Efficient and accurate processing of internally- and externally-generated information is enhanced by the presence of multisensory signals that can provide redundant information about percepts or events. However, efficient usage of multisensory signals requires implicit perceptual knowledge of the potential or likely relationships between signals encoded within each sensory modality. If...
Reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) has enormous potential to become a paradigmatic model of individual differences. However, while its foundations in experimental genetic and neurophysiological research on nonhuman animals are among the strongest in personality psychology, it has perhaps not gained the foothold within the field that it deserves. It is...
Prejudice based on a person’s low socioeconomic status (SES) has been largely understudied in social psychology. In my dissertation research, I argue that understanding a perceiver’s mental model of SES is crucial to explaining anti-poor prejudice. I borrow from work in anthropology to characterize two main mental models of SES—ascribed...
Background: Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a significant public health issue. Previous research on the pathophysiology of depression in adults has demonstrated abnormal neural processing associated with depression symptomatology including alterations in reward and aversion circuits. Loss aversion (LA), or the concept that individuals evaluate outcomes based on losses and...
Research in cognitive and developmental psychology typically focuses on urban middle-class, European American populations. Although there has been a recent surge in psychological research that focuses on cultural variation (Cohen & Kitayam, 2007), little is known about the practices that support this variation. Knowledge about these practices is critical for...
Although chronic stress has been shown to be significantly associated with depression, this relationship has not received adequate attention, particularly in adolescent samples. One gap lies in the examination of whether particular domains of chronic interpersonal stress are uniquely related to risk for depression. Furthermore, the degree to which chronic...
The majority of research on voluntary visual attention has focused primarily on specific attentional processes. While we know much about individual attentional abilities such as shifting attention among spatial locations, tracking multiple objects and maintaining attention for specific targets, we know little about how these attentional processes relate to one...
Most cognitive research on conceptual structure has studied undergraduate populations and either natural (biological) or artificial (experiment-specific) categories. This project investigates how people with extensive, rich knowledge about a complex real-world domain organize and use that knowledge. The research extends prior work on differences among types of experts within biological...
The human brain shows great flexibility to adjust itself to dynamically ever-changing environment. Despite more than 100 years of cognitive brain research, the dynamical aspect of cognitive process has remained poorly understood compared to the static aspect of that. This dissertation concerns the dynamic character and functional significance of periodically...
Although anxiety and depression are clearly distinct from a phenomenological perspective, discriminating these constructs empirically has often been difficult (Clark & Watson, 1991). Both the tripartite model of psychopathology (Clark & Watson, 1991) and the cognitive content-specificity hypothesis (Beck, 1976; Beck & Clark, 1988) were forwarded in an effort to...