Competitive gaming, or esports, is a high-skill endeavor embedded in a highly gendered social context. Using multiple methodological approaches, this dissertation argues that gender-gaming inequality is a result of changeable stereotypes that impact women throughout their lives. Specifically, gender-gaming stereotypes limit women’s initial access to gaming, discourage their continued interest...
Many theories of categorization have included an intuitive role for our ability to detect and judge similarity. Yet, this important role of similarity processing has been disputed. This research adopts a model of similarity processing through structure mapping (Gentner, 1983) to explore its role in similarity processing and categorization. Relational...
Language is a hallmark of human cognition—a rich and flexible method of representing the world around us. As such, language provides an invaluable resource to human infants: a way of gaining insight into the representations that guide adult cognition. In this dissertation, I explore how language influences infants’ cognition as...
With more jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields available than people to fill them, the United States is extremely focused on increasing STEM education to address this gap in the future workforce. This focus is not exclusive to higher education and secondary schooling, but rather, it has...