Browsing by Subject "emotion"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Cortical Processing of Phonetic and Emotional Information in Speech: A Cross-Modal Priming Study
    (2015-05) Diamond, Erin
    The present study utilized a cross-modal priming paradigm to investigate dimensional information processing in speech. Primes were facial expressions that varied in two dimensions: affect (happy, neutral, or angry) and mouth shape (corresponding to either /a/ or /i/ vowels). Targets were CVC words that varied by prosody and vowel identity. In both the phonetic and prosodic conditions, adult participants responded to congruence or incongruence of the visual-auditory stimuli. Behavioral results showed a congruency effect in percent correct and reaction time measures. Two ERP responses, the N400 and late positive response, were identified for the effect with systematic between-condition differences. Localization and time-frequency analyses indicated different cortical networks for selective processing of phonetic and emotional information in the words. Overall, the results suggest that cortical processing of phonetic and emotional information involves distinct neural systems, which has important implications for further investigation of language processing deficits in clinical populations.
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    For the Love of Technology: How Aesthetics Define Emotions in a Digital Education Setting
    (2021) Brower, Autumn
    Educators often admit that they are aware that emotion plays a significant role in students’ educational success, yet most of the scientific literature measures cognition in education to the exclusion of emotion. This study is intended to be a proof of concept design for future research. Its goal is to assess how an individual’s aesthetic value of a product might be a way to gauge emotion in educational settings. Three faculty members at the University of Minnesota were interviewed about their viewpoints pertaining to the product design of a static Canvas page and asked to evaluate its design based on its visceral, behavioral, and reflective beauty. Page orientation and font were used to represent product design. Results of the interviews showed that readability was the most frequently mentioned reason people are drawn to certain aesthetic features of a product’s design in digital education, followed by alignment, accessibility, mobile devices, tradition, and font personalities. Additionally, this paper evaluates the participants’ valence response; their responses to the design’s functionality; and their thoughts on meaningfulness as they relate to Norman’s (2007) three aesthetic levels of product design. At the end of the paper, suggestions for how we might use this data to increase productivity in our classes and enhance educational technology are addressed. Future directions for how these results might apply to cognition, emotion, and computation are also discussed.
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    The Royal Road to Semantic Cognition: Untangling Semantic Components in Temporal Lobe
    (2015-06) Hoversten, Shane
    Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research into semantic cognition has returned highly variable results, especially in anterior temporal regions. One likely reason for this variability is that tasks used to investigate this topic are believed to engage only shallow semantic processing. Another reason is that certain classes of stimuli (particularly abstract words) are often confounded by un-modeled social or emotional content; many researchers believe that it is this social and emotional information, rather than general semantic information per se, that elicits response in ATL. Our experiments use a task designed to elicit deep semantic processing (the triads task) along with explicit investigation into the social and emotional content of semantic stimuli to try to pry these factors apart and characterize the temporal lobes in general, and the ATLs in particular, with regard to their involvement in semantic cognition. We find that, contrary to some reports, the ATL is highly involved in semantic processing even in its most anterior aspects; that counter to prominent theories this involvement is not (or is not always) due to the inclusion of social or emotional content in the stimuli; and that a semantic task that engages deep semantic processing has an activation signature that closely resembles the signature of full-sentence processing, despite the seeming un-structured nature of the processing required by the triads task. We propose a general role for ATL as semantic integrator to characterize these disparate findings.