Experiencing interpersonal betrayals or trust violations can often create negative consequences for victims when creating new relationships. Past studies have found that trauma from previous betrayals can impair trust and thereby trust behavior for victims in the future. However, little research has been done to empirically characterize this connection and existing studies have provided conflicting results. The goal of this study was to explore the relationship between past trust violations, measured through the Brief Betrayal Trauma Survey (BBTS), and present self-reported trust and trust behavior. Differences in trust behavior between those with or without a history of betrayals was measured through an experimental economic trust game. Results found that those with a history of betrayal trauma had marginally lowered self-rated trust in strangers. While a history of betrayal trauma did not yield main effects on either first or average investments in the trust game, those with a history of betrayal had similar first and average investments in partners regardless of visual cue trustworthiness. Victims of betrayal seem to lack discriminatory trust behavior or possibly disregard visual cues entirely. These findings add to the current understanding of how victims of interpersonal betrayal interpret and respond to visual cues both initially and across multiple interactions and is especially relevant for those who aim to form close relationships with these individuals such as care providers.

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With the prevalence of large data stored in the cloud, including unstructured information in the form of text, there is now an increased emphasis on text mining. A broad range of techniques are now used for text mining, including algorithms adapted from machine learning, NLP, computational linguistics, and data mining. Applications are also multi-fold, including classification, clustering, segmentation, relationship discovery, and practically any task that discovers latent information from written natural language. Classical mining algorithms have traditionally focused on shallow representations such as bag-of-words and similar feature-based models. With the advent of modern high performance computing, deep sentence level linguistic analysis of large scale text corpora has become practical. In this dissertation, we evaluate the utility of dependency parses as textual features for different text mining applications. Dependency parsing is one form of syntactic parsing, based on the dependency grammar implicit in sentences. While dependency parsing has traditionally been used for text understanding, we investigate here its application to supply features for text mining applications. We specifically focus on three methods to construct textual features from dependency parses. First, we consider a dependency parse as a general feature akin to a traditional bag-of-words model. Second, we consider the dependency parse as the basis to build a feature graph representation. Finally, we use dependency parses in a supervised collocation mining method for feature selection. To investigate these three methods, several applications are studied, including: (i) movie spoiler detection, (ii) text segmentation, (iii) query expansion, and (iv) recommender systems. / Ph. D.

Older infants are good referential learners. That is, at around 14-months of age, they begin to learn the verbal labels of objects and events around them. However, referential learning can be made more challenging by increasing the lexical similarity between labels. The primary goal of this study was to examine whether an adult speaker's ostensive cues and eye gaze-object contingency could augment referential learning in 14-month-old infants under difficult conditions (i.e., minimal pair labels). In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized and tested on two word-object associations with minimal pairs (e.g., "bin" and "din"), presented on an eye-tracker. Importantly, each session began when infants made eye contact with a female speaker on the screen, and she continually looked at and verbally referenced each object in an infant-directed style. On test trials when the familiar object+label was switched, infants significantly increased their visual scanning of the speaker's mouth compared to control trials. In Experiment 2, the same procedure was followed with a new group of 14-month-olds, except that the speaker now looked in the opposite direction from the objects on the screen, but continued to label them with minimal pairs in an infant-directed style. In contrast to the results of Experiment 1, infants in this latter experiment did not differentially attend to any area of her face during the switch trials. This pattern of results shows that the ostensive nature of a social partner augments infants' referential learning under cognitive challenge, but it is the contingent nature of the speaker's regard to what is being labeled that is a necessary factor in promoting learning. / Ph. D.

Compass orientation or menotaxis is defined as the ability to orient at a specific angle relative to a directional cue. Cues used for compass orientation include the sun, stars, moon, geomagnetic field and polarized light. While there is evidence in a variety of organisms for compass orientation, the ability of mammals to use cues for compass orientation has been relatively unexplored. The goal of this research was to explore whether laboratory mice could use either magnetic or auditory cues for compass orientation. The results indicate that mice are able to learn to position their nest using a magnetic compass. The development of a magnetic compass assay in laboratory mice will allow the investigation of the mechanism of magnetic compass orientation in mammals, a goal that has been unattainable to this point.In addition, this research has provided preliminary evidence that mice are able to learn to position their nests using an auditory compass. While there is evidence in several organisms for place navigation using auditory cues (i.e. the ability to locate a specific spatial position using auditory cues), this is the first evidence in any organism for an auditory compass (i.e. the ability to calculate a directional heading relative to an auditory cue).In conclusion, both experiments provide evidence for specialized compass systems in mice and suggest that further research is necessary to fully understand the role of these systems in the behavioral ecology of mice. / Master of Science

Yes / Reduced binocularity is a prominent feature of amblyopia and binocular cues are thought to be important for prehension. We examine prehension in individuals with amblyopia when the target-object was flanked, thus mimicking everyday prehension. Methods: amblyopes (n=20, 36.4±11.7 years; 6 anisometropic, 3 strabismic, 11 mixed) and visually-normal controls (n=20, 27.5±6.3 years) reached forward, grasped and lifted a cylindrical target-object that was flanked with objects on either (lateral) side of the target, or in front and behind it in depth. Only 6 amblyopes (30%) had measurable stereoacuity. Trials were completed in binocular and monocular viewing, using the better eye in amblyopic participants. Results: Compared to visual normals, amblyopes displayed a longer overall movement time (p=0.031), lower average reach velocity (p=0.021), smaller maximum aperture (p=0.007) and longer durations between object contact and lift (p=0.003). Differences between groups were more apparent when the flankers were in front and behind, compared to either side, as evidenced by significant group-by-flanker configuration interactions for reach duration (p<0.001), size and timing of maximum aperture (p≤0.009), end-of-reach to object-contact (p<0.001), and between object contact and lift (p=0.044), suggesting that deficits are greatest when binocular cues are richest. Both groups demonstrated a significant binocular advantage, in that in both groups performance was worse for monocular compared to binocular viewing, but interestingly, amblyopic deficits in binocular viewing largely persisted during monocular viewing with the better eye. Conclusions: These results suggest that amblyopes either display considerable residual binocularity or that they have adapted to make good use of their abnormal binocularity.

Yes / Mothers' responsiveness to hunger and fullness cues has been implicated in the development of infant over-weight, and baby led weaning (BLW) is argued to be one way to protect against overfeeding. Whilst studies have examined maternal perceptions of hunger, fullness and adequate intake to some degree in traditional weaning (TW) contexts, less is known about this in BLW. This study therefore aimed to understand and compare maternal perceptions of cues and intake in BLW and TW. Eleven mothers of infants (7–24m) participated in semi-structured interviews based on discussions of short videos featuring participants feeding their infants. Interviews were read and transcribed in full. Data were selected for coding which addressed mothers' perceptions of infant hunger, fullness and sufficient consumption and subsequently subjected to template analysis. A sample of data was coded to produce an initial template which was applied to all interviews and revised in an iterative process to produce a final template for interpreting findings. Mothers in the study were adept at recognising fullness cues and gauging feeding state. Both groups perceived similar hunger cues although TW mothers reported a wider range of fullness cues. Both groups used numerous strategies for judging the adequacy of their babies’ intake. These included the use of infant cues, however perceived adequacy of intake was also influenced by factors such as infant tiredness and maternal worries about over and under-eating. Findings have implications for the development of responsive feeding interventions while also highlighting the utility of video elicited interviews for understanding feeding interactions. / This work was supported by a White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership Economic and Social Research Council PhD studentship (UK) to Janet McNally.