Term of Award

Spring 2017

Degree Name

Master of Science in Experimental Psychology (M.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Psychology

Committee Chair

Kent D Bodily

Committee Member 1

Bradley R Sturz

Committee Member 2

Lawrence Locker, Jr.

Abstract

If an organism is trained to approach a location within an enclosure the organism will approach the correct location and it’s geometrically identical location within the environment upon removal of any features. This phenomenon has been turned spatial reorientation, and further studies on how, and to what, organisms reorient have conducted in the last several decades. In the reorientation literature, two theories have surfaced to fill the void left by the rejection of the initial reorientation theory, the Geometric Module theory. I attempt look to discern if the synonym judgement dual task will hinder reorientation in a similar or different fashion than the standard shadowing tasks used. Participants were assigned to a control or dual task condition, in which both groups performed a reorientation task. While performing the reorientation task, the dual task condition was presented with a series of word pairs in which they indicated if the pair of words were synonymous or not. The test indicates Language as a Bridge theory and The Adaptive Combination View may operate via different mechanisms under Baddley’s Working Memory Model. I surmise that the Adaptive Combination View utilizes attentional resources of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad while the Language as a Bridge theory utilizes conscious processing in the episodic buffer and central executive.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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