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Människor lämnar alla efter sig ett miljöavtryck när man inhandlar matvaror. Hur stort miljöavtryck man upplever att man lämnar efter sig är dock inte alltid korrekt. Syftet med studien var att undersöka om upplevelsen av en köprundas miljöavtryck påverkas särskilt av huruvida köprundan inleds med ett miljövänligt val eller avslutas med ett miljövänligt val. Detta för att få en bredare förståelse om kognitiva mekanismer som ligger till grund för miljörelaterat beteende. I denna kvantitativa studie så studerades psykologin i människors upplevelse av miljöpåverkan genom att undersöka hur miljömärkning påverkar upplevelsen av miljöavtryck från konsumentval. Studien undersökte ifall miljömärkta varor har större effekt på denna upplevelse om de märkta varorna inhandlas i början eller i slutet i en sekvens av inköp. Detta utfördes genom ett digitalt test som 32 deltagare (17 kvinnor, 15 män) vars ålder var mellan 22 och 63 år (M=32,31 år, SD=10,92) fick delta i och skattade sin miljöpåverkan som deltagarna tror att varorna hade under den fiktiva köprundan. Genom att undersöka ifall ordningen från första eller sista miljövalet har betydelse så får man en primacy eller en recency effekt. Denna studie indikerar på att under en köprunda när den avslutas med ett miljövänligt val så kommer människor uppleva att ens köprunda har lägre miljöavtryck i sin helhet. Studien visar alltså på en recency effekt samt duration neglect, däremot ingen primacy effekt. / Every single person who buys food products leave an environmental footprint. How big of an environmental footprint you feel you leave behind is not always accurate. The purpose of the study was to examine whether the experience of a shopping round's environmental footprint is particularly affected by whether the shopping round begins with an environmentally friendly choice or ends with an environmentally friendly choice. This is to gain a broader understanding of cognitive mechanisms which are the basis of environmental behaviour. In this quantitative study, the psychology of people's experience of environmental impact were studied by examining how environmental labelling affects the experience of environmental footprint from consumer choices. The study examines whether eco-labelled goods have a greater effect on this experience if the labelled goods are purchased at the beginning or at the end of a sequence of purchases. This is done through a digital test that 32 participants (17 women, 15 men) aged between 22 and 63 years (M=32,31 år, SD=10,92) can take part in where they estimate their environmental impact that the participants think the goods have had during the fictitious shopping round. By checking the order, if the first or last choice is important, you get a primacy or a recency effect. This study indicates that during a shopping spree when it ends with an environmentally friendly choice, people will experience that one's shopping spree has a lower environmental footprint as a whole. The study thus shows a recency effect and a duration neglect, but no primacy effect.

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Children with language impairment (LI) have notable social problems (Brinton & Fujiki, 2004). Research has shown that children with LI often have deficits in working memory (Kirchner & Klatsky, 1985; Stark, Poppen, & May, 1987). The relationship between working memory and social behaviors has not been clearly defined. This study examined this relationship in children with LI and typical age-matched peers by asking participants to repeat nine nonwords and correlating these results with social behaviors as rated by teachers. The Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS; Hart and Robinson, 1996) was used to compare social behaviors of 19 school-age children with LI to 19 age-matched peers with typically developing language skills. Social behaviors were divided into two categories, withdrawal and sociability. One subtype of withdrawal (reticence) and two subtypes of sociability (prosocial and likeability) were examined. Nonword repetition is a culturally nonbiased measurement of the ability to form phonological representation of nonwords in working memory (Edwards & Lahey, 1998). A modified version of Edwards and Lahey's nonword repetition task was used to assess working memory. Teachers rated children with LI as demonstrating higher levels of reticence and lower levels of both types of sociability than typical children. Children with LI performed poorer on the nonword repetition task at all syllable lengths (3-syllable, 4-syllable, and 5 syllable). Analyses of covariance were performed, including all participants, to identify if there were significant relationships between social behaviors and working memory. The results indicated that working memory was a significant factor for reticence, likeability, and prosocial behaviors. Regression analyses indicated that nonword repetition scores were significant predictors of reticence, accounting for 28% of the variance, likeability, accounting for 18% of the variance, and prosocial behaviors, accounting for 11% of the variance. As working memory increased, reticence decreased and both likeability and prosocial skills increased. Further analyses showed that only likeability was significantly influenced by language group and gender. Group specific analyses indicated that likeability was predicted by working memory for typical peers but not for children with LI. Working memory was also a stronger predictor of likeability for males than females.

Background AR technology has been increasing across domains in cognitive activities, i.e. learning. Although there are studies that try to examine the quality AR can bring into different territories of human culture, such as educational settings, few studies aspire to determine how AR can have on human memory. Particularly short-term memory. Objectives This research aims to assess the affect on short-term memory through an AR and Analog game. Methods The method proposed for this thesis work is a user study in a controlled environment to gather data for the results. In order to test the hypothesis, a quantitative approach was selected as two versions of the same game were compared. A within-participant experiment was designed. Results The results from the experiment indicate that AR has a lower score on average compared to its non-virtual counterpart. Conclusion Overall, our findings suggest that AR does not have a significant affect on short-term memory with digits.

Impulsivity is a hallmark of two of the three DSM-IV ADHD subtypes and is associated with myriad adverse outcomes. Limited research, however, is available concerning the mechanisms and processes that contribute to impulsive responding by children with ADHD. The current study tested predictions from two competing models of ADHD – working memory (WM) and behavioral inhibition (BI) – to examine the extent to which ADHD-related impulsive responding was attributable to model-specific mechanisms and processes. Children with ADHD (n = 21) and typically developing children (n = 20) completed laboratory tasks that provided WM (domaingeneral central executive [CE], phonological/visuospatial storage/rehearsal) and BI indices (stopsignal reaction time [SSRT], stop-signal delay, mean reaction time). These indices were examined as potential mediators of ADHD-related impulsive responding on two diverse laboratory tasks used commonly to assess impulsive responding (CPT: continuous performance test; VMTS: visual match-to-sample). Bias-corrected, bootstrapped mediation analyses revealed that CE processes significantly attenuated between-group impulsivity differences, such that the initial large-magnitude impulsivity differences were no longer significant on either task after accounting for ADHD-related CE deficits. In contrast, SSRT partially mediated ADHD-related impulsive responding on the CPT but not VMTS. This partial attenuation was no longer significant after accounting for shared variance between CE and SSRT; CE continued to attenuate the ADHD-impulsivity relationship after accounting for SSRT. These findings add to the growing literature implicating CE deficits in core ADHD behavioral and functional impairments, and suggest that cognitive interventions targeting CE rather than storage/rehearsal or BI processes may hold greater promise for alleviating ADHD-related impairments

The aim of this thesis was to investigate how visual information is organised in perceptual short term memory, with special interest in colour, spatial frequency and velocity. Previous studies of VSTM have indicated the existence of specific memory mechanisms for visual attributes such as orientation, spatial frequency, velocity, contrast and colour. The retention of information in visual short term memory for these basic visual attributes can be disrupted by the presentation of masking stimuli during inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs), which are outside the range of traditional sensory masking. We exploited this memory masking effect in order to examine the organisation of visual information in VSTM. Four groups of experiments were conducted in which participants carried out a delayed discrimination paradigm that employed a two-alternative forced choice (2-AFC) procedure in conjunction with a method of constant stimuli. The fidelity of VSTM was measured by performance markers such as discrimination thresholds and point of subjective equalities. We have found selective memory masking effects, which serve as further evidence in favour of the modular organisation in VSTM, namely, that human visual perceptual memory is based upon multiple, tuned channels in case of colour, spatial frequency and speed, similar to those found in the earliest stages of visual processing for spatial frequency. Moreover, each of these storage mechanisms are tuned to a relatively narrow range of stimulus parameters that are closely linked to visual discrimination mechanisms. These findings add further support to the view that low-level sensory processing mechanisms form the basis for the retention of colour, spatial frequency and velocity information in perceptual memory. We also found evidence for the broad range of transfer of memory masking effects across spatial location, which indicates more long range, long duration interactions between channels that are likely to rely upon contributions from neural processes located in higher visual areas. In conclusion, the experiments presented in this thesis provide significant insight into the organization of visual information in perceptual short term memory. / Federation of Ophthalmic and Dispensing Opticians

This study presents a novel approach for predicting future cellular traction in a time series. The proposed method leverages two distinct look-ahead Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models—one for cell boundary and the other for traction data—to achieve rapid and accurate predictions. These LSTM models are trained using real Fourier Transform Traction Cytometry (FTTC) output data, ensuring consistency and reliability in the underlying calculations. To account for variability among cells, each cell is trained separately, mitigating generalized errors. The predictive performance is demonstrated by accurately forecasting tractions for the next 30-time instances, with an error rate below 7%. Moreover, a strategy for real-time traction calculations is proposed, involving the capture of a bead reference image before cell placement in a controlled environment. By doing so, we eliminate the need for cell removal and enable real-time calculation of tractions. Combining these two ideas, our tool speeds up the traction calculations 1.6 times, leveraging from limiting TFM use. As a walk forward, prediction method is implemented by combining prediction values with real data for future prediction, it is indicative of more speedup. The predictive capabilities of this approach offer valuable insights, with potential applications in identifying cancerous cells based on their traction behavior over time.Additionally, we present an advanced cell boundary detection algorithm that autonomously identifies cell boundaries from obscure cell images, reducing human intervention and bias. This algorithm significantly streamlines data collection, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of our methodology.

The automotive industry is inevitably experiencing a paradigm shift from fossil fuels to electric powertrain with significant technological breakthroughs in vehicle electrification. Emerging hybrid electric vehicles were one of the first steps towards cleaner and greener vehicles with a higher fuel economy and lower emission levels. The energy management strategy in hybrid electric vehicles determines the power flow pattern and significantly affects vehicle performance. Therefore, in this thesis, a learning-based strategy is proposed to address the energy management problem of a hybrid electric vehicle in various driving conditions. The idea of a deep recurrent neural network-based energy management strategy is proposed, developed, and evaluated. Initially, a hybrid electric vehicle model with a rule-based supervisory controller is constructed for this case study to obtain training data for the deep recurrent neural network and to evaluate the performance of the proposed energy management strategy. Secondly, due to its capabilities to remember historical data, a long short-term memory recurrent neural network is designed and trained to estimate the powertrain control variables from vehicle parameters. Extensive simulations are conducted to improve the model accuracy and ensure its generalization capability. Also, several hyper-parameters and structures are specifically tuned and debugged for this purpose. The novel proposed energy management strategy takes sequential data as input to capture the characteristics of both driver and controller behaviors and improve the estimation/prediction accuracy. The energy management controller is defined as a time-series problem, and a network predictor module is implemented in the system-level controller of the hybrid electric vehicle model. According to the simulation results, the proposed strategy and prediction model demonstrated lower fuel consumption and higher accuracy compared to other learning-based energy management strategies. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)