Cognitive Sciences Research
A collection of my essays, studies, and publications on topics of cognition. This work represents methods ranging from qualitative ethnographies to quantitative multi-condition lab studies and cognitive modeling. Further detail and complete research available upon request.
Hearing with the Eyes: Visual Stimuli Alter Evaluations of the Emotional Valence of Music
Much of the work done in music cognition studies musical appreciation and perception in isolation; while, music is largely consumed in the real world in conjunction with other sensory input. This study seeks to assess the extent to which visual stimuli may effect simeotaneously presented auditory stimuli. Given the richness and multimodality of stimulus received on a daily basis, understanding the interaction of the senses is a fundamental part of understanding human cognition. 75 participants between the ages of 18 and 58 with a mean age of 23 and a standard deviation of 9. Participants remotely assessed the affective and semantic content of normed musical excerpts at the same time as they were presented with randomly selected, normed, visual input via an anonymous Qualtrics questionnaire. Each pair of auditory and visual stimuli was followed by a three question self-assessment manikin and corresponding likert scales on which the participants ranked their interpretation of the valence, arousal, and dominance of the musical excerpt. Results showed statistically significant changes in interpretation valence of musical excerpts when presented concurrently with visual stimuli of all types. No difference in arousal was seen. A larger difference in interpretation was seen in samples where visual stimuli conflicted with musical stimuli in emotional content. No difference in interpretive accuracy was found between participants with significant musical training and those without any. These findings suggest that visual stimuli, regardless of emotional or semantic content, have an effect on musical interpretation. Further, musical training does not appear to significantly change the intensity of this effect. This unintentional interaction between senses points to the vulnerability of the emotional and semantic content of auditory communication to factors such as environmental cues and visual distractors.
Honors Thesis: Multimodal “hearing“ with audio-tactile interpolation
Audio and tactile sensations often stem from the same physical pressure wave phenomena in our surroundings. To uncover possible connections in the processing and perception of these two sensory modes, a study of possible summative auditory and haptic effects in the context of spoken language is proposed. In sensation and perception research, multisensory studies show a marked emphasis on audio-visual behaviors over the integrations of other senses. What few previous studies have assessed the connections between auditory and tactile experiences have hypothesized a high-level reflective processing interaction between the two modes. A Proposed Psychophysical study of audio-tactile mediation through the use of sinewave speech delivered aurally concurrent with a tactile channel delivering either no stimulus, pink noise, or rich audio from which the given sinewave speech is derived is proposed. Based on prior literature and anecdotal experience, results are expected to show that certain tactile stimuli improve sinewave speech intelligibility. Specific expectation is given to stimuli that do not require major tonotopic coding but do emphasize portions of the vocal spectrum removed from the audio in the sine wave speech generation. In addition to showing a practical linguistic link between heard and felt experiences, this research would begin to fill in an existing white space between auditory and tactile processing literatures. Further, results could aid in the design of both preventative and assistive solutions to hearing loss.
Critiques of contemporary studies on embodied cognition
One of my greatest research interests in the area of cognition is the way that thought arises physical processes including the mind-body problem, grounded cognition, proprioception, and embodied education. As a part of various courses throughout school, I have written multiple critiques on modern research in these areas. My critiques have covered Reading sky and seeing a cloud: On the relevance of events for perceptual simulation by Markus Ostarek and Gabriella Vigliocco, Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff, Six Views of Embodied Cognition by Margaret Wilson, and Once More, with Feeling: Design Thinking and Embodied Cognition by Karin Lindgaar and Heico Wesselius.
As a final essay for Ken Forbus’ course on cognitive modeling and artificial intelligence, I wrote a review of multiple current and theorized approaches to modeling qualia, creativity, and ill-structured problem solving. The intention behind the project was to learn about the research methods and topics on the bleeding edge of understanding and replicating human creativity.
Emerging methods in modeling creative thought
future applications of Crowdsourcing Prosodic Annotation
An essay that discusses a modern method for breaking beyond the traditional confines of prosodic research and analysis by way of crowd-sourced and massively large scale remote studies. Prosody has been largely studied through a combination of intuition and tedious annotation from highly trained proctors. Neither of these sources of data about prosody are particularly easy to scale or apply to varied groups of people and languages around the world. To resolve this issue, a crowd-sourced alternative to these traditional methods of prosodic study that utilizes a wider net of participants annotating each other’s speech has been proposed by various previous studies (e.g. Cole, Mahrt, and Roy, 2017). In this particular area, the ability to massively scale up studies and utilize native speakers around the world to annotate prosody will allow for new information about the prosody of speakers of countless dialects and languages that have not yet been studied. Further, this time of massively scaled study opens the door to rapid and robust studies in difficult to reach communities with particularly interesting traits and languages. Additionally, the implications of crowd-sourced studies in design research are particularly interesting.