Although a lot of information is available from our environment at every moment, only a small part gives rise to a conscious percept. It is then legitimate to wonder which mechanisms are involved in the perception phenomenon. On the basis of which processes will a sensory stimulation be perceived consciously? What happens to the stimulations that are not consciously perceived? The work presented in this thesis aims to bring some elements of response to these two questions in the auditory modality. Through different behavioral and electroencephalographic studies, we suggest that knowledge could have a top-down facilitatory influence on high-level as well as on low-level (like detection) processing of complex auditory stimulations. The stimulations we have some knowledge about (phonologic or semantic) are more easily detected than the stimulations that contain neither phonologic nor semantic information. We also show that the activation of the knowledge influences the perception of subsequent stimulations, even when the context is not perceived consciously. This is evidenced by a subliminal semantic priming effect and by modifications of the neural oscillations in the beta frequency band associated with lexical processing of stimulations that were not consciously categorized. Hence, auditory perception can be considered as the product of the continuous interaction between the context set by the environment and the knowledge one has about specific stimuli. Such an interaction would lead listeners to preferentially perceive what they already know. / Tandis que de nombreuses informations sont disponibles dans notre environnement à chaque instant, toutes ne donnent pas lieu à une perception consciente. Il est alors légitime de se demander quels mécanismes entrent en jeu dans le phénomène de perception. Sur la base de quels processus une stimulation sensorielle sera-t-elle perçue de façon consciente ? Que deviennent les stimulations qui ne sont pas perçues consciemment ? Ce présent travail de thèse vise à apporter des éléments de réponse à ces deux questions dans la modalité auditive. À travers plusieurs études utilisant des approches comportementales mais aussi électroencéphalographiques, nous suggérons que les connaissances pourraient exercer une influence top-down facilitant les hauts comme les bas niveaux de traitement (comme la détection) des stimulations auditives complexes. Les stimulations pour lesquelles nous avons des connaissances (phonologiques et sémantiques) sont mieux détectées que les stimulations ne contenant ni caractéristique phonologique ni caractéristique sémantique. Nous montrons également que l'activation des connaissances influence la perception des stimulations ultérieures, et ce, même lorsque le contexte n'est pas perçu consciemment. En effet nous avons pu mettre en évidence un effet d'amorçage sémantique subliminal et nous avons observé des modifications neuronales oscillatoires dans la bande de fréquence bêta concomitante au traitement lexical de stimulations non catégorisées consciemment. L'ensemble des perceptions auditives ne serait alors que le produit d'une interaction permanente entre le contexte environnemental et les connaissances, ce qui nous conduirait à percevoir préférentiellement ce que nous connaissons déjà.

Problem: One of the factors that cause new products to fail in a competitive market is the lack of user involvement in the innovative stages of product development. By investigating the benefits of involving users and analysing their ability to generate creative ideas, companies can design products that improve the user-value and the overall perception of the company. This paper examines the variances of users’ idea generation and their ability to come up with producible and user-valuable ideas. Method: A quantitative survey with a mixed-methods analysis was conducted in order to collect primary data. The experiment was carried out in the setting of Karlstad Airport with 193 respondents. The respondents were divided between groups of frequent users, non-frequent users and non-users in order to see their variances of idea generation and the impact of a priming stimulus on each of the user groups. Theory: The theoretical framework used in this thesis mainly consists of theory explaining the concept of priming and Peter Magnusson’s doctoral dissertation focusing on involving users in service innovation. The thesis also takes on the Service-Dominant perspective to better explain the background for user innovation procedures. Conclusion: This study concludes that user involvement in the idea generation process is of a high value for the company due to the broader perspective on the users’ actual needs. Priming can have a strong positive or negative effect on the creative idea generation depending on whether the users are identified according to their product related knowledge.

<p>Three studies examine individuals' implicit sensitivity to the absence of motivation perceived in others and how the nature of this sensitivity is moderated by individuals' own motivational states. Using a subliminal priming paradigm, Study 1 tested a direct perception-behavior link between perceiving indifference in others and applying such indifference towards one's own pursuits. Study 2 then examined how individuals who are primed in advance with a nonconscious achievement goal show automatic counteraction to the indifference perceived in others. Using a video-based priming paradigm, Study 3 then found that such goal-driven counteraction to indifference occurred only among individuals with higher action control--those who had the ability to sustain goal pursuit after the intention to pursue it has been formed. In contrast, individuals with lower action control in Study 3 were more susceptible to indifference than all other participants, particularly when an achievement goal was made highly active in memory. These influences were found in all three studies to occur largely without participants' conscious intent or awareness.</p> / Dissertation

Burns often leads to infection, due to damage to the skin's protective barrier. Burn injury has been repeatedly shown to induce considerable inflammatory and immune dysfunction. The innate immune system is a universal and ancient form of host defense against infection. Activation of innate immunity constitutes the first line of host defense against infection. Neutrophils are white blood cells and part of the immune system. They are the most common PMN (polymorphonuclear neutrophils) and accounted for 70% of all leukocytes. Neutrophils provided the first line of defense of the innate immune system by phagocytosing, killing, and digesting bacteria and fungi. Priming means a process whereby the response of neutrophils to an activating stimulus is potentiated, sometimes greatly, by prior to exposure to priming agents such as tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF-alpha), platelet-activating factor (PAF). Neutrophil priming causes a dramatic increase in the response of these cells to an activating agent; this process has been shown to be critical for neutrophil-mediated tissue injury both in vitro and in vivo. However, the intracellular signaling pathways used by neutrophil in response to pro-inflammatory stimuli have not been elucidated. The discovery of TLRs has made us understanding of the mechanisms of innate immune recognition. The innate immune system detectes the invasion of microorganism through TLRs, which recognize microbial components and trigger inflammatory responses. Severe burn injury produces shock and induces acute gastrointestinal derangement that may disrupt gastrointestinal mucosa integrity and facilitate the bacterial translocation (BT) to Mesenteric lymph node (MLN), liver, and spleen. Hypertonic saline (HTS) has been advocated in thermal injury resuscitation because of the possibility of giving less total volume of resuscitation fluid, with a resulting decrease in edema and the need for escharotomy. In this study, I found that priming effect of BM neutrophils is TNF-alpha and p38 dependent and TLRs play a critical role to the innate immunity by recognizing bacteria and HTS enhance host response to bacterial challenge by increasing TLRs of inflammatory cells.

Rumination is a maladaptive coping style that has been found to be associated with several negative outcomes, including depression and anxiety. In particular, rumination has been found to be associated with deficits in inhibiting irrelevant information. This study examined the relationship of rumination to depression, anxiety, and stress and examined gender differences in these relationships. It also examined inhibitory deficits in rumination using a negative priming task with both short- and long-term components and evaluated the efficacy of a negative priming paradigm which utilised single presentations of stimuli that were not confounded by stimulus-response bindings. The results found that rumination was associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress, in line with the classification of rumination as maladaptive. It was also discovered that the predictors of rumination differed between males and females, with rumination being predicted by stress and depression for females and by anxiety for males, indicating possible gender differences in the explanation of rumination. The negative priming paradigm used in this study failed to produce any significant negative priming, and indeed produced significant positive priming meaning that no conclusions could be drawn from the data about inhibitory deficits and rumination. The results did however highlight the importance of the probe distractor in negative priming as it appears that a lack of competition between the probe distractor and the probe target may be a possible reason for the failure to observe negative priming.

The present study investigated phonological encoding skills in children who stutter (CWS). Participants were 4 CWS (M=10;9years) and 4 children who do no stutter (CNS) (M=12;1 years) The groups were compared in phoneme monitoring and rhyme monitoring, with a tone monitoring task providing a neutral baseline for comparison. Both the phoneme monitoring and rhyme monitoring tasks were performed during silent picture naming. Results revealed that both groups were faster and more accurate when monitoring the rhyme than when monitoring the phoneme. Results further indicated that the children who stutter were significantly slower in both conditions. These findings suggest that there may be a later transition to incremental processing in both typically developing children and those who stutter and that children who stutter may be even less efficient than children who do not stutter. However, these results may have been compromised by a few key variables. / text

In older children and adults, words are stored in the mental lexicon in an organized manner and processed in a systematic manner on the basis of their phonological structures. The processing of novel words is therefore more efficient. Young children may process a novel word in a holistic manner, and the words are not stored phonemically distinct with one another in the mental lexicon. Priming is a method often used in spoken word recognition studies. The effects of phonological primes on word learning would reflect the organization of mental lexicon in young children. At the same time, research has shown that there is a positive correlation between phonological short-term memory (STM) and word learning. But the mechanism of how both phonological STM and mental lexicon are involved in word learning is not clear. Forty-two five- to seven-years-old children with a mean age of 6;06 (SD = 0;10) participated in a spoken word learning task. They were presented with names of 18 novel cartoon characters in nine word learning blocks and the names were novel disyllables that are consistent with the phonotactics of Cantonese. In each block, children were exposed to two novel words along with two real words as primes, with the primes phonologically similar to one novel word (“PHONOLOGICAL” condition) but not with the other one (“UNRELATED” condition). They heard each novel word twice and the primes three times. These participants also took part in nonword repetition tasks and a serial order construction task as measures of the phonological STM. A significantly positive effect of phonological priming was observed in the cartoon character naming but not in the form identification and the referent identification. Further analysis of the naming results showed that only the same-onset-and-tone primes produced a significant priming effect. Among the various short-term memory measures, only nonword repetition of pseudosyllables (syllable score) was significantly and positively correlated with the cartoon character naming score after controlling for age. The findings of the present study presented some evidence that even five-year-old Cantonese-speaking children have already organized the lexical representations in neighbourhoods so that phonological primes could exert facilitatory effects on their spoken word learning. Even this young group of children was able to process novel words in a segmental manner. But there could still be some subtle differences between the younger and older children. A word learning model which integrates the involvement of phonological STM and mental lexicon could help to explain how these two memory components contribute to word learning and the word learning differences between the younger and older children. The preliminary findings of this study provided some evidence in children’s sensitivity to the phonological structures of novel spoken words. Cantonese-speaking children, similar to English-speaking ones, are sensitive to the phonological structures of novel words and phonological primes facilitate their spoken word learning. The results of this study further suggest long-term memory and phonological short-term memory are involved at the initial stage of word learning. However, the mechanism of interactions needs to be further investigated. / published_or_final_version / Speech and Hearing Sciences / Master / Master of Philosophy

This dissertation investigates the mental representation of the root in the Moroccan dialect of spoken Arabic. While morphemes like roots have traditionally been defined as the smallest unit of sound-meaning correspondence, this definition has been long known to be problematic (Hockett, 1954). Other theories suggest that roots may be abstract units devoid of phonological or semantic content (Pfau, 2009; Harley, 2012) or that words are the basic unit of the mental lexicon (Aronoff, 1994, 2007; Blevins, 2006). The root of Moroccan words is examined with auditory priming experiments, using auditory lexical decision tasks, including the subliminal speech priming technique (Kouider and Dupoux, 2005). Chapter 2 shows that the subliminal speech priming technique should be modified with primes compressed uniformly to 240ms for Moroccan Arabic (the compression rate varies to achieve the uniform 240ms prime duration).Chapters 3 and 4 apply supraliminal and subliminal speech priming technique to Moroccan Arabic. The priming effect of words that share a root are found to be robust and distinct from words which simply share semantic or phonological content. Furthermore, roots which are instantiated as novel coinages produce priming effects, which further suggests that the root is a structural unit. Each related word in a morphological family, however, does not prime all of its relatives, contradicting the idea of a root as a structural unit. These subliminal effects also differ from supraliminal effects, where overlap in phonological form between the prime and target results in facilitation when identifying the target. The results of these experiments suggest that the word is the basic unit of speech perception, rather than the root. The root is is not an mental unit but a property of words or relationship among a morphological family. Competition from phonological neighbors is a late effect, since shared phonology facilitates only with the supraliminal technique but not the subliminal technique. Finally, realizational theories of morphology are supported, since take the word as the basic unit of the lexicon. While the root may not have phonological content per se, root phonology is important for deriving morphological families. Chapter 4 uses weak roots (which do not consistently show three root consonants in each derived form) to show that semi-vowels are encoded as root consonants.

Symbols represent information we have previously learned or experienced, but they can also serve to encourage thoughts and behaviors that are consistent with this knowledge/experience in order to maintain social cohesion (Guthrie, 1996). Pictures (e.g., American Red Cross image) representing moral rules (e.g., ‘save lives’) have been shown to influence moral decisions (Broeders, van den Box, Muller, & Ham, 2011), but there is no empirical evidence to demonstrate that religious pictures encourage the same outcome. Four studies examined whether religious pictures would influence decision making (lexical, moral), and furthermore whether personal belief in religion was a moderating factor. In Study 1, participants viewed religious and neutral (control) pictures, and then made a series of lexical decisions (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). In Study 2, participants viewed religious and neutral words (which represented the pictures viewed in Study 1), and then made lexical decisions. In Studies 3 and 4, participants made decisions about moral actions. Moral decisions were preceded by viewing pictures in Study 3, and by words in Study 4. Self-reported religiosity was assessed last in each experiment. Across the four studies, we found support for the influence of religious pictures on decision making. In Studies 1 and 2, lexical decisions were faster to religious words when primed with religious pictures. In Study 3, participants rated morally ambiguous actions as less appropriate when primed with religious pictures. This occurred to a greater degree for religious participants. In Study 4, there was a general priming effect of religious words, but this was not influenced by individual religious beliefs.

In this thesis, I sought to establish whether the mere presence of money differentially affects the perception of competent and autonomous control over life outcomes among people of relatively low and high self-perceived wealth. According to my theoretical perspective regarding the effects of monetary cues, thinking about money should cause people to view themselves in terms of their own relative financial resources. As money is perceived as a resource that enables competent and autonomous control over life outcomes, the presence of money should cause people low in wealth to feel lower in personal control and autonomy and should motivate the preservation or retrieval of a sense of control and autonomy. By contrast, the presence of money should cause the wealthy to feel higher in personal control and autonomy. Three experiments were designed to test hypotheses stemming from this view and to broaden our understanding of how and why money affects cognition and behaviour. In Experiment 1, I tested whether a money prime affected perceived control, autonomy, and need for structure. For people low in self-perceived wealth, money decreased autonomy and control over life outcomes, and increased the need for structure. People high in wealth were not affected by the money prime. In Experiment 2, I examined whether the presence of money had consequences for interactions with others in social environments characterized by low and high structure. In a setting lacking structure, the presence of money caused people of lower socioeconomic status (SES) to prefer less social contact compared to people of higher SES. The interacting effects of money and SES diminished when the environment was structured in nature. In Experiment 3, I tested competing hypotheses regarding whether the presence of money can influence attitudes and beliefs about external sources of control. I found that when people who were lower in wealth were primed with money, versus not, they reported lesser belief in a controlling god. By contrast, when people of higher wealth were primed with money, versus not, they reported greater belief in a controlling god. I discuss my findings vis-à-vis the current perspective and previous money priming research. / Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)