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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    What's in a Mitten?: The Effects of Active Versus Passive Experience on Action Understanding
    (2008-05-28) Gerson, Sarah A; Woodward, Amanda L; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Prior research has shown that young infants understand something about others' goals. This understanding has been developmentally linked to infants' own actions. An open question is what aspects of experience are crucial to action understanding. In the current studies, we sought to examine the relation between experience and action understanding in 3-month-old infants and to investigate the differential effects of active and passive experience. Findings from Study 1 demonstrated a threshold effect: a minimal amount of active experience led to subsequent action understanding. In Study 2, we assessed whether visual experience alone would have the same effect by giving another group of infants matched passive experience. These infants, however, did not reap the same benefits from passive experience. These findings demonstrate that active experience provides important information, above and beyond that which can be gleaned from passive experience, at a time when intention understanding is first emerging.
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    A MODEL OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF EPISTEMIC AND ONTOLOGIC COGNITION
    (2007-05-29) Greene, Jeffrey Alan; Torney-Purta, Judith; Azevedo, Roger; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    While its advocates trumpet personal epistemology research as an essential contribution to the understanding of student cognition, the field currently wrestles with four problems. There is a lack of consensus regarding construct definition, a disconnect between psychological investigations and personal epistemology's philosophical roots, a failure to integrate work from developmental psychology, and difficulties in measuring personal epistemology. This dissertation combines work from both philosophy and developmental psychology with personal epistemology research to put forth a conceptual model of epistemic and ontologic cognition that addresses these four problems while building on the strengths of past research. Development is described using four ordered positions, and is predicted to be probabilistically related to educational level. Domain-specificity is also tested in terms of ill and well-structured domains. Using both quantitative and qualitative data from a pilot study, an instrument to measure epistemic and ontologic cognition was developed. By assessing the construct validity and reliability of scores from the instrument the underlying conceptual model was tested. This instrument was administered to a sample of 662 students ranging in age from middle-school through graduate school. Results indicated that scores from the instrument had acceptable construct validity and reliability, and that a factor mixture model best represented the data, and provided mixed support for the underlying model. Educational level was probabilistically related to participants' epistemic and ontologic cognition.