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.

Eyewitness Memory Article

Eye-Witness memory article:

·      Major possible influences on the eye witness memory?

o   Whether or not they talked to others

§  People CONFORMING to other people: Can forget info, mis-remember, are influenced by others.

§  UNCERTAINTY : informational influences (questioning their own feelings or memories)

§  FALSE MEMORIES: incorporating the other’s view into your own memory.

·      Timothy Mcveigh’s case is a good example. He probably didn’t have an accomplice, but the two other eye-witnesses conformed to the other’s opinion.

·      Another example is Barry George: Only 1/16 witnesses identified him, but the person talked to others in the cab, and not they are 95% sure.

·      1. Normative influence: weighing the social cost of disagreeing, you want to conform to the norm.

·      2. Informational influence – being uncertain of your own memory up against someone else’s.

·      3. Memory distortion: you now think that this is what happened – it becomes part of your episodic memory.

·      What determines the magnitude of a normative influence?

o   Weighing the social cost of agreeing or disagreeing.

·      People talk or conform, and then they are interviewed separately. Do they still agree with the social norms?

o   Yes, maybe they want to appear consistent.

o   Maybe they trust in the other person’s opinion based on their confidence, their expertise, if they are in the majority, or how important the issue is.

§  An example is listening to school children vs. listening to police officers.

·      Source monitoring errors – you’ve forgotten the source of your memory – lost representation of the source from the representation of the memory itself (confuse what they actually saw with what someone else told them).

·      There are three different processes:

o   Conform

o   Unsure

o   Create a new memory

·      Big point: memory, then, does have a social component.