The role of causal beliefs in people's decisions when faced with economic problems was investigated. Two experiments are reported that vary the causal structure in prisoner's dilemma-like economic situations. We measured willingness to cooperate or defect and collected justifications and think-aloud protocols to examine the strategies that people…

Virtual worlds provide useful platforms for social behavioral research, but impose stringent limitations on the rules of engagement, responsiveness, and data collection, along with other resource restrictions. The major challenge from a computer science standpoint in developing group behavior applications for such environments is accommodating the…

Location-based services (LBS for short) providers require users' current locations to answer their location-based queries, e.g., range and nearest-neighbor queries. Revealing personal location information to potentially untrusted service providers could create privacy risks for users. To this end, our objective is to design a privacy-preserving…

Although software testing has been well-studied in computer science, it has received little attention in natural language processing. Nonetheless, a fully developed methodology for glass box evaluation and testing of language processing applications already exists in the field methods of descriptive linguistics. This work lays out a number of…

The deep semantic understanding necessary for complex natural language processing tasks, such as automatic question-answering or text summarization, would benefit from highly accurate word sense disambiguation (WSD). This dissertation investigates what makes an appropriate and effective sense inventory for WSD. Drawing on theories and…

Incorporating relevant numerical information into decision-making is a fundamental and important aspect of numeracy. However, the process through which weight is assigned to particular numerical values is not well understood. The central theory proposed in this dissertation is that the weight assigned to numerical information may be conceptualized…

This dissertation examines the manner in which young school-age children construct quantitative mental imagery and act upon these constructions for arithmetic ends. After conducting dyadic teaching experiments with three first grade students who were participating in mathematics intervention, I found the connection between the participants'…

Linton Waters and Jayne Kranat ran a session on the Nuffield "Applying Mathematical Processes" (AMP) activities at BCME7 in Manchester in April this year. These 1-2 hour activities are revamps of some of the Graded Assessment in Mathematics (GAIM) resources, developed in the 1980s, and are freely available via the Nuffield website and…

Two experiments were conducted to determine whether explicit instruction focusing on metaphorical collocations would promote the incidental noticing of similar phrases by English learners during a subsequent reading task. Noticing was operationalized using the remember-know protocol and learning was measured on a fill-in-the-blanks test. In…

Conflict adaptation effects refer to the reduction of interference when the incongruent stimulus occurs immediately after an incongruent trial, compared with when it occurs after a congruent trial. The present study analyzes the key conditions that lead to adaptation effects that are specific to the type of conflict involved versus those that are…

Visual information can specify spatial layout with respect to the observer (egocentric) or with respect to an external frame of reference (allocentric). People can use both of these types of visual spatial information to guide their hands. The question arises if movements based on egocentric and movements based on allocentric visual information…

A new physical chemistry laboratory experience has been designed for upper-level undergraduate chemistry majors. Students customize the first 10 weeks of their laboratory experience by choosing their own set of experiments (from a manual of choices) and setting their own laboratory schedule. There are several topics presented in the accompanying…

Using 3 experiments, I examined false memory for encoding context by presenting Deese-Roediger-McDermott themes (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) in usual-looking fonts and by testing related, but unstudied, lure items in a font that was shown during encoding. In 2 of the experiments, testing lure items in the font used to study their…

In his article, "An Alternative to Null-Hypothesis Significance Tests," Killeen (2005) urged the discipline to abandon the practice of "p[subscript obs]"-based null hypothesis testing and to quantify the signal-to-noise characteristics of experimental outcomes with replication probabilities. He described the coefficient that he…

Two experiments investigated the effects of characteristic features of concept mapping used for prior knowledge activation. Characteristic demands of concept mapping include connecting lines representing the relationships between concepts and labeling these lines, specifying the type of the semantic relationships. In the first experiment,…