As our world is increasingly filled with data visualizations, having the skills to leverage data visualizations is essential for participation in society. Confident engagement with data visualizations is critical for being an educated member of society; however, research has shown that it is difficult for individuals to digest and gain...
Prior studies about restatements generally examine outcomes under assumed auditor responsibility. Surprisingly, however, about 20% of the restatements obtained from Audit Analytics correspond to cases where the current auditor was not engaged during the misstatement period. I refer to these cases as uninvolved. The first chapter examines current literature findings...
Decision making is an essential and indispensable element in everyday life. It is posited that parallel, distinct systems subserving deliberative, goal-directed control and automatic, habitual control underlie decision making. Computational accounts suggest that model-based and model-free learning strategies give rise to these two systems respectively. The model-based system is a...
This dissertation investigates two ways in which personality psychology should move beyond the traditional approach of measuring personality with broad domains composed of trait descriptors, as exemplified by the Big Five taxonomy. The first study (Chapter 2) suggests an alternative to the traditional approach of aggregating personality items into domains....
Motivated by rhythms in the brain, we investigate the synchronization of noisy and all-to-all pulse-coupled oscillators. We consider a case where the oscillatory excursions are of varying amplitude and where only sufficiently large excursions result in the output pulses that drive the interactions between the oscillators. In the regime of...
For years, neuroscientists have strived to understand memory consolidation, where salient memories are sorted and organized into distributed cortical networks for long-term storage. A large body of sleep research suggests that slow-wave sleep is an optimal opportunity for memory consolidation, and that consolidation is driven, at least in part, by...
Leptin, a peptide mainly secreted in proportion to adipose tissue mass, increases energy expenditure with a parallel increase in breathing. The existence of a leptin-mediated neural circuit linking breathing to metabolism has been speculated, yet the precise central mechanisms were unknown. In my thesis, I show that optogenetic activation of...
Every day, we communicate through computers on projects ranging from a group lunch order to booking a flight to learning critical medical information. And every day, we also miscommunicate through computers: We don’t pick up on an intentionally humorous response, or we miss the criticality of a request. This is...
This dissertation aims to understand the contribution of schools to reducing bullying behaviors and, in turn, to examine the benefits for students of attending a school that effectively reduces bullying. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the literature on bullying by a) locating the school as a key environment...
This thesis deals with modeling long-term deformation and failure of concrete and shale structures. First concrete structures are studied. For concrete structures, design lifetime of over a hundred years is required. Shrinkage, swelling, creep and Alkali-silica reaction are significant parts of the long-term deformation of concrete and are studied here....