Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Cognitive psychology'

Willingness to expend effort has received increased attention over the past decade, and for good reason – effort is crucial to life's successes, and many of us wish we could harness and control it more optimally. In particular, cognitive effort is central to academic and vocational achievements. Though effort is important, it is also costly. If it were not, no projects would be left unfinished, and no treadmills would be abandoned early. Because it is costly, self-control is often required to exert and maintain effort. Reduced willingness to expend effort has also come into focus as a clinically relevant variable related to amotivation, most notably in schizophrenia. Additionally, both incentive motivation (immediate monetary reward availability) and effort have been linked with cognitive performance, suggesting that our measures of cognitive ability are inexorably linked to and to some degree confounded by cognitive effort.

In this dissertation, I present a novel paradigm developed for the assessment of perseverant cognitive effort in the absence of monetary incentive. The Cognitive Effort and DisEngagement (CEDE) task is a cognitive test that increases in difficulty and measures perseverant effort disengagement in a simple but novel way: participants are permitted to skip trials without penalty. The present work introduces the task, situates it within a framework of self-control divided into inhibitory and actuating mechanisms, and provides evidence of its association with stable traits, context, and psychosis.

The first set of studies (Chapter 1) tests the reliability and validity of the CEDE task in an undergraduate sample and a community sample. We find evidence of high internal consistency using a split-half method. We also find that skips on the CEDE show convergent validity in terms of correlation with self-reported perseverance and work ethic, as well as discriminant validity, showing lack of significant relationships with several theoretically distinct aspects of self-control. We also show evidence of tolerability of the paradigm and of face validity of skipping as an index of effort disengagement.

In Chapter 2, we test the effect of observation on perseverant effort on the CEDE task. We find that participants skip significantly more trials when they are observed by an experimenter with access to information about their performance via sound effects, compared with than when they have privacy (when the experimenter leaves the room, or when the participant wears headphones). We also find that self-reported internal motivational style predicts more perseverant effort when in private, whereas external motivational style predicts more effort when observed, suggesting that motivational styles exert influence differentially depending on features of the context. We also show that self-reported stress during the task negatively predicts performance, and that this relationship is fully mediated by skips. These results suggest that observation has a potent effect on cognitive task effort, affecting people differently according to motivational style, and that test anxiety also promotes effort disengagement.

In Chapter 3, we test for group differences in skips between individuals with first episode psychosis (FEP) and community controls, as schizophrenia is associated with both a cognitive and a motivational impairment. We show reduced perseverant cognitive effort on the CEDE in FEP. We find that this group difference specifically emerges during difficult trials, suggesting specifically a deficit in perseverance in reaction to difficulty rather than continuous attention throughout the test. We also show that reduction of effort in the form of skips is correlated with self-reported amotivation among patients. These results suggest clinical relevance of perseverant cognitive effort in schizophrenia as a component or reflection of motivational impairments.

Together, these findings provide novel insight into cognitive effort perseverance, its relationship to non-monetary motivations in terms of motivational style and observational context, and its reduction in psychosis. Our findings also highlight the relevance of cognitive effort perseverance to cognitive testing. Willingness to expend cognitive effort appears to be sensitive to numerous factors in the context of difficulty, when the demands on effort are higher, whereas it is relatively steadfast during easier tasks.

Two studies tested hypotheses regarding the idea that humor promotes cognitive flexibility. Two components of humor are argued to promote cognitive flexibility. First, the positive emotion associated with humor may enhance cognitive flexibility. Second, the processing of humor may exercise complex cognitive processing, thus making similar processing more efficient on subsequent tasks. Participants in Experiment 1 read humorous sentences or one of two types of non-humorous sentences. Participants in Experiment 2 viewed captioned images that varied in the presence of positivity and incongruity. Results of both studies do not support the idea that humor promotes cognitive flexibility, nor do they show evidence that humor promotes cognitive flexibility because of the positive emotion or incongruity associated with it. Explanations for the failure to find support for hypotheses focus on the stimuli used in non-humor conditions and the stimuli and method of measuring cognitive flexibility. Alternative methods of testing the hypotheses are also offered, such as investigating sense of humor as a personality trait, using different types of humor and a different method of measuring cognitive flexibility. This project hoped to provide elementary evidence for the notion that humor is beneficial for health, but did not do so. It is hoped that future research can elucidate the relationship between humor and health.

Given the increasing number of older adults in the population, the fact that about 1 in 10 people over the age of 65 will develop mild cognitive impairment, and the substantial individual, familial, and financial burden associated with such disorders, the need for innovative research examining cognitive impairment in older adults is evident. The present study used a microlongitudinal design to assess cognition and contextual factors that may affect cognition for 14 consecutive days using a daily diary method in older adults with varying degrees of cognitive function. This study design enables investigation of concurrent associations between variables, as well as providing unique information not gleaned from the traditional focus on mean values of cognition. The present study had two broad aims: 1) to compare variability in cognition in older adults with varying degrees of cognitive impairment and 2) to investigate relationships between daily cognitive performance, variability in cognitive performance, and contextual factors that may influence daily cognitive performance and variability in older adults with varying degrees of cognitive impairment. Results suggest there was sufficient intraindividual variability in daily cognition to warrant investigation of within-person associations. Furthermore, the contextual factors of pain, stress, and sleep were predictive of cognitive performance, but with significance and directionality of these associations depending on level of measurement (baseline, daily, or mean values). Finally, associations between contextual factors and cognition were frequently conditional upon baseline cognitive status. The findings highlight the need for continued examination of these associations to expand our understanding of cognition in older adults and to discover potential targets for interventions to attenuate cognitive decline.

Cognitive science has been beset for thirty years by foundational disputes about the nature and extension of cognition—e.g. whether cognition is necessarily representational, whether cognitive processes extend outside the brain or body, and whether plants or microbes have them. Whereas previous philosophical work aimed to settle these disputes, I aim to understand what conception of cognition scientists could share given that they disagree so fundamentally. To this end, I develop a number of variations on traditional conceptual explication, and defend a novel explication of cognition called the sensitive management hypothesis.

Since expert judgments about the extension of “cognition” vary so much, I argue that there is value in explication that accurately models the variance in judgments rather than taking sides or treating that variance as noise. I say of explications that accomplish this that they are ecumenically extensionally adequate. Thus, rather than adjudicating whether, say, plants can have cognitive processes like humans, an ecumenically adequate explication should classify these cases differently: human cognitive processes as paradigmatically cognitive, and plant processes as controversially cognitive.

I achieve ecumenical adequacy by articulating conceptual explications with parameters, or terms that can be assigned a number of distinct interpretations based on the background commitments of participants in a discourse. For example, an explication might require that cognition cause “behavior,” and imply that plant processes are cognitive or not depending on whether anything plants do can be considered “behavior.” Parameterization provides a unified treatment of embattled concepts by isolating topics of disagreement in a small number of parameters.

I incorporate these innovations into an account on which cognition is the “sensitive management of organismal behavior.” The sensitive management hypothesis is ecumenically extensionally adequate, accurately classifying a broad variety of cases as paradigmatically or controversially cognitive phenomena. I also describe an extremely permissive version of the sensitive management hypothesis, arguing that it has the potential to explain several features of cognitive scientific discourse, including various facts about the way cognitive scientists ascribe representations to cognitive systems.