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Possibilities of working memory training and the influence on cognitive functions
Páchová, Anna ; Rendl, Miroslav (advisor) ; Preiss, Marek (referee) ; Lukavský, Jiří (referee)
TITLE: The possibilities of working memory training and the influence on cognitive functions AUTHOR: Anna Páchová DEPARTMENT: Psychology SUPERVISOR: PhDr. Miroslav Rendl, CSc. ABSTRACT: The topic of the PhD thesis was to explore the possibilities of the cognitive development using the training of the basal functions. The analysis of literature showed that (1) working memory (WM) is considered to be the function, which is frequently associated with higher cognitive processes and (2) core training can improve the WM capacity and this improvement seems to be transferred to other types of memory. The transfer to higher cognitive functions (intelligence) was not confirmed unanimously. Training programs were evaluated usually in different groups of individuals but none of these studies considered the possibility of WM training in context of the socio-cultural handicap, even if low SES children achieve poorer performance in cognitive tests including tests of WM. Therefore the aim of this study was to verify the possibilities of WM training on cognitive development with special interest in low SES children. We designed a 400-minutes WM training PC program, which was applied on two groups of children with different SES (low SES - Roma children, middle/high SES - Czech children). The results showed that both groups...
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Reliability and validity of communication sociomapping: focused on peer-to-peer ratings in small work groups
Höschlová, Eva ; Bahbouh, Radvan (advisor) ; Šípek, Jiří (referee) ; Lukavský, Jiří (referee)
Dissertation thesis: Reliability and validity of communication sociomapping: focused on peer-to-peer ratings in small work groups Author: Mgr. Eva Rozehnalová Supervisor: MUDr. Mgr. Radvan Bahbouh, Ph.D. Abstract: The theoretical part of the thesis shortly introduces the topic of group communication and identifies relevant influencing factors. The subsequent summary of the research studying the impact of communication on work group performance illustrates not only the importance of the group communication topic itself, but also the development of diagnostic methods in this field. Such methods are further summarised by focusing on their specific characteristics, differences and available validity and reliability data. The last chapter of the theoretical part briefly describes the sociomapping method measuring group communication with the up-to-date reliability and validity research. The empiric part of the thesis combines several studies performed to verify the quality of the sociomapping method in the field of group communication. The criterion validity of sociomapping visualization was studied as an accuracy of numeric data translation into distance matrices, the reliability was measured as an inter-rater agreement of interpreting sociomaps. The studies showed the sociomapping being highly relevant in...
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Factors contributing to interindividual differences in olfactory abilities and odour awareness
Nováková, Lenka ; Havlíček, Jan (advisor) ; Lukavský, Jiří (referee) ; Vodička, Jan (referee)
The main body of the thesis deals with selected factors underlying the considerable variability in human olfactory abilities and some odour awareness-related measures, addressed in samples ranging in age from middle childhood to young adulthood. The thesis consists of two parts. The first part (Chapter 1), first presents the major advances and developments that brought about something of a renaissance of scientific interest in the human sense of smell, including the recent proliferation of psychophysical studies, both basic research and clinical. Next, an outline of olfactory psychophysical measures and related olfactory abilities that are of relevance to the studies presented in this thesis is provided. Subsequently, the selected factors contributing to interindividual differences in olfactory abilities, that have been addressed by this thesis, are reviewed, namely the effect of sex (or gender), which is approached from a developmental perspective, childhood gender nonconformity, and personality. Finally, intraindividual fluctuations in olfactory performance are also mentioned in brief. Next, the focus shifts to odour awareness by first introducing the various approaches that can be adopted to get closer to the real-life context as opposed to laboratory setting (where most olfactory studies continue to be...
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Possible ratings for photographs
Kubát, Petr ; Lukavský, Jiří (advisor) ; Smolík, Filip (referee)
This thesis addresses the question of the perception of photographs. It is based on the work of R. Greene and A. Oliva (2008) and further expands it. These authors investigated which global properties people identify on photographs of natural scenes and how consistent their evaluation of these properties is. In this paper I used general photographs without any thematic limitations. In the first part of the research I examined what global properties people determine during a quick viewing of a general photograph. The obtained general properties (movement limitation and fun) were added to the properties found in R. Greene's and A. Oliva's work. In the second part of the research I used a computer program for hierarchical grouping to determine how consistent the rating of these global properties is when different people rate the photographs. The resulting consistency is expressed as the average of all interobserver correlations for a given property. The experiment revealed that the transience property has the highest consistency rate (r=0,516), followed by movement in the scene (r=0,457) and openness (r=0,450). Fun (r=0,283) and navigability (r=0,245) exhibit the lowest rate of consistency. Lower concordance observed with general photographs is in my opinion caused by the higher complexity of the...
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Modelling eye movements during Multiple Object Tracking
Děchtěrenko, Filip ; Lukavský, Jiří (advisor) ; Toth, Peter Gabriel (referee)
In everyday situations people have to track several objects at once (e.g. driving or collective sports). Multiple object tracking paradigm (MOT) plausibly simulate tracking several targets in laboratory conditions. When we track targets in tasks with many other objects in scene, it becomes difficult to discriminate objects in periphery (crowding). Although tracking could be done only using attention, it is interesting question how humans plan their eye movements during tracking. In our study, we conducted a MOT experiment in which we presented participants repeatedly several trials with varied number of distractors, we recorded eye movements and we measured consistency of eye movements using Normalized scanpath saliency (NSS) metric. We created several analytical strategies employing crowding avoidance and compared them with eye data. Beside analytical models, we trained neural networks to predict eye movements in MOT trial. The performance of the proposed models and neuron networks was evaluated in a new MOT experiment. The analytical models explained variability of eye movements well (results comparable to intraindividual noise in the data); predictions based on neural networks were less successful.
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Sledování očních pohybů ve virtuální realitě
Jirásek, Jozef ; Brom, Cyril (advisor) ; Lukavský, Jiří (referee)
In this work we present an application for observing and recording data about movements of a human eye when looking at a computer screen. We use two commercially available devices: I4Control by Medicton Group Ltd. and TrackIR 4 by NaturalPoint. We build a software package which interfaces with the SpaNav system for cognitive research. We also provide an extensible framework for creating other eye tracking applications.
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Living nature in the third grade
Pokorná, Daniela ; Klusák, Miroslav (advisor) ; Lukavský, Jiří (referee)
The paper deals with "living nature", how it is presented at school to the third graders, how children deal with examining, and what kind of mistakes they make. It comes out form the observation during lectures, dialogues with teacher and analyses of the tests. Piaget's works The Childs Conception of the World, The Psychology of the Intelligence and The Psychology of the Child were used as a theoretical base. Three main reasons for mistakes emerged from this research. First children have problems with the terminology, naming of objects, either brand new words or new content of familiar words. Second problem is different experience of each child. And finally, logical and infralogical mental operation which are quite new and difficult for children but important for organizing our surrounding world. Through acquiring of this topic at school children learn how to reason what is alive and why, what the typical characteristics of life are, so they can leave their child animism and egocentric way of understanding the world.
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Conservatism and liberalism - an outdated concept?
Pour, Marek ; Vranka, Marek (advisor) ; Lukavský, Jiří (referee)
Conservatism and liberalism in american psychological reasearch is mostly described as unidimensional scale which clearly divides ideology into two opposite ideological standpoints. However, current relevant studies show that unidimensional approach to study ideology is overly simplified. Linking ideological orientation and personal traits seem to bring about contradicting results. In a similar way, relevant psychological instruments for measuring conservatism seem to measure two relatively independent aspects of conservatism. It is apparent mostly from large population studies, that ideological orientation is more complex than it may appear. Specific agendas stemming from their respective ideological directions are for a large part of population relatively uncorrelated with their overall ideological self- identification. Multidimensional models of conservatism and liberalism using at least social and economic agenda therefore seem as a more useful way to describe political orientation for most of the population. Empirical part of the study proposes a partial replication of two relevant studies to test a thesis of similar multidimensionality of the left-right ideological orientation scale in czech population. This could at the same time provide a relevant american-czech comparison.
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