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Companies face the challenge of determining the return on investment of premium paper packaging features, such as substrate thickness and finishing options. If companies can better understand how consumers perceive “premium,” they could channel their focus on specific design elements and maximize their returns (Dwivedi & Nayeem, 2018). Touch is a critical factor in driving consumer behavior and purchase decisions and influencing trust between brands and consumers (Krishna et al. 2017). While previous studies have explored the impact of design elements like size, shape, color, and font on consumer behavior, this research investigates the influence of touch, substrate, print finishes (foil, emboss, and gloss), unboxing experiences of direct mail, and consumer packaged goods. The study employed three unique in-person environments, which collected participant data through eye-tracking, facial expressions analysis, touch coding, and surveys across various consumer activities. Results indicate that premium packaging generates higher engagement and positive responses from consumers in retail and at-home settings. Foil finish outperforms in the retail environment for unfamiliar CBD serum (P < 0.0001). Touch is shown to be a better predictor of sales than visual attention across multiple packaging finishes, including foil (P = 0.002), glossy (P = 0.006), embossed (P = 0.007), and no finish (P = 0.028). All participant touches were identified and coded, revealing four unique touch actions (feel, pick up, compare, put in cart). Premium paperboard packaging evokes more positive facial expressions in consumer electronics unboxing and more interaction with direct mail. Notably, prominently displaying discount codes increases consumer engagement. Direct mail results reveal that circular mail was widely perceived as recyclable, tri-folds were retained the most, while postcards were more likely to be discarded. These findings have practical implications for businesses, enabling them to optimize packaging strategies, drive consumer engagement, and promote environmentally friendly practices.

For nearly 200 years, an individual’s personal papers enjoyed near-absolute protection from government search and seizure. That is no longer the case. With the widespread adoption of cloud-based information processing and storage services, the third-party doctrine operates to effectively strip our digital papers of meaningful Fourth Amendment protections. This Article presents a new approach to reconciling current third-party doctrine with the technological realities of modern personal information processing. Our most sensitive data is now processed and stored on cloud computing systems owned and operated by third parties. Although we may consider these services to be private and generally secure, the law does not currently require the government to obtain a warrant to access our information. The third-party doctrine creates a sweeping exception to the warrant requirement for any information exposed to a third party—even where that third party is an automated computing system rather than a human. As a result, our personal papers now receive no more protection than any other piece of potential evidence. In practical terms, they receive less. This ahistorical approach undermines the essential balance between an individual’s interest in privacy and the public’s interest in law enforcement. Many have identified and tried to rectify the privacy problems created by this shift, but it has proven difficult to articulate a limitation to the third-party doctrine that is both consistent with existing principles and feasible in practice. The Article begins with the intimate connection among freedom of thought, privacy of thought, and the longstanding enumeration of “papers” as a distinct object of Fourth Amendment protection. This historical understanding, which prior generations recognized intuitively, now finds strong support in contemporary cognitive science. Modern models of human cognition reveal how papers serve as cognitive artifacts performing cognitive tasks. These models furnish a set of proxy characteristics for reliably singling out those personal papers whose protection would most likely serve constitutional values. The result is a coherent and workable method for bringing needed discipline to the third-party doctrine and restoring equilibrium to information privacy.

The overwhelming majority of existing literature on the effects of age on judicial sentence decision-making focuses on juveniles (ages 18 and below) and older adults. This paper focuses on offenders between the ages of 18-29, who fall legally outside the definition of juvenile, yet do not have the full brain development or clinical maturity of an adult to provide knowledge of sentencing outcomes for different populations and a well-rounded review and critique of judicial sentence decision-making (Johnson, Blum, & Giedd, 2009). Using a series of logistic regression analyses on the Pennsylvania Commission Sentencing (PCS) data from 2001 to 2018, I examine the effects of legal and extralegal factors, specifically age, on the in/out prison sentence decision and sentencing trend of youthful offenders. The paper discusses the influence of existing brain development research on the Supreme Court's ruling in Roper v. Simmons, Graham v. Florida, and Miller v. Alabama and examines judicial sentence decision-making through Focal Concerns Theory to synthesize how a brain science spillover effect has impacted youthful offender sentencing. The results demonstrate that all offenders are sentenced leniently after the Miller ruling; therefore, a brain science spillover effect is not the cause or reasoning for sentencing leniency. Furthermore, the results affirm sentencing literature findings about specific factors that increase an offender's likelihood of imprisonment.

This study is a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies examining the effect of note-taking modality during lecture, that is, taking notes by hand using pen and paper vs. taking notes using a keyboard and computer, on learning among secondary and postsecondary students. I begin with a review of the literature and theoretical introduction to the theories and terms used. From a theoretical standpoint, there are strong reasons to believe that taking notes by hand might offer recall benefits relative to taking notes using a computer and keyboard. At the same time, I point out that one problem, which I term the “fundamental problem of modality research”, is that when researchers randomly assign participants to a note-taking modality they are also, indirectly, assigning them to a note-taking style. Furthermore, most studies do not consider factors such as participant transcription capacity that might serve as theoretically important moderators. I then describe the methods used for the systematic review and meta-analysis. These included a robust literature search, double screening of all potentially eligible studies, and double coding of all eligible studies. The meta-analytic methods involved multilevel applications of standard meta-analytic methods. The systematic review resulted in identification of 33 eligible reports containing 42 independent samples and 88 effect sizes, all evaluating whether there are recall differences — almost always operationalized as scores on a quiz given after exposure to lecture material — between participants taking notes by handwriting vs. typewriting, that is, the modality effect. A statistically significant overall meta-analytic average was found g = +0.144 [0.023, 0.265], p = .021, benefiting handwriters over typewriters. This is a small effect; on average, in the typical study typewriters scored about 50% on the recall quiz. The effect size of g = +0.14 translates into an average percent correct of about 57% in the handwriting group. There is some evidence that providing participants with an opportunity to review their notes might substantially reduce the observed advantage for handwriters.

Evidential evil is an encompassing title for moral evil, natural disasters, disease, famine, divorce, suffering, or other calamities in life that yield dissatisfaction or discernable discomfort. This area of evidential evil is the focus of this paper generally, including the argument posed by William Rowe from evidential evil and contemporary treatments offered by Bruce Russell. The argumentation is God’s nonexistence from the platform, or derivative of no greater good observed or known, of the justification or allowance of evil. It is not a refutation of the premises, per se, but instead, the biases associated with them are de facto statements of seeming certainty absent the claim of certain knowledge. In like manner, the contemporary work of Bruce Russell, specifically the 2018 essay “The Problem of Evil and Replies to Some Important Responses,” will be critiqued in chapter three. This critique will point to a specific bias and evaluate this bias for objective discourse. This, then, is the heart of this thesis, the specificity of the ontology of bias as a worldview engine as it pertains to the Problem of Evil and addressing this bias to determine the incoherence to reality to instantiate warranted belief in God’s existence.

Peter Carruther's Interpretive Sensory-Access (ISA) theory of self-knowledge is an interesting account of the opaqueness of our own minds that draws upon a wide range of theories from cognitive science and philosophy. In the present paper, I argue that the theory's assumptions support the conclusion that the available perceptual evidence massively underdetermines all of an agent's second-order beliefs about her own beliefs. Such a result is far more negative than the ISA's well-known pessimism regarding self-knowledge. Furthermore, I also argue that, from the same assumptions, it is possible to build an argument to the effect that cognitive scientists trying to determine an agents' true behavior-causing attitude face similar underdetermination problems. Toward the end of the paper, I suggest that the theory's problems arise from a conflation of two different ways in which terms denoting propositional attitudes, such as 'belief', are used in its formulation. Distinguishing between the two usages of these terms, in turn, leads to a further distinction between two different senses in which we can talk about the 'opaqueness' of our own minds.

This paper evaluates the interaction between mathematics and human cognition. The literary review explores the mathematical pathways theory, network theory, and reflective abstraction. The goal of the review is to explore the implications each of these theories have on the ways we should teach mathematics. Network theory seems to speak to the importance of teaching many conceptual metaphors for a given domain and introduce the same conceptual metaphor in a variety of domains. The pathways theory seems to suggest the complicity of mathematical achievement and the different effects that reading based learning disabilities have on mathematics achievement and potential ways of supporting these students.

A series of experiments reveal that people are more likely to mistake black men as holding a gun than white men (Payne 2001; Payne et al., 2002; Correll et al., 2002). These data suggest that real-world cases of racially biased object-identification occur, such as in cases of police killings of unarmed black men. The aim of this paper is to correctly model what goes on in people’s heads, leading them to misidentify objects in these instances. One possibility is that people are making the wrong judgment about the object in question; perception might proceed as it should, but the viewer may think that they’re seeing a gun due to a cognitive error. Instead, I present a model which construes the error as a result of a visual illusion: even though the object is a hand tool, erroneous visual processing causes them to have the illusory experience of a gun.

Since Timothy van Gelder's 1995 paper “What Might Cognition be if not Computation?” there has been a growing distrust of representational accounts of cognition, most notably from proponents of relatively new programs like dynamical systems theory and ecological/embodied approaches to cognition. Some advocates of these programs have argued that the concept of “representation” is deeply flawed – does little explanatory work, prejudices what is researched and how results are interpreted, and loses sight of the complex interactions that hold between agents and their environments. In this dissertation, I will not try to challenge these claims. Instead, I will argue that responses from defenders of representational modeling often fail to adequately meet these challenges, underestimate their insights, and have a tendency to react by redefining “representation” in such a way that it loses its explanatory significance. Although I believe that the ultimate shape and utility of representational models of cognition will only be revealed in the course of doing science, I will advocate a new tack for defending representational modeling. I begin by acknowledging that representational terminology is indeed used inconsistently, and sometimes without warrant or explanatory power. Next, I examine cases from the cognitive neuroscience to try to show that we can distinguish between explanations whose representational features are closely tied to their explanatory ambitions and those that are not. I will argue that the representationalist should emphasize that information-processing solutions are contingent strategies available to organisms for producing adaptive behavior – as are varieties of synergistic agent-environmental coupling – and, therefore, there should be ways of marshaling evidence for or against the hypothesis that any particular cognitive/perceptual capacity is the result of a representational solution. She can then point out that explanatory representational models in neuroscience provide concrete examples of the kinds of empirical considerations and observations that can be used to motivate attributions of representational significance. They do so by bringing together disparate nervous systems and their components under reoccurring principles of anatomical organization, processing strategies, encoding methods, etc., and these produce testable empirical predictions, suggest interventions, unify phenomena as instances of a more general pattern, and exemplify other commonly lauded scientific virtues. A defense of representational modeling should demonstrate that some of our best explanations in cognitive neuroscience do make central use of representational theorizing for securing their explanatory goals. This can be done while also admitting that there may be many cases where organisms adopted non-representational solutions to navigating their environment. Adjusting metaphysical definitions of “representation” to include even apparently non-representational processes is unconvincing and fails to appreciate the reasons that animate representational explanations.