Psychology Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/995

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon Psychology Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Open Access
A Contextual Psychology Approach to Improving Health Outcomes in the Perinatal Period
(University of Oregon, 2023-07-06) Lightcap, April; Berkman, Elliot
The United States holds alarming records for highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the developed world. The US infant mortality rate is on par with many low and middle income countries, and despite the decline in maternal mortality rates globally, pregnancy-related deaths in the US have trended upwards. The Birth Your Way perinatal health promotion program was designed to address this US public health crisis by amplifying the ability of federal maternal child health programs to mitigate the primary infant mortality risk factors, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) admissions, low birthweight and preterm deliveries, and the key maternal mortality risk factor, Cesarean delivery. The federal Medicaid program buffers mortality risk via increased access to perinatal healthcare services; while the federal Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program (WIC) improves health outcomes via improved prenatal nutrition. Employing an implementation science approach, the Birth Your Way intervention has been developed and evaluated in collaboration with Medicaid and WIC partners in a model public health test site. The Birth Your Way intervention is the first to utilize an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) approach to increase pregnant individuals’ adherence to the WIC prenatal nutrition protocol via increases in psychological flexibility, the psychological mechanism underlying ACT. A pragmatic randomized clinical trial was conducted to examine Birth Your Way program effects on psychological flexibility, perinatal nutrition and infant and maternal birth outcomes. Results from the Birth Your Way pragmatic randomized clinical trial demonstrate the ACT-based intervention’s potential to bolster WIC program effects and mitigate poor infant birth outcomes when a minimum dose is received. The current study documents a promising role for the application of ACT in the prenatal period to increase maternal engagement in values-directed actions and healthy dietary behaviors and to decrease the likelihood of NICU admissions, low birthweight, and preterm deliveries. Expanding the reach of ACT-based programs across Medicaid distributors to amplify WIC program engagement could prove a critical component in the public health effort to mitigate the US infant and maternal mortality crisis.
Open Access
A Micro-Randomized Trial To Improve College Students’ Wake Time Regularity
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Latham, Melissa; Allen, Nicholas
Many college students experience irregular sleep patterns due to their unique schedule. These patterns confer risk for other sleep problems as well as mental health difficulties including mood disorders, physical aggression, and suicidal ideation. Current interventions to improve college students’ sleep are often created using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia components, although the components used are often not consistent. These interventions are also plagued by drop out, often by those that need the intervention the most. The current study takes a step toward creating an intervention with fewer, simpler components that is more agreeable to college students due to its ease and delivery through a phone-based application. In order to achieve this, I use a micro-randomized trial design to assess the most effective timing and content for an intervention that reminds students of techniques to help increase the regularity of their wake up times. The aims of the study were 1) to determine the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention; 2) to determine the effect of the reminders on immediate use of sleep hygiene strategies and on subsequent wake time regularity; and 3) to determine whether proximal outcomes were related to variability in wake times at the end of the intervention. Participants completed a baseline week of sleep diaries, an online psychoeducation module about sleep regularity, and then entered the intervention phase, where they were randomized each day to receive a reminder. If they were randomized to receive one, the timing and content of that reminder were also randomized. The results of this study indicate that participants were invested in completing our intervention and found it somewhat helpful. However, there was no effect of the reminders nor their timing or content on proximal outcomes. Lastly, there was no relationship between sleep hygiene use and wake time variability during the final week of the study. Although our results indicate that the intervention components were not effective, future iterations of the study are being planned to address several important limitations. The goal of the next iteration will be to assess the effect of these reminders without a number of unintended, confounding factors.
Open Access
A Multi-Method Approach to Examining Emotion Regulation Profiles in Women with and without Borderline Personality Disorder
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Lewis, Jennifer; Zalewski, Maureen
Emotion regulation is an important transdiagnostic symptom of psychopathology and a key treatment target for intervention. It has been extensively researched in psychology using multiple measurement methods. Despite the diverse methodological approaches used to measure emotion regulation, little research has examined the correspondence of those measures. This multi-study dissertation investigated how different measures of emotion regulation correspond in women with and without Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) to generate preliminary ideas of how the relationships among these measures may be used to better understand mental disorders and improve treatment. The first study examined correspondence among self-report, behavioral, and physiological measures of emotion regulation and emotion dysregulation in 50 women with BPD and 55 non-disordered controls. Latent profile analyses were used to identify unique profiles of emotion regulation and dysregulation. Results showed that few measures of emotion regulation correlated with each other and that differences between groups were primarily found only in self-report measures. Three latent profiles of emotion regulation and four latent profiles of emotion dysregulation were identified in the full sample, demonstrating unique patterns among the relationships of these measures. The second study expanded on the neuroimaging literature of emotion reactivity and regulation in women with BPD, as well as, examined the relationships of neural findings with other measures of emotion reactivity and regulation. A sample of 32 women, 17 with BPD and 15 non-disordered controls viewed negative and neutral images while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging and were instructed to either view, suppress, or reappraise. Results did not show hypothesized group differences in limbic hyperreactivity or prefrontal control regions. Activation unique to suppressing negative images was related to several measures, including self-report of increased anger and of dysfunctional coping skills. Findings of these two studies demonstrate that multi-method approaches are important in the study of emotion regulation as different measurement methods do not always correspond with each other and therefore a single measurement does not provide an accurate picture of the emotion regulation system as a whole. This research has important clinical implications in the understanding of assessment and treatment of individuals who experience difficulties in emotion regulation.
Open Access
A Randomized Efficacy Trial of an Early Intervention in Laos
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Fong, Michelle; Measelle, Jeffrey
Approximately half of all children in Laos fail to reach their full developmental potential as a result of exposure to poverty-related risks. Early interventions that encourage sensitive and responsive caregiving in the context of stimulating activities such as reading and playing have shown consistent benefits on children’s developmental trajectories across diverse domains. However, to our knowledge, no such intervention has been implemented in Laos. As such, the overarching goal of this dissertation was to examine the acceptability and efficacy of a culturally adapted early intervention on caregiving practices and children’s cognitive and language outcomes in rural Laos. Our first aim was to culturally adapt an evidence-based responsive stimulation intervention and to assess the acceptability of the resulting intervention, Phadthana Khong Dek (PKD). Cultural adaptation included process adaptations (e.g., identification of local needs and relationship-building with stakeholders) and content adaptations (e.g., adaptations across several domains including language, persons, metaphors, content, concepts, goals, methods, context) following established models of cultural adaptation. Preliminary findings from 93 Lao families receiving the intervention suggested that the cultural adaptions resulted in an intervention that is relevant, useful, and easy to put into practice. A second aim was to examine the efficacy of PKD on caregiving practices and children’s cognitive and language development among 159 caregivers and their under-five children. Trial arms included control, family-, and community-level conditions of PKD. Controlling for sociodemographic risk (e.g., caregiver education level, caregiver depression, ethnicity) and baseline measures, both family- and community-level conditions evidenced medium to large effects on caregiving stimulation practices one-month post-intervention. There was also a positive effect of the family-level condition on the likelihood of child play with different types of stimulating toys. The family-level intervention also had significant short-term benefits with a large effect size on cognitive and language outcomes for children who received the intervention at the earliest ages, before 20 months of age, but not at later ages. Together, these findings point to PKD as one brief, low-cost, and scalable public health strategy for alleviating the enormous burden of children in Laos not reaching their full developmental potential. This dissertation includes unpublished coauthored material.
Open Access
A Systematic Review Identifying and Characterizing Psychotherapeutic Interventions that Improve Parental Psychopathology, Child Psychopathology and Parenting Behavior
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Everett, Yoel; Zalewski-Regnier, Maureen
The high rates of psychopathology in parents and children means that many families are living with a member with psychopathology. The availability of psychotherapeutic interventions that are able to improve outcomes in parent and child psychopathology as well as parenting quality, a mechanism that explains the transmission of psychopathology in families, has not been reviewed to date. Therefore, the goal of this systematic review is to identify and characterize evidence-based psychotherapeutic interventions which report improvements in all three domains. A total of 49 unique interventions were eligible for review of which twenty-one reported improvements in all three domains. Interventions which targeted all three domains were more effective in improving all three compared to interventions which targeted one or two domains. Importantly, few existing interventions have been tested with families in which a parent, or both parent and child met clinical thresholds. The development of more treatments for these populations is warranted.
Open Access
Actigraphic evaluation of sleep disturbance in young children
(University of Oregon, 2008-06) Tininenko, Jennifer R., 1978-
Sleep studies have rarely explored individual differences in sleep disruption and associated outcomes at early ages. In two studies, this dissertation addresses both of these limitations using actigraphy, an activity-derived assessment of sleep, to increase understanding of negative impacts of sleep on early development. Study 1 investigated sleep disruption in foster children and sleep-related treatment outcomes of the Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care for Preschoolers (MTFC-P) intervention program. Study 2 explored individual differences in the associations among sleep, children's behavior, and neurohormonal activity. Four groups of participants ages 3- to 7-years-old were included in both studies: (1) Regular foster care (RFC; n=15); (2) MTFC-P intervention (TFC; n= 17); (3) Low-income community (LIC; n= 18); and 4. Middle-income community (MIC; n=29). Results of Study 1 indicated greater sleep disruption in foster groups, as evidenced by longer sleep latencies and increased variability of sleep duration, in the TFC group than in community groups. There was also indication of a treatment effect as the TFC group slept longer than RFC and LIC groups and had earlier bedtimes, fell asleep earlier, and spent more time in bed than either community group. LIC children had marginally more active sleep than MIC children, indicating a possible role for socioeconomic status in sleep quality. In Study 2, correlational and causal modeling approaches were used to investigate associations among sleep disruption, problem behaviors, and diurnal cortisol. Influences of foster care placement, gender, and age were also examined as potential individual difference factors. Results of mixed linear autoregressive models indicated that children were more likely to display inattentive/hyperactive behaviors after shortened sleep durations. Furthermore, at lower sleep durations, differences among care groups and genders emerged as children in foster care and males were at heightened risk for inattentive/hyperactive behavior problems. No associations between sleep and disruptive problem behaviors were found and there were few associations with morning and evening cortisol values. Results of these studies are discussed in terms of the effectiveness of the MTFC-P program for addressing sleep problems in foster children. Additionally, clinical implications of the heightened likelihood of inattentive/hyperactive behavior problems after disrupted sleep in some children are discussed.
Open Access
Addressing the Harm of Workplace Sexual Harassment: Institutional Courage Buffers Against Institutional Betrayal
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Smidt, Alec; Freyd, Jennifer
Workplace sexual harassment is associated with negative psychological and physical outcomes. Recent research suggests that harmful institutional responses to reports of wrongdoing– called institutional betrayal – are associated with additional psychological and physical harm. It has been theorized that supportive responses and an institutional climate characterized by transparency and proactiveness – called institutional courage – may buffer against these negative effects. The current study examined the association of institutional betrayal and institutional courage with employee workplace outcomes and psychological and physical health. Adults who were employed full-time for at least six months were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Data were analyzed using 805 participants who completed online survey instruments and an experiment. We used existing survey instruments, developed the Institutional Courage Questionnaire-Climate to assess institutional courage at the climate level, and developed the Institutional Courage Questionnaire-Specific to assess individual experiences of institutional courage within the context of workplace sexual harassment. We also replicated and extended of Gündemir, Does, and Shih’s (2018) experiment by 1) examining two new conditions with specific types of institutional courage and 2) examining trust in management. The primary findings of this research were: (1) Institutional courage at the climate level was associated with better employee workplace outcomes, including job satisfaction and organizational commitment. (2) Of participants who experienced workplace sexual harassment, nearly 55% also experienced institutional betrayal and 76% also experienced institutional courage. Institutional betrayal was associated with decreased job satisfaction and organizational commitment and increased somatic symptoms. Institutional courage was associated with the reverse. Furthermore, institutional courage appears to attenuate negative outcomes. (3) Institutions appear to benefit reputationally from responses to workplace sexual harassment that are characterized by institutional courage, including reductions in perceived gender bias and increases in trust in management compared to responses characterized by institutional betrayal. Overall, our results suggest that institutional courage is important at multiple levels in organizations – both at the climate level and following workplace sexual harassment. These results are in line with previous research on institutional betrayal, may inform policies and procedures related to workplace sexual harassment, and provide a starting point for research on institutional courage.
Open Access
Adolescent Social Motives: Measurement and Implications
(University of Oregon, 2019-01-11) Flournoy, John; Pfeifer, Jennifer
The study of decision making during adolescence has received considerable attention throughout the history of developmental psychology, justifiably, given the marked increases in morbidity and mortality that belie otherwise robust health. Although the dominant theories invoked to help explain decision-making during adolescence acknowledge the existence of motivations that are thought to be central to this developmental period, there is little work that investigates the effects of these motives, per se. In particular, motivations toward developing sexual and romantic relationships, as well as toward navigating peer status hierarchies have both been acknowledged as especially relevant for this period of development. Almost all research in this area focuses on self-report, and is heavily weighted toward the domain of status and popularity. A major gap in this literature is an understanding of how adolescent-relevant motivations affect basic behavioral processes, and of the consequences of individual differences in motivations. The current investigation uses reinforcement learning to examine the effects of social motives on stimulus salience. This may allow both indirect, behavioral measurement of motivations, and is itself a potential mechanism by which motivations affect behavior via experience of the environment, and learning. Adolescent (N = 104) and college student (N = 230) participants learned four social-motive-relevant, and two baseline face-word associations. Learning was characterized using both proportion of optimal responses in the last half of the learning task, and a Rescorla-Wagner-like computational model. Results showed greater learning, and higher learning rates, in the social-motive conditions. In order to explore the validity of behavior on the task as a measure of particular motivations, individual learning differences between social and baseline conditions were compared with developmental indices, self-report traits, and self-report health-relevant behaviors. Older participants were better at the learning task, but social-motive learning enhancement was constant across development. Measures of social-motive effects on learning did not correlate with self-reported traits or health-related behaviors. The effects of motive-relevant words on learning may be due to factors unrelated to motivation, but research design may also be problematic. Self-report trait instruments performed well, but a more comprehensive taxonomy of motivational constructs and measures would be beneficial.
Open Access
An Exploration of Fear of Sleep and Experiential Avoidance in the Context of PTSD and Insomnia Symptoms
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Kelly, Shay; Casement, Melynda
Fear of sleep (FoS) has been posited to develop following trauma exposure and significantly contribute to the maintenance of insomnia symptoms. While FoS has been operationalized within the Fear of Sleep Inventory - Short Form (FoSI-SF), preliminary examinations of the measure have yielded diverging factor structures. Experience avoidance (EA), a trait-based measure of avoidance implicated in PTSD and insomnia symptomatology, is thought to be conceptually akin to FoS and may be an important foil to clarify the unique contributions of the construct in trauma-induced insomnia. In the present study, the psychometric properties of the FoSI-SF were evaluated in a population of college students (N = 197), including the underlying factor structure, convergent validity with EA as well as discriminant validity with sleep hygiene, another sleep-related process implicated in insomnia. A conceptual model of FoS was investigated within a subsetted sample (n = 50) that had clinically-significant PTSD and sub-threshold insomnia symptoms. An exploratory factor analysis revealed the following three-factor structure: (1) fear of loss of control and/or vulnerability (FoSI-V); (2) fear of darkness (FoSI-D); and (3) fear of re-experiencing traumatic nightmares (FoSI-N). The FoSI-SF was found to have convergent validity with EA, but did not display discriminant validity with sleep hygiene. The FoSI-V and FoSI-N were significantly predicted by trauma-related hypervigilance and nightmares, respectively. Analyses indicated that FoS was a more robust predictor of PTSD and insomnia symptom severity than EA. Theoretical implications of the findings were discussed to guide future research into the role of FoS in trauma-induced insomnia.
Open Access
An Introspection Intervention for Perceived Inefficacy in Charitable Giving
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Mayorga, Marcus; Slovic, Paul
Observed biases in how people value human life have sparked an area of research investigating the mental processes leading to the devaluing of mass suffering. Parallel lines of research in psychology, economics, marketing, and environmental sciences are seeking to understand why people act to help others at all. The emotional and deliberative process in contexts of giving behaviors are complex and evolving. This dissertation focuses on one such bias: pseudoinefficacy, or the dampening of anticipated positive affect from giving, driven by the sense that we cannot help everyone at risk in given context. First a literature review of the relevant studies and previous work on the concept of “warm glow” is presented. Next, two studies are described that were conducted in an effort to replicate previous findings and test a possible de-biasing intervention: structured introspection. A structured introspection task that asked participants to think deeply about the factors influencing their prosocial decisions was tested against instructions to deliberate and against a no-instruction control. Results were mixed. The pseudoinefficacy manipulation failed to replicate previous findings of dampened positive affect by being reminded of individual outside of reach for help. The introspection condition showed no obvious benefit in a one-shot donation paradigm. However, a study on blood donation found a significant increase in self-efficacy from the introspective task, leading to greater intentions to donate, and indirectly increasing actual donation behavior compared to the other conditions. An exploration of the data and future directions are discussed.
Open Access
Assessments (in the Making) of Attachment in the Making: Organized Patterns of Infant Regulatory Behavior in Response to the Maternal Still-Face
(University of Oregon, 2024-12-19) Hagan, Katherine; Ablow, Jennifer
Infants’ experiences of caregiver attunement and regulatory support in the first months of life likely shape embodied expectations about the self, the caregiver, and the extent to which the emerging attachment relationship can transform and soothe distress. Infants’ biobehavioral responses to the Still-Face Paradigm (SF) offer a potential index of these emerging expectations, with potential implications for understanding precursors to later quality of attachment and the origins and malleability of these precursors in early development. This dissertation adopts a programmatic and integrative approach to evaluating the possibility that infant responses to the Still-Face paradigm are meaningfully indicative of dyadic adjustment during the infant’s first year of life and potentially prognostic of quality of attachment in the infant’s second year. To this end, the introduction to the dissertation describes (1) the theoretical and empirical rationale for regarding infant SF response as a marker of the infant’s interactive history and (2) the importance that identification of attachment-like regulatory patterns or precursors to later quality of attachment in the SF may have for the study of infant adaptation and long-term health. The dissertation’s second chapter consists of a narrative review of existing efforts to glean attachment-like patterns or otherwise predict later quality of attachment on the basis of infants’ SF response. The narrative review details discrete affective and regulatory behaviors in the SF that have received attention as possible markers of infants’ attachment-related working models in-the-making; the review identifies overlap and discrepancies among existing microanalytic findings. While modest associations between infant SF behaviors and attachment outcomes point to the promise of the SF paradigm as a source of information about dyadic adjustment and attachment in the making, discrepancies across microanalytic studies of discrete behaviors (including among infants at different ages) and differences in measurement strategies exemplify the need for programmatic, synthesizing efforts to facilitate comparison of findings between studies. The narrative review also draws on the development of the attachment classificatory system to advocate for an approach to individual differences in the SF that attends to organized patterns of regulatory behavior rather than discrete behaviors. The subsequent chapters of this dissertation examine proximal and distal correlates to infant regulatory responses in the SF, by way of three sub-studies of a single sample of mother-infant dyads contending with socioeconomic and other psychosocial risk. Each of the three sub-studies make use of archived recordings of the SF paradigm and leverage secondary analysis of several related measures that were collected in an already-completed study that predated the dissertation. Study 1 adopts a novel but existing typological approach to identifying organized patterns of infant regulatory behavior in the SF, to in turn compare the distribution of the patterns in the present sample to that of other samples that have applied a similarly categorical approach. Study 1 also (a) examines evidence for convergent validity of the regulatory patterns by juxtaposing the patterns with more granular approaches to observing and describing infant SF behavior, and (b) evaluates the hypothesis that patterning of infant regulatory behavior reflects features of the infant’s interactive history. Study 2 examines whether patterns of regulatory behavior are accompanied by differences in infants’ autonomic (specifically, heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia) responses to the SF stressor. Finally, Study 3 seeks to replicate an existing finding of association between SF regulatory patterns and later organized attachment classification. Studies 1 and 2 find evidence of convergent validity of the regulatory patterns, which exhibit expected associations with more granular observations of infant behavior, maternal sensitivity to infant distress, and differential changes in infant heart rate during the SF paradigm. While several hypothesized associations between infants’ SF-based regulatory patterns and concurrent measures bear out in the present study, the regulatory patterns observed in the SF paradigm in this sample at five months postpartum are not associated with later organized quality of attachment assessed in the Strange Situation Procedure one year later. Connections to current findings are discussed, as are recommendations for future study of organized patterns of regulatory behavior and attachment in the making.
Open Access
Associations between Maternal Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms, Parenting, and Mother-Child Cortisol Levels
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) O'Brien, Jacqueline; Zalewski, Maureen
Children of mothers with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are at heightened risk for developing mental health difficulties but the pathway through which this risk is conferred is unclear. Developmental psychopathology theories have highlighted parenting and stress physiology as potential mechanisms for the intergenerational transmission of mental health outcomes that may be particularly relevant to children of mothers with BPD. The aims of this dissertation were to 1) identify associations between maternal BPD symptoms and observed parenting behaviors and 2) examine whether positive parenting behaviors mitigated the risk of disrupted child stress physiology within the context of maternal BPD. To do this, two studies were conducted using both a clinical and community sample of mothers with BPD symptoms to examine both salivary cortisol levels and hair cortisol concentrations as measures of stress physiology.Across both studies, maternal BPD symptoms were not associated with displays of positive parenting behaviors. This may be a unique strength of mothers with BPD, as maternal psychopathology in other contexts (e.g., maternal depression) has been consistently associated with lower levels of positive parenting behaviors. Maternal BPD symptoms were associated with disrupted child salivary cortisol levels through its influence on maternal salivary cortisol levels. However, maternal BPD symptoms were not associated with mother-child hair cortisol concentrations which may be due to a lack of sensitivity in hair cortisol concentrations to psychosocial adversity, especially for children. In both studies, positive parenting behaviors were not associated with child stress physiology, which may be due to low power to detect effects as well as limited variability in parenting behaviors. Across both studies, the strongest predictor of child stress physiology was maternal stress physiology. These findings are contextualized within broader theoretical models of early adversity on child stress physiology, as well as a discussion comparing the use of salivary and hair cortisol collections as measures of stress physiology. As the field continues to develop approaches to reduce suffering and promote healthy child development in families of mothers with BPD, the role of parenting and dyadic stress physiology should continue to be explored as targets for intervention and prevention.
Open Access
Attending to Action at Your Own Pace: Benefits for Knowledge Acquisition?
(University of Oregon, 2012) Sage, Kara; Sage, Kara; Baldwin, Dare
Past research has established that children typically learn better from live demonstrations than from 2-dimensional sources of information like video. The current dissertation investigated the efficacy of a new form of 2-dimensional learning medium, specifically the self-paced slideshow, where children advance through slides of an unfolding action sequence at their own pace. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to test whether the "video deficit effect" extends to the self-paced slideshow. In Experiment 1, children saw demonstrations of novel event sequences either live, via a video, or by advancing through a self-paced slideshow. They were then tested on their ability to perform the sequences, as well as their verbal memory for the action. Individual difference measures were also collected to provide some insight into how children's inhibitory control, theory of mind skills, and verbal ability related to their performance. Findings suggest that all children showed learning, in that children across the three learning media outperformed their peers in a no demonstration control group. In line with past work, children in the live condition outperformed those in the video and self-paced slideshow conditions at reproducing the target actions. However, children's memory did not differ across conditions. To further explore the self-paced slideshow, Experiment 2 directly compared learning from the self-paced slideshow to learning from a video. Two alterations were made to the slideshow: the method of extracting slides was altered to create a more natural flow of action, and the content of the slides was altered to help children focus more on the object than the person. Children's performance differed little between conditions, with the exception of children reproducing fewer actions in the slideshow condition on two (of four) toys. Ultimately, this dissertation documented that the video deficit effect extends to the self-paced slideshow: live demonstration produces superior learning for children. Future work should investigate at what age the self-paced slideshow might become a useful learning medium as well as how to enhance children's learning from 2D sources given the increasing role that they play in daily life.
Open Access
Attentional and Neural Manipulations of Visuospatial Contextual Information
(University of Oregon, 2013-07-11) Lester, Ben; Dassonville, Paul
A critical function of the human visual system is to parse objects from the larger context of the environment, allowing for the identification of, and potential interaction with, those objects. The use of contextual information allows us to rapidly locate, identify, and interact with objects that appear in the environment. Contextual information can help specify an object's location within the environment (allocentric encoding) or with respect to the observer (egocentric encoding). Understanding how contextual information influences perceptual organization, and the neural systems that process a complex scene, is critical in understanding how contextual information assists in parsing local information from background. In the real world, relying on context is typically beneficial, as most objects occur in circumscribed environments. However, there are circumstances in which context can harm performance. In the case of visual illusions, relying on the context can bias observers' perceptions and cause significant motor errors. Studying the illusory conditions under which perceptual/motor functions are "fooled", or breakdown, can provide valuable information about how the brain computes allocentric and egocentric frames of reference. The following studies examine how attentional (Chapters II & III) manipulations of visuospatial context affect components of observers' egocentric reference frames (e.g., perceived vertical or subjective midline) and how neural manipulations (Chapter IV) can modulate observers' reliance on contextual information. In Chapter II, the role of attentional control settings on contextual processing is examined. Chapter III addresses the question of how visuospatial shifts of attention interact with an egocentric frame of reference. Finally, Chapter IV examines the functional role of superior parietal cortex in the processing of egocentric contextual information.
Open Access
Background Functional Connectivity Reveals Neural Mechanisms of Top-Down Attentional Control
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Li, Yichen; Hutchinson, Ben
Top-down attentional control is essential for efficiently allocating our limited attentional resources to process complex natural environments, focusing on information relevant to our goals. The neural mechanism underlying this pervasive cognitive ability can be dichotomized into externally-oriented, which allocates attention to perceptual details, and internally-oriented, which direct attention to mnemonic episodes. Extensive research has investigated these neural mechanisms by focusing on the operations of attentional control, executed in response to a stimulus, by examining the evoked activity patterns in the brain. However, growing evidence indicates the importance of exploring these neural mechanisms supporting the states of attentional control that persist over time, by scrutinizing the intrinsic functional interaction patterns among brain regions. The present dissertation follows along the latter perspective to extend our current knowledge of the neural mechanism of top-down attentional control. In a series of two experiments, background functional connectivity (BGFC) analyses were applied to isolate intrinsic functional organizations of the brain from stimulus-evoked signals. Utilizing a whole-brain, data-driven approach combined with machine learning, important neural interaction circuits and pathways were revealed in response to switching between externally and internally oriented attentional control states (Chapter 2) and concurrently representing multiple states requiring either external or internal attention (Chapter 3). Moreover, evidence was provided suggesting the systematic distinctions between stimulus-related signals (captured by evoked activity) and state-related signals (captured by BGFC) in reflecting the process of top-down attentional control. Finally, in Chapter 4, a self-developed open-source Python library (BGFC-kit) was introduced for streamlining the preprocessing steps of BGFC analyses. Together, the works in this dissertation provide important insights and facilitate future investigations of the general neural mechanisms underlying top-down attentional control.
Open Access
Behavioral and Neural Effects of Self-determined Choice on Goal Pursuit
(University of Oregon, 2020-09-24) Cosme, Danielle; Pfeifer, Jennifer
A wealth of research has documented the positive associations between autonomy and health and well-being. Acting in autonomous, self-determined ways promotes intrinsic motivation and has been linked to more successful goal pursuit in numerous domains. However, it is unclear how motivation might affect the ability or tendency to use self-regulatory strategies. If such strategies are the building blocks that enable successful goal pursuit, then investigating how motivation affects strategy implementation might help elucidate the mechanisms underlying the relationship between motivation and goal pursuit. The goal of this dissertation was to assess whether and how motivation impacts goal pursuit during a novel appetitive self-regulation task in which participants use cognitive reappraisal to control their cravings for personally-desired foods. Since choice is a primary method for supporting autonomy, and autonomy is associated with greater intrinsic motivation and more successful goal pursuit, we expected that manipulating motivation via choice would result in enhanced goal pursuit during this task. Across three experiments, we showed that autonomous and controlled goal pursuit were dissociable neurally, and that autonomous goal pursuit was perceived as less difficult across task goals. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the degree to which choice helps or hinders goal pursuit is dependent on how self-determined and autonomously motivated choice feels. Together, these results help refine neurobiological and social psychological theories of motivation, self-regulation, and goal pursuit. This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material.
Open Access
Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Spontaneous Generalization
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Ashby, Stefania; Zeithamova, Dagmar
Memory generalization is the process by which we extract commonalities across our individual experiences to form new knowledge that can guide future decisions. Studies examining generalization have traditionally employed tasks, like category learning, that emphasize learning categorical information via extraction of commonalities among stimuli. Generalization is then explicitly assessed via transfer of category knowledge to new examples. Separately, memory for individual experiences, or memory specificity, has been studied through episodic memory tasks that emphasize differences between stimuli. However, real-world experience rarely puts us in situations where learning goals prioritize specificity or generalization at the expense of the other. Rather, circumstances often require us to extract the commonalities across our experiences while also maintaining memory for the specific details. Thus, the goal of the dissertation was to evaluate the behavioral and neural mechanisms that support spontaneous memory generalization during learning that emphasizes memory specificity. Using a novel, paired associates learning task where blended faces were paired with full-name labels, we provided an opportunity for participants to form category knowledge based on shared surname labels. Unlike traditional category learning tasks, learning goals in the current task explicitly required participants to differentiate all faces, even those with shared family membership. Across 3 studies, using behavioral measures of perceived similarity and neural pattern analyses during encoding, we found that the mere presence of a shared label produced behavioral and neural evidence for category-biased representations during learning. Notably, neural evidence for category-biased representations extended beyond hypothesized memory generalization regions to include widespread aspects of the brain including higher-order visual cortex. Further, we found evidence that the hippocampus may support generalization and specificity simultaneously via differential connections with other hypothesized memory generalization and specificity regions. Together, our results inform our understanding of current theories of memory generalization by demonstrating conditions under which memory generalization proceeds spontaneously during learning.
Open Access
Boredom and the Need for Agency
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Kahn, Lauren; Berkman, Elliot
Humans are highly motivated to avoid boredom. What is the functional role of boredom, and why is it so aversive? An empirical study tested the hypothesis that a need for agency, or control over one’s actions and their effects, plays a role in our avoidance of boredom. The study also explored the role of an individual difference called experiential avoidance, which captures the tendency to avoid negative internal experiences, sometimes via problematic behaviors. Results were integrated with current clinical techniques that use mindfulness and acceptance-based approaches to address such avoidance of internal experiences. In the study, one hundred twenty-three adults completed a series of computer tasks in which their sense of agency was manipulated. After being oriented to high and medium levels of agency, participants completed a series of 30-second low agency trials in which they had the opportunity to escape to high or medium agency, at a cost. The amount of money they were willing to forego indicated their motivation to avoid low agency, or “need for agency.” After a break, they were then asked to complete a series of 30-second trials in which they did nothing, but again had the option to escape to high or medium agency at a cost. The amount of money they were willing to forego in this task indicated their motivation to avoid doing nothing, or “need for action.” Results demonstrated that on average, people were willing to give up money to avoid both low agency and to avoid a boring situation (doing nothing). Furthermore, their motivation to avoid boredom indeed was driven by the extent to which they felt that doing nothing afforded them a low sense of agency. Finally, those who were higher in experiential avoidance demonstrated a higher need for agency and action, and those lower in mindfulness demonstrated a higher need for agency. These results demonstrate that the motivation to avoid boredom may be rooted in a need for agency, and that acceptance- based clinical approaches may have success addressing this avoidance and the problematic behaviors that follow.
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The Capacity of Visual Short Term Memory Determines the Bandwidth of Information Transfer into Visual Long Term Memory
(University of Oregon, 2012) Fukuda, Keisuke; Fukuda, Keisuke; Vogel, Edward
Visual long term memory (VLTM) research has shown that we are capable of learning a virtually infinite amount of visual information. At the same time, visual short term memory (VSTM) research has shown that there is a severe limitation in the amount of information we can simultaneously apprehend at a given time. How does the severe capacity limitation in the initial uptake of information influence the encoding of information into VLTM? To this date, there has been no direct test of such influence, and the effect of such limitation has been unclear. Here, we demonstrate that, across wide varieties of conditions, the severe-capacity limitation in VSTM dictates the encoding of information into VLTM by determining the "bandwidth" of information transfer. This finding has a substantial implication for the understanding of the role of severely-capacity limited VSTM in forming many types of VLTM representations.
Open Access
Characterizing the Structure of Infants' Everyday Musical Input
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Mendoza, Jennifer; Fausey, Caitlin
Infants acculturate to their soundscape over the first year of life (e.g., Hannon & Trehub, 2005a; Werker & Tees, 1984). This perceptual tuning of early auditory skills requires integrating across experiences that repeat and vary in content and are distributed in time. Music is part of this soundscape, yet little is known about the real-world musical input available to infants as they begin learning sounds, melodies, rhythms, and words. In this dissertation, we collected and analyzed a first-of-its-kind corpus of music identified in day-long audio recordings of 6- to 12-month-old infants and their caregivers in their natural, at-home environments. We characterized the structure of this input in terms of key distributional and temporal properties that shape learning in many domains (e.g., Oakes & Spalding, 1997; Roy et al., 2015; Vlach et al., 2008; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). This everyday sensory input serves as the data available for infants to aggregate in order to build knowledge about music. We discovered that infants encountered nearly an hour of cumulative music per day distributed across multiple instances. Infants encountered many different tunes and voices in their daily music. Within this diverse range, infants encountered consistency, such that some tunes and voices were more available than others in infants’ everyday musical input. The proportion of music produced by live voices varied widely across infants. As infants progressed in time through their days, they encountered many music instances close together in time as well as some music instances separated by much longer lulls. This bursty temporal pattern also characterized how infants encountered instances of their top tune and their top voice – the specific tune and specific voice that occurred for the longest cumulative duration in each infant’s day. Finally, infants encountered many pairs of consecutive music bouts with repeated content – the same unique tune or the same unique voice. Taken together, we discovered that infants’ everyday musical input was more consistent than random in both content and time across infants’ days at home. These findings have potential to inform theory and future research examining how the nature of early music experience shapes infants’ early learning.