Themen für Masterarbeiten

Beschreibung: Wie viele Ereignisse in unserer Umwelt können wir gleichzeitig beachten? Gibt es dafür eine begrenzte Kapazität? Ziel der Masterarbeit ist, ein Mass für die Kapazität der visuellen Aufmerksamkeit zu entwickeln und zu überprüfen.
Kontakt: Prof. Klaus Oberauer, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Zahlreiche Studien haben bisher versucht, kognitive Inhibition als Fähigkeit zu messen. Faktoranalytische Methoden (z.B. Strukturgleichungsmodelle) wurden auf Leistungsmasse diverser experimenteller Inhibitions-Paradigmen, wie z.B. Stroop-Aufgabe oder Eriksen Flanker-Aufgabe, angewandt. Diese Studien haben inkonsistente Ergebnisse hervorgebracht: In manchen Studien korrelieren die Inhibitionsmasse positiv miteinander, so dass ein gemeinsamer Faktor "Inhibition" identifiziert werden konnte, aber in vielen Studien gelang das nicht. Ein Grund dafür könnte sein, dass die experimentellen Effekte, durch die die Fähigkeit zur Inhibition geschlossen wird (z.B. Flanker-Effekt), recht klein sind, so dass sie schwer reliabel zu messen sind. Ziel der Masterarbeit ist, eine Reihe neuer Inhibitionsaufgaben (oder Varianten existierender Aufgaben) zu prüfen, bei denen erwartet werden kann, dass die Inhibitionseffekte grösser sind, so dass sie als bessere Masse der kognitiven Inhibition in Frage kommen.
Kontakt: Prof. Klaus Oberauer, E-Mail

Beschreibung: The inspiration for this topic comes from the U.S. TV show "The Hot Ones", which builds on the assumption that eating hot (spicy) food compromises the cognitive control of a talk show guest, thereby making them more prone to revealing information that they would otherwise not reveal in public. The goal of the MSc project is to test whether this assumption is true.
Kontakt: Klaus Oberauer, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Forgetting is a natural property of the memory system, but it can also occur intentionally. When people study a list of items, and after each item they are told to remember (TBR items) or to forget (TBF items) the item, they have better memory for TBR relative to TBF items. Some researchers have argued that the instruction to forget causes people to engage in active inhibition of the just created memory (Fawcett & Taylor, 2008; 2012). In support of this claim, Fawcett & Taylor (2008, 2012) asked people to respond to unrelated visual probes presented at the same time as the memory list. They showed that reaction times to the irrelevant probes were longer after TBF items, suggesting that people were still engaged in attempting to forget the TBF item. In contrast, Popov, Marevic, Rummel & Reder (2019) have shown better memory for words in the same list studied after TBF items than after TBR items. These results suggested that to-be-forgotten items deplete less resources than to-be-remembered items. These findings are in apparent contradiction to prior results by Fawcett & Taylor. The goal of this Master?s thesis would be to investigate and attempt to reconcile this discrepancy.
Kontakt: Dr. Ven Popov, E-Mail

Beschreibung: The spacing effect refers to the findings that long-term retention of information is better, when repeated study trials are spaced farther apart. It is also known that the ideal spacing length depends on how far into the future memory will be tested ? the greater the test delay, the greater the study spacing should be for optimal memory. A number of different memory models exist to explain these findings. A recent memory model, the source of activation confusion (SAC) model (Popov & Reder, 2020), surprised us in that it produces the spacing effect without being designed to do so, and without fitting any parameters. The goal of this project is to explore why a simplified version of the SAC model generates the spacing effect and the optimal study-test lag relationship, and to compare it to existing models of the spacing effect. Additional goal would be to identify unique predictions of this new spacing effect model that could be empirically tested.
Kontakt: Dr. Ven Popov, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Why can people only remember a limited amount of information at any given time? One proposal is that storing information in long-term-memory depletes a limited cognitive resource that in turn *recovers gradually over time*. Evidence for this assumption comes from a recent discovery of ?sequential study effects?, namely, that people are more likely to remember words, if during study these words were preceded by information that is easier to process. For example, memory for one word is better, if the preceding words during study are of higher normative frequency (Popov & Reder, 2020), or if people were instructed to forget rather than remember them (Popov, Marevic, Rummel & Reder, 2019). However, all of these findings are an indirect evidence for resource depletion and recovery, since these are inferred based on a subsequent memory test. In this project, we want to use pupil dilation during study as a measure of cognitive load to investigate the time course of resource depletion and recovery during memory encoding.
Kontakt: Dr. Ven Popov, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Complex span tasks, often used to investigate working memory, combine storage demands, such as remembering memoranda in serial order, with processing demands like judging whether a math equation is correct or incorrect. Interference theories of working memory assume that processing imposes additional interference and thus decreases the fidelity of representations, leading to worse performance compared to memory tasks not involving processing. Yet, it is unclear with which aspect of memory representations in working memory the processing of distractors interferes specifically.

The proposed master thesis should investigate this using adapted complex span task, in which participants remember feature pairs (such as digit-color pairs, or color-spatial location pairs), and the distractor task involves processing the same kind of pairs. Using this task, we want to investigate in how far processing one of the features (e.g. color or spatial position) affects the interaction and fidelity of memory representations during retrieval depending on using the processed or non-processed feature as retrieval cue. This might be a promising way to evaluate in how far processing specifically interferes with feature representations or bindings in WM.
Kontakt: Dr. Gidon Frischkorn, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Ein Befund aus der Forschung zum Arbeitsgedächtnis ist "output interference": Wenn mehrere Elemente einer Liste, die im Arbeitsgedächtnis gehalten wird, nacheinander getestet werden, dann beeinträchtigt jeder Test die Erinnerung an die noch verbleibenden Elemente, so dass von einem Test zum nächsten die Erinnerungsleistung schlechter wird. Ziel der Masterarbeit ist, herauszufinden, was diesen Effekt verursacht: Ist es das Abrufen eines Elements aus dem Arbeitsgedächtnis, oder entsteht der Effekt durch die Antwort, die man beim Test geben muss (z.B. das getestete Element reproduzieren)?
Kontakt: Prof. Klaus Oberauer, E-Mail