Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2010 - 20112

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    Three Quasi-Experimental and Experimental Papers in Environmental Economics
    (2011) Herberich, David; McConnell, Ted; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation utilizes quasi-experimental and experimental techniques to contribute to the literature on environmental and resource economics in three distinct ways but with the overarching goal of demonstrating the usefulness of experimental techniques to explore topics related to the environment. First, chapter one demonstrates the feasibility and draw-backs of using a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity approach to analyze the ozone regulation contained in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Chapter two explores the impacts how economic and social-psychology factors affect the adoption of an environmental technology, namely compact fluorescent light bulbs. In order to consider these factors, chapter two utilizes a large-scale field experiment informed by a theoretical model of adoption. Finally, chapter three utilizes a field experiment designed for a large apartment management company, to advance the literature on presumed (opt-out) and explicit (opt-in) consent procedures by exploring a willingness to pay to forgo the decision to opt-out of the installation of an environmental technology.
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    RAPID ADAPTIVE PLASTICITY IN AUDITORY CORTEX
    (2010) Atiani, Serin; Shamma, Shihab A; Neuroscience and Cognitive Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Navigating the acoustic environment entails actively listening for different sound sources, extracting signal from a background of noise, identifying the salient features of a signal and determining what parts of it are relevant. Humans and animals in natural environments perform such acoustic tasks routinely, and have to adapt to changes in the environment and features of the acoustic signals surrounding them in real time. Rapid plasticity has been reported to be a possible mechanism underling the ability to perform these tasks. Previous studies report that neurons in primary auditory cortex (A1) undergo changes in spectro-temporal tuning that enhance the discriminability between different sound classes, modulating their tuning to enhance the task relevant feature. This thesis investigates rapid task related plasticity in two distinct directions; first I investigate the effect of manipulating task difficulty on this type of plasticity. Second I expand the investigation of rapid plasticity into higher order auditory areas. With increasing task difficulty, A1 neurons' response is altered to increasingly suppress the representation of the noise while enhancing the representation of the signal. Comparing adaptive plasticity in secondary auditory cortex (PEG) to A1, PEG neurons further enhance the discriminability of the sound classes by an even greater enhancement of the target response. Taken together these results indicate that adaptive neural plasticity is a plausible mechanism that underlies the performance of novel auditory behaviors in real time, and provide insights into the development of behaviorally significant representation of sound in auditory cortex.