Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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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Item Grounding Judgment Phenomena in Memory: Examining the Role of Retrieval in the Estimation of Events(2018) Nguyen, Rosalind; Dougherty, Michael; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Suppose you were running late to work and had to decide which route to take that would give you the best chance of getting to work on time. How do you come up with the various routes to consider? How do you assess which route will give you the best chance of getting to work on time? In order to make that decision, you may think about all the prior routes you’ve taken and then evaluate each one with some probability of getting the desired outcome. On the surface, the act of generating choices and evaluating their likelihood may seem to have little in common. However, one may be surprised to learn that these processes are closely intertwined. The findings from this project suggest that judgments of likelihood may be constrained by one’s ability to retrieve from semantic memory. In experiment 1, we demonstrate that one’s general ability to retrieve from long-term memory (LTM) may play a critical role in judgments of likelihood and that the nature of the retrieval may relate differentially to different types of event estimation. In experiment 2, we assess different measurement models of memory and find that the type of relation between memory and judgment changes as the function of the type of memory model that one adopts. Finally, combined data across both experiments reveal that how the to-be-judged items are distributed plays a role in judgments and that retrieval ability, specifically, semantic memory, is predictive of probability judgments. Taken together, we argue that the ability to retrieve from LTM plays a critical role in judging the likelihood of an event occurring.Item A META-DATA INFORMED EXPERT JUDGMENT AGGREGATION AND CALIBRATION TECHNIQUE(2016) Feldman, Ellis; Mosleh, Ali; Reliability Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Policy makers use expert judgment opinions elicited from experts as probability distributions, quantiles or point estimates, as inputs to decisions that may have economic or life and death impacts. While challenges in estimating probabilities in general have been studied, research that distinguished between non-probabilistic, i.e., physical, variables and probabilistic variables specifically in the context of meta-data based expert judgment aggregation techniques, and the errors associated with the predictions developed from such variables, was not identified. This research demonstrated that for two combined expert judgment meta-data bases, the distinction between physical and probabilistic variables was significant in terms of the extent of multiplicative error between elicited medians and realized values both before and after aggregation. The distinction also impacts the widths of bounds around aggregated point estimates. The research compared nine methods of aggregating estimates and obtaining calibrated bounds, including ones based on alpha stable distributions, quantile regression, and a Bayesian model. Simple parametric distributions were also fit to the meta-data. Methods were compared against criteria including accuracy, bounds coverage and width, sensitivity to outliers, and complexity. No single method dominated all criteria for either variable type. The research investigated sensitivity of results to level of realized value for a variable, such as infrequent events for probabilistic variables, as well as sensitivity of results to number of experts.Item A UNIFIED MODEL OF MOTIVATED REASONING: THE INTERACTIVE ROLE OF MOTIVATIONAL FACTORS, SITUATIONAL AFFORDANCES, AND COGNITIVE RESOURCES IN HUMAN JUDGMENT.(2011) Bélanger, Jocelyn; Kruglanski, Arie W; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Motivated biases are considered under an integrative theoretical framework which specifies the interplay between motivation, situational affordances, and cognitive resources. According to this framework, motivation influences the cognitive strategies taken in a given situation. Then, cognitive resources are channeled to the appropriate set of cognitive processes suggested by the dominant motivation. The presence of cognitive resources allows information processing to be directed at either reaching an accurate decision, or overcoming reality constraints impeding one from reaching a desirable judgment. In the absence of cognitive resources the dominant motivation, whether it be accuracy or directional motivation, has a lesser impact when reaching the desired judgment is made difficult. In such case, salient situational cues and ambiguous information may determine judgments to a greater degree irrespective of the motivational relevance of those cues. Two studies supported the present model in two unrelated contexts using different operationalizations of the major constructs.