My Senior Thesis Project

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2024-09-30

Well the form responses were quite helpful, so thank you. 42 people gave their input. About 30% of you advised me to choose aesthetic categorization decisions, while over 50% thought that I should go with unconscious versus conscious reasoning speeds. I've chosen to side with the minority and I'm putting together a proposal for an independent study proposal for January now.

If you have any resources you think will be relevant to my study of how people categorize things using aethetic preferences, please let me know.

2024-09-25

Hello!

I'm choosing an initial topic for my research work over the next year which will lead into my senior thesis. I have two ideas and I'd like to know which one you find more interesting!

Please just fill out this form before it's too late and I've already made up my mind.

I'm going to be doing a thesis project my senior year of college. I'll actually be starting work on it this January, and I'm submitting my initial proposal for this winter's work on October 2nd of this year. So it's time to choose a first direction for my project!

Here are my two ideas right now:

1. Aesthetic categorization decisions

I'm interested in how people make decisions about categorization based on aesthetic preferences. Most prior research on categorization decisions looks categorization as a way to maximize efficiency or provide some other useful function; I'm interested in the way we categorize things in specific ways based on aesthetic preferences. How would a child choose to categorize toys? By shape, size, color, material, something else? How does a fantasy or sci-fi novelist decide what imaginary things aesthetically ‘fit’ in their imaginary world? Can we learn about this by using computer models to do similar kinds of categorization?

2. Conscious versus unconscious reasoning speed

Unconscious intuitive reasoning can be done in parallel, often extremely quickly. Think about how we can recognize a type of animal - we don't have to think through each animal category which we know about one by one, we can send our visual stimulus to all of our animal categories simultaneously and only consciously latch on to the animal category or categories which seem the most likely. Conscious formal reasoning, on the other hand, must be done in series, which is extremely slow by comparison. Conscious reasoning has a lot to do with attention. Attention is generally a single stream process, and we are conscious of the reasoning processes which we attend to. Why can’t we be conscious of many thoughts at once? We are certainly capable of being conscious of many external sensory stimuli at a given time.