The criminal justice system depends on verbal accounts of crimes. Can the act of reporting a crime harm eyewitness memory for the perpetrator of that crime? The answer is yes according the verbal overshadowing effect. The verbal overshadowing effect describes the finding that memory is adversely affected after verbally describing a previously presented item (e.g., face). Often in studies of the...

BACKGROUND Schizophrenia patients show disturbances on a range of tasks that assess mentalizing or 'Theory of Mind' (ToM). However, these tasks are often developmentally inappropriate, make large demands on verbal abilities and explicit problem-solving skills, and involve after-the-fact reflection as opposed to spontaneous mentalizing. METHOD To address these limitations, 55 clinically stable...

The perspective of modeling knowledge in Artificial Intelligence is that these models are equal to the knowledge itself (e.g. equate the map with the territory). This encoding view treats knowledge as if it were primarily verbal and assumes that verbal concepts themselves can be replaced by descriptions of concepts--as if a body of descriptions and neural categorizations were equivalent mechani...

Two experiments explored lateralized biases in mental representations of matrix patterns formed from aural verbal descriptions. Healthy participants listened, either monaurally or binaurally, to verbal descriptions of 6 by 3 matrix patterns and were asked to form a mental representation of each pattern. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to judge which half of the matrix, left or right, c...

This thesis explores the effect of vocal affect expression on communicative effectiveness. Two studies examined whether positive speaker affect facilitates the encoding and decoding of the message, combining methods from Phonetics and Psychology. The first study explored the relationship between perceived affective state and communicative effectiveness. To obtain a range of naturally occurring ...

Music similarity underlies a large part of a listener’s experience, as it relates to familiarity and associations between different pieces or parts. Rhythmic similarity has received scant research attention in comparison with other aspects of music similarity such as melody or harmony. Mathematical measures of rhythmic similarity have been proposed, but none of them has been compared to human j...

Physical contact with patients by health care providers has been found to benefit the patients by reducing their fearful or avoidant reactions. This study tested whether a reassuring touch could be used during a routine pediatric dental examination to reduce children's anxiety and improve their behavior. Thirty-eight children between 3.5 and 10 years of age were randomly assigned to one of two ...

Describing troubling events and images and reflecting on their emotional meanings are central components of most psychotherapies. The computer system described here tracks the occurrence and intensity of narration or imagery within transcribed therapy sessions and over the course of treatments; it likewise tracks the extent to which language denoting appraisal and logical thought occurs. The Di...

Architects typically tell stories about their design intentions and then translate the verbal descriptions into action-based commands in Computer Aided Design tools. In other words, during the creative process the designer works in a “concepts space” that is different than the “properties space” available in the software virtual world of CAD tools. In this paper we propose to study the vocabula...