Complete Issue 53(1)

Complete digitized issue (volume 53, issue 1) of Speaker & Gavel

Programme content is king: how spaced product presentation influences advert reminding and advert memory

The rise of digital streaming services and online advertising has put strain on the linear TV advertising model; yet, TV advertising has maintained its crown as the best medium for long-term brand building activities. The present thesis supports the linear advertising offering by evidencing ways to improve advert memory via proximal placement to related programme products. The reminding theory of learning was applied to understand how non-branded category related programme products can increase advert memory. Chapter Two demonstrated memory effects relating to product repetition were contingent upon the advert retrieval activity during programme viewing, with the advert detail recalled in-programme determining the memory enhancement at test. In Chapter Three, the effects of product repetition information availability at test after more passive viewing conditions and a day long delay were assessed. It was found that those who could recollect the repetition had better memory for the advert product, while those who remembered repetitions demonstrated improvements to product and brand memory. Chapter Four used a full episode of a programme and interspersed unfamiliar US adverts, some of which created product repetition; when adverts did create repetition, they were better recalled than those without an associated programme product. The thesis’ paradigm also offered a method for evidencing the mechanisms behind a guerrilla marketing phenomenon; ambush marketing. In Chapter Five, participants’ ability to determine programme brands after viewing repeated product adverts was assessed, finding that when evaluating brand information using heuristic evidence, brand misattributions were more likely. However, when assessing the same information using recollective details, this misattribution effect was removed; meaning brand suggestion can be overcome via cognitive effort, which has implications for how to counter ambushing. Taken together, the investigations demonstrate the utility, and at times danger, of the programme to advertisers in designing, presenting, and scheduling advertising

Through a Glass Darkly: Facial Wrinkles Affect our Processing of Emotion in the Elderly

The correct interpretation of emotional expressions is crucial for social life. However, emotions in old relative to young faces are recognized less well. One reason for this may be decreased signal clarity of older faces due to morphological changes, such as wrinkles and folds, obscuring facial displays of emotions. Across three experiments, the present research investigates how misattributions of emotions to elderly faces impair emotion discrimination. In a preliminary task, neutral expressions were perceived as more expressive in old than in young faces by human raters (Experiment 1A) and an automatic system for emotion recognition (Experiment 1B). Consequently, task difficulty was higher for old faces relative to young faces in a visual search task (Experiment 2). Specifically, participants detected old faces expressing negative emotions less accurately and slower among neutral faces of their peers than young faces among neutral faces of their peers. Thus, we argue that age-related changes in facial features are the most plausible explanation for the differences in emotion perception between young and old faces. These findings are of relevance for the social interchange with the elderly, especially when multiple older individuals are present

Determining the effect of human cognitive biases in social robots for human-robotm interactions

The research presented in this thesis describes a model for aiding human-robot interactions based on the principle of showing behaviours which are created based on 'human' cognitive biases by a robot in human-robot interactions. The aim of this work is to study how cognitive biases can affect human-robot interactions in the long term. Currently, most human-robot interactions are based on a set of well-ordered and structured rules, which repeat regardless of the person or social situation. This trend tends to provide an unrealistic interaction, which can make difficult for humans to relate ‘naturally’ with the social robot after a number of relations. The main focus of these interactions is that the social robot shows a very structured set of behaviours and, as such, acts unnaturally and mechanical in terms of social interactions. On the other hand, fallible behaviours (e.g. forgetfulness, inability to understand other’ emotions, bragging, blaming others) are common behaviours in humans and can be seen in regular social interactions. Some of these fallible behaviours are caused by the various cognitive biases. Researchers studied and developed various humanlike skills (e.g. personality, emotions expressions, traits) in social robots to make their behaviours more humanlike, and as a result, social robots can perform various humanlike actions, such as walking, talking, gazing or emotional expression. But common human behaviours such as forgetfulness, inability to understand other emotions, bragging or blaming are not present in the current social robots; such behaviours which exist and influence people have not been explored in social robots. The study presented in this thesis developed five cognitive biases in three different robots in four separate experiments to understand the influences of such cognitive biases in human–robot interactions. The results show that participants initially liked to interact with the robot with cognitive biased behaviours more than the robot without such behaviours. In my first two experiments, the robots (e.g., ERWIN, MyKeepon) interacted with the participants using a single bias (i.e., misattribution and empathy gap) cognitive biases accordingly, and participants enjoyed the interactions using such bias effects: for example, forgetfulness, source confusions, always showing exaggerated happiness or sadness and so on in the robots. In my later experiments, participants interacted with the robot (e.g., MARC) three times, with a time interval between two interactions, and results show that the likeness the interactions where the robot shows biased behaviours decreases less than the interactions where the robot did not show any biased behaviours. In the current thesis, I describe the investigations of these traits of forgetfulness, the inability to understand others’ emotions, and bragging and blaming behaviours, which are influenced by cognitive biases, and I also analyse people’s responses to robots displaying such biased behaviours in human–robot interactions

Baby Boomers’ Attitudes Towards Product Placements

Including branded products within mass media programming is becoming common. Previous research has focused almost entirely on college-age students\u27 attitudes about placements in movies and television. This research focuses on Baby Boomers and is the first to include questions about multiple media in forming attitudes towards product placements. Six hypotheses were tested. Attitude toward product placement is related to media consumption. Males appear more positive than females. Interactions effects of media consumption x gender and media consumption x age appear insignificant. Analytical results, graphs, tables and managerial implications and representative comments from respondents are presented

Hearing the Tonality in Microtonality

In the late 1970s and 1980s, composer-pianist Easley Blackwood wrote a series of microtonal compositions exploring the tonal and modal behavior of a dozen non–twelve-tone equal temperaments, ranging from 13 to 24 tones per octave. This dissertation investigates a central paradox of Blackwood’s microtonal music: that despite being full of intervals most Western listeners have never heard before, it still seems to “make sense” in nontrivial ways. Much of this has to do with the music’s idiosyncratic approach to tonality, which I define as a regime of culturally conditioned expectations that guides one’s attentional processing of music’s gravitational qualities over time. More specifically, Blackwood configures each tuning’s unfamiliar elements in ways that correspond to certain schematic expectations Western listeners tend to have about how tonal music “works.” This is why it is still possible to hear the forest of tonality in this music, so to speak, despite the odd-sounding trees that comprise it. Because of its paradoxical blend of expectational conformance and expectational noncompliance, Blackwood’s microtonal music makes for a useful tool to snap most Western-enculturated listeners out of their ingrained modes of musical processing and reveal certain things about tonality that are often taken for granted. Accordingly, just as Blackwood writes conventional-sounding music in unconventional tunings, this dissertation rethinks several familiar music-theoretic terms and concepts through the defamiliarizing lens of microtonality. I use Blackwood’s microtonal music as a prism to shine a light on traditional theories of tonality, scale degrees, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic function, arguing that many of these theories rely on assumptions that are tacitly tied to twelve-tone equal temperament and common-practice major/minor music. By unhooking these terms and concepts from any one specific tuning or historical period, I build up a set of analytical tools that can allow one to engage more productively with the many modalities of tonality typically heard on a daily basis today. This dissertation proceeds in six chapters. The four interior chapters each center on one of the terms and concepts mentioned above: scale degrees (Chapter 2), consonance and dissonance (Chapter 3), harmonic function (Chapter 4), and tonality (Chapter 5). In Chapter 2, I propose a system for labeling scale degrees that can provide more nuance and flexibility when reckoning with music in any diatonic mode (and in any tuning). In Chapter 3, I advance an account of consonance and dissonance as expectational phenomena (rather than purely psychoacoustic ones), and I consider the ways that non-pitched elements such as meter and notation can act as “consonating” and/or “dissonating” forces. In Chapter 4, I characterize harmonic function as arising from the interaction of generic scalar position and metrical position, and I devise a system for labeling harmonic functions that is better attuned to affective differences across the diatonic modes. In Chapter 5, I synthesize these building blocks into a conception of fuzzy heptatonic diatonic tonality that links together not only all of Blackwood’s microtonal compositions but also more familiar musics that use a twelve-tone octave, from Euroclassical to popular styles. The outer chapters are less explicitly music-analytical in focus. Chapter 1 introduces readers to Blackwood’s compositional approach and notational system, considers the question of his intended audience, and discusses the ways that enculturation mediates the cognition of microtonality (and of unfamiliar music more generally). Chapter 6 draws upon archival documents to paint a more detailed picture of who Blackwood was as a person and how his idiosyncratic worldview colors his approach to composition, scholarship, and interpersonal interaction. While my nominal focus in these six chapters is Blackwood’s microtonal music, the repertorial purview of my project is far broader. One of my guiding claims throughout is that attending more closely to the paradoxes and contradictions of Blackwood’s microtonality can help one better understand the musics they are accustomed to hearing. For this reason, I frequently compare moments in Blackwood’s microtonal music to ones in more familiar styles to highlight unexpected analogies and point up common concerns. Sharing space with Blackwood in the pages that follow are Anita Baker, Ornette Coleman, Claude Debussy, and Richard Rodgers, among others—not to mention music from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fortnite, Sesame Street, and Star Wars. Ultimately, this project is a testament to the value of stepping outside of one’s musical comfort zone. For not only can this reveal certain things about that comfort zone that would not be apparent otherwise, but it can also help one think with greater nuance, precision, and (self-)awareness when “stepping back in” to reflect upon the music they know and love

Reducing implicit racial bias in preservice teachers by facilitating impact awareness

Implicit racial bias has a measurable impact on the judgments and evaluations of Black individuals by Whites, as well as communication between these two groups. The purpose of this study was to develop an efficient, researched-based intervention for raising awareness about aversive racism in order to establish impact awareness (Gawronski, Hofmann, & Wilbur, 2006) and achieve measureable reductions in implicit bias in preservice teachers who were students in a public, regional comprehensive university in the Southeast. Participants in the experimental group were engaged in activities in which they learned about and discussed aversive racism and implicit bias, while the members of the control group was not exposed to this material. All participants then completed the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005) as a measure of implicit racial attitudes, and they responded to vignettes describing a White or Black student with academic and behavioral difficulties to determine biases in participants’ approach to these situations. Twenty-six days following the intervention, participants in the experimental group completed the AMP and responded to vignettes once more to determine changes to implicit bias over time

2015 - The Twentieth Annual Symposium of Student Scholars

The full program book from the Twentieth Annual Symposium of Student Scholars, held on April 16, 2015. Includes abstracts from the presentations and posters.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/sssprograms/1014/thumbnail.jp

Making memory: techne, technology, and the refashioning of contemporary memory

My dissertation answers two questions: Does the tension between interactive technologies and rhetoric re-shape the nature and relevance of the canon of memory? Do interactive technologies affect the ways we remember and persuade? I argue that my interpretation of techne suggests possibilities for the creation and production of new types of memory in combination with digital media. To interrogate this connection, I suggest three interpretations of the Greek concept, techne: as a process that is inherently productive; as a force that renegotiates contemporary sources of social power; and as a skill that balances expert knowledge with instrumentality. I explore the creative possibilities of making memory in several examples such as digital archives, photo manipulation, and digital collaborative pedagogy. In Chapter One, I begin by reviewing how memory has been employed since its characterization as one of the five canons. Starting with Plato\u27s Phaedrus and ending with Merlin Donald\u27s Origins of the Modern Mind and Collin Gifford Brooke\u27s Lingua Fracta, my thorough treatment of memory illustrates that even though memory has persisted through the centuries, it has not been properly adapted as a foundation of rhetoric for use in connection with information technologies. Chapter Two is a critical exploration of techne as well as an argument that states how techne and memory should be thought of as complimentary forces. New technologies afford users the possibilities to create and replicate memories, thus understanding techne as a characteristic of digital memory is critical for contemporary rhetorical practices. Chapter Three is an exploration of three digital archives: The Wayback Machine, The 9/11 Digital Archive, and The Soweto \u2776 Archive. By looking at digital archives, I argue that visitors are encouraged to participate in memory making, indicating a shift from consumerist trends of memory towards productive memorial spaces. I use the term technemonic to suggest the devices, spaces, or tokens (digital or otherwise) that we make or collect to remember a particular event. In chapter four, I argue that memory is a persuasive construct--it is not a concrete structure, as we tend to think it is, but rather it is extremely fluid and easily subjected to recreation by the slightest suggestive details. I examine two specific vectors of memory manipulation: external photo manipulation and internal cognitive manipulation. Chapter Five questions the implications of technologies used through the process of techne to change the canon of memory. This final chapter will discuss how technologies have always affected memory and why those influences are critical to contemporary rhetoric studies. In particular, Chapter Five will deal with the new sources and boundaries of control individuals have (or do not have) over their digital memories