Born to Chose Article

Jengar article:

• What evidence shows that choice is important?
• People are happy when offered a lot of choices. Choices may be important for self-efficacy, you cant feel effective if you don’t have the opportunity to make choices. Its adaptive for our survival. 
• Studies of the elderly patients who have some elements of control of their environment, people actually live longer in those conditions. A big issue in retirement homes… loss of control is just really massive.
• “Mindless Eating” claiming that we are led into eating too much because we use heuristics to decide how much to eat and those shortcuts are misleading us. So we eat mindlessly. We utilize system 1 (intuition) thinking.. and diets fail disastrously because they force people to use system 2 all the time. Its too attention demanding. We are so driven by our intuitions… so we need to arrange our minds so we eat mindlessly without lead into eating too much.
• choice is critical because choice is rewarding. It gives us a good feeling to be in control in some ways.
• Why do we cling so strongly to the importance of choice and to our right to choice?
• She basically says, that’s sort of just the way we are. Its built into the structure of our brains and minds to want and need that. We don’t have any choice but to believe in choice.
• How are our attitudes effected by our choices?
• If we chose something, then we like it better! If you choose something out of as set, then you end up evaluating it more highly than you did initially.
• Music studies… once they’ve chosen a piece of music, they like it better.
• Its like a justification of our choice.
• What evidence indicates that choice can overwhelm??
• indidviduals were more satisfied with their choices when there was a smaller array of things to choose from.
• If there is an array of 30 jams, people are more likely to buy one from an array of 6.
• We want lots of choice, but when we have it, we don’t really want it that much.
• We are very poor predictors of what we are going to like… 
• When we have a really long list of things that you have, you just have to satisfice instead of thoroughly doing it all.
• You end up wondering if you could have done something better if you had looked longer, etc. Too many choices can be annoying.
• When people are faced with these health care options, people don’t know what the hell to do with them. People don’t actually like what they say they want in terms of healthcare, etc. 
• TED talk: cultural differences. They studied children of first generation parents and other children. They could choose their anagrams, take on the teacher had given them, or take one their mom had picked. American kids did way better when they themselves picked it, but Japanese children were more likely to do well when their parents may have picked it.
• Our culture seemed more obsessed with choice than others.
• Ex. French vs. American parents taking their children off of live support… americans want control but look at it more negatively.
• Still examples of how what we say what we want is not what we end up liking
• 
  

2 lectures: Intuition and Well being

• Lecture 1: This does not account for very much of what people really actually do in decision-making. People use a lot of heuristics in judgments and decision-making tasks. He won the nobel prize in economics. He talked about having debates with economists and debates with psychologsts. With Economists, he wonders how accurate is the normative approach? He is asking to what extent may intuition be truly marvelous? Ex. A firefigther who can tell who things are going to explode, or nurses who say that people have to get to the ER right before they have a heart attack? But there are other times when people’s performances become really flawed.
• Expected Utility theory : main ideas
• completeness 
• We know our preferences so we act in accordance with our preferences.
• Is intuition marvelous or is it flawed? Ex. firefighters or nurses (marvels of intuition).
• Are these feats of conscious reflective judgement?
• He is arguing that they are not, they are probably not on the bases of a conscious reflective process.
• How well can people make predictions about:
• wine quality: you could do, but most people don’t
• value of an art work: could do, but most people don’t
• stock market
• relative success of different students going to professional school or graduate school
• outcomes of judicial proceedings
• economic and political outcomes
• People usually don’t do well at all… an irritate. Major finding: in complex decisions, people and experts are routinely outperformed by simple equations.
• Ex. House of cards: professionals tend to rely on their own opinions, but a lot of it turns out to be wrong.
• For outcomes of judicial proceedings: an equation based on the judge’s behavior did better than the judge himself!
• Our ability to generate predictions is really limited, more than we think it is. They insist that they are experts in ways that they are not.
• These are the flaws in intuition.
• 2 ways that thoughts come to mind: what are those two ways?
• Reason (deliberative process) ((system 2))
• Intuition (automatic process) ((system 1))
• major differences between the two: a speed difference. Intuition is fast, reasoning is slower. Intuition  is automatic, reason is controlled, intuition is effortless, reasoning is effortful. One is learned slowly (intuition), and one is more flexible (reasoning). 
• Intuition is gained over time, but not at a conscious level. 
• What are natural assessments?
• natural assessments are: judgements that we very naturally do, almost automatically without reflecting. On the basis of perceived similarity or familiarity or whether or not its surprising, or the emotional aspect.
• used perceptual illustrations as examples. They are similar to what is happening generally in cognition.
• A couple of towers with child’s building blocks, and an array of blocks on the table
• the two towers looks similar
• but the array on the table looks different, but we realize that they both have the same number of blocks.
• Perceptual popout: some things just leap off the page. 
• Behaviors can start out as system 2 (reasoning) and then become system 1 (intuition). 
• Monitoring of intuitive processes:  How tightly do we check on ourselves and monitor?
• Not so much. It is a rather loose monitoring.
• So what can cause our intuition to fail?
• occupying the working memory or a cognitive load. Ex. stereotype threat.
• We might make a mistake using our intuitive system but we wouldn’t notice it, because we don’t monitor that closely, especially if we are preoccupied.
• What is the role of associations in intuitions?:
• ex. the word vomit. There are a whole series of responses that occur, ex. a flash of disgust on your face or a change in heart rate.
• These are quick responses that presumably over time experience with the word and the things that go with it have become linked… they are associated.
• This then provides an evaluation and provides a basis for an immediate response.
• Associative coherence is important underlying the intuitive response
• These are the basis of a judgment such as looking at a person and saying, are they likely to be a wallstreet banker? You could probably assign a probability to that without knowing exactly why. This is an example of representativeness… matching up our experience to these judgments.
• These judgments can lead to some silly errors too
• How do we become experts, and then capable of great intuition?
• Practice/repetition. 10,000 hours of practice or something, in a variety of different domains.
• Not only practice but also feedback. Immediate unambiguous feedback that tells you that what you did was correct or not. 
• Sometimes people can’t get this kind of feed back, so they can’t become experts, like predicting the stock market, or being an “experienced” clinician who may not have learned what they think they know.
• So how do these associations make us subject to failures of rationality?
• various aspects of associations make us subject to these failures:
• framing effects: the way the facts are presented, showing losses vs. gains, and we have an exaggerated reaction to losses. 
• It’s a failure of our monitoring.
• Discounts vs. surcharges: can portray the same situation as though its good or bad… if you give a comparison price that looks like you’re getting a discount, you’re more likely to buy it and makes us subject to silly decisions.
• You can give a bogus alternative that leads them to a different choice.
• Dan Ariely
• Predictably Irrational
• Your choice depended on your phone number, so if you’re given a stating point, you may find it very difficult to forget that.
• Why in places where driver’s liscence are not automatically donors do they have less donors?
• people just agree with the defaults when they don’t know what else to do.
• He said we are asked complex questions and to response, you answer a simpler question where you can use a short cut, in doing so, we use a heuristic. Perhaps this is not reliable at all
• So intuition can be marvelous in certain situations, but without unambiguous immediate feedback about the quality of your judgment, you may make really bad judgments. 
• Various affective biases play a big role. The classic decision making model shows that we weigh the pros and cons, etc, but in reality, we use shortcuts, etc. 

Lecture 2: wellbeing

• How is wellbeing related to decision-making?
• Decisions that people make to achieve their well being often make it worse.
• People know what they want and what they like, but we can’t really measure subjective wellbeing.
• How has happiness changed as the gross domestic product has gone up?
• It has deceased a bit, and yet people think that more things will make them happy
• How does life satisfaction change before and after marriage?
• It increases before marriage and decreases after marriage. 
• He finds a very sharp contrast between what people say in the moment and what they say after the fact. A well demonstrated phenomena
• The big issue he is raising here is: why are we surprised by these findings? Its as though we don’t have a very good grasp on our feelings or emotions, or not knowing what we will feel in the future, and not knowing what we have felt in the past.
• Bill James:
• figure in baseball (where they take a lot of data on sports in order to see what works, etc) who applies statistics to baseball and has careful attention to equations and deicision making, etc. Not based in intuition
• Major issue: why does this seem surprising to us?
• What do people say about the mood of paraplegics? A month later vs. a year later?
• The people who knew a paraplegic would say that they wouldn’t have so bad of a mood after a year, but someone who doesn’t know a one thought their mood wouldn’t change at all.
• What would people say about mood and winning the lottery?
• but if you know someone who had actually done it, you would predict after the initial mood that their happiness would drop back to normal.
• Having a high household income or being a woman over fourty?
• How well do people predict that they will like eating ice cream after eating it for 8 days straight? They don’t predict their liking any better than a stranger could.
• What determines how much one suffers in a painful situation?
• They thought the duration of the pain was the important factor, but really what is most important is when it was worst and what it was like at the end. 
• Like the cold arm test – people would rather have the long one than the short in the end, because it was more gradual.
• So! there is quite a difference between living an experience and remembering one or thinking about it.
• There is an experiencing self (living the experience) and the evaluating self, but it seems we only keep the evaluating self because we are remembering. 
• Its hard to know which one is more important of if they both are… but what we remember at the end and what we report feeling at the time seem to not at all be the same thing. 
• .4 is the correlation between moment to moment happiness and life satisfaction.
• Time seems to be a major factor for the experience self…
• So what are you thinking about for each?
• they don’t think so much about their experiences how great it is during the fact! Maybe sometime… but it’s a matter of attention. WE are attending to different things in the experiencing self vs. the evaluating self.
• The quality of the experiencing life is having a good time with our friends, and not  a lot of attention toward climate, etc… “
• “nothing in life matters quite as much as you think it does when you’re thinking about it.”
• The evaluating self greatly exaggerates things. 
• The focusing illusion: the idea of directing your attention to certain aspects of the situation and thinking that those are really the important aspects for a decision. 
• We tend to direct our attention to just certain aspects.
• ex. having a nice salary and having a nice car would make you happy, but here we are just focusing on a limited number of aspects that don’t necessarily relate to your wellbeing.
• How much pleasure do you get from your car? It turns out to correlate with the bluebook value of the car. 
• How much did you enjoy your commute this morning? Then there is no correlation with the blue book value of the book at all! The bulk of the everyday experience with their car doesn’t seem to relate to their enjoyment of the car.
• So, he has many examples that our feelings and the feelings that we imagine that we would have are not at all the same. We are very poor predictors of our feelings, and we remember our past feelings very differenetly than we would have reported them at the time.
• So how does this relate to decision making?
• These are all issues that were dismissed in classical decision making theory, they  thought we knew what we wanted and liked and those preferences would be evident in our choices… but here we see that we are often of two minds not knowing what exactly we would want. 
• Its interesting to see this much literature on emotion and decision making… 20 years ago it would not have existed so much.

Reasoning and Decision making

• Reasoning and Decision Making wiki ch
• So, what is reasoning? 
• Differences between deductive and inductive reasoning? See table
• Deductive: going from general facts or general principles, and conclude more specifics. If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true.
• Inductive reasoning: based on observations of specific cases, and the conclusions are more general. Lead to a conclusion that is probably true (the bread and butter of science and experiments). Based on evidence instead of proved facts.
• Normative vs. descriptive approaches to reasoning.
• Normative approach is based on logic and deals with valid or invalid statements. Normative is saying how people SHOULD think. Here there is a standard of how to do syllogistic reasoning..
• Descriptive is based on how people DO think. People often don’t follow the normative standard.
• So, why do people do so badly in terms of syllogistic reasoning
• Wason Selection Task: 4 cards … following the rules and people do really badly on this task, which is similar to affirming the antecedent.
• The Florida Drinking Age problem : griggs turns that task into real world contexts, and performance is better in the case of real-world items.
• Illustrates that people are not attending to the form as much as the content. Deduction relies on the form of the argument only, not whether it is right or wrong. But, they do respond to the form of the argument when they are in real world terms.
• Perhaps based in an evolutionary preparation for certain things, or a permission schema or a cheater.
• Generally we don’t do very well with deductive reasoning.
• Inductive reasoning: quality of the evidence, number of observations, representativeness of these observations.
• These conclusions are not definitely true, but they become very likely.
• Limitations that people have in inductive reasoning tasks?
• People rely on heuristics: mental shortcut, thinking aid.
• So then there is strong focus on some parts of the evidence (such as things that can be recalled to memory easily) and ignoring others.
• Ex. People being afraid of flying after 9/11, because they could recall easily a time when people died in a plane, but it was still safer
• Representativeness: They can look at someone and ask is he more likely to be a librarian or a farmer? But they are just making their decision on their looks… relying on similarity and neglecting other pertinent information. 
• Conjunction rule: conjunction of two events is never more likely to be the case than the single events alone.
• People are not usually capable of unbiased evidence, and look for evidence of what they agreed with in the first place.
• These are especially important for decision making.
• Have many options and chose from among those options. 
• 3 major approaches: normative, descriptive, prescriptive.
• Normative approach: trying to liken the decision making to some standard or norm, or evaluate it in realation to a norm. Asking, How should they decide?
• Descriptive: how do people make decisions?
• Prescriptive: how can we help people make decisions they way thay should? To improve their decision making. 
• Satisficing: just doing things well enough. Satisfies and suffices.
• A normative approach? => an expected utility. Takes into account the value of an option and the probability of an option.
• So, you have option x y and z
• V(x) P(x), V(y) P(y), P(z) V(Z)
• You calculate based on the value and proability of an option.
• In this model, you would do it perfectly, knowing how much you need or what you want, do the computation thoroughly and see what works best.
• Claims: losses pack more punch than gains.. it effects you more quickly with less.

Brad and Lisa's Presentations:

• Brad’s Presentation: Right or Wrong? The brain’s fast response to morally objectionable statements.
• (not a lot of studies have been done with moral issues)
• Two groups of dutch respondents with opposing value systems took a realistic attitude survey while EEG was recorded. Christian or not Christian parties
• Ex. I think euthanasia is an ACCEPTABLE vs. UNACCEPTABLE choice.
• They gave these word by word.
• Cognitive Survey research assumption: people read an entire statement then decide how they feel about it.
• Psycholinguistics: evidence indicates initial valuation happens rapidly as the statement unfolds.
• They think that affect effects the meaning of words… so we base it off of our emotional intuition.
• Haidt and Greene – moral decision making – intuitions and emotions.
• Ex. Why can’t you eat your dead dog?
• In this study, they were looking for three ERP components:
• Late Positivity Potential (LLP) Amplitude caries with ratings of emotional arousal.
• Negativity Bias (LPP) Negative stimuli generate stronger responses than positive
• N400 – larger amplitude = more difficult processing.
• Hypothesis: value inconsistent statements in both groups should elicit the same ERP effects for the opposite variants of the critical statements Elevated N400 as a result of value-inconsistent words being unexpected, emotionally salient, and attention grabbing. 
• Results: 
• Control condition did seem to work. The differences were the same between the Christians and non Christians , so they were disagreeing in the same brain areas, basically.
• N400 effect may come from expecting a different word, or it may index difficulites… like a mental pause. If it doesn’t mean what you think it should mean ahead of time, it takes extra time or resources to process it.
• Lpp effect: explained by negativity bias. Strongly disagreeable statements warrant extra attention. Lpp effect may have gotten interrupted by the N400?
• Conclusion: This task involved explicit evaluation : language was used in a natural way to communicate relevant ideas. The neural signature revealed here may or may not reflect the unlocking of deep moral values, its more superficial level. Findings were obtained with men only (SGP only allowed men to participate at the time).
• These findings testify to the presence of very rapid reciprocal links between neural systems for language and for valuation. 
• Relevant for the question, can prejudice be changed?

Lisa’s Presentation: How we know

• Explanation v. evidence
• Explanation seems to be more influential than evidence.
• People tend to offer explanations rather than covariation evidence when asked to justify theories.
• We depend on explanations that make our arguments make sense to us and feel we are “right”… We feel that we know when we think we know how it works (explanations). We are more interested in how it works than how if works… even though that’s backwards!
• Context is important
• Choosing explanations over evidence seems to depend on the context and the strength of the evidence
• This preference decreases developmentally
• This disappears with education.
• Dangers of Relying on Explanation
• Limits ability to analyze alternatives
• Leads to overconfidence
• Might be false
• Juries
• They have to make and justify a claim that is “correct”
• Jurors tend to rely on an explanation of “what happened” and come to a decision that is consistent with that explanation.
• Individual variation
• Satisficing: Hearing a narrative that is plausible, so you go with that.
• Theory-evidence coordination.: looking at all the alternatives and making a decision on what is the most consistent with evidence.

• The Social Dimension of Justification
• Many vs. one: can 6-12 people make a better decision than just one?
• Does deliberation with other jurors enhance the quality of the decision?
• Had individuals make a decision before they met, and had some make a decision after. Afterwards, they demonstrated a higher level of reasoning, and use evidence that they discussed in the group. They made the same decision, but used different reasons. McCoy, Nunez, Dammeyer
• Flanton: asked jurors before and after. 38% changed their decision following the  discussion, but they didn’t reason any better than they had before.
• Weinstock found that individual differences are stable across all different kinds of trials. Decisions cannot be changed by content differences of short term social interactions. 
• Age and Knowledge
• Hypothesis: below a certain age, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between evidence and explanation as a basis for knowledge claims.
• 4-6 yr olds were shown pictures, and they mixed evidence and explanation, they were the same for them.
• 4 yr olds gave more explanation-based responses.
• 6 yr olds still made a mistake of mixing the two, but were able to distinguish between evidence and explanation.
• As we get older, do we show an appreciation for the use of evidence?
• 8th graders, college students, and graduate students.
• Very few of the participants understood how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each arguments (ex. Why do people smoke?)
• Nonepistemic: how right an argument is. 
• Epistemic: the form of the claim… sticking with this was hard.
• People immediately look at the specifics of the content.
• Absolutists, Multiplists, Evaluatisvist
• Absolutist
• Facts are objective, certain and come from and external reality
• Changes during adolescence and is replaces by multiplists
• Multiplist
• Aware of uncertain and understand how subjective knowing is
• (ex. Saying, well its just a matter of opinion… not necessarily one argument is better than the other).
• Evaluativist
• Knowing is objective
• 2 people can each have a legitimate argument
• Justification of claims becomes important
• Epistemological beliefs
• Can these beliefs explain indivdual differences in cognitive performance?
• Developmental data says yes
• Juror reasoning
• Hypothesis: Epistemological beliefs influence intellectual values which then influence if we engage in intellectual activities. These influence our intellectual performance.
• Ex, how important we think the act of learning is.
• Our understanding influences our values, which makes us choose whether or not to seek information.
• Real world reasoning
• Interpretation of any 2 cognitive variables is limited when two variables are similar
• Weinstock questioned jurors about a fictitious war
• One historian’s account had to be true
• People who believed this were more likely to believe that they had the only one right answer
• Each account was an informed interpretation 
• People who went with this one evaluated based on which had the best evidence.
• Epistemological understanding influences people’s justification of claims.
• Conclusion
• Differening conception of what it means to know something influences how people know. (can accept the facts if there are no alternatives, or accept valid claims to truth if there is a valid explanation, or we regard the claims as representations of the truth).
• Its important for people to know the strengths and weaknesses of an argument
• Individual differences such as a personality and cognition should be looks at to understand the role of disposition.
• Values and dispositions are acquired in social settings. 

Functional fixedness and problem solving

• Functional Fixedness article:
• How may human created things be represented differently in mind and brain than are other things?
• the design of something (links to the purpose or function). 
• Human created things we know what they are designed for. But we may not have that same type of info about natural things vs. a human artifact.
• based on the mechanical properties of the object.
• 6 years of age
• What do we mean by functional fixedness? We think of an object as having a particular function with exclusion to others. See it more in older children than younger. Younger children are less susceptible to fall into this rut.
• Why might we think that functional fixedness might be less in cultures with fewer complex technological devices?
• Fewer artifacts are used for more tasks, they are more accustomed to seeing a particular tool in many ways, such as a machete
• “Bricolage”: someone who works with their hands and uses devious means compared to those of the craftsman. Finding some sort of improvised solution when something breaks. Like a jack of all trades.
• When you don’t have a vast array of options, you may be more improvatory and have a greater ability to put tools to different uses… so maybe here there would be less evidence of functional fixedness. 
• So, how did they test the hypothesis that there would be less functional fixedness in a technologically sparse area?
• Studying hunter-horiculturalists of the Amazon region. Did an experiment comparing a function-demonstrated condition vs. a baseline condition.
• They would try and induce functional fixedness by having items IN a box or next to the box (so it is a container, not a building block). The spoon is in the cup as a scoop, or out of the cup. Sort of like the candle and matchbox condition. 
• Results: box condition: slower to select the box, but about equal time of solving the solution.
• In spoon condition, the function demonstration condition was slower both in selection and in total solving time.
• So it seems that these people are also prone to functional fixedness… but is it as great as it is in our own culture? We don’t know yet. 
• It seems that even these cultures are prone to seeing the objects as what they are used for, just like we are. So maybe seeing these attributes for humans is relatively universal, and not just a peculiarity in a certain culture. 
• So, the nature of concepts has implications for how we solve problems as well.

Wikibook: Problem solving

• Herbert simon characterized problem solving as a searching process. In what way is problem solving searching? What are you searching for/ among?
• You have to examine the various possible (mental) states, and then be able to find a path through intermediate states from the current state to the goal state. This is how it is searching… searching for a suitable path to the solution.
• Allen Newell and Herbert Simon – computer science ideas in cognitive psychology. This is the heart of their early contributions.
• What is the nature of this search?
• May be trial and error, or an organized search. What is the principle whereby you can proceed toward a solution in a systematic way?
• Means Ends Analysis: finding a way to analyze what means will lead to certain ends (the goal state). 
• Try to reduce the difference between initial state and goal state by creating sub-goals until a sub-goal can be reached directly. (Sub-goal is not the goal, but on the way to the goal… or a state on the way to the goal state). 
• These are domain general problem solving strategies…. Not specific to any domain, can be used when you have no idea or no advantages, just general problem solving strategies. Ex. Towers of Hanoi : moving disks from 1 peg to the other. 
• You can program a computer with an algorithm that will get you to your strategy no matter what for the towers of hanoi. – Herbert simon showed this.
• Once you become an expert on a certain problem (domain specific), then you may solve problems in a very different way. ex. chess
• Applications of analogies may be hard and people may disagree on them.
• In order to apply an anology, you have to notice similarities and apply point by point to make it work, and this is not easy kind of reasoning for people, so using analogies are not a fool-proof approach.
• Schemata: have a mental frame-work and you try and conceptualized based on those for some ideas… but also not fool-proof
• Experts vs. novice:  Experts know more about their field, their knowledge is organized differently, and they spend more time analyzing the problem. They think about the problem in a different way.
• Compared chess novices vs. experts, and Chess experts just rememeber a whole lot of Chess position. They have a huge repertoire of images of a chess board in their minds, and  they can act one those.
• Based on productions: if … then …. 
• This way, they can plug in chunks for knowledge, and can remember exactly what to do based on that image or knowledge of the situation. It becomes almost automatic after a while. 
• Herbert Simon article in moodle
• Physics problems: comparing how physics professors solve them against students. It seems that profs organize and classify the problems based on what basic principle the problem represents, and then can solve the problem much more easily. Novices rely on more superficial characteristics.
• To what extent are there general problem-solving strategies?? Hard to say. Maybe problem solving is actually quite domain specific. May not be a general characteristic… Problem solving.
• The expert examples may reflect domain specificity.

manic thoughts, bilingual, Stereotype threat

• manic people also have fast or racing though… is it the speed f our thoughts that make us happier?
• hypothesis: faster thoughts for them mean more elation and more positive mood, more powerful and creative despite if you think about sad things.
• They had four categories: happy/sad/fast/slow
• "mood induction” words/sentences showed up twice as fast vs. twice as slow, and then the participants rated how slow/fast they were thinking.
• Results: participants in fast thinking showed better moods than slow, and fast plus elation had the best moods.
• the strongest correlations between if you think you’re thinking fast and positive mood
• they had more manic thoughts/symptoms with faster thinking speeds
• even if you think depressing thoughts fast, you still are more positive.
• So, maybe it’s the speed of our thoughts that induces mania or depression
• if you had words going fast across a screen, perhaps you could induce a positive mood?

language cont. kids seem to make sign language more grammatical than adults.. kids are inherently grammatical!

Bilingual Article 

1. Does learning two languages simultaneously impede cognitive development?

-This has been a boiling issue for quite a few years. There was a period in which strong claims were made. But, there were findings beginning the 60s to indicate that that was not the case. In the end, we are coming to the fact that this is the case in some respects and not in others.

2. Are mind and brain in bilingual people different than those in people who speak one language?

-Probably yes – some general differences.

3. Metalinguistic awareness

-an awareness of language issues. Perhaps a difference is that bilingual people have more metalingustistic awareness? Maybe the answer is yes... it's not focused on in this article.

-In the end the authors argue that bilingual children that while they have more metalingustic awareness, thats not really the main advantage. They have a better ability to focus on grammar when sentences get confusing. They are able to ignore meaning and focus on grammar. There is an attentional advantage in selectivity and inhibition. This isn't really a language thing, but an attentional thing – components of executive functioning!

4. Executive Function and Bilingualism

-Children gradually master the ability to control attention, inhibit distraction, monitor sets of stimuli, expand working memory, and shift between tasks (executive function) that decline in older age.

*Task: Dimensional Change Card Sort Task: sort cards and some dimension is relevant (color or shape) and then you have to shift to a different dimensional.

-Results show that bilingual children do a better job of shifting dimensions.

*Task: Interpretation of an Ambiguous Feature

-Results show that bilingual children did a better job of shifting executive control processes.

5. Is this just in kids or in adults too?

-parallel results to the kids' study – with *Stroop Task and *flanker task (distraction task)

-greater ability to ignore distractors and shift views from one to another

*Simon Effect: you have compatible and incompatible responses compared

-Results show that differences between bilingual and monolingual individuals widen with age. There is a protective effect as people get older. (especially pronounced in older adults).

6. How do vocabularies differ for mono- and bi-lingual children?

-Bilingual children have smaller vocabularies.

7. Is there evidence for other deficits in bilingual children?

-lower scores of verbal fluency task, experience more tip-of-the-tongue states, and demonstrate more interference in lexical decision.

8. Is it helpful or is it not?

-Proactive Interferences: old learning gets in the way of new learning. Avoiding proactive interference is an executive control issue – can you take what you're attending to and separate it from you what attended to?

-When you're given lots of lists to remember, the interference gets worse and worse

-What about in bilinguals? It is less problematic for bilinguals. They are less affected by proactive interference.

9. Dementia

-Monolingual people acquire dementia 4 years earlier than monolingual persons.

-Implications for practical consequences.

• Cognitive processing in blilinuguals:
• people who are bilingual do better in tasks that involve shifting rules
• bilingualism helps protect against dementia
• it requires a high level of executive control and the tasks require you to inhibit one approach and enhance another
• it seems there is a constant control of the two, so perhaps the high executive control helps you to use this to your benefit in other areas of cognition

Wikibook: Problem solving From an Evolutionary perspective

• what is a problem?
• a situation that differs from the desired goal. Some problems we are naturally adapted to solve, but other more abstrac ones we may not encounter from day to day.
• not all species solve such abstract problems like humans do.
• well defined vs. ill defined problems:
• well defined has a finite set of rules, has a clearly defined state, and it has a clear goal state.
• ill defined: the problem can’t be properly formalized, and this may be the bulk of our everyday experiences.
• it involves creativity and defining the goal~
• Gestalt approach: tried to examine problem solving in a structured way. They want to know, how are you structuring things in the brain?
• Problem representations are models of the situation as experienced by the agent. Analyze it and split it into separate components.
• Wertheimer: restructuring – altering the way you process the info hoping that another way will be fruitful.
• Insight: productive thinking – suddenness component where all of the sudden you see the path to the solution.
• but sometimes a piece by piece step is more needed than one big ah-ha.
• sometimes we get stuck in a mental rut 
• ex. matches candles and tacks to corkboard (if they see the matches as a container, its hard for them to solve it).
• functional fixation is like a mental set we get stuck in.
• ex. water jar problem. 

Stereotype threat and financial decisions:

• decision making is shaped by emotion an intuition… an affect (heuristic) or deliberative processing 
• people tend to use more affect/intuition in decision making.
• Hypothesis: stereotype threat may effect decision making
• study 1 whether stereotype threat increases loss-aversion behavior in women.
• they were told in the stereotype threat condition that they would be measuring their ability
• coin toss lottery: indicate gender or not
• study 2 effect of risk aversiontasks varied in riskiness – risk aversion - # of trials they chose low-risk options.
• used a Stroop task to measure ego depletion
• ego depletion may be depletion of self control resources.
• Results: 
• women were more loss-averse than men in stereotype relevant conditions.
• stereotype threat increased risk aversion in women.
• in the stereotype condition, men were more willing to take risks.
• females showed more ego depletion in stereotype threat conditions.
• conclusion: we need to make sure stereotype threats are not present so people can make the best decision
• they are clear interaction effects in all 3 experiments. 

Ashley's Computational Models / Words as a window to thought: Object REpresentation

• we must specify all parts of the model to compare and falsify
• advantages: these models not have working memory limitation like our minds, and they can help to compute complex things
• a model supposedly reveals true or real behavior
• they ensure reproducibility in scientific thinking
• as new models are developed for more complex things, we need to try and find the simplest model that displays the data accurately
• Major reasons to uses these models:
• very repeatable
• it makes reasoning from different scientists consistent
• people may make mistakes in their reasoning, but this helps eliminate that... but they can be confusing. (con)

wikibook: worf: language changes our perception of reality

Object Representation:

• Comparing english to other languages, do these differences lead to different perceptions of objects?
• linguistic determinism? (grammatical differences)
• English has both count nouns (ex. a cat, two cats), and mass nouns (mud, not one mud or two mud)
• Madarian and japanese have only mass nouns
• So, does this change their perception of those objects?
• the authors say, maybe not.
• Words as windows - an alternative to whorf theory.
• words reveal the structure of thought, but don't modify it.
• so, neither is the complete determinate of the other. 
• Perhaps thoughts are not just represented in language, it can be represented separately from the words
• ex. I know what I want to say, but I can't find the words
• How should english speakers and Japanese speakers treat novel things (like the blicket test)?
• english speakers are more likely to treat novel things as objects (countable things) than just more "stuff"
• so, japanese children thought it was more of a substance
• But the authors argue that the japanese and english children have different information, there are 2 possibilities for English children and only one for japanese children
• count nouns are more common in english, so they are biased toward a count non, but that bias does not exist for the japanese children... so they are reasoning from different information.
• They found a way to make both of them (substance and shape) equally important, and under those conditions, things evened up between the two.
• Ratings experiment (whether they were more object like or more substance like) showed no difference either
• So, testing bilinguals: its not so much based in a different perception, but a different way of expressing.
• Can mass nouns ever be for countable individuals?
• mass nouns such as jewelry, furniture, etc. are mass nouns??? Or count nouns?? Should not refer to countable individuals just because they have no count syntax. 
• Quantity judgement task
• count noun: determined by number (ex. cups)
• mass nouns: determined by determined by volume (ex. ketchup)
• this implies that the syntax is not the issue thats at the core...
• weird nouns like string, or strings? does both mass and count... 
• but just because Japanese children don't have mass AND count nouns, doesn't mean they are perceiving things differently.

 Do english speakers rate likelihood to refer to object

-Results show no difference between english and japanese speakers.

-They are perceiving shape to the same degree. They are perceiving shape in a similar manner.

11. Do english and japanese speakers make different judgments?

-English and Japanese speakers are equally likely to perceive objects as substance. English speakers are often affected by syntax and Japanese speakers are about right in the middle (in the degree to which they judge something as a shape as opposed to just substance).

-Language doesn't seem to have much bearing on your judgments (as opposed to the Whorfian claim – this claim does not seem to be supported because of it's degree).

12. Development – From a Whorfian perspective one might argue that learning syntax is a crucial thing that shapes your understanding which would make you think that maybe the learning of your syntax of language comes first and then your understanding of the world falls into place to fall in line with this syntax. So, do children learn meaning (semantics) first or syntax first?

-Manual Search Task: child watched the exp. Put balls in the box, then the child is allowed to remove a ball. At the end, if the exp. Removes balls – to what extent does the child notice that and continue to search?

-For 12 month olds: if you have three balls only, then they keep searching for the missing balls that the exp. Took. If you have four or more balls – they don't do it anymore. There is some fundamental break between three and four years old.

-For 22 month olds: they begin to search for the ball – about the same age when they begin producing plural nouns. In fact, infants were more likely to distinguish singular and plural sets if they produced plural nouns in their speech. The language milestone and performance milestone are come to at the same time.

-Since count nouns have this syntactical feature – that their ability to do this would be driven by language. (Fits with Whorfian claim). This also applies to other children – both in japanese and mandarin languages. The syntactical features is not a crucial factor driving understanding of the world.

13. Claims

-This is not a claim that language has no influence on thoughts. Our perception of reality seems to be more driven by reality rather than by language. (Thank goodness...)

Article: Understanding sentences in context

• model: semantics first... then syntax, and then you understand. But its not so simple. 
• some words have more than one meaning, and the context of the sentences change the meaning of a sentence... and the background information you know about the author or the kind of writing.. the whole context effect the meaning!
• So, the major question is: when and how does all this get processed and put together?
• why is it advantageous to use ERP to study this?
• language processing happens quickly, so you need a technique that can keep up. ERP is very good for WHEN. its a speed issue.
• what ERP component reflects a surprise about meaning (semantics)?
• n400 - negative response at 400 ms after the word.
• so maybe 400 ms. is what it takes for us to recognize the meaning of a word.. or 150-200 ms?
• But syntax may also be processed by then.
• even just saying the first syllable of a word brings about the N400.
• but the N400 is not just an anomoly detection...
• ex. sack and promote. diagram. participants were not expecting to promote someone who did something wrong, but 'sack' would make better sense. 
• It turns out that the N400 was still involed in milder surprises... its the prior information that makes it a surprise.. its all about context.
• What determines the n400 strength?
• how things fit for what is being talked about right now.
• How soon does info about the speaker have an effect?
• about the same... 200-400 ms. Ex. a small child's voice saying "I like olives". We draw on stereotypes about children and likes and dislikes. Even this context can invoke the same response.
• we take those into account in less than  400 ms.. very early.
• " the linguistic brain seems more "messy" and opportunistic, taking any partial cue that seems to bear an interpretation into account as such an item.
• When does a listener show evidence/knowledge of ambiguity?
• ex. the lecturer..
• in the frontal area, the Nref effect: 300-400 ms. (in a different part of the brain than the N400). Here there is greater negativity when we have ambiguity vs. certainty.
• people can rapidly take into account previous context to reduce ambiguity.
• How can ambiguity about the identity of the person lead to syntactical surprises?
• ex. ambiguity about which lecturer... the lecturer that commited plagarism.. the lecturerer that got fired.
• This surprise brings out a p600 effect
• Garden path sentences in syntax first: wikibook
• ex.  because he always jogs a mile seems a short distance.
• a "rule" is ambiguous in a way, its deceiving
• you momentarily think there was a syntactic error, so it brings about a p600 effect.
• we think there are errors when there aren't any
• ex. david prsed linda because he => we think we are going to get more information about Linda, no david. This also brings about the P600 effect.
• So, syntactic stuff is also contextually based and is processed very rapidly.
• This suggests that we are dealing with multiple levels of linguistic structure simultaneously... not just syntax first or semantics first. Doing a lot really fast.
• So, how are we doing things so quickly?
• we anticipate and guess ahead of time. 
• sometimes that may lead us to errors that slow us down, but overall, our guesses are confirmed.
• ex. family safe behind a painting: expected vs. a bookcase...
• it occurs quicky, in these two instances we get different responses.
• "an oportunistic proactive brain at work"
• taking cues, not following rules, but making predictions.... this gives us speed.
• The author says we need tailed computational models to continue studying this.

Language

• What is language and what are the subtopics?
• system of communication through which we code our information
• Psychologists focus on language as seen as a cognitive ability of humans... closely linked with thinking.
• We are so linguistic its hard to separate language from thinking.
• Subcategories:
• acquisition
• production (speech)
• and comprehension
• History:
• B.F. skinner and operant conditions... then Chomsky combated the behavioristic view saying that children had novel utterances, so language was not just reinforced learning. It is univeral and has common features, the structures are similar in different languages, and so Chomsky says we are genetically programmed (language is inherent)
• Main topics:
• acquisition
• speech production (both mental and mental)
• comprehension
• young children loose ability for some sound distinctions and gain skills in others.
• Levels in which you can study language:
• phonology(sounds)
• morphology (words)
• syntax (sentence structure)
• semantics (meanings)
• pragmatics (use_
• We focus mostly on syntax, semantics, and pragmatics)
• Physical uses of languages:
• used socially - exchange ideas, knowledge, feelings, etc.
• Is human language a unique a specialized ability or just a general communication ability in other creatures? How unique is it?
• hard to know how specialized other creatures communication is, we have to infer from its effects.
• Major features of human language that may show uniqueness:
• semanticity: symbols have particular meanings, no necessary regular relationship between the symbols and the things they express.. its arbitrary
• creativity: combinational: small sets of basic concepts and combine them in many many (rule-governed) ways.
• ex. 26 letters (sounds) => words, => sentences => paragraphs... many possibilities.
• people can say brand new things, not just parroting things back they've heard before. Its not clear that animals can do this.
• structure dependency: syntax. We don't just string words together, we do it in a particular way - a lot of our knowledge of language is implicit or procedural in how the words go together even if we don't 'know' the rules of grammar, they just are grammatical naturally.
• ex. the dog bites the cat vs. the cat bites the dog.
• Language is not the only way humans communicate:
• facial expressions, gestures, postures, prosody (convey emotion), but these can also become the main form of communication for people who are blind or dear, etc. but those are true languages.
• ex. sign language. 
• These elements are shared with animals, but they seem to lack syntax.
• Could there be inter species communication?
• maybe, but no where near what we have with other people.
• semantics and syntax: you can create sentences that have these errors in them and measure brain responses.
• ex. the pizza was too hot to cry.
• this evokes an N400 - semantical incorrectness response. in the parietal and central regions.
• ex. syntax: early left anterior negativity errors (not really reliable), or p600 (like the cats won't eating).

Comprehension: Wikibook

• parsing: how you break a sentence into parts; distinguishing one word from another.
• syntax first approach: concentrates on the role of syntax when parsing a sentence (ex. lewis carroll poem)

Mental Rotations in Children/Infants

• Spatial Ability: think about 3D things and draw conclusions.
• Men have better spatial ability, shown as young as 4 years old, but not yet in infants.
• Mental rotation is effected by gender differences quite a bit.
• A 4 month old can track, but mental rotation needs to deal with 3D objects, not 2D.
• They wanted to know, if the babies would habitualize the rotated object, that is they wouldn't see it as novel.
• Experiment recorded eye fixations and durations and saw either left or right parts of a mirrored object.
• In the habituation trials, the objects rotated. In the Test object, they switched between left and right.
• Novel object (mirrored image) - males looked at it longer - significant difference.
• Females saw them the same, females did not recognize familiar objects, males did.
• Maybe due to hormones (testosterone), or in the hemispheric differences.
• They also showed that 3-4 month old infants would have differences showing preference for the mirrored objet shows you have done the mental representation-rotation.
• familiarized trials, then preference trials.
• Males did better, even at 3-4 months.
• Social experience/influences may play a big role here.

Cognitive and Neural Contributions to Understanding the Conceptual System

Barsalou article:

• conceptual system: extensive system distributed throughout the brain, and represents knowledge about all aspects of experiences.
• What is the role of attention in these categorizations?
• It allows us to focus on distinctive elements that separate categories (ex. spatial, physical, social).
• The conceptual system (whole of knowledge representation) is used for basically anything we want to think about or do mentally. There is no such thing as a knowledge-free cognitive process... top down knowledge.
• What's semantic memory?
• facts. Its amodel, that is, its not linked to episodic memory or anything else... specifically not particular senses.
• This is a big debate between cognitive science and neuroscience. Barsalou questions this idea in the article. If we don't have vision, then visual memory decreases, so perhaps semantic memory is liked to vision in some way.
• Conceptual system: an entire system of knowledge that includes concepts, categories, and how they're linked together.
• It is used for everything that we do with our minds.
• There is no such thing as a knowledge free action.
• Semantic memory is amodal, meaning it is not based on vision or hearing, etc.  Semantic memory is another name for the conceptual system.
• Cognitive revolution came about around 1970, breaking out of behaviorism... so they concluded it was amodal.
• How does neuroscience view differ from cognitive?
• Its grounded in modal cortexes, so, knowledge is perhaps based in vision, or auditory, not separate areas that are abstracted from the senses. Perhaps some knowledge is based in the areas that process the senses.
• What happens when those areas are damages?
• Lesions to visual areas produce deficits in categories that rely heavily on visual processing (ex. animals).
• In imagery studies, the people imagining still have areas activated like they were seeing something.
• the knowledge is somewhat stored in the areas that do the processing in the same way... otherwise you wouldn't know if you were perceiving or imagining.
• Cognitive science and neuroscience are disagreeing: Perhaps cognitive students need to be open to the modal processing areas bringing about the knowledge.
• Neural network theory: entities that hold knowledge may have some of the same properties as neurons... which may begin to bring about common ground between the cognitive and the neuro perspective. 
• Impact on grounded theories: the brain attempts to redefine the experience when remembering - knowledge: simulating the way in which we learned it at first... same mental state.

Environment and Goals Jointly Direct Category Acquisition / Wikibook - Semantic Networks

Love Article

• Why and how do people categorize?
• why- to develop a schema that corresponds well to their real life. We need that so we aren't routinely mislead.
• how- from either exemplars or prototypes (maybe both? we're unsure)
• What issue is important but ignored by prototype and exemplar?
• The author argues that its not so clear, but we have to take into account flexibility of structures as well as people's goals. Instead we should use clusters.
• clusters: bundles of experiences that group together - a more flexible way of representing info.
• Encompass both prototypes and exemplars in that a category represented by one cluster is a prototype and one category with many clusters is an exemplar.
• exemplar prototype continuum (a spectrum)
• Knowledge gets more complex the more we learn, and this model follows that.
• The author says the world comes in natural chunks, so it makes sense that we would make clusters out of those things that naturally go together
• from this perspective, clustering is driven by the environment, but it may also be influenced by goals. -ex. you may look at a cow differently if you are a vet or a butcher.

Wikibook - Semantic Networks

• A node represents a concept, also stores various characteristics of that concept.
• a link represents what ties different concepts together.
• They argue that it is stored heirachically in nodes.
• demonstrated that the time it takes to respond correlates with the distances in the networks.
• Collins and quillian were key in the move to semantic networks.
• Semantic network: evidence that things are stored by specificity. Specifics are stored, and the rest of the process is inferred, (but its not always this way).
• ex. you can say very quickly that a sports car is fast and needs fuel.
• Spreading activation: adjacent concepts are activated, and then are more easily retrieved fro memory, they are joined. Thinking of one thing makes you think of another.
• This was proved with the lexical decision task - is this a word or isnt it?
• Typicality effect: reaction times are faster for more typical members of a category
• Connectionistic Approach (vs. semantic approach, saying a node is not just one concept): A concept is distributed across other networks - Multiple elements working together.
• Neural network:
• input layer - sensory perception/from environment
• hidden layer- inter-neurons between the two
• output layer- what we do in response to those things
• Connectivist approach may be more likely as they are more complex networks, not just a single model.
• Neural networks work well in practice
• Parallel distributed processing- processing takes place in parallel lines, output is distributed across many units (which leads to neural networks), not a single node in a network.
• so, if you destroy one unit, the whole thing won't break down.
• Computational Knowledge Representation
• knowledge is full of useful information, rather than as supporting a model of cognitive activity. 
• it doesn't come before the actual cognitive or neural processes, but it is something we draw on during those.
• Applications of knowledge Representation: computational knowledge representation provides tools to make knowledge accessible.

Love article continued:

• He uses a neural network approach to understand concepts: SUSTAIN model about categorization
• Clusters: like the hidden layer (represented by circles on diagram) formed mental averages... refine themselves.
• 2 kinds of learning: supervised and unsupervised.
• new clusters are created when old clusters fail for goals (supervised)
• SUSTAI N changes when its surprised by experiences, and creates new clusters.
• Inference: related to concepts - you know that something is in a category but you don't know a lot about it... but you can infer. A missing factor inferred from others.
• classification categorization - focuses on information that distinguishes categories.
• the SUSTAIN model, he claims, can handle both types of learning.
• he found inference learning leads them to more complete knowledge - best for classroom learning.
• Two groups with different goals (like fisherman) and can draw different inferences from the same information - the SUSTAIN model can account for differences in goals, like this.
• SUSTAIN is good for the relationship between clusters and rules: clusters with selective attention are mimicking rules/ maybe they then are rules.
• SUSTAIN takes into account rules.
• conclusion: categorization - searching for regularities in the world (taking into account what's in the environment (and differing goals). It starts simple, then experience leads to added clusters as experiences and surprises are encountered.

Neural Markers of Relicious Construction

• Religion pros: have better mental health, physical health, lower mortality rates
• Religion cons: terrorist attacks, wars, conviction
• Religious conviction provides relief from uncertainty - it reduces anxiety, but then we ignore the inconsistencies.
• A system that responds to out comes different than what we expected is in the anterior cingulate cortex, an "alarm" is activated which produces anxiety
• Religion as xanax:
• we have ideals, it reduces our experience of error, and we can become more extreme in our convictions
• religion is too structured and rigid that any inconsistencies are restructured to fit their existing beliefs.
• Religious conviction reduces uncertainty because it minimized the ACC response to error, like an anti-anxiety pill.
• Study 1: Religious Zeals
• Assess people's religious conviction
• They used the Stroop.
• People with religious zeal had less ACC reaction to an error, and responded more accurate. They sacrificed speed for accuracy.
• Study 2: Belief in God
• greater belief in God was correlated with less ACC activation too, when all other factors were controlled for. 
• So, people who believe in God overall have neural signs of lower anxiety.
• Causes? Religion lowers ACC arousal, not vise versa.
• Maybe not specific to religion, probably strong convictions of anything.
• Makes us prone to a mental set, though.

Wikibook - Knowledge Representation

• What is knowledge? Why is it so important to us?
• mental representations of the world, a structured collection of information that can be acquired through learning , perception of reasoning.
• ex. "Watson"the computer playing jeopardy, and beating others... its a computer manipulation of knowledge representation.
• It is so important because it is essential to so many other things we do with our minds.
• Why are categories or concepts so important to knowledge?
• Saving time and effort so we don't have to remember every detail of everything - efficiently and save space.
• Category: a group of something that are labeled with similar properties of and other general information.
• Perhaps the categories and concepts are important for survival, too, so we can know dangerous from not dangerous, and we don't have to dawdle. 
• Concepts can't always be so rigidly defined, because real concepts tend to overlap - hard to figure out, what are the core of the essential features?
• Definitions don't work very well for real concepts (ex. cars)
• This brings about the idea of family resemblance: members of a category resemble each other in several ways.
• Prototype Approach: a kind of mental average
• typicality effect: high-prototypical members are faster recognized as a member of a category, ex. sparrow is more prototypical of a bird than a penguin.
• Exemplar Approach: judging by comparison to examples you have in your mind... can also explain the typciality effect.
• Heirarchical organization of categories.:
• Supordinate level: ex. animal (decrease of information)
• Basic level: ex. dog
• Most common and preferred.
• Subordinate level: ex. Retriever (low gain of information)
• most expert.
• Maybe your base level is higher if you're an expert.

A Basic-Systems Approach to Autobiographical Memory

• What are autobiographical memories made of?
• spatial, temporal, emotional elements, but most importantly, they have personal significance.
• The basic systems are: components from senses, spatial system, narrative system, explicit memory system (which coordinates and binds information from the other systems, like explicit memory with Schacter).
• What does this perspective tell us about the self?
• The self is not a single entity, but parts linked together.
• So, what seems to be uniquely you, actually depends on what people in your culture emphasize.
• 2 main properties of autobiographical memory?
• sense of recollection
• belief that memories are accurate
• Measured by ratings on scales of vividness of visual imagery, and auditory imagery, and spatial context.
• What may be the basis of a person's sense of recollection?
• how vivid the imagery was - more = stronger sense of recollection (correlation)
• So these are somewhat separable.
• What about the belief that the memory is accurate?
• (somewhat visual), clarity of spatial context and narrative coherence (correlation)
• People with amnesia - can have loss of autobiographical memory, because the elements of the memory can't be bound together and retrieved later (like Schacter imaging studies of future and past).
• So, if you damage visual memory, is autobiographical memory damaged? Yes!
• so, visual components are key for autobiographical memory. 
• But, an interesting catch is that the old memories are damages, but the people studied could still make new autobiographical memories! It may be that visual is preferred, but it is possible to make new memories with other senses.
• But auditory loss or language loss doesn't effect the memories as much.
• Psychopathology- memories of worry and social phobia are rated lower on recollection.
• One major claim - PTSD memories are unorganized, but this article finds that that is not the case, there is no difference compared to others.
• The more a person makes the trauma a central part of who they are, the more PTSD they will show.
• To test this, he did a experiment where people take pictures of something, and then are shown pictures of something, and asked whether or not the picture they took that one.
• There seem to be certain areas that are activated more for biographical information.

Sierra's presentation and Schater's Seminar

Sierra's Presentation:
Article One:

• We infer rather than perceive the moment we decide to act.
• We have a neurological prep before and action - conscious will is not an instigator of choice.
• 'W' is the time participants select on the basis of available cues.
• Eagleman - the critical cue for judgement of intention is perception of the response.
• Experiment one: Dot going around the clock, participant was supposed to report the number when they made the choice to press the button.
• W is probably based on the time of response (rather than motor response or prior brain events)
• Experiment 2: wanted to make sure experiment one wasn't specific to auditory cues, and it wasn't.
• Intention causing actions are backwards according to this, its actually actions that cause intentions.
• Movements of decision come from perceived movements of action.

Article two:

• attending to a certain thing increases oxygen to that level - attentional spotlight
• 2 conditions attending to the action movements, or attending to the urge to move.
• greater activation during the first condition in areas like:
• PreSMA
• Dorsal Prefrontal cortex (intention to move?)
• IPS - interparietal sulcus
• Patients with parietal lesions - no distinction between the I and the M condition. 
• There are separate brain areas between attending to intention and movement.
• We don't think about thinking a thought, we may not be the authors of our own thoughts.

Schater's Webinar and Slideshow

• Bartlett (during behaviorism) quotation:  memory as a constructive process, i.e. linking bits and pieces of info from different sources. Memory is not reproduction, but construction.
• Why would memory be constructive, are there advantages?
• economy of storage - we don't need to know every detail, but the gist. The bad side of that is that it can lead to memory errors.
• Episodic memory: the ability to recollect our experiences. But episodic memory is also important for the future as well as the past, because we imagine the future (constructive)
• amnesic patients - medial temporal lobe damage
• Can't make new lasting memories, but also have trouble imagining their personal futures.
• Patient KC could not remember his past - he had hippocampal damage, but also couldn't think of what he'd do tomorrow.
• There is a correlation between remembering the past and imagining the future.
• This is supported by individual differences studies
• also be remembering and imagining studies - study for younger and older people, evidence of this link.
• The parts that are involved are the medial temporal love - hippocampus, frontal lobe, parietal lobes too, - implicated in both past and future tasks.
• Hypothesis: imagining and remembering both use the same information.
• A flexible recombination of details from past events
• but that makes us more likely to make errors, but also imagine the future.
• The major questions :  How does hippocampus contribute? How do we interpret the correlation between imagining and remembering?
• They ask participants both about imagining and remembering, but they are really in the same brain areas when compared to a control group.
• but levels may vary - stronger for future or stronger for memory.
• Hippocampus (a particular part) engages more during imagining the future than remembering the past.
• So, they are trying to test this experimentally - recombination
• For more experimental control, first they had participants generate a memory pool.
• Experimenters mix these memories up, and have you imagine the future or imagine something in the past (vs. a control)
• they want to know if its critical for future or just imagining in general.
• All the core networks come online, but the front part of of the hippocampus was still most closely tied to imagining than remembering.
• Age-related changes in the past and future events (article in moodle)
• Recalling events - younger people have more internal and less external memories, and its the same when they are imagining.
• Still, younger people have more internal details, and old have more external details for imagining and recalling.

Sequence Memory in Music

• Why study music for sequence memory?
• Untrained people seem to be able to remember long sequences of rhythm, pitch, movements, and timing of notes.
• Music is unique in the role of rhythm, so its a good testing ground.
• How are rhythm, pitch, and movements represented in the mind?
• They are represented as both sequences of action and sequences of sound.
• It helps if they have similar movements and similar pitches
• they each have independent effects on the results, so both representations help, that is it is doubly easier (mostly transfer studies - positive).
• Positive transfer - makes the 2nd task easier
• How are they different in beginners vs. experts?
• novice - dependent on motor skills - movements changes effected them the most.
• expert- they depended more on the notes.
• How is rhythmic sequence different from motor sequence?
• Rhythmic sequence: patterning of key pressed sequenced time
• Motor: sequence of finger movements.
• Are these two truly the same?
• Both are being remembered separately. They contribute independently.
• 3 sort of different representations in the mind are movements, pitch, and rhythm.
• timing is just a different ways to think about it.
• So, is all of this imagery in a way?
• People have differences.
• Pianists scored high on imagery tests. So, does imagery ability effect artists performance? Yes. Getting both types of feedback helps the most, but motor didn't matter, auditory did. -Supposed to imagine what they were plating, and it did matter.
• Auditory imagery was significant, not motor
• What information about memory for music comes from pitch ordering skills?
• You have to think ahead, so 3-4 pitches can be remembered in a sequence.
• Older people make mistakes that are farther away.
• Working memory supports musical imagining.
• Errors are not just random.
• the slower the tempo you get a broader range of errors and vise versa.
• errors become more and more about anticipation.
• Older pianists did better than younger, and also showed evidence of a greater working memory capacity that allows them to perform better in sequential memory tasks.
• Kinds of errors made with more experience are anticipatory errors.
• can get evidence of anticipatory movements from finger positions.

Imagery, Food Cravings

Wikibook : Imagery

·      People have been talking about imagery for a long time.

o   Aristotle, Wundt, Watson

·      Is imagery necessary to thought? Do you have to be able to imagine to think?

o   Aristotle said “God is impossible without and image”

o   Wundt said, “imagery, sensations, and feeling are the base of consciousness”

o   Watson said, “there is no visible evidence of imagery, so it doesn’t matter).

·      More recent imagery debate:

o   Pylysyiyn: says imagery is represented in the mind as linked with propositions.

§  Any given sentence can be broken down into a true or false proposition ( a network with links)

§  Imagery is an epiphenomena (it has no causal role, not part of the essential basics of thought.

·      Like the light on a dvd player, it shows up, but it is more of an indicator or side effect ot he main function.

·      Task: asked to generate associates to words. More likely to generate one that was within a proposition rather than between propositions.

·      Even if a word is spatially or temporally closer, it is still more likel if it is in the proposition.

·      Some sort of spatial representation in the mind and brain.

·      “The advantage of a coordinate representation is that tit is directly analogous to the structure of the real space”

o   ex. An image representation of a dog vs. the word dog (part of the image that correspond to a particular part of the dog, but “D” or “”O” doesn’t correspond. Point to point correspondence between image and representation. Words are relatively arbitrary for the things they represent ((except maybe words like “Buzz”)))

·      Topographic maps apply here – such as a spatial map on the occipital cortex in vision.

·      Keeping spatial information preserved seems pretty important/

o   So maybe when you imagine something, this same principle is activated.

·      Our perceptions can come into the brain a lot of ways. Our representations may come from a lot of different things.

o   Such as language, photographs, movies, etc.

o   Some information stands for other information (such as maps, photos, but some info is just literal.

·      The author here argues that part of the real world may also be symbolic, such as spirals in churches representing something else.

·      Mental representations interact with other parts of memory.

·      Big question: what these images are and how they may function?

o   Perky Experiment: used a back projected image – the participant described what was on the screen without realizing it.

·      What happens when people are asked to scan an image in their mind?

o   Things that are spaced more widely on a picture, it takes them longer to can it (an analogy)

·      In blind people, it seems to work the same (except its spatial, not visual).

·      Mental rotation tasks: 2-stimuli say are they the same shape of different?

o   It takes longer the father they have to rotate – its like they are doing mentally to the shape what you would do physically.

·      Do they use these mental spatial representations for only touch and vision?

o   No, when you read a book or hear words, they get translated into mental images too.

·      Size/distance relationship in representation of objects (up close vs. far away = larger vs. smaller = more detail vs. less detail.)

·      Do image representations work this same way?

o   Yes, it seems so.

·      Overall, mental representations are linked closely with the things the represent, and perceptions too. The brain processes overlap a lot.

o   They don’t overlap entirely though, within vs. external difference

·      Motor imagery – can imagine doing things which activates motor areas.

o   Perhaps this activates mirror neurons too?

Kemps Article : Food Cravings.

·      Food cravings: specific food, not just for nutritional value

o   Motivation based: desire or urge-intense for a food.

o   Not necessarily a psych disorder, but it could indicate one.

o   Mental imaging of the food seems to be a key component of craving.

·      Does imagining something make you crave it?

o   Yes, strength of craving and strength of image are linked.

·      Dual tasks methods – craving can be like a cognitive task, so pairing it with another cognitive task à limited capacity working memory – the tasks are harder when you do 2 at once, and craving counts as one of them.

·      Food cravings consume limited cognitive resources.

·      Evidence for this – induced cravings in people and surprise word recall or math problems and a reaction time.

• Strategy for reducing food cravings: occupy your mind with other things so your working memory is full.
• This article does show evidence that craving occupies working memory, so it reducing our abilities.
• A visual imagery or olfactory task will reduce cravings, but an auditory task won't really help. Maybe because visual and olfactory are the s=ways in which we experience food in the first place.
• These teactics may also help reduce cigarette cravings, but they don't work very well in everyday life, it needs to be more readily applied to everyday settings.
• maybe eventually the randomized dots screen could be an app on a phone, but dynamic visual noise seems to work... these flashing white and black dots.
• maybe this is perceptual load, not cognitive load? perhaps imagery and perception are very closely linked.