Senior Comprehensive Paper Topics, 2002–2022
* Denotes distinction
2021-2022 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Ruken Bastimar – Beyond Mindfulness: A Metacognitive Approach to Samādhi ‘Meditative Absorption’ in Sāṃkhya-Yoga Philosophy
Isabella Chaffee – Bounded Morality: How is Moral Reasoning Similar to Non-Moral Reasoning?
Hana Mensendiek – Some Fun Housekeeping on the Normative Significance of Neuroscience
Jordan M. Navarro – Effect of Religiosity on the Conjunction Fallacy
Ali Purdum – The Tic-Reducing Effect of Music on Tourette’s Syndrome
Julia Shirley – Cognitively Bounded Morality: How Cognitive Limits Could Impact Moral Decisions
Jed Villanueva – You Can’t Get Groovier Than This: A Replication of Janata et al. (2012)
2020-2021 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Lily Danna – Dopamine and Motivation in Schools: Implementing Teaching Methods that Increase Dopamine Release and Motivation in Grades 6-12
Rachel Hodes – Otto’s Notebook Burns: Problem Solving in the Digital Landscape
Trevor Hughes – Intersections Between Ways of Knowing and Male Sexual Orientations
Tracy LeBlanc – The Role of Habits, Goals, and Narratives In Decision Making
Kesh Rughani – Thinking on a Mountain Bike
Laura Savage – Age and Distraction: A Misunderstanding of Memory
Cole Schiffer – The Cognitive Behavioral Sciences
Jake Winter – Emotions are Situated Concepts: Insights from the Theory of Constructed Emotion
2019-2020 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Tyler Chang – Cognitive Science Comps: Emergence of Hierarchic Syntax in Neural Machine Translation
Katherine Jackson – Does Gamification Work? The Impact of Gamification on Student Engagement with Second-Language Acquisition Applications
Ana Knighten – Inferential Reasoning by Tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) Using Auditory and Visual Information
Alina Maki – Comparing Lies by Size, Medium, and Perspective
Daniel Quintero – Disruption of CSF Glymphatic Flow after Anti-AQP4 Antibody and Bumetanide Injection
Lewis Thelen – Artistic Enactivism: A Potential Explanation for Emotional Engagement of Non-Representational Film Under Radical Enactivism
Alex Zhai – Coarticulatory Influences of Liquid Consonant on Stop Perception in Tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)
2018–2019 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Ahmed Abdirahman – What is Interaction? Embodied Interaction in Human-Computer Interaction
Morgan Ross * – Quantifying Self-Phones: The Effects of Smartphone Usage on Self-Extension
Elliot Schwartz * –The Effect of Repetition on Acceptability and Confidence Judgments of Linguistic Tokens
Valerie Umscheid * – Academic Self-Concept, Theory of Intelligence, and Overconfidence in Late Elementary School
2017–2018 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Trixie Dao – The Child as a Consumer: Issues with Child-Directed Advertising
2016–2017 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Hanbit (Shiny) Choi – The Foreign Language Effect on the Sunk-Cost Fallacy with English-Chinese Bilinguals
Charlotte Duong – Effects of Foreign Language on Decision Making
Jessi Jacobsen* – Talking to Nonnative Speakers: Investigating Language-specific Audience Design and Cognate Use
Yining (Rebecca) Liu – Using Self-paced Reading to Test the Syntactic Structure of Serial Verbs in Mandarin Chinese
Sanders McMillan – Creativity Embodied
Zach Montes – Hallucination as a Response to the Ecological Approach to Perception
Charles Moore – Multisensory Illusions in Peripersonal Space using Tools in Reality and Virtual Reality
Robbye Devyn Raisher – Does Music Make You Smarter? The Legacy of the Mozart Effect
Anna P. Smith – Effects of Cortical Schemas on Memory Trace Competition
Laura Soter* – Is Lying Less Wrong in a Foreign Language? Everyday Moral Reasoning and the Moral Foreign Language Effect in the Absence of Outcome Information
Hettie Stern * – Deaf Literacy: Learning to Read in English with Strong ASL Skills
2015–2016 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Alexander Auyeung – Beyond Bambini: Montessori Methods in the College Classroom
Connor Dale * – Inattentional Blindness in Early and Middle Childhood
Joyce Yu – Neuroprosthetics: Reconnecting with the World
2014–2015 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Emily Bauer* – The Evolution of Narrative Cognition
Carl Bou Mansour* – Radical Testimony: An Exploration of Radical Embodiment and Credulous Testimony
Michelle Chen* – To Afford or Not to Afford: Does the Digital Environment Have Affordances?
Andrew Hwang* – Cognitive Fluency in Website Navigation
2013–2014 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Jeffery Berg* – A Bat and a Ball and a Ballot: Proposing a Cognitive Foundation for Partisan Ambivalence
Lauren Chow* – Use What You Already Know: Positive Language Transfer in Adolescent Spanish Speaking English Language Learners
Rebecca Plotnick* – Is There a Context Effect for the Identification of Brand Logos?
Alyssa Wisekal – Pragmatics and Theory of Mind Development through the Lend of Autism
2012–2013 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Benjamin Altshuler – The Puzzle Puzzle: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach
Kelsey Han – How We Make Meaning: The Mental Representation of Concepts in Cognitive Science
Patrick Nalepka* – Us of Just You and Me? An Empirical Approach to Understand (Shared) Intentions in Joint Action
Lauren Partch – The Neuroscience of Free Will
Andrea Simenstad* – Modeling Moral Cognition: Virtue Ethics and Connectionist Architecture
2011–2012 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Lauren Hickman – How Cognitive is Cognitive Therapy?
Jane Tandler* – Ordering Disorganization Syndrome: Modeling Schizophrenic Language
2009–2010 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Elizabeth Aeschlimann*- Eliciting Emotion and Affect in Moral Judgment: An Examination of Intention, Personal Force and Personal Relevance
Heather Campbell* – Emergent Consciousness: An Ant-Based Explanation of Subjective Experience
Laura Stone – Stereotype Alteration through a Cognitive Dual-Process Lens: Examining Stereotype Knowledge Structures, Stereotyping Processes, and Perspective Taking
2008–2009 Senior Comprehensive Paper
Katie Stroud* – Cue Type and Biasing Verb Presence: Factors Influencing False Memory Development in Pseudo-Jurors
2007–2008 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Maureen Burns* – The Relationship Between Embodied Cognition and Spatio-Temporal Perspective
Benjamin G. Otopalik* – Simulation, Theory-theory and Reconciling Old Foes with New Findings
Diminika Ujlaky – Savant Syndrome: Background, Theories, and Applications
Katherine Wingert* – Observational Learning and Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation
2006–2007 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Aaron Fanta – Visual Color Detection and Laterality: Does Language Affect Color Processing?
Anna Graefe* – Medical Decision-Making in Adolescents: A Framework for Practice
Lucy Hodgman – The Role of Feedback in the Environment and the Brain in Causing Consciousness
George Kachergis* – Whorf Hypothesis Not Supported at a Perceptual Level
Jamie Olson – Reputation, Privacy and Cooperation in the Classical Prisoner’s Dilemma
2004–2005 Senior Comprehensive Papers
Drew Dara-Abrams* – Architecture of Mind and World: How Urban Form Influences Spatial Cognition
Anna Grasso* – The Effect of Context on the Syntactic Processing of Ambiguous Sentences
Kate Jones* – Scaffolding Preschoolers’ Developing Theory of Mind: Does Sibling Age Gap Matter?
Alanna K. McLeod – “Putting the Baby Down”: The Role of Physical Proximity in Mother-Infant Vocal Communication
2002–2003 Senior Comprehensive Paper
Garret Westlake* – Understanding the Cognitive Basis of Dyslexia: A review of educational research and practice, fMRI neuroscience research, and language processing models of cognitive science
2001–2002 Senior Comprehensive Paper
Deanna M. Fierman* – Bilingual Language Acquisition and Structure in a Controlled Environment: Implications for future Psycholinguistic Research