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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Subject: search.filters.subject.Cognitive Psychology

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    DESIGN THINKING: COGNITIVE PATTERNS IN ENGINEERING DESIGN DOCUMENTATION
    (2012) Westmoreland, Sophoria Nicole; Schmidt, Linda C.; Mechanical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Engineering design is an integral resource that on the surface uses creative, scientific, and process knowledge. Over the years many research driven improvements have been made to the methods and tools used for crafting the engineering design profession. Some progress has been made in exploring the cognitive processes, reading between the lines, and thinking about design thinking. This information is valuable to engineering designers in visualizing and performing the product development process. This dissertation is interdisciplinary in nature. The goal of this research is to apply cognitive research techniques to engineering design documentation to understand what happens in the mind during the design process. This research can be considered as an exploratory study of uncovering cognitive processes during design by developing a coding scheme that is applied to student and professional design journals. A successful cognitive coding scheme can be used in different domains and leads to development of new metrics for examining journal activities. This first study will enable future work aligned with the larger research goal of improving the understanding of design thinking. Engineering design documentation is one method of revealing insights into the mysteries of the mind. Design journals are used in this study combined with a Cognitive Coding Scheme created by the author to explore design thinking. This dissertation focuses on identifying patterns in cognitive behavior of engineering designers. Design documentation is also analyzed for insights on attitudes towards design journaling. This dissertation will make a contribution to the field of engineering design research by presenting a cognitive coding scheme capable of revealing insights into the mind of the designers.
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    Users' spatial abilities affect interface usability outcomes
    (2011) Campbell, Susan; Norman, Kent L; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The usability of a system depends both on inherent characteristics of the system and on its users. This paper argues that a major source of differences among users is variations in spatial ability, but that variations in different types of spatial ability affect components of usability differently. In two experiments, I investigated a simple model of the relationships of spatial visualization ability, spatial orientation ability, and spatial working memory with the usability constructs of efficiency and effectiveness. Both experiments used Wikipedia search as a representative information search task. The first experiment used a desktop computer interface, and the second experiment used a pair of mobile devices with widely different screen sizes. Better spatial orientation ability corresponded to faster performance on efficiency across devices. Better spatial visualization ability corresponded to slower performance on larger screens, but faster performance on smaller screens. Better spatial visualization ability also predicted better effectiveness in both experiments. These results suggest that spatial ability is a useful way to characterize users and to improve usability testing, and that its effects vary in systematic ways depending on characteristics of the tested interface and on which metrics are chosen.
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    INVESTIGATING DIFFERENCES IN STRUCTURAL KNOWLEDGE AND METACOGNITIVE PROCESSES AMONG LAY HELPERS ADVANCED STUDENTS AND SENIOR PROFESSIONAL THERAPISTS
    (2011) London, Kevin; Kivlighan, Dennis M; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Therapist expertise is associated with the use of complex knowledge structures and metacognitive processes. A cross sectional ex-post facto design assessed differences in structural knowledge and metacognitive processes between lay helpers, advanced students, and senior professional therapists. A card sorting task involving 19 therapist intentions was used to assess the following structural knowledge indicators: minutes to complete a card sort, number of card sort categories, and card sort score. Metacognitive processes were assessed using an adaptation of the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory and the Self-reflection subscale of the Self-Reflection and Insight subscales. An inverse U shaped relationship was found in where compared to lay helpers and senior professional therapists; advanced student's had higher card sort scores, indicative of greater consistency with a sample of experienced therapists. Compared to lay helpers and advanced students, senior professional therapists used significantly more time to sort therapist intentions and sorted intentions into a greater number of categories. Relative to metacognitive process, advanced students and senior professional therapists reported significantly greater knowledge of cognition than lay helpers. Also, advanced students also reported greater self-reflection than both lay helpers and senior professional therapists. Discriminant analysis assessed the potential for a linear combination of structural knowledge indicators and metacognitive processes to differentiate participants by level of therapist development. Self-reflection and card sort scores discriminated advanced students from senior professionals, whereas knowledge of cognition and minutes to complete the card sort discriminated experienced professionals from lay helpers. Multidimensional scaling analysis was used to assess the optimal structural configuration of the pooled card sort data and yielded a 4 dimensional solution of the 19 therapist intentions. Results were consistent with Skovholt and Ronnestad's (1992) model of therapist professional development. Results also supported the attenuating effect of ill defined problems on problem solving ability of highly experienced individuals in their respective domain. The study concludes with implications for training, therapy, and research.
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    Clarifying Survey Questions
    (2011) Redline, Cleo D.; Tourangeau, Roger; Survey Methodology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Although comprehension is critical to the survey response process, much about it remains unknown. Research has shown that concepts can be clarified through the use of definitions, instructions or examples, but respondents do not necessarily attend to these clarifications. This dissertation presents the results of three experiments designed to investigate where and how to present clarifying information most effectively. In the first experiment, eight study questions, modeled after questions in major federal surveys, were administered as part of a Web survey. The results suggest that clarification improves comprehension of the questions. There is some evidence from that initial experiment that respondents anticipate the end of a question and are more likely to ignore clarification that comes after the question than before it. However, there is considerable evidence to suggest that clarifications are most effective when they are incorporated into a series of questions. A second experiment was conducted in both a Web and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) survey. IVR was chosen because it controlled for the effects of interviewers. The results of this experiment suggest that readers appear no more capable of comprehending complex clarification than listeners. In both channels, instructions were least likely to be followed when they were presented after the question, more likely to be followed when they were placed before the question, and most likely to be followed when they were incorporated into a series of questions. Finally, in a third experiment, five variables were varied to examine the use of examples in survey questions. Broad categories elicited higher reports than narrow categories and frequently consumed examples elicited higher reports than infrequently consumed examples. The implication of this final study is that the choice of categories and examples require careful consideration, as this choice will influence respondents' answers, but it does not seem to matter where and how a short list of examples are presented.
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    Auditory Streaming: Behavior, Physiology, and Modeling
    (2011) Ma, Ling; Shamma, Shihab A; Bioengineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Auditory streaming is a fundamental aspect of auditory perception. It refers to the ability to parse mixed acoustic events into meaningful streams where each stream is assumed to originate from a separate source. Despite wide interest and increasing scientific investigations over the last decade, the neural mechanisms underlying streaming still remain largely unknown. A simple example of this mystery concerns the streaming of simple tone sequences, and the general assumption that separation along the tonotopic axis is sufficient for stream segregation. However, this dissertation research casts doubt on the validity of this assumption. First, behavioral measures of auditory streaming in ferrets prove that they can be used as an animal model to study auditory streaming. Second, responses from neurons in the primary auditory cortex (A1) of ferrets show that spectral components that are well-separated in frequency produce comparably segregated responses along the tonotopic axis, no matter whether presented synchronously or consecutively, despite the substantial differences in their streaming percepts when measured psychoacoustically in humans. These results argue against the notion that tonotopic separation per se is a sufficient neural correlate of stream segregation. Thirdly, comparing responses during behavior to those during the passive condition, the temporal correlations of spiking activity between neurons belonging to the same stream display an increased correlation, while responses among neurons belonging to different streams become less correlated. Rapid task-related plasticity of neural receptive fields shows a pattern that is consistent with the changes in correlation. Taken together these results indicate that temporal coherence is a plausible neural correlate of auditory streaming. Finally, inspired by the above biological findings, we propose a computational model of auditory scene analysis, which uses temporal coherence as the primary criterion for predicting stream formation. The promising results of this dissertation research significantly advance our understanding of auditory streaming and perception.