Funded by a gift from Robert J. Glushko, Adjunct Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information, the Prize is intended to encourage students to pursue senior honors theses in cognitive science.  At least two such prizes are awarded each year, in order to insure that excellence can be recognized in both empirical disciplines like cognitive neuroscience, and theoretical disciplines like philosophy.  The prize inaugurated in 2006, includes a $500 cash award and a certificate.

2007

Andre M. Bastos

Electroencephalogram Correlates of Momentary Mindfulness

Advisor: Eleanor Rosch

Despite widespread interest, few experiments have studied neural correlates of momentary mindfulness. To address this, electroencephalography with respirometry was collected from two groups trained in “focused attention”: mindfulness meditators and rowing athletes. Participants engaged in 1) a 50-minute task involving sustained attention to and counting of breath and 2) a “mind-wandering” control condition. Randomly-spaced tones interrupted the tasks and prompted participants to report their momentary attentional state (i.e., either focused on the breath or “mind wandering”). Reported breath count from trials was compared to respirometer data, allowing classification of trials into three conservative conditions for analysis: a) focused attention on breath with correct respiration count b) “mind wandering” from breath; and c) “mind wandering” during control condition. Analysis of pre-tone spectral power data suggests that momentary mindfulness is associated with alterations in alpha power over parietal electrodes, with different participants displaying different directions of power change.

Jessica S. Thierman

Reference Frames in Figure-Ground Organization

Advisor: Stephen Palmer

Within what reference frames do orientation-related factors of figure-ground organization operate: retinal, environmental/gravitational, or object-based? We studied all known figure-ground cues that have an orientation component -- lower-region, wider base, shape familiarity, symmetry, and horizontal-vertical orientation – for their sensitivity to head tilt. Observers indicated which region appeared to be figure with their heads upright or tilted (45, 90, or 180 degrees from upright, depending on the particular factor) to dissociate different reference frames. The results indicate that retinal directions clearly dominate for lower region and wider base, but object-based directions dominate for shape familiarity. Symmetry showed only weak retinal and gravitational effects, and no clear directional preference was found for horizontal-vertical orientation. The paucity of evidence for gravitational reference frames is interesting not only because it conflicts with previous findings on shape perception, but because the ecological rationale for orientation sensitive figure-ground cues is based on gravitational considerations. The results are discussed as indicating that at least some figure-ground organization cues (e.g., lower region and wider base) operate before orientation constancy and that retinal directions may provide an evolutionarily useful surrogate for gravitational directions.

2006 

Claire Boudreaux

A Charming Little Cabernet: Effects of Label Design on Purchase Intent and Brand Personality of Wine

Advisor: Stephen Palmer

This thesis, completed for an Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major in Cognitive design in the Marketplace, examined the impact of brand personality on purchase intent, and the influence of three elements of packaging design as an antecedent of brand personality.  In the study, 262 subjects made brand personality judgments and rated their purchase intent for a total of 90 experimental wine labels, which varied along three dimensions chosen on the basis of a pilot study: color (six colors), imagery (picture of a chateau or vineyard; grape motif; coat-of-arms; an elk, a traditional animal; or a platypus, an unusual animal) with or without a picture of a deer) and design layout (traditional with white background, traditional with full color, or modern with half unprinted, half color background).   Brand personality explained nearly half of the variance in purchase intent, with the facets successful, charming, spirited, and up-to-date most strongly correlated with purchase intent.  Of the three dimensions of visual design studied, the illustration used on the label had the greatest impact on both purchase intent and perceptions of brand personality.

Elliott Cohen

Independent Component Analysis and Bayesian Networks: A New Approach to Non-Invasive Brain Machine Interfaces

Advisor: Prof. Richard Ivry

This paper described a new method of non-invasive brain-machine interfaces (BMIs), also known as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), based on combining independent component (IC) analysis and Bayesian networks.  Cohen tested his new method on a simple finger-tapping task from the BCI Competition III; his results were comparable to the best published.  He then tested his approach on a continuous movement task in which he predicted the time series of the ICs of a set of electromyography (EMG) signals over a specific trial period using only the ICs derived from electroencephalography (EEG) signals.  Finally, he used his methodology to investigate whether the spinal cord is transmitting motor signals from the brain to the peripheral muscles in a simple linear manner, as a wire transmits electricity, or if the spinal cord is performing complex non-linear transformations on the motor signals coming from the brain to the peripheral muscles. 

Fenna Krienen

Cross-Modal Differences in Response Inhibition

Advisor: Mark D'Esposito

The ability to inhibit unwanted or irrelevant thoughts and actions is central to cognition.  Often, inhibition is conceptualized as a unitary, central faculty, independent of what cues signal its initiation or what process or action needs to be inhibited.  Deriving from this perspective, recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence implicating the right inferior prefrontal cortex in the inhibition of an already initiated manual response (the stop-signal task) has led to the proposal that the right inferior prefrontal cortex is the site of a general capacity inhibitory system.  Critically, however, the assumption that the stop-signal task or other inhibition-based tasks are reflective of a central inhibition faculty remains to be tested.  This project sought to test this assumption directly.  In the stop-signal task, regular responses (go trials) are interrupted by periodic cues to stop an already initiated go response (stop trials).  This procedure ca yield an estimate of a subject's stop-signal reaction time (SSRT).  The SSRT is thought to be directly reflective of the central inhibitory mechanism.  This experiment tested whether SSRTs would be consistent regardless of the output modality (manual or verbal) or the type of go decision (spatial or semantic).  Output and go decision were crossed factorially, producing four stop-signal tasks.  Subjects made either button press (manual) or voice key (verbal) go responses, indicating either the direction of arrow stimuli (spatial) or the typical size of pictured objects (semantic).  An SSRT was computed for each of the four tasks.  SSRTs correlated within output domain, in that the SSRTs for manual conditions were correlated whether the go decision was spatial or semantic; likewise within the verbal conditions.  Strikingly, however, there was no such correlation across output domain, even holding decision content constant.  These results cast some doubt on the assumption that all inhibition is due to a central faculty, mediated by the right prefrontal cortex.  Rather, these data may indicate that multiple inhibitory mechanisms exist depending on the nature of the response to be inhibited.