Are the Effects of Familiarity with the Size of a Novel Object on the Perception of Distance the Result of a Cognitive or Perceptual Process?

Description

This study investigates the effects of familiarity and the size of a novel object on perception of depth. Familiar size is a visual depth cue that provides information about the distance of an object. This project explores if the familiar…

This study investigates the effects of familiarity and the size of a novel object on perception of depth. Familiar size is a visual depth cue that provides information about the distance of an object. This project explores if the familiar size illusion is a result of an automatic perceptual process or an intellectual thought process. This data was collected in two phases, a familiarization phase and a testing phase. The experimental participants were familiarized for 30 seconds with a novel object, while the control group was not shown any objects prior to presentation of test objects. The novel test stimuli were constructed in 5 sizes and participants in the familiar group were familiarized with the medium size object. Participants were then asked to indicate the perceived distance of different sized objects by moving a rod with a pointer at the end to match the distance. The smaller comparison objects subtended visual angles that participants had not previously experienced, while larger comparison objects produced a larger visual angle than the participants had seen during the familiarization phase. The testing phase was identical for both familiar and unfamiliar control groups. Apparent distance was influenced by the size of the objects. Larger objects were judged to be closer than the smaller objects. Participants not familiarized showed smaller effects of stimulus size than the familiarized group. The effect of familiarity was not significant for the smaller stimuli but was very significant for the larger stimuli. The results were not consistent with the cognitive theory which argues that familiar size is a result of a conscious thought process. These outcomes are predicted under the model of familiar size being an automatic perceptual process.

Date Created
2023-05
Agent

Age of Divorce, Parenting Time, and Later Relationships:
A Mediational Model

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Description
The growing acceptance of divorce has sparked a discussion regarding the distribution of children’s parenting time with each parent. As a result, researchers are evaluating how divorce impacts children and what can be done to improve their wellbeing. This study…

The growing acceptance of divorce has sparked a discussion regarding the distribution of children’s parenting time with each parent. As a result, researchers are evaluating how divorce impacts children and what can be done to improve their wellbeing. This study sought to examine how a child’s age at their parent’s divorce predicts later parent-child relationships and romantic attachment style. Furthermore, it evaluates parenting time as a potential mediator to this relationship. In order to test this mediational model, we distributed a survey to nearly 1,000 college students with divorced parents. This questionnaire was composed of several batteries that assessed the following: their age at their parent’s divorce, the amount of parenting time awarded to each parent after the divorce, their relationship with each parent, and their romantic attachment style, in addition to many other variables that were used as covariates. Given the complexities of divorce, we controlled for potential third variable explanations that were found to be associated with parenting time, parent-child relationships, and romantic attachment style. We hypothesized that younger ages of divorce lead to less parenting time which in turn worsens the father-child relationship and their romantic attachment style. The data supports the mediational model in regard to the father-child relationship with no correlation found between our predictors and attachment style. This highlights the importance of equal parenting time becoming the new standard.
Date Created
2022-05
Agent

Bias and the Bias Blind Spot among Social Workers in a Simulated Child Abuse Case

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Description
Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts, sometimes give rise to biases that can influence decision making. These biases may be particularly impactful in a legal context where decision making has lifelong consequences. One such legal decision falls upon social workers who…

Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts, sometimes give rise to biases that can influence decision making. These biases may be particularly impactful in a legal context where decision making has lifelong consequences. One such legal decision falls upon social workers who are often tasked with providing custodial recommendations in child custody cases. Across a series of 2 studies, I explored the role of confirmation bias in social worker decision making, the potential value of blinding to reduce bias, as well as social workers’ perceptions of their own biases. Social workers were given detailed case materials describing a custody case between the state and a father. Participants were randomly assigned to read a previous examiner’s positive evaluation of a father, a negative evaluation of the father, or were blinded to a previous examiners rating. Social workers engaged in confirmation bias, such that those who read a positive evaluation of the father viewed him more positively than participants who read a negative evaluation of the father, despite the fact that all of the actual case evidence remained constant. Blinding did not appear to mitigate the bias. In study 2, social workers viewed themselves as less biased than their peers and less biased than other experts in a different field – signifying the presence of a bias blindspot. Together, my findings suggest the need to further explore how bias might affect judgments and also how to mitigate biases, such as making experts aware of their potential for bias.
Date Created
2021
Agent

Testing for “Hyper Theory of Mind” in Autism: Honors Thesis

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Description

In this thesis I will explore deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) in autistic people due to new evidence that they do not completely lack a ToM. A new theory is proposed, claiming that autistic people use a Hyper Theory…

In this thesis I will explore deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) in autistic people due to new evidence that they do not completely lack a ToM. A new theory is proposed, claiming that autistic people use a Hyper Theory of Mind (HyperToM) which has some application and processing differences from typical ToM. The HyperToM test will be administered as an online questionnaire that includes a self-reported Autism Quotient (AQ) section. The study is done in low support needs autistic (LSA) adults, which should have a developed ToM due to age and ability. Results showed some correlations with the AQ symptoms and HyperToM, but not enough diagnosed autistic people (9) participated in this study for significant results.

Date Created
2021-05
Agent

Shared Parenting: From Practice to Policy

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Description

This study examines how a 2013 Arizona law on shared parenting would affect living arrangements, and thus mental health measures. There were two hypotheses. According to the Law Change Hypothesis, it was hypothesized that parenting time in Arizona would be…

This study examines how a 2013 Arizona law on shared parenting would affect living arrangements, and thus mental health measures. There were two hypotheses. According to the Law Change Hypothesis, it was hypothesized that parenting time in Arizona would be more equal following the 2013 Arizona law change while there would be no change in parenting time in other states following the 2013 Arizona law change. It was further hypothesized that child mental health would be better after the law change in Arizona with no change being seen in other states. Results of this study were almost completely inconsistent with the hypothesis. According to the Law Reflect Hypothesis, the law is actually reflecting the behavior of the community and their thoughts on equal parenting time becoming more favorable, and therefore a change towards more equal parenting time would be found prior to 2013 in Arizona with no change seen in other states. Furthermore, as the Arizona community’s behavior changed, child mental health would be better with no change being seen in other states. Regressions found that a small change toward more equal parenting and closeness with father was prior to 2013 for Arizona students, compared to out-of-state students, although it did not find that the year of divorce resulted in less anxiety, stress, and depression. This partially agrees with past research that the 2013 law is working as intended, even if it started working earlier than we thought. This does not agree with previous research stating there is a connection between equal parenting and better mental health. This is important because this study questions the efficacy of an important and controversial policy. If future studies are consistent with this one, the effectiveness of the Arizona 2013 law change on mental health will need to be further evaluated.

Date Created
2021-05
Agent

Eliciting Informative and Accurate Reports of Touching from Children

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Description
Many children who testify to alleged sexual abuse struggle to answer questions about touching, likely because attorneys and children may operate under different definitions of “touch.” However, little is known about how children define touch, and the most productive question…

Many children who testify to alleged sexual abuse struggle to answer questions about touching, likely because attorneys and children may operate under different definitions of “touch.” However, little is known about how children define touch, and the most productive question type for eliciting reports of touching has yet to be determined. In the present investigation, Study 1 examined (N = 64, 5 - 12 years of age) children’s testimonies to identify the sources of misunderstanding when children report abusive touch in court. In light of the language difficulties observed in Study 1, specifically, that attorneys and children appeared to be operating under different definitions of touch, a laboratory study (Study 2) was conducted to examine (N = 95, 4 - 7 years of age) children’s definition of touch, and how children reported touching in response to open-ended wh- questions, compared to close-ended yes
o questions. Body contact (i.e., manual and non-manual touch, compared to touching with an object) was most closely representative of children’s definition of touch. Additionally, children reported touch more often, and provided more informative reports of touch, in response to wh- questions, compared to yes
o questions. These findings demonstrated that children’s definition of touch exists on a scale, and through asking specific, open-ended wh- questions attorneys can elicit reports of touching from children even when definitional discrepancies are present.
Date Created
2020
Agent

Does Non-Response Bias Compromise the External Validity of a Sample of College Students of Divorce?

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Description
It is possible that voluntary studies on the effects of divorce fail to capture the perspectives of offspring who may be deterred from volunteering by their negative experiences of the divorce of their parents. This issue of non-response bias would…

It is possible that voluntary studies on the effects of divorce fail to capture the perspectives of offspring who may be deterred from volunteering by their negative experiences of the divorce of their parents. This issue of non-response bias would cause researchers to gather unrepresentative samples that ultimately create an unrepresentative picture on the effects of divorce. The problem of non-response bias may also be a possible explanation for why research shows that small differences in psychological problems exist between children of divorce and children from intact families. This study sought to identify if non-response bias compromises the external validity of a sample of college students of divorce. To answer this question we conducted this study through the use of the introductory psychology pre screening study that is administered every semester to introductory psychology students at Arizona State University. We surveyed undergraduate introductory psychology students, all of whom completed a required prescreen survey for research credit. The students who indicated they were from divorced families, or whose parents were “never married and not still together”, were invited to participate in a follow up study to “to understand young adults’ perspectives on their parents’ divorce”. The students who responded to our invitation were compared to the students who did not volunteer in terms of their prescreen data. Volunteers did not differ from non-volunteers on seven out of the ten dependent measures. Volunteers differed from non-volunteers in terms of their closeness to their fathers, in terms of the parents conflict they experienced during the two years before and the two years after their parents permanently separated. Volunteers were more likely to be closer to their fathers and more likely to have experienced more parent conflict than non-volunteers. We are unaware of any studies on the subject of divorce that have had a similar opportunity to address the issue of non-response bias and its effects on the external validity of a college sample of divorce. This study should be replicated to determine the reliability of the results.
Date Created
2020-05
Agent

Do 2-Year-Olds Understand Object Permanence?

Description
According to Jean Piaget, a prominent cognitive development psychologist in 1954, infants should have an understanding of object permanence at 12 months of age. Current research has backed this idea and shown that children younger than 2 years of age…

According to Jean Piaget, a prominent cognitive development psychologist in 1954, infants should have an understanding of object permanence at 12 months of age. Current research has backed this idea and shown that children younger than 2 years of age understand object permanence- shown through their increased looking times to inconsistent displays in which a moving object appears to have fallen through a solid shelf. However, current research used active search tasks with 2 year olds and found that they failed to search for the object consistently. My thesis explores why 2 year olds are failing search tasks if infants are appearing the understand object permanence with their looking responses. The Theory of Mind Lab at ASU designed a simple two door/two room apparatus to test 2 year olds’ ability to search for an object once it goes out of sight. Two doors open to two rooms separated by a green wall that extends above the front wall. Results showed that 2-year-olds randomly searched for the object. Perhaps children were not able to clearly differentiate the two separate spaces and ultimately started guessing because they assumed both doors go to the same room. Therefore, my thesis involved adding a ‘hallway’ between the two rooms to help children mentally separate the two spaces by showing them the bottom of the barrier. Despite the hallway, results showed that 2-year-olds again hardly performed above chance across all 6 trials. To remove the social aspects and the need to coordinate motor movement with knowledge of the object’s location, I designed a Visual Anticipation Task with automatic doors that required 2-year olds to merely look at the correct door for the hidden object. Results showed that children looked correctly at the first location correctly but when hidden in a new location in the second trial, perseverated and looked back at the first location. These results showed that 2-year olds do not understand object permanence at this age when it comes to both searching and looking.
Date Created
2019-05
Agent

Going Back in Time: Children’s Word Learning Through Backwards Integration

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Description
For many years now, early word learning in children has been an important subject among many researchers. There are many ways in which children learn word-object pairings including using co-occurrences, forwards integration, and backwards integration. This study primarily focuses on…

For many years now, early word learning in children has been an important subject among many researchers. There are many ways in which children learn word-object pairings including using co-occurrences, forwards integration, and backwards integration. This study primarily focuses on backwards integration. Backwards integration entails using learned information to be able to recall a word-object pairing from a previous time. In this thesis, three different studies were conducted with children aged 3-7 years old. In the general task, children were presented with a computerized word-learning task in which they could track word-referent pairings using co-occurrence statistics, forward integration, and backward integration. The goal of Study 1 and Study 2 was to determine the best task design to study backwards integration. The goal of the final study, Study 3, was to provide preliminary data on backwards integration. The overall results indicate that a between subjects design is the most beneficial way to test backwards integration because as a group, children were learning when compared to chance. In addition, the results from Study 3 showed that children were not learning in the task. In general, this suggests that this task may have been very difficult for children to complete. One limitation of Study 3
was that there was a small sample size of only 29 children. In order to account for this, the sample sizes in Study 2 and Study 3 were combined. This combined data did show that children succeeded at the backwards integration condition. It is noteworthy to mention that backwards integration was above chance in Study 2 and in the Study 2 and 3 combination. Therefore, the overall results suggest that children may possibly be able to backwards integrate; however, no evidence of learning in any of the other conditions were present.
Date Created
2019-05
Agent

Introspection and Certainty Training in Preschool Children

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Description
This study assessed preschool children's (N= 52) ability to introspect and monitor their own levels of certainty. After a book reading intervention, children reported that they were less certain of answer choices in a picture identification game. School differences showed…

This study assessed preschool children's (N= 52) ability to introspect and monitor their own levels of certainty. After a book reading intervention, children reported that they were less certain of answer choices in a picture identification game. School differences showed that some groups of children reported improved levels of certainty monitoring, while other groups of children reported scores dissimilar to those predicted. This indicated that children who were immersed in rich learning environments, where strict curriculum and emotion understanding training were enforced, could be predisposed to this type of certainty understanding.
Date Created
2018-12
Agent
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