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The way our minds encode information impacts our lives on a daily basis. It determines how we learn and retain, what we recall after a unique experience, and how long we can remember the events. Research on the working of memory has shown that chunking facilitates subsequent recall through the regrouping of informational units. Event segmentation involves the chunking of visual information. This master’s thesis investigates the relationship between event segmentation and subsequent event memory, while taking into account the possible influence of more general cognitive abilities. Specifically, this study examines whether the ability to segment events can predict subsequent memory above and beyond working memory and executive functioning, hereby replicating basic parts of the set-up used by Sargent et al. (2013). They found that segmentation ability does predict event memory above and beyond the contributions of general cognitive abilities. It was expected that the outcome would be similar despite the differences between the studies. The hypothesis was tested with an online application of tests focusing on event segmentation ability, event memory, working memory and executive functioning on Qualtrics. First, to measure segmentation ability, participants were asked to segment the ongoing behavior in a movie. Second, to measure event memory, participants had to write down as much as they could remember from that movie, followed by choosing which of two frames was directly from the movie and finally, put a collection of frames from the movie in the correct order. Last, to measure working memory and executive functioning participants respectively completed shortened versions of the reading span and the operation span task, and a shortened version of the reading with distraction task, all inspired by the set-up of the original tests. Due to the misconstruction of one subtest, and the low internal consistency of three others, the measures of different segmentation-related abilities were unreliable. The residual cognitive test showed that working memory was not significantly related to segmentation ability and the test was not reliable enough to make strong conclusions regarding the main hypothesis. The correlation between segmentation ability and subsequent event memory was low, possibly due to the fact that only one rater scored the results of the residual event memory task. In conclusion, the core question could not be answered.
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When the goal is to keep someone from learning the truth, the rational way to behave in a conversation would be to say nothing at all or something completely irrelevant. But is this indeed what people do in such a situation? This thesis argues that instead of remaining silent or being non-informative, people instead revert to telling so-called half-truths (Vincent & Castelfranchi, 1982) through which they trick their listeners into making wrong inferences. People have the extraordinary gift to understand more than is literally being said in conversations. This is because conversational partners usually adhere to what is called the Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975), which ensures that what we say is truthful, concise, relevant and perspicuous. Because a listener assumes that a speaker is adhering to this principle, she can make inferences regarding the underlying meaning of the speaker’s utterance. However, all of these assumptions can easily be abused by those who intend to deceive others. In a first study, we established that people indeed prefer misleading to lying. From a rational model analysis, we derived that the trust relationship between conversational partners is of crucial importance in deciding whether to be uninformative or misleading. In the next two studies, we manipulated this factor and looked at whether this caused them to give more misleading or non-informative answers. In addition to this we also tested whether the level of informativity of the misleading answer (i.e. how many options it excludes) has an effect on which strategy is preferred. The results clearly indicated that people prefer misleading to lying, and that the misleading answers were significantly more popular when they excluded fewer options and were thus less informative. However, the results regarding the trust relationship and type of answer were not so clear.
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Age, gender and race are by many researchers referred to as the three primitive categories used when you perceive others. Kurzban, Tooby and Cosmides (2001), however, doubt the status of race as a primitive category. In their 2001 study, they argue, on the basis of six experiments, that race is a byproduct of categorizing in terms of coalition. In this master's thesis, we replicated the study of Kurzban et al. (2001) to ascertain whether the same effect can be observed. By replicating the experiment of Kurzban et al. (2001), we wanted to examine the status of race. A first - high powered - replication study was conducted in the USA. A second replication study was performed in Flanders. The methods and materials of both replications were the same; only the adopted language differed. In the two conditions of both experiments, participants first saw a discussion between two basketball teams on the basis of written sentences and photographs of the players. In the instructions preceding the conversation, participants were asked to form an impression of the players. After this first phase, the participants were presented with a short distractor task. In the last phase of the experiment, a surprise recall task followed where the participants had to match the right photograph and sentence from the first phase again. The difference between both conditions was that in the first condition, also called the verbal cue condition, participants could only use the verbal utterances the players made to determine team membership. However, in the second condition, the visual cue condition, team membership was indicated by means of different t-shirt colors (grey and yellow) so participants could not only use verbal cues but also visual cues. In the last phase of the experiment, participants obviously made a lot of errors, i.e. a mismatch between a sentence and a photograph. Four types of errors were possible (same team same race, different team same race, same team different race and different team different race), wherefrom two scores (coalitional encoding and racial encoding) could be derived. These errors and scores are essential when analyzing the results. In the USA study, we observed the same effect (but with lower effect sizes) as Kurzban et al. (2001), that is a decrease in racial encoding and an increase in coalitional encoding when visual cues (i.e. different t-shirt colors) are present. In the Flemish study, we observed a similar effect for coalition encoding, but an insignificant effect for racial encoding. This insignificant effect could be due to the low power of the study (the sample size was too small). Another hypothetical explanation could be the difference in social context, as blacks have another status in America than in Europe/Belgium.
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Words that we use in daily life are stored in memory and more specifically in what is referred to as the mental lexicon. The structure and organization of the human mental lexicon is complex, and multiple semantic models of how our vocabulary is organized have been proposed. A considerable amount of research has investigated these semantic models, either by focusing on one single model or by comparing two different models using particular semantic tasks. The latter approach has also been implemented in this study which compared two well-known semantic models each proposing a different structure of the human mental lexicon, i.e. a model based on word associations and a model based on text corpora. The association-based model states that two words are closely related when they are located close to each other in the semantic network (and thus share many associations), while the corpus-based model proclaims that two words are closely related when they share a similar word co-occurrence pattern in text corpora. The research hypothesis of this study is that the association model approximates the structure of the human mental lexicon closer than the corpus model. To test this hypothesis, two different experiments were performed, i.e. a hangman game and a false memory experiment. In the hangman game experiment, participants had to guess critical words based on hints sequentially presented one by one. The hints represented words that are related to the critical word, either according to the association model or to the corpus model. The false memory experiment employed the Deese-Roediger-McDermot (DRM) paradigm in which the participants’ rate of false recognition of critical words was compared following a study phase during which a list of related words was presented selected either based on the association model or on the corpus model. The hangman experiment revealed that participants needed a lower number of hints to guess the critical word when hints were selected based on the association model. The false memory experiment showed that a larger number of critical words were ’falsely’ (since not having been presented) recognized when the list words shown during the study phase were selected from the association model. In conclusion, the participants found the task easier (hangman experiment) and were more easily tricked into false recognitions (false memory experiment) when based on the association model as compared to the corpus model, providing support to our research hypothesis that the word association model is better in line with the structure of the human mental lexicon. However, it should be taken into consideration that this conclusion is limited to the nature of semantic tasks as assessed in this study.
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