https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/74122 2026-04-14T15:58:28Z 2026-04-14T15:58:28Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/74457 2021-04-23T10:37:34Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Moral cognition in males and females : an analysis of white matter tracts underlying grey matter areas related to morality Abstract: Studies investigating moral cognition have generally focused on grey matter activations obtained from neuroimaging studies, however there is a gap in the literature investigating the white matter fibre pathways underlying these grey matter areas related to morality. For this reason, this study investigated the fibre pathways underlying the functional areas associated with moral cognition and examined whether there are any significant sex differences in fibre metrics of these pathways. In this study, these white matter fibre pathways are referred to as ‘moral connectome’. Results from the automated meta-analysis mainly show an activation in the vmPFC extending to the OFC, mPFC, dmPFC, TPJp, PCC, the bilateral TP, the bilateral MTL, the left pars opercularis of IFG, and parts of the precuneus. The moral connectome underlying these functional areas were found to be the cingulum (bilateral), forceps minor, the fornix and the extreme and external capsule. As findings about sex differences in white matter areas are inconsistent, this study further investigated sex differences in the moral connectome by performing a fixel-based analysis to compare different fibre metrics between males and females. The findings showed no significant sex differences in the fibre metrics of the moral connectome, once the results were corrected for brain volume per subject. Therefore, this study shows no evidence for sex differences in white matter over and above that explained by brain size. Description: M.SC.COGNITIVE SCIENCE

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/74404 2021-04-22T12:36:32Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Ensemble coding of the average crowd speed using biological motion Abstract: Perception of human crowds is integral to social understanding and interaction. Previous studies have shown that observers could accurately estimate the average facial expression, gender, family resemblance, joint attention, and heading direction of a crowd (for a review, see Whitney & Yamanashi Leib, 2018). The ability of extract summary statistics globally from a set of multiple features or objects has been term ensemble perception, a visual phenomenon which can occur rapidly and bypass the need to register local information of set members. The robustness and near automaticity of ensemble perception has sparked an ongoing debate as to how information of high-level social representations can be integrated. The parallel processing hypothesis proposes that multiple features are automatically integrated in parallel under distributed attention to form an ensemble percept (Treisman, 2006). The serial processing account argues that only a few set members are inspected in a serial manner within the capacity of visual memory and focused attention to compute summary statistics (Myczek & Simons, 2008). The current study examines ensemble perception of crowd speeds and addresses the parallel/serial processing debate using standard point-light walkers (Johansson, 1973). In the first experiment, it was found that observers could reliably and accurately estimate the average speed of a crowd. Ensemble processing of crowd speed could rely on local motion alone, however, the global percept of the human form enhanced all aspects of performance including precision, accuracy, and response time. The second experiment established that ensemble speed could be formed under rapid viewing duration, although speed estimation of slow crowds was less reliable and accurate than that of fast crowds. The efficiency of crowd speed perception was examined using an ideal observer analysis. This simulation revealed that only 2-3 walkers were integrated in rapid ensemble processing of slow crowds while 4-5 walkers were integrated in rapid ensemble processing of fast crowds. Together, these findings suggest that perception of average crowd speed may be a hybrid case of parallel and serial processing mechanisms and the degree to which observers can process high-level representations in parallel may depend on the spatiotemporal properties of actual stimulus speed. The study contributes to the current literature of ensemble processing of complex social characteristics, as well as provides the basic understanding in crowd speed perception. Such knowledge can be valuable to several real-world applications in public planning and monitoring of human crowds. Description: M.SC.COGNITIVE SCIENCE

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/74313 2021-04-22T05:06:26Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Investigating the relationship between production and perception of epenthetic glottal stops in the case of Maltese Abstract: The Maltese language, like many other languages, marks vowel-initial words with a glottal stop. In the case of Maltese, this epenthetic segment occurs separately as a separate phoneme, with the potential for ambiguity due to words becoming homophonous. In a series of two experiments, we tried to investigate whether the underlying functions of such epenthetic glottal stop is constrained by matters of audience design. Our first experiment laid important grounds upon which we were to interpret the findings from the second experiment, because it provided us with descriptive evidence that Maltese listeners do not possess an a-priori preference to words with or without an underlying glottal stop, hence implying that the result from the production experiment occurred was not constrained by a baseline preference for one of the forms. This was done by a simple procedure, where participants had to rate the auditory stimuli they were exposed to, on a 7-point scale. The stimuli contained an even frequency of words with and without glottal stops. Our second experiment found a stark difference between the two main conditions, accented and unaccented. This was done by having participants participating in a simple question-answer experiment. Participants had to answer written questions by reading another written answer, placing strategic emphasis as indicated in the trials. More glottal stop productions occurred in the accented condition than in the unaccented condition. Furthermore, as opposed to listener-oriented paradigms, we found more glottal stop productions in the phonological contrast of the accented condition than in the lexical, suggesting that speakers do not modulate their efforts in favor of the listener when producing the epenthetic glottal stop. Description: M.SC.COGNITIVE SCIENCE

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/74258 2021-04-20T11:08:40Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The importance of Maltese diacritical marks in visual word recognition in the context of online writing Abstract: The rapid changes in technology have changed the way we live and communicate with one another. Particularly, the internet created a place where people engage in orthographic communication with one another, such as social media and blog posts. However, written material online does not always follow all of the language rules. We asked whether this influenced the way the Maltese language is written and read online. Firstly, we analysed a corpus of comments on Times of Malta’s news portal articles. Our focus was on words which contain at least one diacritic mark in their letters (ċ, ġ, ħ, ż). Approximately 95% of the words had such diacritics omitted. Through simulated data, we observed that higher frequency words tend to have diacritics omitted more frequently. Moreover, commenters were likely to be consistent in their use (or lack thereof) of these unique Maltese letters. Then we tested participants in a masked lexical priming decision task (experiment 1) and found that removing the diacritic mark from the letters ġ or ż within the prime did not affect the task performance. In experiment 2, participants read whole sentences in which diacritic marks were removed from the context, the target, neither or both. We found no reading cost between either of these four conditions. Thus, we concluded that diacritic marks are not an important feature in early visual word processing in Maltese. Theoretically, these findings suggest that repeated exposure to words with missing diacritics leads readers to store these casual forms, which subsequently leads to easy recognition. Description: M.SC.COGNITIVE SCIENCE

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z