Change Blindness, Lab notes

Change Blindness:

• What is change blindness?
• where people can't detect exactly what is changing (in a picture or in real life, etc).
• When they don't see the signal change happening, its hard for them to detect it.
• 1950 began the study of change blindness, but now the studies are more ecologically valid (they have implications for real life).
• What is a socode?
• A category of eye movements
• the period when your eyes are moving from one scene to another - rapid darting movements where your mind has to complete the idea.
• Socodic Suppression: during socode, visual perception may be shut off or maybe it blurs so we can't see what's happening. This may be when we have change blindness.
• Flicker Test: first there is a picture, then a blank screen, then another picture. It flickers back and forth until the person can detect the change. 
• What are the conditions where we seem to fail to detect change?
• if you mess up the signal in the change
• if there are other elements for visual signals that distract from the change
• if a change occurs very gradually
• if you aren't expecting a change in that moment
• Major previous findings:
• attention is diverted which is change blindness.
• change blindness is less likely if the change is closely tied to the meaning of the scene.
• It may be necessary for you to have attention to the stimuli to be able to detect the change but...
• attention may not be sufficient for you to detect the change. Detecting it requires them to encode the information before and after the change, and then to be able to compare the two.
• What is it that will guarantee attention? What will make us attend to the change?
• we aren't really sure, but there may be two things:
• visual distinctiveness (external): things in the scene that grab out attention.
• expectations (internal): if you expect a change.
• Do experts do better at change blindness?
• yes, especially for semantically meaningful stimuli, but perhaps experts would be worse in things they aren't experts in? We don't know.
• Does change blindness mean that there is very little info represented in our minds?
• not necessarily, just that we need to represent the scene before and the scene after to compare them.
• maybe we have representations, but we don't think to compare them (ex. man reading map and person being switched in between)
• In addition, observers sucessfully recognize an object, even if they don't notice the change. They attended to it without locating the change.
• Can you detect changes and not know it?
• Mindsight- sensing a change without actually seeing it.
• But we aren't quite sure if this is right.
• Change blindness blindness: we think we are better at detecting changes than we are... this is a failure of metacognition.
• implications : driving while talking on a cell phone, etc. Activities where we have little conscious awareness.

Lab Notes:

• Interaction effects: when one variable differs at different levels of the other variable (ex. the effects of dosage is different for males or females, that is, the dosage effects males and females differently at different levels).
• main effects: overall influence of an I.V.
• effects of one IV averaged across the levels of the others.
• ANOVA - really is trying to break up the variable into pieces and analyzing the pieces.
• doing this assumes that the variances of each condition is about the same.
• Can check this with something like a boxplot display
• for our data, we have a strong p-value, but our variance for each condition may not be equal. 
• Ceiling or floor effects: a restraint on the upper limit (ceiling) or lower limit (floor) that the value of a dependent variable can take.
• Besides just a within subjects or just a between subjects approach, you can also have a mixed design.
• For example, depressed people at 3 different times (within subjects variable) in 2 different treatment groups (between subjects variable).
• This example is a 3x2 mixed design

Sensation and Perception / Signals

Sensation and Perception Book

• Do our sensations/senses convey reality?
• most of the time,  but what about tricks or illusions?
• ex. matching lines, constantly descending tones
• So, we cant always sense exactly what's going on.
• Strictly speaking, we'll have to go with no, our perceptions do not always convey reality. 
• People often contrive physical and psychological responses to stimuli (i.e. optical illusions (or visual illusions may be more appropriate.
• But our senses serve us very well, they don't often mislead us
• there should be an important distinction between the physics and psychological of a stimuli.
• What evidence is there that perception is not just physical? 
• Perception involves cognition and psychological context (ex. of 13 or a B? And old lady or a young woman?)
• top -down perception - things from "high" in our mind that influence our context, as well as things that come from "low" in our minds (like our perceptions).

ANOVA clip:

• maybe the parthenon was built to trick the eye into thinking it was perfect. They compensated for our natural visual distortion to make it more perceptually perfect.
• Gestalt Psychology- principles that organized perceptual wholes.
• law of proximity
• law of similarity
• law of closure
• continuation
• common fate
• Helmholtz: "Contructivists theory" - we add information to what is provided in the stimulus to draw inferences with our conscious knowledge. "unconscious inferences" - way of processing sensory information.
• Bev Dottle's art is a good example (with the horses and mountains, etc). 
• Phiphenomena: 2 red dots flashing - we tend to see movement, even though there is none. This is an example of our perception tricking us.
• Method of limits
• methods of constant stimuli
• methods of adjustment
• discrimination threshold
• all of these were difficult to measure when the people might be bias or participants may be dishonest, so, they came up with measures of biases:
• forced choice methods: not so much a yes or no answer, but when or where? - This way there would not be people saying yes 50% of the time (Percentage correct against the percentages of chance)
• signal detection theory: separate participants sensitivity to the signal vs. biases of the patient. This method takes into account the role of decision making in these experiments.
• There were a series of trials were a stimuli either occurs or doesn't occur (and the task should be challenging) and then the person says yes or no.
• How might expectations effect the decision to say yes or no?
• you may try really hard to see something... maybe you'd have a bias or motivation to say yes.
• context of previous experiments may matter too, or social contexts.
• Signal detection theory can detect these biases and separate out our sensitivity to the stimulus from the bias. (4 categories, hit, miss, false alarm, correct rejection).
• There is always ambiguity in the experiments with backgrounds or other stimuli occurring at the same time, random firing neurons, etc.
• Stimuli is a signal to be tested against a background of noise.
• when hits = false alarms, then there is no ability to detect really anything.
• ex. distribution of effects inside the brain. When the distributions sit on top of each other, you aren't really detecting anything.
• d prime - measure of sensitivity; ability to detect.
• criterion - shows bias (yes more or no more). If you say yes more, your signal detection goes up, but so does your false alarms  (low criterion)
• Receiver operating characteristics: plots hits vs. false alarms. If hits = false alarms, the line will be perfectly diagonal. So, the more sensitive you are, the more the curve will be bent up to the left. 

Signal Detection Analysis

• You can't just look at hits of just look at misses, because you get 100% if you say yes all the time, but also 100% on false alarms.
• d prime - differences between distributions of hits and signal absent (sensitivity to signal). 
• A smaller d prime is harder to differentiate
• percentages correlate with the ares of each
• The more separate the two distributions of false alarms and hits are, the more curved away the ROC will be, the greater the d prime is, and vise versa.
• The degree of bend in the ROC is an indication of our sensitivity to the signal.
• ROC should be generated from multiple points from the same person.
• "noise" is background ongoing elements.
• how far apart the two distributions are depends on the actual strength of the signal and our sensitivity to it (d prime).
• You have to take into account the cognitive business that interferes with the actual sensory perception.
• This helps us get the bias out of motivation or setting or expectations.
• SDT separates what the person can truly detect and what is just biases.
• ex. a radiologist in detecting cancer
• This method casts objective light on performance.
• Its a lot like statistical tests with Type 1 (false alarms) vs. Type II errors (misses)

Week 3: Insight Article, Lab notes

Article: Facilitate Insight by Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation

• its hard to have insight because people get into a rut. Experts are even worse because they are further in their ruts.
• In what way are we hypothesis driven?
• We agree with evidence that fits with our preconceived notions. This is a way of bias.
• The part of our brain that makes us hypothesis driven: May we be able to damage or inhibit this area to help you see outside the box?
• such as artistic talent (left anterior lobe) damage there may help artistic ability.
• to not be able to think outside the box is to not have insight
• what is a mental set?
• The rut - once we've solved a problem in a certain way, we want to keep doing it that way.
• Restructuring: seeing something in a new way.
• ATL on right is associated with insight, and if the left part is inhibited, it produces more novelty and insight.
• lateralization: the two sides of the brain are different (more lateralized = more differences in hemispheres).
• handedness is important because people who are right handed have more lateralization (more differences in hemispheres). So for right handers, language etc is usually in the left.
• anterior temporal lobe (on left and right) were stimulated.
• cathodal (negative) stimulation: decrease cortical excitability
• anode (positive) stimulation: increases cortical excitability.
• 3 groups
• Control
• cathode on the left and anode on the right
• cathode and the right and anode on the left
• The method was for them to do a lot of the same kind of problems, and then try to do a different type.
• Then, you would get TCDs before you start the new problem
• So, does getting tCDs make a difference?
• Yes. People do a lot better with left inhibition and right excitation. (especially for type 2 problems.)
• Why might tDCS help? 4 possibilities:
• making us less driven by the hypothesis we already have
• interrupting the mental set
• improving set-switching ability
• direct enhancement
• Those who are less right handed (with left hemispheric dominance) are less stuck in their mental sets
• maybe there is a trade off between the two hemispheres in cognitive functioning?

A few Lab Notes:

• Variance Test/Analysis
• Use when you have more than one independent variable
• use when there is more than one condition (such as congruent/incongruent/baseline)
• In a within subjects design:
• order is important because of carry over effects (practice effects or fatigue)
• To control for carry over effects, we counter balance or randomize the order in which subjects do the tasks.
• In an anova:
• The degrees of freedom is usually the number of groups -1
• The Mean Sq is the variance of components (sum/degrees of freedom)
• Pr (>F) is asking, is the P value greater than F?
• Differences in means could be due to random differences of people, or due to differences in the IV.
• Variance between groups (top row) is due to random variation. Variance within groups (bottom row) is just random variation.
• The F value is finding the ratio between the 2 mean squares to show how much the independent variable is the cause of the effect.
• If F is bigger than 1, we are likely to have a big effect; more than what you would expect with chance alone.
• To reject a hypothesis, check to see which is bigger or smaller by looking at the "pairwise" box in variance.
• The more tests you do, the more likely you are to conclude that there is something more than random variation when there isn't.
• Type 1 error: saying effect of IV when there isn't.
• more and more tests make you more likely to make a type 1 error.Tukey test tries to control for these errors.
• confidence intervals: ex. I am 95% confident that the value of the difference between A and B is between x and y. It is important if it doesn't include zero.
• This type of test doesn't work for a within subjects approach.
• Interaction between 2 (or more) IV - the condition that exists when the effect of 1 independent variable differs at different levels of the other independent variables.
• within subjects is the same as repeated measure designs.

Two Articles: Week Two

Article on Learning and Retrieval

• In the 2nd experiment: they used concept mapping. Students did better on initial learning, but they had poorer long-term memory.
• Why might retrieval be better for long-term?
• Authors say: for elaboration, they enrich the number of encoded features, but thats not what you need when you are tested. You need retrieval cues. "So retrieval practice enhances may improve cue diagnosticity by restricting the set of candidates specified by a cue". 
• aka - a cue doesn't lead you to 15 different options, but something specific.

Cognitive Psychology Handout:

• Cognitive Psychology: the scientific study of thinking; how people process information; perception, learning, remembering, reasoning, decision-making.
• Dialectic: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis => integrating the best parts of opposing views.
• Empiricism: Know through the senses, evidence through experience; how we know.
• Rationalism: reasoning process is how we get to knowledge; logical.
• A synthesis of the two: base empirical observation on theory, and use observation to revise the theory.
• structuralism: tried to look at the parts that make up the brain, looking at specific processes (Wundt and Titchener). 
• Introspection: major element: a self analysis, looking inward at the contents of your consciousness. 
• Functionalism: focused more on the processes of thought than the structure (Wiliam James - Pragmatism and John Dewey).
• Herbert Simon: Major advocate of thinking aloud protocols as a means of studying cognitive processing (like introspection of structuralism).
• Associationism: memory and knowledge come from our associations between things (empiricism). Things that are similar to each other (later than functionalism).
• Ebbinghaus (1886) and Thorndike (1905)
• Behaviorism: observe reactions to stimuli and that is all that matters. Stimuli and responses are the source of your data.
•  Pavlov was around the same time as Thorndike.
• Behaviorism dismisses introspection and mental processes. (Only lasted a couple of decades)
• John Watson: father of behaviorism (1878-1958)
• B.F. Skinner: important to behaviorism too
• Operant conditioning - rewards and punishment
• Critiques of Behaviorism
• Tolman: believed behavior was goal-directed, not just driven by stimuli. Representations in the mind. (1930-1940)
• Bandura: animals or people may learn socially, such as observing others and imitating them without doing it themselves.
• Gestalt Psychology: (in Europe) same time as behaviorism.
• Emphasized perception and problem solving.
• How associationism became behaviorism?
• behaviorism focuses on observable behavior
• associationism was important between the stimulus and the response
• Gestalt Psychology emphasized the organization of the whole; studied insightful problem solving
• Koehler did insight studies
• So what happened to behaviorism?
• It didn't really survive.
• 1950's language was an important issue: kids learn to say things, and they create novel sentenes that they have never actually been rewarded for (Chomsky's critique of behaviorism).
• This shows the natural tendencies in mind and brain, not stimulus driven. Minds are inherently linguistic and grammatical.
• Steven Pinker also important in language.
• Artificial Intelligence emerged (1956) and Gave rise to cognitive science (that is, how info is represented and manipulated).
• "tuning test" of AI- if you can't tell the difference between the output and an actual human.
• Newell and Simon: showed computers could solve very complex problems... can model human intelligence.
• Jerry Fodor: modularity (special-purpose system)-> acting independently.
• Ulric Neisser-> Cognitive revolution in psychology
• 1970-Neuroscience was coming about, recently its more a part of Psychology, not just cellular.
• fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging: Can show what parts are active during a certain task (but can't show a causal relationship).
• TMS: transcranial magnetic stimulus. 
• tDCS: transcranial direct current stimulation: mild stimulation.

Kihlstrom Consciousness Lectures

Questions for Kihlstrom's lecture 2 :

Who was Descartes? What major idea about thinking is attributed to him?

-Because he was thinking, he must be existing. (We don't have any reason to doubt our own experiences). Thought is very broadly used by then. He was an early philosopher (17th century)

Who was William James? In what way was his use (and that of Descartes) of the concept of "thinking" very general and inclusive?

-They thought that thinking encompassed feeling, wanting, perception, etc (All kinds of mental states). He was an early scientific psychologist and philosopher who was prominent in the U.S. and wasn't very interested in research (19th-20th century)

James (and many others) used introspection. What five characteristics of consciousness did he identify?

-Examining your own mental life and processes.

-5 characteristics:

1. Personal subjectivity (My thoughts are my own, they are personal)
2. Constant change (in our thoughts)
3. Continuity to our consciousness (stream of consciousness)
4. Intentionality (aboutness... thought is always about something)
5. Selective Attention (able to choose to pay attention to one thing rather than another, not everything all at once)

What is it like to be a conscious human being? What three components does this consciousness have, according to Immanuel Kant, and according to Ernest Hilgard? (And who are these two guys?)

-Kant (early 19th century philosopher) says there are three discrete kinds of mental states: Knowledge, Feeling, and Desire.

-Hilgard (Psychologist, late 20th century): Trilogy of Mind : Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation

What is cognitive science all about? What mental states does it not address (or at least not do so very explicitly)?

-Cognitive Science is about "how we know" (The knowledge or cognition from Kant and Kilgard). It doesn't address emotions or feeling, which are separate from knowledge.

Why is an affective science (or maybe an affective neuroscience) emerging? Why may there eventually be a conative science (or conative neuroscience)?

-People claim that affective science is different from motivation or cognition and it stands independently of those. This may come to be because of Kant and Hilgard's ideas say that cognition, emotion and motivation are distinct. These three are irreducible (can't reduce cognition to emotion, or motivation to cognition, etc).
-(Conative means motivational states)
-Asks the question if feeling and wanting are the same thing.

What are qualia? What are their four characteristics, according to Daniel Dennett?

-Qualities (Subjective qualities of consciousness in experiences).

-Modalities by which we experience the world (sensory modalities are different like visual or auditory).

-4 characteristics: 

1. Qualia are ineffable. Its hard to describe what the experience is like (what its like to see red?)
2. Qualia are intrinsic to the experience, they are not derived from anything else; you can't imagine them.
3. Sensory Qualia are private, other's don't know what your experience is really like.
4. Qualia are directly apprehended, they are not mediated by anything else... they just ARE. No inference.

What has the study of unusual individual cases shown us about these characteristics of qualia?

-no amount of knowledge could help people who are colorblind understand or experience color. They really are ineffable.

-Qualia are directly experienced, so the person who became colorblind can no longer think in color, or dream in color.

James said that consciousness is ABOUT something (other than itself). Are all mental states about something else? For example, are emotional states about something else? Are motivational states about something else? (Intentionality) Discuss these issues.

-This works best for cognitive states, but emotional or motivational states don't have propositional content, its just a statement. The nature of the intentionality is going to be kind of weird. For example, hunger... its not really about something else. 

-Russell- Propositional Attitudes: Other people though argue that you don't have emotional states, they just reduced emotion into cognitive beliefs (I believe I am hungry... not just I am hungry). Its still up in the air. 

At the close of this lecture, Kihlstrom reiterates three major properties of consciousness - qualia, intentionality, and subjectivity. Discuss what each of these means.

-Qualia are subjective qualities of consciousness. 

-Intentionality: ideas or representations (aboutness)... cognition is always about something else.

-Subjectivity: Consciousness is subjective. Conscious states only exists in our experience of them. A first person ontology in conscious states.

--------------

Lecture 3

This lecture addresses experimental approaches to qualia.

A major broad issue in understanding qualia is to account for why seeing is different from hearing, from tasting, from smelling, from pain, etc. What four features make the different sensory modalities different from each other?

1. Each modality of sensation is associated with a different stimulus energy (ex. seeing is about light)
2. goes to sensory receptors that transduce the stimulus into a neural impulse (ex. eyes that transduce the light into a neural impulse). 
3. A sensory tract that carries the impulses to the brain (like the vision pathway).
4. Then to the sensory projection area (that processes the different modalities).

What are these four features for vision? Perhaps you can also say a bit about what they are for audition?

-Stimulus energy: lightwaves of different wavelengths, Sensory receptors : the eyes (rods and cones), Sensory tract: the optic nerve, Projection area: in occipital lobes.

-vibrations in the air, (hair cells) in baslar membrane, auditory nerve, auditory projection area on temporal lobe.

What was Müller's doctrine of specific nerve energies? (And who was he?)

-Early physiological psychologist (mid 19th century). Every modality of sensation is associated with a unique neural pathway. It depends on where it goes, not what it starts out as. (Ex. Pressing on your eye ball gives visual cues, even though eyes are not especially tuned for pressure).

What was (still partly is) psychophysics? What were their methods? What were they trying to do?

-Trying to match up psychological qualities of an experience to the physical qualities of the stimulus (Psycho-Physics). Interested in quantifying between the physical properties of a stimuli, and the corresponding psychological experience. Relationship between the physical stimulus, and how we sense or experience it (psychologically). Methods: variant on introspection called experimental introspection. 

What is an absolute threshold? a relative threshold?

-Absolute: the point at which we become aware of the presence of a stimulus for the first time, vs. Relative: being aware that the stimulus has changed. (i.e. how different do they have to be for us to perceive the difference? (Just noticeable difference)). 

Psychophysicists showed that the intensity of our sensory experience is related to the strength of the physical stimulus.

- What was Weber's law regarding this relationship? (And who was he?)

       *delta i over i equals c- You have a stimulus of some intensity, and the amount of change that you have to put on the stimulus to produce a change in the experience is a constant amount of the original energy. The amount of change depends on how strong the stimulus was to begin with. (ex. flour, sugar bags. If you have to increase the sugar from 2 to 2.4, then you would have to increase the flour from 20 to 24).  He was a Psychopysicists who came up with the first law about the change in the physical experience. 

- What was Fechner's law regarding this relationship? (And who was he?)

       *Later Psychophysisits (1960)  who made a generalization of Weber's law. s=k(log)i (is perceived strength), the intensity of the sensation tends to grow more slowly than the stimulation. Exceptions: perceived length, and pain (Perceived strength goes up faster than the stimulus).

- What was Stevens's law regarding this relationship? (And who was he?)

       *Another Psychophysisits (recent) : s=Ki^n : for every psychological experience, there is an exponent that gives you a nice relationship between the stimulus and the reaction. So, n is different for any experience... a power law.

How did psychophysics address the differences in quality within a sensory modality?

     *We can quantify the differences in the stimulus by a rating, and by looking at the specialties within each modality. These laws don't just apply to intensity, but to all different sensory modalities. 

- Vision is characterized not only by brightness, but also by hue and saturation.

- What accounted for the experiences of different colors, according to Helmholtz? (Who was he?)

     *(A students of Meuller. Late 19th century, important across disciplines, but better known as a physicist) He says that within each modality, every quality of sensation is mediated by a specific neural system. All visible colors can be produced by a mixture of the three primary colors (so there may be three major pathways for vision?).  Each color can be mixed with others, so perhaps they are not so distinct, except the three. This may match up with the eyes because there are three different kinds of cones. Perhaps these are the primary pathways?

So what were Wundt and the other structuralists (Titchener and Boring) trying to do with mental experiences, using their method of introspection? 

-Trying to figure out what the fundamental qualities were of sensory experiences. They thought of it as mental chemistry.

What was the stimulus error?

-describing the object, not their experience that the object gives rise to.

- What primary colors were identified in vision? What evidence do we have for these primaries?

     *Red, Blue, yellow, and (green). (Red/Green seemed to be paired together, and Blue/Yellow seem to be paired together as opponents). You can get any color from the right combination of these three. This is accounted for by saying we have different cones for different colors. Unique neural pathways for each. Basic, so it should be reflected in many languages. 

- What primary qualities were identified in touch?

     *pressure, pain, warmth, cold, roughness, wetness. 
     *Smooth, soft, wet, tickle, and hot

- What primary tastes were identified? Why was one of these identified much later?

     *sweet, sour, salty, bitter. The foods he was exposed to could be broken down into those, but later savoriness was added from the Japanese cuisine. 

- What primary smells were identified?

    *Spicy, fragrant, etherial, rosiness, putrid, burned

How might this analysis into primaries be applied outside the study of these sensory qualia?

    *relate them back to the physical features of the stimuli, but also back to the physiological processes behind them. This could also been extended to emotions or other areas. There may be fundamental primary emotions that underly all others. 

Cognitive: Week 1

• A few lab terms:
• Dependent Variable: measures the behavior that reflects the effects of the independent variable. 
• Independent Variable: factor whose levels are selected by the experimenter in order to determine the effect of the D.V. 
• Within Subjects Design: (controls for individual differences) repeated measure design; all subjects receive all levels. Each subject serves in each treatment. An issue here may be carry-over effects from prior experience. 
• Between Subjects Design: (may not have equivalent groups) different groups receive different levels of the same independent variable.
• Counterbalancing: systematic technique used to distribute carry-over effects so they won't be confounded with the experimental treatments.
• Confounding: presence of extraneous variables that vary systematically with the independent variable; varying together.
• Article about memory retrieval and learning:
• What is typically assumed about memory and retrieval?
• the assumption is that more studying means more learning, and retrieval isn't about learning, its just a tool to test learning, not a learning process itself.
• "enhancing the process when students encode knowledge" has been the focus and how to make that process, not a focus on retrieval.
• the author says no, retrieval plays a role in learning.
• Why would that be?
• because each act of retrieval changes the memory. The act of reconstruction. Knowledge bust be considered an essential to the process of learning.
• It may be modified every time you retrieve information. Maybe you make inferences about what might have been present.
• What are elaborative study tasks?
• And example is concept mapping - it requires students to enrich the material they are studying and encode meaningful relationships. Here, you link new info into things you already know.
• The way retrieval has been studied did not take into account the complex learning environment that actually occurs. There was no external validity in this approach... it wasn't generalizable.
• This study compares retrieval learning and concept mapping.
• What was the design of the first experiment?
• Between subjects design
• 4 groups: study once, study more, study then concept map, and study with retrieval practice.
• 20 participants per group.
• initially, the learning for concept mapping and retrieval was about the same.
• metacognition: thinking about learning; the participants asked participants how much they thought they had learned, and they thought they had leaned the most with repeated study, and the least with retrieval practice.
• their predictions were wrong... retrieval was the highest.
• What issues were addressed in the 2nd experiment?
• different knowledge structures: like remembering a sequence vs. remembering a whole concept.
• they wanted to know, are retrieval methods as effective for both sequence vs. enumeration texts?
• this time, they used a within subjects design to see if retrieval could work reliably for each individual.
• half of the participants did a short answer test as the final test, and half did concept mapping.
• Interestingly, retrieval learning did better than concept mapping on making concepts maps! In all cases, retrieval strategies worked as the best strategy for retaining information.