Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Behavioral Science'

Cognitive science has been beset for thirty years by foundational disputes about the nature and extension of cognition—e.g. whether cognition is necessarily representational, whether cognitive processes extend outside the brain or body, and whether plants or microbes have them. Whereas previous philosophical work aimed to settle these disputes, I aim to understand what conception of cognition scientists could share given that they disagree so fundamentally. To this end, I develop a number of variations on traditional conceptual explication, and defend a novel explication of cognition called the sensitive management hypothesis.

Since expert judgments about the extension of “cognition” vary so much, I argue that there is value in explication that accurately models the variance in judgments rather than taking sides or treating that variance as noise. I say of explications that accomplish this that they are ecumenically extensionally adequate. Thus, rather than adjudicating whether, say, plants can have cognitive processes like humans, an ecumenically adequate explication should classify these cases differently: human cognitive processes as paradigmatically cognitive, and plant processes as controversially cognitive.

I achieve ecumenical adequacy by articulating conceptual explications with parameters, or terms that can be assigned a number of distinct interpretations based on the background commitments of participants in a discourse. For example, an explication might require that cognition cause “behavior,” and imply that plant processes are cognitive or not depending on whether anything plants do can be considered “behavior.” Parameterization provides a unified treatment of embattled concepts by isolating topics of disagreement in a small number of parameters.

I incorporate these innovations into an account on which cognition is the “sensitive management of organismal behavior.” The sensitive management hypothesis is ecumenically extensionally adequate, accurately classifying a broad variety of cases as paradigmatically or controversially cognitive phenomena. I also describe an extremely permissive version of the sensitive management hypothesis, arguing that it has the potential to explain several features of cognitive scientific discourse, including various facts about the way cognitive scientists ascribe representations to cognitive systems.

There are limitations to traditional methods of capturing the dynamics of violent interactions. These limitations are due to outcome driven approaches, data sampling issues, and inadequate means to capture, express, and explore the complexity of behavioral processes. To address these challenges, it is proposed that “violent offending” be re-framed as an emergent feature of a complex adaptive social system. This dissertation abstracts and computationally implements a theoretical framework that forms the basis of a complex social simulation of the violent offending process. The primary outcome of this effort is a viable synthetic offender that emerges from simulated interactions between potential offenders (subjects) and potential victims (targets) within an environment. The results of calibrating this model to a real-world murder series are discussed, as well as, the comparison metrics used to assess goodness-of-fit of simulated and real-world event-sites. A synthetic offender promises valuable insights into individual offending trajectories, offender tactical processes, and the emergence of geospatial and temporal behaviors. Furthermore, this approach is capable of reproducing the violent offending process with sufficient detail to contribute new scientific understanding and insights to criminology and the social sciences.

The energy needs of rorqual whales (f. Balaenopteridae) govern their relationship to marine habitats during the foraging season. However, their cryptic foraging strategies and extreme feeding behaviors complicate our effort to identify and protect habitats “critical” for rorquals. What is the relationship between rorquals and their habitat, and how must that shape conservation strategies? I addressed this question in the case of sympatric humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and fin whales ( Balaenoptera physalus) in the marine territory of the Gitga’at First Nation in the Kitimat Fjord System of British Columbia. For three summers (2013-2015) I studied whales, their prey, and their environment aboard the RV Bangarang using oceanographic station sampling, systematic transect surveys, and opportunistic focal follows of whales (Chapter 1). Ocean sampling demonstrated the strong coupling of water features with offshore patterns in storm forcing and regional meteorology (Chapter 2). By combining these surveys with a long-term Gitga’at dataset, area humpback whales were found to practice a structured and persistent pattern in seasonal habitat use, which demonstrates how complex and habitat-specific a rorqual’s habitat use can be (Chapter 3). Both humpback and fin whales were found to respond to changes in krill supply in aggregative and behavioral thresholds that are set by a combination of intrinsic energetic needs and the context of local prey supply (Chapter 4). Associations with non-prey habitat features were markedly different in the two species (Chapter 5). Humpback distribution was more closely coupled to that of their prey and other habitat features, while fin whale distribution was driven broadly by site fidelity. Novel spatial analytics were used to identify the most probable environmental cues used by foraging whales (Chapter 6). Both species were found to be particularly sensitive to the depth of prey layers, which is governed largely by oceanographic features (Chapter 7). This coupling of habitat features and feeding performance influences the competitive dynamics of rorqual whales. The findings in this case study advance general theories on marine predator ecology and conservation, and have direct implications for the management of Gitga’at territory and the identification of fin whale critical habitat in Pacific Canada.

What was the last interaction you had with a bird? Was it a cordial conversation with a parrot or indirectly, as while devouring deviled eggs? The colorful ways in which avian and human lives are connected are as nuanced as they are pervasive. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given that globally, birds are held in captivity by the billions. Despite the massive scale at which our lives intersect, we often fail to recognize the psychological aspects of bird confinement. This project dives below the surface to examine the largely unconscious forces that underlie bird captivity by exploring psychosocial dynamics between poultry, parrots, and people. Employing a heuristic methodology, emergent themes are woven into a 30-minute film, A Bird Tail to develop conscientização, the cultivation of a critical awareness of how captivity shapes avian-human relationships, the psyches of individual humans and birds, and ultimately our collective, trans-species cultures. Told from the perspective of an avian alchemist, the film explicitly navigates across species lines through imagery and voice by providing a bird’s eye view of numerous challenges faced by captive-held birds, including death, disease, and trauma. A central purpose of this exploration is to bring these subsurface currents to light so that we as humans can begin to dissolve those psychological constructs and projections that prevent authentic cross-species connection and cause such profound harm.

Visual perception depends fundamentally on statistical regularities in the environment to make sense of the world. One such regularity is the orientation anisotropy typical of natural scenes; most natural scenes contain slightly more horizontal and vertical information than oblique information. This property is likely a primary cause of the “oblique effect” in visual perception, in which subjects experience greater perceptual fluently with horizontally and vertically oriented content than oblique. However, recent changes in the visual environment, including the “carpentered” content in urban scenes and the framed, caricatured content in digital screen media presentations, may have altered the level of orientation anisotropy typical in natural scenes. Over a series of three experiments, the current work aims to evaluate whether “digital” visual experience, or visual experience with framed digital content, has the potential to alter the magnitude of the oblique effect in visual perception. Experiment 1 established a novel eye tracking method developed to index the visual oblique effect quickly and reliably using no overt responding other than eye movements. Results indicated that canonical (horizontal and vertical) contours embedded in visual noise were detected more accurately and quickly than oblique contours. For Experiment 2, the orientation anisotropy of natural, urban, and digital scenes was analyzed, in order to compare the magnitude of this anisotropic pattern across each image type. Results indicate that urban scenes contain exaggerated orientation anisotropy relative to natural scenes, and digital scenes possess this pattern to an even greater extent. Building off these two results, Experiment 3 adopts the eye tracking method of Experiment 1 as a pre- post-test measure of the oblique effect. Participants were eye tracked in the contour detection task several times before and after either a “training” session, in which they played Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) for four hours uninterrupted in a darkened room, or a “control” session, in which they simply did not interact with screens for four hours. It was predicted, based on the results of Experiment 2, that several hours of exposure to the caricatured orientation statistics of the digital stimulus would suffice to alter the magnitude of participants’ oblique effect, as indexed by the difference in the post-test relative to the pre-test. While no accuracy differences were observed in this primary manipulation, detection speed for canonical contours did alter significantly in the Minecraft subjects relative to controls. These results indicate that the oblique effect is quite robust at the level of visual contours and is measurable using eye tracking, that digital scenes contain caricatured orientation anisotropy relative to other types of scenes, and that exposure to naturalistic but caricatured scene statistics for only a few hours can alter certain aspects of visual perception.

This study investigated the influence of professional training and personal factors on five categories of technostress: techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-complexity, techno-insecurity, and techno-uncertainty. The goal of the study was to determine whether experience and knowledge gained during professional training influenced the level of technostress individuals experienced in the workplace. The research also sought to determine how personal factors influence technostress directly and whether those factors moderate the relationship between professional training and technostress. The specific personal factors that were examined included gender, generational cohort, race, religion, and education level. A sample of 212 individuals who regularly use information technology as part of their daily work routine were surveyed on their levels of stress related to techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-complexity, techno-insecurity, and techno-uncertainty. Multiple linear regression analyses were then conducted to examine the relationship between the criterion variables (categories of technostress) and the predictor variables (professional training and personal factors). The data analysis demonstrated that while professional training had little influence on technostress, women experienced significantly higher levels of techno-overload, older participants experienced significantly higher levels of stress related to techno-complexity, non-Whites experienced significantly higher levels of techno-insecurity, and age impacted levels of techno-uncertainty in individuals in the IT/engineering field who had received professional training. These results suggest that there is a need for further investigation into how specific elements of technostress impact individual populations.

This is a study of the behavioral biometric of smartphone motion to determine the potential accuracy of authenticating users on smartphone devices. The study used the application Sensor Kinetics Pro and the Weka machine-learning library to analyze accelerometer and gyroscope data. The study conducted three experiments for the research. They were conducted in spring 2015, fall 2015, and spring 2016. The final experiment in spring 2016 used six Android-based smartphones to capture data from 60 participants and each participant performed 20 trials of two motions: bringing the phone up to eye level for review, and then bringing the phone to the ear, resulting in 1200 runs. The resulting sensor datasets were used for machine learning training and testing. The study used filtering data to remove noise, and then aggregated the data and used them as inputs to the Weka Machine Learning tool. The study used several machine classification algorithms: the Multilayer Perception (MLP), k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), Naïve Bayes (N-B), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) machine learning classification algorithms. The study reached authentication accuracies of up to 93% thus supporting the use of behavioral motion biometrics for user authentication. Preliminary studies with smaller numbers of participants in spring 2015 and in fall 2015 also produced 90%+ authentication accuracy.

Social media plays a prominent role in the daily lives of Millennials. The majority of Millennials use some form of social media, and with the amount of political content on various social media sites, it is worth examining how social media influences Millennials’ political behavior. This study focused on three social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This research was rooted in George Gerbner and Larry Gross’ Cultivation theory (1976), which states that long-term media exposure shapes reality. The study consisted of survey and focus group research, which attempted to determine how much time Millennials spend on each site, how politically active they are, and whether or not they thought their political behavior was influenced by social media. The resulting data showed that YouTube and Twitter were not used for political information, but Facebook is so saturated with political content that it may have a negative influence on formal political participation levels. Millennials may feel that participating in political dialogue on Facebook qualifies as formal political participation.