Tag: Poster 111

Understanding the Wine Industry’s Influence on Culture of the Pacific Northwest

Presenter(s): Michelle Miller − Public Relations

Faculty Mentor(s): Dean Mundy, Kim Sheehan

Poster 111

Research Area: Public Relations: Circuit of Culture

The wine market creates an opportunity for wine regions to produce powerful stories that reflect tradition and characterize a lifestyle. The relationship between wine and culture is a significant factor to identify when exploring the implications these elements play within the wine industry. The specific research question of this project is: How does the wine industry influence the culture of the PNW, in comparison to Italy? This is important because it can provide journalists and researchers with a tool to help further understand the impact of the wine industry on a larger scale. This can interconnect the food and beverage industry and provide a resource for audiences to understand how culture plays an active role in marketing. While this project has a defined research question, I want to understand what differs in terms of wine culture when examining the wine industry among different regions and how wine tourism plays a role in wine culture. Furthermore, I want to explore how the circuit of culture plays a role in influencing the PNW and the Italian wine industry and what attracts consumer engagement to these particular regions. In terms of marketing, it is imperative to evaluate the fundamental differences when comparing the PNW to the Italian wine industry, locally and internationally. Similarly, it is vital to examine if wine tourism and culture are the driving forces behind wine marketing. These explorations will provide support for the question my research will address. I plan to use both Qualitative and Quantitative methods for my research. For my qualitative research, I will create interview questions for individual interviews.Many of the research questions provided will be based on the Circuit of Culture. This will provide perspective in the professional realm within the wine industry. Quantitative data is also fundamental to my research, particularly when referencing factors that deal with the Circuit of Culture. This includes consumption, production, and regulation. I will create a survey using Qualtrics to further understand the PNW and Italian wine region markets. This survey will help me gain general knowledge of behavior based on the circuit of culture. Additionally, I find it important to use a social media audit when observing the wine market. This is particularly significant because I am examining many elements of a domestic and international market. The social media audit will examine wine tourism and wine marketing through the most used platforms in the PNW and Italy. This will support my research and demonstrate how the wine industry is represented to a larger market.

The Role of Abstract Chunk Patterns in the Organization of Complex Sequences

Presenter(s): Min Zhang

Faculty Mentor(s): Ulrich Mayr & Melissa Moss

Poster 111

 Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

In order to execute complex sequences, such as playing a piece of music, people group sequential elements (e.g., individual notes) into “chunks”. The dominant theory assumes that chunks are merely independent bundles of elements (Lashley, 1951), though little is known about the organization of chunked information. Applying the efficient coding principle, chunks may be coded in a relational manner, based on structural similarities, to allow people to smoothly execute complex tasks (Botvinick et al., 2015). In two experiments, we assessed how performance is affected by whether chunks contain similar, abstract patterns of elements (“matching” chunks, e.g., ABA pattern of elements in both chunks). Participants completed a task in which they needed to remember and execute sequences of rules. The rule sequences contained two 3-element chunks with various patterns of rule elements. Some sequences contained matching chunks, while others contained non-matching chunks. In Experiment 1, participants executed sequences in which both chunks contained the same types of rules arranged in matching or non-matching patterns. In Experiment 2, the two chunks contained different sets of rules, thus requiring a greater degree of abstraction across chunks. Results showed better performance for sequences containing matching chunks. The effect of pattern similarity on sequential performance was much weaker in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1. Generally, these findings indicate that our cognitive system makes use of abstract patterns to efficiently code sequential information.