Using one's success and failure experiences can be an indicator of how well risk is being managed in uncertain situations, particularly because exact probability information about outcomes is often missing. Experience-based paradigms include this more real-world aspect of a lack of information when studying risk taking behavior. This thesis builds upon experience-based paradigms to include the element of skill. A puzzle task was developed. A goal was given to participants to try to discern a pattern in each puzzle that would yield consistently positive outcomes. Participants were randomly assigned to a high or low success rate, but told that skill played a role in performance. The outcomes associated with each puzzle were chosen by the participant, and served as a measure of risk taking. After playing 41 puzzles, participants responded to scales measuring skill and chance beliefs, and motivational focus. Risk preferences were similar to experience-based paradigm predictions, though they were not well-calibrated. Those with a high success rate took more risks relative to those with a low success rate, but the results were less extreme than predicted. In addition, a closer look revealed that the pattern for those with a low success rate began by increasing their risk taking, and then did not decrease their risk taking significantly. Neither group felt that skill or chance was playing a dominant role in outcomes, though self-serving bias was observed as better performance did lead to higher ratings of skill. Overall, the results suggest that introducing the potential for skill may change how people approach risk in ways not predicted by experience-based paradigms.

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Formal systems thinking methods are not readily understandable, applicable nor necessarily useful in the dealing with complex problem domains facing managers in the public sector workplace. This thesis explores the design of other practical techniques that managers, designers, business systems analysts and project staff can use in the workplace to enhance their individual and collective analytical, systemic and critical thinking skills and capabilities. The interpretive framework used in this social ecology research comprised a constructivist paradigm, a relativist ontology, a subjectivist epistemology, and a critical learning heuristic method. The research technique has been a purposeful and practical combination of critical learning heuristics, action research, project management and creative design conversations. Through the adoption of a first person narrative form and the literary motif of a journeyman’s story, the author relates aspects of his cumulative learning and research. The four major action research cycles are presented in a chronological sequence spanning the seven year period from late 1997 to end 2004. Key findings include a range of practical techniques, informed by systems and complexity theories, that managers and staff can readily understand and apply in approaching complex issues and dynamic problem domains in a large public sector organisation. / Master of Science (Hons)

This thesis investigates theoretical propositions of Beck (1996), Epstein (1987), and Young (1999) that suggest maladaptive schemas operating as deep unconscious cognitions are intrinsically linked to the psychological health and wellbeing of the individual. To date, research on psychological health has mainly used self-report measures that focus on conscious processes. The primary aim of this thesis was to explore particular maladaptive schemas that purportedly operate unconsciously and to examine their relationship with self-reported psychological dysfunction. Bruhn�s (1990a) Cognitive Perceptual Theory of early childhood memories was employed as a vehicle to access schemas deemed outside of conscious awareness. These unconscious schemas were investigated in conjunction with current self-reported maladaptive schemas in Study 1 and psychological symptoms in Study 2. The participants in Study 1 comprised 249 undergraduate first year psychology students. There were 198 women and 50 men with a mean age of 22 years who were asked to write down four early childhood memories. The first two memories were spontaneous in order to reveal the most pressing underlying schemas. The next two early memories requested were relating to mother and to father, to gain schema information about relationship dynamics. The participants then filled out the short-form of Young�s (1998) Schema Questionnaire (YSQ-S). Independent raters coded the memories for Young�s (1994) Early Maladaptive Schemas, and Last and Bruhn�s (1992) Object Relations categories of �Perceptions of Others�, �Perceptions of the Self�, �Perception of Environment�, and �Degree of Interpersonal Contact�, and �Individual Distinctiveness�. Polyserial correlations indicated that there were significant relationships between maladaptive schemas represented in early memories and self-reported maladaptive schemas. However, the lack of maladaptive schemas in memories being linked to the same maladaptive schemas that were being self-reported, suggested that the schemas represented in memories were tapping into a different source of information than conscious self-reports. A Discriminant Function Analysis (DFA) was performed with the sample divided into three groups (low, medium and high YSQ-S scorers). The results showed that maladaptive schemas identified in early memories that corresponded to Young�s (1990) �Disconnection and Rejection� domain and, Last and Bruhn�s (1992) Object Relations theme of �Perceiving the Environment as Unsafe�, were significant predictors of people in the group with high levels of self-reported maladaptive schemas. These variables also differentiated people in the high group from those in the low group at a greater rate than chance (33 percent). Fifty�six percent of people were correctly allocated to the high group on the basis of representations of these particular schemas in their memories. When only the low and high groups were analysed, using individual schemas rather than domains, �Mistrust/Abuse�, �Social Isolation�, �Emotional Deprivation� and �Subjugation� schemas in the first analysis and �Perceptions of the Environment as Unsafe� in the second analysis were found to be significant predictors. These predictors correctly classified 70 percent of cross-validated cases in the high groups in both analyses. For Study 2, the participants comprised 278 undergraduate first year psychology students. There were 65 men and 206 women with a mean age of 22 years who provided accounts of four early childhood memories as in Study 1. They also completed the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI; Derogatis, 1993). As with Study 1, the accounts of the completed early childhood memories were coded by independent raters who examined the memories for Young�s (1994) Maladaptive Schemas and Last and Bruhn�s (1992) Object Relations categories. Additionally, following each memory, the participants rated their memories using Hermans and Hermans-Jansen�s (1995) list of Affect Terms. The sample was divided into three groups on the basis of the General Severity Index [GSI] scores (low, medium and high scorers) that were derived from the BSI (Derogatis, 1993). A Discriminant Function Analysis showed that maladaptive schemas identified in the memories that corresponded to Young�s (1990) �Disconnection and Rejection� domain were significant predictors of people in the group with high levels of self-reported psychological symptoms (Derogatis, 1993). Fifty percent of people (which is greater than the chance rate of 33 percent) were correctly predicted as belonging to the high group on the basis of representations of schemas from this domain. In another DFA analysis that used individual schemas instead of domains, �Abandonment� and �Insufficient Self-Control�, together with �Perceiving the Environment to be safe� and �Negative Affect�, were found to be significant predictors that correctly allocated 58 percent of people into the high GSI group. Further analysis using only the low and high groups resulted in 83 percent of people in the high group being correctly identified on the basis of representations of �Abandonment�, �Insufficient Self-Control� and �Perceiving the Environment to be safe�. These results endorse the relevance of the relationships among an underlying sense of abandonment and insufficient self-control with high levels of psychological symptoms of distress. Taken together, the findings from both studies support the theoretical proposition that schemas residing outside of conscious awareness can have a pervasive link with psychological health and wellbeing. A particularly important discovery was that a relatively small number of schemas centered around perceptions of �Disconnection and Rejection� from others, that were operating unconsciously, were significantly linked to people in both studies who reported a wide range of psychological difficulties. It was concluded that investigating object relations, affect, and Young�s (1990) maladaptive schemas in early memories, is an efficient and possibly essential method of gaining information that may otherwise not be obtained from self-report measures exclusively. Consequently, in therapy, maladaptive schemas associated with disconnection and rejection represented in clients� early childhood memories can be viewed as very important unconscious schemas to examine. This is especially necessary given that these schemas may not be consciously accessed or easily articulated by clients, and yet seem to be intrinsically linked to a range of conscious psychological difficulties.

Mathematics is much more than the manipulation of numbers. At its best, it involves simple, clear examples of thought so apt to the world we live in that those examples provide guidance for our thinking about problems we meet subsequently. We call such examples, capable of heuristic use, POWERFUL IDEAS, after Papert (1980). This article documents a child's introduction to a specific powerful idea in a computer environment. We trace his extensions of that idea to other problem areas, the first similar to his initial experience and the second more remote from it.

This study investigated the nature of the relationship between working memory (WM) and sentence processing by examining interference effects in sentence comprehension and relating those to performance on a set of WM tasks, executive function tasks, and vocabulary tests. For online sentence comprehension, semantic interference effects were negatively correlated with semantic retention capacity. Syntactic interference effects were negatively related only to reading span. These results are consistent with the multiple capacities account (Martin & Romani, 1994), which postulates that there are separable retention abilities for semantic, syntactic, and phonological information, with the first two being critical for sentence comprehension. For offline sentence comprehension, participants with better semantic STM, WM span, vocabulary, or Stroop performance showed less difficulty in semantic interference resolution. These results were consistent to some extent with multiple capacities account, the general resources account (Just & Carpenter, 1992) and retrieval-based interference account (Van Dyke, 2007). Keywords: Interference effect, Working memory capacity, Cue-based retrieval, Sentence processing

The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is transforming the way planes move on the ground as well as in the sky. Some of the proposed changes, such as automated scheduling algorithms to generate taxi clearances and speed-based taxi clearances, require thorough testing to ensure safety and reliability. Cognitive modeling is able to uniquely address these issues in a compromise between costly human-in-the-loop simulations and deterministic computer simulations. In this thesis, I present an ACT-R cognitive model to emulate pilot taxiing behavior in a dynamic environment, in order to predict human behavior in novel situations imposed by NextGen constraints. The model is validated by comparing taxi routes generated by the model to routes driven by real pilots while on the job.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Linguistics, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Feb. 10, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: . Advisers: David B. Pisoni; Kenneth J. de Jong.

Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy in Modeling, Virtual Environments and Simulation (MOVES))--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Rudolph Darken. Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-313). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-206). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.