Psychology PhD thesis collection
This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
Recent Submissions
-
Binocular strategies in reading and non-reading visual tasks: from oculomotor behaviours to higher cognition
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-04-21)Humans use two eyes to extract selected information from the real world and deliver it to the human brain for higher cognition and the perceptual system. However, the two eyes are not always aligned. Eye movements are ... -
Application of gene-set analysis to identify the molecular genetic correlates of human cognitive abilities
(The University of Edinburgh, 2015-06-30)Individual differences across seemingly disparate cognitive tests are not independent. This general factor of cognitive ability allows around half of the variation in a diverse battery of cognitive tests to be explained ... -
Computational framework of human causal generalization
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-04-11)How do people decide how general a causal relationship is, in terms of the entities or situations it applies to? How can people make these difficult judgments in a fast, efficient way? To address these questions, I ... -
Social biases of mention order
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-23)What can first mention, the entity mentioned first in an utterance, tell us about group identification, self-other equivalences and assumptions of agency? In the field of psycholinguistics, language is not routinely studied ... -
Reasoning about quantities and concepts: studies in social learning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-03)We live and learn in a ‘society of mind’. This means that we form beliefs not just based on our own observations and prior expectations but also based on the communications from other people, such as our social network ... -
Navigating expectations for sustainable product design: a discursive psychology analysis of designers’ accounts
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-24)Sustainable design is vital to achieving sustainable development. It is commonly argued that designers should ensure more sustainable design decisions are made, based on environmental values, and should take responsibility ... -
Relation learning and reasoning on computational models of high level cognition
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-18)Relational reasoning is central to many cognitive processes, ranging from “lower” processes like object recognition to “higher” processes such as analogy-making and sequential decision-making. The first chapter of this ... -
Symbolic-connectionist model of relation learning and visual reasoning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-17)Humans regularly reason from visual information, engaging in simple object search in a scene to abstract mathematical thinking. In recent decades, the field of machine learning has extensively focused on visual tasks ... -
Understanding long-term forgetting in the healthy and clinical population: evidence from different research paradigms and methods
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-10-20)Memory and forgetting are closely related, yet cognitive research has neglected the topic of long-term forgetting, leaving several questions unanswered. From a theoretical point of view, understanding the dynamics of ... -
Longitudinal depression trajectories: the persistence of depression symptomology and their genetic & environmental underpinnings from mid- to later-life
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-10-04)The work contained within this thesis primarily focused on estimating depression symptom score trajectories in mid- to late-life. There has been little consistency in the literature concerning such phenotypic trajectories, ... -
Decision-making and memory: an investigation on the recollection of a moral dilemma
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-09-06)Individuals inevitably face situations where they have to choose between several options with uncertain future outcomes. This decision-making process can occur in various contexts such as getting the COVID vaccine, ... -
Reporting racism in the public domain
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-07-29)Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances onto machineinterpretable programs, which can be executed against a real-world environment to obtain desired responses (e.g., a SQL query against a ... -
Bilingual encoding strategies during the production of motion event utterances
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-28)When describing motion events, English speakers tend to encode the manner of motion in the verb (e.g., A penguin is skiing into an igloo), whereas Spanish speakers tend to express the path or trajectory of motion in the ... -
Rate of forgetting is independent from initial degree of learning
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-28)Research on forgetting has extensively explored factors that modify the rate at which information is forgotten. However, the question of whether initial degree of retention influences the rates of forgetting has been ... -
Computational modelling of social cognition and behaviour
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-08)Philosophers have always been interested in asking moral questions, but social scientists have generally been more occupied with asking questions about morality. How do people differ with regards to their morality? How ... -
Exploring frailty and cognitive functioning trajectories in later life
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-05-25)Understanding the ageing process in later life is a crucial step in identifying those at highest risk of health decline, and in implementing effective prevention and treatment strategies. However, measuring the ageing ... -
Investigation of the associations between intelligence in youth and a range of physical health, mental health, and health behaviour outcomes in childhood, adolescence, and middle age
(The University of Edinburgh, 2018-11-28)[No Deposit Agreement] -
Neuropsychiatric disorders in motor neurone disease kindreds: clinical and subclinical symptoms and their relationship with cognition and behaviour
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-08-27)BACKGROUND: Motor neurone disease (MND), of which amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is the most common, and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) occur on a spectrum, overlapping clinically, pathologically and genetically. Family ... -
Investigating personality differences using nuance-level traits and links with health
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-03-09)Research on personality differences has been well-established on the levels of broad personality domains such as the Big Five and their more specific facets. Over the past decade, a small number of researchers have proposed ... -
Human-dog bond: personality and attachment
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-01)To assess variables associated with a mutual human-dog bond, a new scale was developed to measure dog owner’s relationship satisfaction and Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Test (SST) was used to measure the attachment ...
