Recent studies have begun to examine white matter connectivity aberrations in psychiatric populations, such as major depressive disorder. Several studies have found reduced white matter integrity (WMI) in depressed samples, though the location of this reduction is not clear. Incorporating symptom measures of depression severity and rumination may allow for...
The concealed information test (CIT) has garnered more empirical support than other methods of recognition detection and has a firm theoretical foundation. Because it occurs involuntarily, even when recognition is denied, P300 amplitude is a robust indictor of concealed information. Although the P300-based CIT shows great promise for field use,...
Sexual orientation is conventionally understood as relative attraction to men versus women. It has recently been argued that male sexual orientation in particular can be extended to include other dimensions of sexual attraction besides gender, such as sexual maturity and location. With respect to the dimension of location, most men...
Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words—even property terms—through indirect learning (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We explore two factors that contribute to this ability—perceptual alignment and linguistic contrast. We propose that spontaneous comparison processes lead children to notice key commonalities and differences that facilitate indirect property word learning....
Rhythmic fluctuations of electrical activity in the brain provide insights into the proposed mechanism by which we encode experiences and then maintain, forget, modify, and retrieve them. Yet there is still much to learn about how neural oscillations relate to memory function. The purpose of this research is to discover...
Selective attention enables people to focus on a small number of objects, features, or events with good resolution. Sometimes attention may also be less selective and distributed across numerous items, which allows more information to be processed at a lower resolution. The degree to which attention is more or less...
Memory systems research has established the importance of two distinct types of memory systems in the brain: explicit and implicit. While a robust literature exists on individual differences in the explicit domain (Chapter 3), research on individual differences in implicit learning remains relatively limited. The key question guiding the investigation...
Students often change majors during college, and most workers change jobs throughout their careers. Yet the diverse opportunities for entering natural science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are often overlooked during college and beyond. This dissertation therefore analyzed four large nationally representative datasets to characterize the pathways for joining...
There has long been an interest in the idea of generativity the concern for and commitment towards promoting the well-being of future generations. In Western societies, generativity can be characterized through societal contributions and acts dedicated towards others. Since the early 1960s, when Erikson proposed generativity as the major developmental...
Research shows that psychometrically-assessed spatial abilities (e.g., spatial visualization and spatial orientation) can be improved through training, and that some training yields improvements that are transferable to novel contexts and tasks (Uttal et al., 2013). While the training of these spatial abilities may be valuable for some forms of STEM...