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.