Browsing by Subject "Cognitive science"
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Item Belief-directed exploration in human decision-makers : behavioral and physiological evidence(2012-05) Otto, Anthony Ross, 1983-; Markman, Arthur B.; Love, Bradley C.; Huk, Alexander; Poldrack, Russell; Gureckis, ToddDecision-making in uncertain environments poses a conflict between the goals of exploiting past knowledge in order to maximize rewards and exploring less-known options in order to gather information. The descriptive modeling framework utilized in previous studies of exploratory choice behavior characterizes exploration as the result of a noisy decision process, rather than a process reflecting beliefs and/or uncertainty about the environment. It stands to reason that people do not merely negotiate the exploration-exploitation dilemma by stochastically making choices, but rather, fully utilize their knowledge of the environment structure and integrate their trial-by-trial observations of choice in order to direct exploratory choice. The work presented in this dissertation evaluates this hypothesis. As the previous used tasks structures and descriptive models obfuscate this more sophisticated form of belief-directed exploration, I describe a novel exploration-exploitation task that affords disentanglement of reflective belief-directed exploration strategy from a reflexive and naïve exploration strategy. The former strategy is distinguished from latter by its ability to update its belief states in the absence of direct observations of choice payoff changes. Accordingly, we specify cognitive models instantiating these two choice strategies and in the first experiment, we find evidence that behavior is by and large better characterized by a reflective strategy, and further, that choice latencies appear to index value computations carried out in implementing such a strategy. In a second experiment, I reveal how physiological arousal (measured by Skin Conductance Responses) appears to index a form of value computation similar to what is prescribed this reflective model, and further, how individual differences in physiological response to these value signals bear on choice behavior. In a third experiment, I demonstrate how this sophisticated form of choice behavior carries cognitive costs, and following the contemporary model-based/model-free reinforcement learning framework, I show how placing concurrent decision-makers under cognitive load diminishes the contribution of the more sophisticated reflective exploration strategy, fostering reliance on stochastic, reflexive form of exploratory choice behavior.Item Control chart for complex systems with trended mean and non-constant variance(2012-05) Ramirez, Jose G; Beruvides, Mario G.; Temblador-Perez, Maria del Carmen; Smith, Milton L.; Limon-Robles, Jorge; Cordero-Franco, Alvaro E.This research focuses on the monitoring of complex systems. Specifically, the main objective is to define a technique to monitor a quadratic behavior when the standard deviation is linearly trended. A three-paper format is chosen for this Dissertation. The first paper shows the mathematical model that the data follows and presents the first approach for a control chart where time series analysis (with an autoregressive approach to identify the parameters of the quadratic behavior) is used to model the central line and the control limits are established considering traditional control charting theory. A correction factor was identified as necessary to provide adequate results and the control chart is able to detect almost all signals; a numerical example is provided. The second paper uses the same principles as the first one but uses the likelihood function to identify the parameters of the quadratic behavior and, as a result, the central line is again estimated. Results show the control limits are smoother in comparison with the first approach; the control chart seems to provide even better results. The third paper performs extensive Monte Carlo simulation to determine the performance of the proposed approaches and to compare them with an equivalent method: the regression control chart (RCC). Results show both LSE and MLE perform well for larger shifts by detecting most signals and controlling the Type-I error.Item Embodied cognition, Latin pedagogy, and the rhetorical foundations of medieval vernacular poetry(2015-05) Garbacz, Robert Scott; Woods, Marjorie Curry, 1947-; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Wojciehowski, Hannah C; Johnson, Michael A; Walker, JeffreyThis dissertation uses the insights of recent cognitive science to illuminate narrative and rhetorical strategies in the Eclogue of Theodolus, a Latin debate poem, and its French and English literary descendants. The Eclogue was wildly popular in classrooms throughout the Middle Ages and modeled for students ways to respond to stories with counter-stories, demonstrating rhetorical virtuosity by transforming images, words, and ideas. In doing so, it prepared the way for vernacular literary production. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the ways the Eclogue’s narrative rhetoric, and particularly its imagery, was processedby medieval students using mental capacities recently revealed by modern cognitive linguistics and neuroscience. In the Eclogue, a character representing Christian truth triumphs over one representing pagan falsehood precisely through her ability to transform the cognitive and affective effects of the work’s visual and spatial rhetoric. Yet if the Eclogue emphasizes Christian superiority, the early French Roman d’Enéas deploys a similar specular rhetoric for a less respectable purpose. Lush descriptions of funeral monuments lure the reader away from what is otherwise the text’s central concern: legitimizing the French political order. These chapters show both the sophistication of medieval imagery and the discourses deployed to limit its power. Chapters 3 and 4 consider medieval theories of cognition. Chapter 3 focuses on the Owl and the Nightingale, a debate poem generally considered the first great work of Middle English literature. This poem undercuts the Eclogue’s lofty rhetoric by presenting myopic protagonists whose avian nature (in keeping with Neo-Aristotelian theory) is most clearly shown in their stubborn emphasis on their desires to live and kill. Similarly earthbound in its orientation is Chaucer’s House of Fame. This work, which begins with a survey of scholastic cognitive science and which offers a climactic ekphrasis in which the Eclogue takes a prominent place, offers both a deeply skeptical account of the ability of embodied humans to know the truth and a tour de force of medieval narrative rhetoric. Taken together, these discussions offer a survey of the power of medieval images on medieval brains and unearth a significant force in medieval intellectual culture.Item Innovation study in engineering design(2009-12) Krager, Jarden Ellison; Wood, Kristin L.; Jensen, Dan D.Well developed innovation processes are becoming an essential component to the continued success of a large number of industries. Such processes build upon the evolutionary steps taken to advance innovation. In light of the need for innovation, companies and engineers must create the most efficient processes for their systems or product development teams. A step toward the creation of such processes, as well as the corresponding teaching of such processes in higher-education, is the development of a baseline of current best practices. This paper considers a contribution to this effort in the form of a study of a specific group of innovation practitioners. The study was created to probe a group of leaders in the engineering design domain using technical, demographic, and short answer questions. Various analysis methods are used to obtain a fundamental view of the answers to the questions but also the demographics of the participant group. Two deductive analysis methods are used, the first a set of hypotheses are explored from participant responses, and second a qualitative technique to understand links in the short answer portion of the study. An additional inductive approach is used, consisting of a correlating approach to compare responses to questions and understand trends across the participants. Results from the analysis emphasize the current perceptions of innovation by the participants and opportunities to refine our search for better innovation practices.Item Lessing's Laocoön : an early analysis of the aesthetic experience(1997) Martin, Lucinda, 1965-; Arens, Katherine, 1953-Lessing's classic Laocoön, in which he compares painting and poetry, has always been by critics and theorists either as a treatise setting out rules for the genres, or as a comparison of two semiotic systems. In this thesis, I argue that these two approaches represent only two-thirds of the picture. In the introduction to Laocoön, Lessing outlines three ways of dealing with art, all of which play a role in each aesthetic experience. I examine each of these three crucial elements of the art encounter, using Lessing's own examples to support my position that Lessing was not talking about the limits of the genres, but about the limits of human cognition. I correlate Lessing's vocabulary and ideas with the terminology and theories of modern, twentieth-century cognitive science, since it is my belief that Lessing was actually anticipating current ideas in these fields. Finally, I urge that Lessing's work be reevaluated: First, his importance on the development of Enlightenment thought has been underestimated because critics have not seen his emphasis on the cognition of art, and second, because the insights he had about the art experience are very relevant to current work in the fields of art, psychology, and cognitive science.Item Misreading English meter : 1400-1514(2012-12) Myklebust, Nicholas; Cable, Thomas, 1942-; Blockley, Mary E; Heinzelman, Kurt O; Scala, Elizabeth D; King, Robert DThis dissertation challenges the standard view that fifteenth-century poets wrote irregular meters in artless imitation of Chaucer. On the contrary, I argue that Chaucer’s followers deliberately misread his meter in order to challenge his authority as a laureate. Rather than reproduce that meter, they reformed it, creating three distinct meters that vied for dominance in the first decades of the fifteenth century. In my analysis of 40,655 decasyllables written by poets other than Chaucer, I show that the fifteenth century was not the metrical wasteland so often depicted by editors and critics but an age of radical experimentation, nuance, and prosodic cunning. In Chapter One I present evidence against the two standard explanations for a fifteenth-century metrical collapse: cultural depression and linguistic instability. Chapter Two outlines an alternative framework to the statistical and linguistic methods that have come to dominate metrical studies. In their place I propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines the two techniques with cognitive science, using a reader-oriented, brain-based model of metrical competence to reframe irregular rhythms as problems that readers solve. Chapter Three applies this framework to Chaucer’s meter to show that the poets who inherited his long line exploited its soft structure in order to build competing meters; in that chapter I also argue that Chaucer did not write in iambic pentameter, as is generally assumed, but in a “footless” decasyllabic line modeled on the Italian endecasillibo. Chapter Four explores metrical reception; by probing scribal responses to Chaucer’s meter we can gain insight into how fifteenth-century readers heard it. Chapters Five through Seven investigate three specific acts of reception by poets: those of John Walton, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. I conclude the dissertation by tracing the influence of Hoccleve and Lydgate on the later fifteenth-century poets George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, and John Metham, and by identifying the eclipse of fifteenth-century meter with the Tudor poets Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barclay, who replaced a misreading of Chaucer’s meter with a misreading of Lydgate’s, inadvertently returning sixteenth-century poets to an alternating decasyllable reminiscent of Chaucer’s own meter.