This thesis is concerned with the factors underlying both selection and use of evidence in the testing of hypotheses. The work it describes examines the role played in hypothesis evaluation by background knowledge about the probability of events in the environment as well as the influence of more general constraints. Experiments on information choice showed that subjects were sensitive both to explicitly presented probabilistic information and to the likelihood of evidence with regard to background beliefs. It is argued - in contrast with other views in the literature - that subjects' choice of evidence to test hypotheses is rational allowing for certain constraints on subjects' cognitive representations. The majority of experiments in this thesis, however, are focused on the issue of how the information which subjects receive when testing hypotheses affects their beliefs. A major finding is that receipt of early information creates expectations which influence the response to later information. This typically produces a recency effect in which presenting strong evidence after weak evidence affects beliefs more than if the same evidence is presented in the opposite order. These findings run contrary to the view of the belief revision process which is prevalent in the literature in which it is generally assumed that the effects of successive pieces of information are independent. The experiments reported here also provide evidence that processes of selective attention influence evidence interpretation: subjects tend to focus on the most informative part of the evidence and may switch focus from one part of the evidence to another as the task progresses. in some cases, such changes of attention can eliminate the recency effect. In summary, the present research provides new evidence about the role of background beliefs, expectations and cognitive constraints in the selection and use of information to test hypotheses. Several new findings emerge which require revision to current accounts of information integration in the belief revision literature.

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The current study addresses the overarching issue of the role that different types of involvement play in cognitive and behavioral processes and attitude formation by investigating 1) if and how SI and EI function jointly to form the level of AMI, 2) how SI, EI and AMI are interwoven to affect the level of RI, 3) the joint role of SI and EI on the routes to attitude formation. The findings suggest that SI and EI additively influence the level of AMI with stronger role of EI on the formation of AMI. Moreover, while SI and/or EI may affect AMI and subsequent cognitive and behavioral processes such as attention, comprehension, elaboration and information search intention their influences on such cognitive processes are only observed indirectly via the mediating role of AMI. No direct influence of SI and/or EI is observed when AMI is included in the models tested. In addition, AMI appears to be a robust indicator to the level of attention and information search intention regardless of the types of situational source of personal relevance and product types used, while SI and/or EI provide somewhat mixed results depending on the type of situational source of personal relevance and the type of products considered. With regard to joint function of SI, EI and AMI on the information search intention, there is an initial evidence of direct interactive influence of SI and EI on information search intention beyond the mediating role of AMI. However, this interactive function is only found via moderated regression analyses rather than ANOVA with a median-split of EI. Concerning attitude formation via dual-route theories of ELM and HSM, the current study suggests that systematic (central) vs. heuristic (peripheral) processing based on SI is inadequate to account for the two qualitatively different processes in advertising context dealing with laptop computer and digital camera ad. / text

The two studies described here address the question of how District Nurses determine patients' nursing problems and plan care. The theoretical framework for the investigation is derived from Information Processing Theory. A process tracing methodology was used to capture the content of District Nurses' thinking during an assessment visit to a newly referred patient. Data was collected in the natural setting to ensure ecological validity. The assessment visits were tape recorded and immediately following the visit a stimulated recall session was conducted in which the nurse was asked to describe her thinking during the assessment, prompted by the tape recording. This session was itself tape-recorded. Thus two verbal protocols were elicited for each assessment: a visit protocol and a recall protocol. Data were analysed by content analysis. The verbal protocols were assessed to ensure that they met the criteria for validity and reliability of the coding schedules was established using two measures or interrater reliability. The first study sought evidence of hypothetico-deductive reasoning by nurses and describes the type of decisions made by nurses. Although evidence of hypothesis generation and testing was found, nurses' knowledge was found to determine how they interpreted data initially and what data they sought. It was therefore concluded that a model of diagnostic reasoning that focused on cognitive processes alone was insufficient to explain the dynamics of clinical problem solving. The second study, therefore, sought to establish the structure and content of District Nurses knowledge and the cognitive processes they used during an assessment. The results suggest that nurses attend to both clinical and personal phenomena in order to make a judgement about the state of the patient and that their knowledge is organised internally as schema. This provides an explanation of how nurses recognise salient information and determine what further data is required. Four key cognitive activities were identified: search, inference, action and plan. The study concludes by drawing a line of reasoning to show how nurses integrate knowledge and reasoning processes to accomplish clinical problem solving.

Meta-parenting, defined as parents thinking about their parenting, has been identified and is a new field of research. The purposes of this study were to add to the existing knowledge of meta-parenting and to compare the influences of gender, work status, and parenting experience on meta-parenting occurring in parents of infants and toddlers. Sixty parents participated either electronically or by completing a written survey and reported engaging from "sometimes" to "usually" in four domains of meta-parenting: anticipating, assessing, reflecting, and problem-solving. Gender, work status, and parenting experience did not significantly influence participants' meta-parenting scores. Parents were found to have a higher sense of satisfaction and overall sense of competence when they engaged in higher levels of meta-parenting.

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Proponents of the Extended Mind Thesis (EMT) argue that the mind literally extends into the world because mental states literally extend into the world. But the arguments presented in favour of these claims are compatible with a much weaker conclusion, expressed as the Extended Machinery of Mind Thesis (EMMT) that secures only the extension of the enablers of mental states. What is required is a mark of the mental that can settle the constitutive versus enabling issue. Both sides of the debate accept non-derived content as a necessary condition on a state‘s being mental but this cannot settle the constitution versus enabling issue, meaning the debate has stagnated because there are no decisive moves left to make. Thus, the strongest move for the EM theorist to make is to reject non-derived content as the mark of the mental and seek an alternative. Because enactivism rejects the representational view of mind then if it can be made to work as an account of mentality it offers promise with regard to the formation of a new mark of the mental on which a genuinely interesting EMT can be based.

Data on standardized tests is often used to advocate for the inclusion of music programs in secondary education curriculum. There have been studies that claim to identify a relationship between music participation and higher earned test scores; however, correlation does not necessarily equate to causation. The argument between whether music instruction improves student testing ability or if higher achieving students are attracted to music courses is still prevalent within the music education domain. Executive function represents the processes within the brain that encompass a number of cognitive ability processes used in the transfer of knowledge. These processes are essential to progression and success in education (Caine & Caine, 2006; Chan, et. al., 2008). Research demonstrates that music instruction has the capacity to enhance various executive function processes in young students with previous music instruction and individualized violin training (Bugos, 2010; Ho et al., 2003; Chan et al., 1998). The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of secondary music instruction, specifically in the band setting, on executive function processes of processing speeding and working memory. 40 high school students, 20 students who had received previous band instruction and 20 who had not received previous band instruction ages 13 to 18, completed various cognitive and musical assessments to gauge musical ability and cognitive function (measuring attention, working memory, and processing speed). Students from both groups were paired using the Wechsler Abbreviated Intelligence Scale. Analysis of the results demonstrated that students who received prior band instruction demonstrated enhanced processing speed and working memory indices, as well as increased attention abilities.

Fire Service commanders work in a very dynamic environment. This research investigated the process they use to make sense and thereby develop understanding of situations during the response to a large-scale emergency. In previous research that investigated decision-making and situation awareness in real-life environments, the need for commanders to understand an incident is emphasised. This research aimed to generate new insights into the process individuals follow to build and improve situational understanding. An exploratory project phase was used to focus the research. Data from emergency exercises and interviews resulted in the design for the main study regarding application domain, data sources and methodological issues. For the main study, records of publicly available interviews with senior officers of the New York Fire Department on their experience of the response to the events at the World Trade Center on September, 11 2001 were analysed. Findings include six variations of the sensemaking process structure, which is characterised by distinct stages. A following investigation into why these stages occur took a theory-building approach and revealed two insights. First, process stages are tied to seven hierarchical but interlinked levels of understanding. Second, three groups of underlying mechanisms trigger process stages: four cognitive factors, eight needs to understand and three situational factors. The mechanisms occur in different combinations across process variations and have varying explanatory power. This study contributes to knowledge on the process of building and improving situational understanding and its link to understanding. A micro-level view of the sensemaking process is provided, showing the specific understanding that is gained and evolves along its stages. The view of sensemaking is extended from understanding what is going on and what can be done to include understanding performance of action. A review with experts revealed that findings adequately reflect the thinking of commanders during incident response and might have practical relevance for training and command support.

The central goal of the current thesis was to increase our understanding of how representations of individual faces are built from instances that vary. The prototype effect was used as a tool to probe the nature of our internal face representations. In face recognition, the prototype effect refers to the tendency to recognize, or find familiar, the average image of a face after having studied a series of similar face images. The experiments presented in this thesis investigated the modulating role of different variables on the prototype effect in face recognition. In the study phase, two or more different exemplars based on the same identity were presented. In the test phase, one of the seen exemplars, the unseen prototype, and an unseen exemplar of each studied identity were presented one at a time, and participants were asked to make a recognition judgement about the prior occurrence of either the exact image or the person’s face. Variants of each face identity were either unaltered images of real people’s faces, or they were created artificially by manipulating images of faces using several different techniques. All experiments using artificial variants produced strong prototype effects. The unseen prototype image was recognized more confidently than the actually studied images. This was true even when the variants were so similar that they were barely perceptually discriminable. Importantly, even when participants were given additional exposure to the studied exemplars, no weakening of the prototype effect was observed. Surprisingly, in the experiments using natural images of real people’s faces, no clear recognition advantage for the prototype image was observed. Results suggest that the prototype effect in face recognition might not be tapping an averaging mechanism that operates solely on variations within the same identity.