events E1 and E2, such that E1 either occurs before E2 or causes E2. Problems were defined with respect to the order of events expressed in CPs, so that P(E2|E1) represents the CP in schema-consistent, intact order by considering the occurrence of E1 before E2, while P(E1|E2) represents CP in schema-inconsistent, inverted order. Introductory statistics students had greater difficulty encoding CP for events in schema-inconsistent order than CP of events in conventional deterministic order. The differential effects of schematic context on solving probability problems identify specific conditions and sources of bias in human reasoning under uncertainty. In addition, these biases may be influential when evaluating empirical findings in a manner similar to that demonstrated in this paper experimentally, and may have implications for how social scientists are trained in research methodology.

Adult literacy training is known to be difficult in terms of teaching and maintenance (Abadzi, 2003), perhaps because adults who recently learned to read in their first language have not acquired reading automaticity. This study examines fast word recognition process in neoliterate adults, to evaluate whether they show evidence of perceptual (automatic) distinctions between linguistic (words) and visual (symbol) stimuli. Such a mechanism is thought to be the basis for effortless reading associated with Visual Word Form Area activation that becomes "tuned" to scripts as literacy skills are acquired (McCandliss, Cohen, Dehaene, 2003). High density EEG was recorded from a group of adults who are neoliterate in two reading tasks: (1) a one-back task requiring implicit reading (available only to those who have attained automaticity), and (2) reading verification task, an explicit reading task, in which participants detected mismatches between pairs of visual and auditory words. Results were compared to recordings from a comparison group of adults who learned to read in childhood. Left-lateralized N170 ERP was targeted as an index of automaticity in reading. Participants from the comparison group showed left-lateralized N170 to word stimuli in both the implicit and explicit reading tasks. Conversely, N170 effects were not found on the participants form the study group on either implicit or explicit reading tasks. This suggests that automaticity in reading can be indexed in neoliterate adults using the ERP component N170, and that automaticity had not been acquired by the study group investigated here.

Changing demands of the workplace require that schools teach students to think critically. The new Common Core State Standards stress that to prepare for college and careers, students must be capable of engaging in skilled evidence-based argumentation, which entails use of evidence to support one's own claims and to weaken arguments of the opposing position. In Study 1, middle-school students who had participated in a one or two-year curriculum designed to develop argumentation skills were recruited. Previous use of the curriculum had shown it effective in developing students' skills in supporting arguments with evidence. However, they displayed only limited use of evidence to address and weaken opponents' arguments, a finding replicated in the present study. A prompt was therefore instituted, explicitly instructing them to undertake this goal in a post-intervention essay assessment. This simple instruction enhanced middle school students' use of evidence-based arguments to weaken an opposing claim, indicating that the skill to do so was within their competence but they possibly were insufficiently aware of its relevance to use it without prompting. Study 2 was undertaken to determine whether a novice group of middle schoolers similarly needed only a prompt to display this skill critical to argumentive reasoning. They were provided with only minimal experience in discourse with peers on the same social issue used in Study 1 (whether cigarette sales should be banned), following which they were asked to write individual argumentive essays, first without any prompt and then with the prompt instructing them to attempt to weaken an opponent's position. In this group, essays following the prompt showed no greater use of arguments to weaken, compared to essays with no such instruction. Nor was there an effect of whether students' prior dialogs had been with agreeing or disagreeing peers. These results indicate that the weaknesses of Study 2 participants, in understanding the objectives of argumentation and in executing the strategies to achieve these objectives, were more fundamental and not ones remediable by a simple prompt. Overall, the results of both studies thus point to the need for extended engagement and guided practice in order for students to master the skills of argument.

The purpose of the present study is to test whether symbol grounding for action verbs occurs in entrenched native verb forms, and whether they transfer to novel verb forms that are acquired as explicit translations of existing verbs. The entrenched and novel verbs were referred to here as L1 verbs and L2 verbs respectively, and were used as analogs of meanings in first and second language learning. Symbolic grounding was investigated by observing behavioral data in lexical decision tasks, and scalp electrophysiological signals using 128-channel EEG data. The present study used different kinds of action verbs (e.g., verbs of foot movement, such as kick or jump, and verbs of hand movement, such as swipe or grab) and abstract verbs, such as learn or plan. Previous researchers have provided empirical evidence showing that when action verbs are accessed in reading, there is concomitant activation of primary motor and/or somatosensory cortex. The established relationships of action verbs in L1 and their sensorimotor groundings as a reference were used to determine successful transfer of groundings of L1 words to L2 words. By observing the responses to the L2 words that are acquired through symbolic manipulation without perceptual or bodily experiences and examining, it can be determined if they produce similar neural activations as in those found in L1 words, and we can test whether the symbol-grounding-transfer occurs in part or in whole, given this minimal learning context. The behavioral measure was a lexical decision task where the participants respond to meaningful words (foot-related verbs or hand-related verbs) with two kinds of response modalities (button press with a finger or foot pedal press with a foot). Although either facilitation (foot verb to foot movement and hand verb to hand movement) or interference (Foot verb to hand movement and hand verb to foot movement) effect of action verbs was expected, the results showed that the participants consistently responded faster to the L1 English verbs than to the L2 verbs and responded faster with finger-pressing button box than foot-pressing pedal. However, at the slowest response times condition, the condition of foot-pedal pressing to L2 words, the facilitation effect of Foot related verbs was observed. The response times of foot pedal pressing to L2 Foot-related verbs were significantly faster than both L2 Hand-related verbs (p=.003) and abstract verbs (p=.005) at the paired t-test. This result is consistent with the research hypothesis and provides partial evidence supporting the assumption that the Foot-related action verbs have close link with sensorimotor cortex associated with foot movement and reading those verbs will facilitate corresponding body movement. The three kinds of EEG data analysis methods were used in the current study: Event Related Potential (ERP) component analysis, EEG topographic analysis, and EEG source localization with low resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (LORETA). The ERP components were used to examine the effect of language (L1 vs. L2) and lexicality (Word vs. Non-word) in terms of amplitudes and temporal points of ERP components. The EEG topographic analysis and EEG source localization with LORETA are methods for spatiotemporal analysis, which provide information on intracranial neural activations that are sources of scalp electric signals. When ERP components of the montaged electrodes placed on the central area of the scalp (vertex and neighboring 14 electrodes) were examined, the P3 component for L1 (at around 390~400ms) reached its peak earlier that that of L2 (495~505ms). Topographic analysis results that compared topographic maps created by different verb groups provided evidence that different configurations of the neuronal activations were created by the verb groups representing body movements of different body parts. In addition, by means of the source localization analysis with the LORETA, the differential neural activations at sensorimotor cortex were observed when the brain activations elicited by L1 Foot related and Hand related verbs were compared. At both temporal windows, early (126~134ms) and late (318~322ms), the regions of the sensorimotor cortex associated with Hand movement were activated significantly more by the Hand related verbs than Foot related verbs. In order to test Harnad's symbol grounding transfer hypothesis, the neural activations at the sensorimotor cortex elicited by L2 Foot verbs and the L2 Hand verbs were examined in comparison with those of the abstract verbs. Significant larger activations were elicited by both of the action verbs over the abstract verbs. To summarize, the current study provided the neurophysiological evidence on the symbol grounding at L1 word and the symbol grounding transfer at L2 words by exhibiting links between the regions of sensorimotor cortex and L1 and L2 action verbs in terms of differential neural activations elicited by the verb groups.

Perceptual decision making is a cognitive process that involves transforming sensory evidence into a decision and behavioral response through accumulating sensory information over time. Previous research has identified some temporally distinct components during the decision process; however, not all aspects of a perceptual decision are characterized by the post-stimulus activity. Using single-trial analysis with temporal localization techniques, we are able to identify a cascade of cognitive events associated with perceptual decision making, including what happens outside the period of evidence accumulation. The goal of this dissertation is to elucidate the association between neural correlates of these cognitive events. We design a set of experimental paradigms based on visual discrimination of scrambled face, car and house images and analyze EEG evoked potentials and oscillations using advanced machine learning and statistical analysis approaches. We first exploit the correlation between pre-stimulus attention and oscillatory activity and investigate such covariation within the context of behaviorally-latent fluctuations in task-relevant post-stimulus neural activity. We find that early perceptual representations, rather than temporally later neural correlates of the perceptual decision, are modulated by pre-stimulus brain state. Secondly, we demonstrate that the visual salience of stimulus image, being a surrogate for the decision difficulty, differentially modulates exogenous and endogenous oscillations at different times during decision making. This may reflect underlying information processing flow and allocation of attentional resources during the visual discrimination task. Finally, to study the effect of visual salience and value information of stimulus on feedback processing, we propose a model that can estimate expected reward and reward prediction error on a single-trial basis by integrating value information with perceptual decision evidence characterized by single-trial decoding of EEG. Taken together, these results provide a complete temporal characterization of perceptual decision making that includes the pre-stimulus brain state, the evidence accumulation during decisions and the post-feedback response evaluation.

People perform gestures both while communicating with others and while thinking to themselves. Gestures that people perform for themselves when they are alone can reveal a great deal about what they are thinking, and are also believed to improve comprehension and memory. Previous research has demonstrated that people gesture when information can be mapped directly to a spatial representation; for example, on tests of spatial thinking. What is not as widely researched is whether or not people will gesture for information that is not inherently spatial. Further, will people gesture for information that is not spatial or relational? And if individuals do gesture for these other types of stimuli, what types of gestures will they perform, and will gesturing improve memory? This work provides evidence that people do gesture, even when the information is not inherently spatial or relational. For information that is not spatial but related, people perform representational gestures; for example, creating an ordered list with their hands to represent preference of movie genres. For information that is non-relational, people use considerably fewer representational gestures, but can be observed using beat gestures, which are believed to help in keeping track of information. These studies did not provide strong evidence to support the claim that gestures help people understand and remember information, as gesture was only beneficial for one type of stimuli (mechanical systems). However, future research with more sensitive measures has the potential reveal this phenomenon.

No description available.

Older adults (OAs) typically experience memory failures as they age. However, with some exceptions, studies of OAs’ ability to assess their own memory functions– Metamemory (MM)– find little evidence that this function is susceptible to age-related decline. Our study examines OAs’ and young adults’ (YAs) MM performance and strategy use. Groups of YAs (N = 138) and OAs (N = 79) performed a MM task that required participants to place bets on how likely they were to remember words in a list. Our analytical approach includes hierarchical clustering, and we introduce a new measure of MM—the modified Brier—in order to adjust for di↵erences in scale usage between participants. Our data indicate that OAs and YAs di↵er in the strategies they use to assess their memory and in how well their MM matches with memory performance. However, there was no evidence that the chosen strategies were associated with di↵erences in MM match, indicating that there are multiple strategies that might be e↵ective (i.e. lead to similar match) in this MM task.

In this study it was hypothesized that the ability to mentally solve II story type" problems, those presented in the form of sentences, is significantly related to one's spatial reasoning ability and that a weakness in this ability, when tested by the "story type" problems, could be compensated for by training in and utilization of overt "paper and pencil" manipulations. To test the hypothesis, three measures were used. These were the DAT Verbal Reasoning test--used to control the factor of verbal reasoning, the DAT Space Relations test--used to measure spatial reasoning ability, and two forms of a test composed of "story type" problems--used to measure problem-solving ability. A large group of college students (146) were first tested on the DAT tests and then 18 pairs were selected which were matched as nearly as possible on verbal reasoning abilities while keeping their spatial reasoning abilities as diverse as possible. The 18 pairs were then tested and retested on the problem-solving tests with half of the pairs receiving problem-solving instructions prior to the retest. Statistical analysis of the results confirmed the hypothesis in that it revealed a substantial positive correlation between spatial reasoning ability and the ability to solve "story type" problems. Also, an analysis of the results showed, to a significant degree, that a weakness in spatial reasoning ability, when used to solve the type of problems considered, can be compensated for by using "paper and pencil" manipulations involving graphic procedures.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Psychology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.