Thesis (Ph. D.)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2003. / Dissertation supervisor: Michael Zyda. Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-192). Also available online.

<p>The petrochemical field is an industry seeking to increase efficiency, improve safety of workers, and lessen environmental impacts (U.S. Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board, 2007). One way to improve the performance of operators is to investigate their situation awareness (SA). Research has shown that SA is a predictor of performance (Durso et al., 1999). However, there is little consensus on how to measure SA. This study investigated two prominent techniques for measuring SA: the Situation Present Assessment Method (SPAM; Durso & Dattel, 2004) and the Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT; Endsley, 1995b). These two techniques were examined for their psychometric properties in assessing SA among operators. The results of this investigation showed that probe-type SA techniques can be used to assess SA in this field. This especially applies to the SPAM technique, which was shown to predict performance, not intrude, and was preferred by a majority of operators.

<p> This qualitative study uses phenomenology as its method of inquiry to examine increased intuitive capabilities experienced by firefighters during emergency incidents. Firefighters provide immediate crisis intervention and are often faced with exposure to traumatic incidents that demand rapid and spontaneous decisions. The emphasis of this investigation is placed on the phenomenological implications of unconscious motivations that target spontaneous tactical and strategic split-second decisions. Intuition is the basis from which implicit decision-making practices emerge during emergency-scene management. Increased intuitive awareness simultaneously arises from, and is a reaction to, the activation of rapid decision making when exposed to crisis situations. Through the oral documentation of the lived experiences of on-scene firefighter managers (battalion chiefs and captains), this investigation expands the literature concerning the activation of intuition.</p><p> Attempts to define intuition during critical incidents can often lead to a generalization that overlooks the importance of cultural implications of the diverse firefighter population. The findings in this study recognize commonly held interpersonal, group organizational, and sociocultural personality identities of the 21st-century American firefighter. Thematic constructs of firefighter personality formulations expand the multiple dimensions of explicit and implicit characteristics of firefighters&rsquo; occupational subjective and collective personality preferences that correlate with specific inherent tendencies toward intuitive decisions.</p>

<p> Limited research on creativity in delinquents concluded they were generally not creative, and delinquents who <i>were</i> creative tended to express creativity in the domains of crime and violence. None of this research examined creativity in delinquents with testing validated to measure both the divergent-exploratory and convergent-integrative thinking processes, now considered essential and interdependent elements of creative thinking. Further, no studies empirically examined creative products for violent and criminal content. The present study used archival data from an adapted Evaluation of Potential Creativity (EPoC) to analyze the creative potential of adolescents in a juvenile detention center relative to a reference group of adolescents in the general population. The adapted EPoC assessed creative potential in the graphic and verbal domains of divergent-exploratory thinking and the graphic domain of convergent-integrative thinking. Drawings from the adapted EPoC were also analyzed for presence and level of unsolicited violent content. </p><p> Delinquents demonstrated lower levels of creativity than adolescents of the general population in the graphic domain of both divergent-exploratory and convergent-integrative thinking. However, there was no difference in level of creativity between delinquents and adolescents of the general population in the verbal domain of divergent-exploratory thinking. In addition, delinquency did not moderate the relationship between creativity and production of unsolicited violent content in drawings; high levels of creativity in both delinquents and adolescents of the general population were associated with the production of high levels of unsolicited violent content in drawings. </p><p> The finding of no difference in levels of verbal creativity between delinquents and adolescents of the general population may suggest both groups share a common deficiency in verbal creativity due to environmental and pedagogic factors; specifically, an art bias equating creativity with graphic but not verbal creativity, and a teacher preference for students oriented toward the visual arts. The finding associating high levels of creativity with high levels of unsolicited violent content in drawings for both delinquents and adolescents of the general population may be related to the observed tendency of all creative adolescents to draw a greater volume of content overall, indicating drawing violent content is commonplace and disassociated from delinquency.</p>

In many everyday activities, we must visually process multiple objects embedded in complex real world scenes. Our visual system can flexibly extract behaviorally relevant visual information from such scenes, even though it has a severely limited processing capacity. This dissertation proposes that human superior intra-parietal sulcus (IPS) plays a central role in this flexible visual information processing. In Chapter 1, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with univariate analysis, I found that distractor processing in superior IPS was attenuated when target locations were known in advance. In Chapter 2, using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), I showed that superior IPS encoded object shapes, but only when such information was required by task. In Chapter 3, I showed that, given a set of perceptually distinct, but semantically grouped visual inputs, superior IPS could represent abstract object identity. The neural similarity of identities in superior IPS significantly correlated with perceived similarity between identities, confirming the representation in this region indeed reflected identity. Taken together, these results suggest that human superior IPS encodes a wide range of visual information, from simple features to abstract identities, in a task-dependent manner, enabling flexible goal-directed visual information processing in the human brain. / Psychology

<p> The ubiquity of social media has enhanced consumers&rsquo; ability to stay in touch as well as save and access information about others at will. This easy access to information on social media has the potential to change the way consumers seek and remember information. This dissertation sheds light on how information accessibility on social media shapes users&rsquo; cognitions. Using a professional social network context, we examine two types of information that consumers pay attention to &ndash; content (i.e., &lsquo;who knows what&rsquo;) and connections (i.e., &lsquo;who knows who&rsquo;) and how different types of social media influencers (content generators vs. content diffusors) strategically seek information under specific contingencies - when they are vs. are not connected to others (i.e., when information accessibility is high vs. low). We also suggest that individual differences in executive attention moderate this type of content seeking. Results across five studies reveal that content generators tend to focus on others&rsquo; content when they are not linked (vs. linked) but content diffusors tend to demonstrate the opposite, i.e., increased focus on content when they are linked (vs. not linked). Alternatively, when it comes to information about connections, content diffusors tend to focus on it when they are not linked (vs. linked) while content generators demonstrate no such active information seeking behavior. Interestingly, selective content seeking manifests only in users who rank high in working memory capacity &ndash; a factor that determines strategic attention control. Overall, this research shows that strategic content seeking happens on account of attention control processes and its outcome depends upon users&rsquo; social media roles. This thesis contributes to the emerging social media literature in marketing by outlining a new phenomenon, strategic content seeking, explicating its underlying cognitive mechanism and delineating relevant social and cognitive moderators.</p>

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Neuroscientific data may be usefully invoked in the arbitration of debates concerning the scope of representational theories of the mind. Contemporary cognitivists (e.g. Fodor) tend toward theoretical imperialism in that they argue that all types of intelligent behaviour, including perceptual-motor skills, can be explained within the framework of representationalism. Phenomenologists (e.g. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Dreyfus) argue that the scope of cognitivism is not as vast as its proponents suppose. They claim that perceptual-motor skills are non-representational and thus fall beyond the purview of cognitivism. I argue that this debate can be resolved in favour of the phenomenologists by citing the neuroscientific evidence for the claim that there are two distinct neural memory systems: (1) a hippocampal system which operates over neurally realized Fodorian representations and subserves rational thought and action and (2) a non-representational striatal system which subserves perceptual-motor skills.

The present thesis and series of studies explores the underlying cognitive and neuropsychological processes that underlies propensity for aggressive response in adult men and women, both sober and intoxicated. Previous research demonstrated that poor executive functioning, either pre-existing (idiopathic) or induced by alcohol-intoxication, was associated with heightened aggressive responses. The first study demonstrates that although cognitively impaired when alcohol intoxicated, men with above average pre-alcohol Executive Cognitive Functioning (ECF) do not act aggressively if they are properly motivated to remain non-aggressive, suggesting some ability to use residual executive function. The second study directly compares the aggression-eliciting effects of alcohol in both men and women, an under-investigated issue. Results indicate that aggression levels in the women are not significantly less than those of men, and that alcohol-intoxication is not as predictive a factor in women as in men. The third study, a post-hoc analysis of the second, indicates that like for men, executive function level in women is highly related to propensity for aggressive response, in fact far more predictive than acute alcohol-intoxication. The fourth study was intended to investigate a possible behavioural explanation for the ECF-aggression relationship. Specifically, this study was designed to assess whether the aggression manifested by individuals with poor ECF was rapid or impulsive, i.e. due to a disinhibition process. Contrary to this popular contention, this study demonstrates that when faced with complex, social interactions, low-ECF individuals act aggressively, but only after a somewhat slow period of apparent contemplation. These findings and others conducted by the author are discussed in a speculative model of the ECF-aggression relationship. Means by which to test this model are proposed, as are other theoretical implications of the work.

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