Nicolás Cárdenas-Miller

Relatively Economic: Protest Motivations in the 2019 Chilean Uprising

https://honors.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/9637nkc5332

The Chilean 2019 student protest upheaval was marked by surprise amongst authorities, increased police presence, protests that escalated into violence, and an eventual devaluation of protests as a means of political participation among average Chilean opinion. By conducting analyses on survey data collected in 2021 from 3,965 adults living in Chile, I investigate what role ideology, economic context, and anti-elite attitudes play in explaining the motivation behind these protests. Additionally, I investigate if there is evidence that relative deprivation theory and/or survival protests are a part of this motivation. I find that predictors of ideology and anti- elite attitudes provide evidence that the Chilean student protests were motivated to some extent by fraternal relative deprivation, and where anti-elite attitudes matter greatly, socioeconomic status matters little.

Surprise! Draw the scene: Visual recall reveals poor incidental working memory following visual search in natural scenes:

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01465-9

Cárdenas-Miller, N., O’Donnell, R.E., Tam, J. et al. Surprise! Draw the scene: Visual recall reveals poor incidental working memory following visual search in natural scenes. Mem Cogn (2023).

Searching within natural scenes can induce incidental encoding of information about the scene and the target, particularly when the scene is complex or repeated. However, recent evidence from attribute amnesia (AA) suggests that in some situations, searchers can find a target without building a robust incidental memory of its task relevant features. Through drawing-based visual recall and an AA search task, we investigated whether search in natural scenes necessitates memory encoding. Participants repeatedly searched for and located an easily detected item in novel scenes for numerous trials before being unexpectedly prompted to draw either the entire scene (Experiment 1) or their search target (Experiment 2) directly after viewing the search image. Naïve raters assessed the similarity of the drawings to the original information. We found that surprise-trial drawings of the scene and search target were both poorly recognizable, but the same drawers produced highly recognizable drawings on the next trial when they had an expectation to draw the image. Experiment 3 further showed that the poor surprise trial memory could not merely be attributed to interference from the surprising event. Our findings suggest that even for searches done in natural scenes, it is possible to locate a target without creating a robust memory of either it or the scene it was in, even if attended to just a few seconds prior. This disconnection between attention and memory might reflect a fundamental property of cognitive computations designed to optimize task performance and minimize resource use.

Are Vowels Social? Perceptual Illusions in L2 Speech Perception:

Our project aimed to investigate an illusory vowel effect in bilingual Spanish-English speakers. Specifically, we were interested in whether bilingual listeners (the participants in the study) alter their perception of words depending on whether the speaker (the experimental manipulation) was "Latinx" or "racially ambiguous". We also collected data on language proficiency and attitudes on accented speech. Interestingly, we found that the illusory vowel effect remains strong, regardless of the social aspect that may be present in speech perception. Although our findings disproved our initial theory, the finding was still important in understanding the illusory vowel. Through this project I gained training in experimental design, participant recruitment and data collection in a foreign setting, advanced statistical methods (R, principal component analyses, and visualization methods), dissemination through conference presentations