Cognitive Psychology - Attention

This is the definition of attention by William James, in his book called "Principles of Psychology". He said,

"Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state..."

William James studied attention during a period where introspection was widely used in understanding psychology. After him came a period, 1950 onwards, where study through behaviorism took precedence instead.

There were also other arguments about attention. The early selection model states that people actually do not process all the semantic content they hear. The mind shuts out or attenuates the sounds not focused on. An alternate hypothesis was that we actually process all of the sounds we hear whether we pay attention to it or not. The semantic content of the sounds just do not get into our conscientiousness.

The following video is quite interesting with regards to our abilities to pay attention.





There is also a theory called the Future Integration Theory, where it states that our attention on a certain object is combined with other characteristics that define the object. The model states that we actually consciencely experience certain things as a whole.

Also, try out this Stroop Effect test.

Cognitive Learning & Computational Neuroscience

The speaker briefly talked about Aristotle and that he came up with the concept of contiguity. This means that when things co-occur, they would eventually result in association. This gave rise to studies that used quantitative conclusions such as the closeness of issues in terms of time, space or frequency and how these factors determine learning. In essence, the way people learn probabilistically was discussed.

The Basil Ganglia is the part of the brain that detects feedback. It is the means by which humans detect positive or negative feedback due to a given behavior. A positive feedback is caused by dopamine being fired to the Basil Ganglia when a certain action is performed. This explains how learning happens through positive affirmation and feedback.

The video also talks about the Hippocampus participating in observational or latent learning. An interesting fact about the Hippocampus is that it creates cognitive maps via Redundancy Compression and Predictive Differentiation. Compressing understanding of things that are somewhat associated and distinguishing the differentiation between similar information that needs elaboration. The Hippocampus helps in generalizations. Novelty (“Anomaly”) detection was also discussed by applying concepts learnt from the study of the Hippocampus.

Here is the video.

Cognitive Science - George Lakoff

George Lakoff presented some very interesting facts about Cognition and presented them in a very applicable way in politics. I shan't go into the area of Cognitive Science in politics at the moment, but he did write several books with regards to it which I believe will be very facinating reads.

A few points stuck with me after I watched the following video. First of which is that emotions are deeply intertwined with rationality. He mentioned that with the part of the brain governing emotions damaged, a person is unable to think rationally. According to him, neural bindings link the intellectual with the emotional. The narrative example he drew out was very illustrative. The hero is a role given intellectually, but when the hero encounters a villian, the person viewing the narrative feels anxiety. When the villian does something bad to the hero, the third party feels angry watching the scene. These intuitive feelings seemingly gives evidence of this linkage. The conclusion i derived about this seemingly coupled aspects of a human is that empathy (emotions) can be a way that people can manipulate to govern the intellectual in ways deeper then we realize.

There was also another interesting fact he pointed out. The Primodial Cortex enables the human being to feel what another person is feeling. When we see another person greiving, in deep pain or feeling estatic, we often are able to identify with the feeling and on many occasions are able to feel the same way. This, he pointed out, gave evidence that our perceptions are intrinsically connected to the neurons controlling our own feelings and physical being. George calls them mirror neurons. Monkeys were used in physcially determining the precise neurons which gave these linkages. He explained that when a monkey peels a banana, the same set of neurons get activated as when a monkey sees a human peel a banana. Hence, he also argued that when we observe another person or thing doing something, it can be accrued that it has happened in our mind to us as well. To stretch it further Empathy is/can be Physical.

With these conclusions about perception, a deeper understanding about the influences of art, media and videos can be derived. Therefore it is exceptionally imperative that the eyes are exposed only to things which we are ready to address in our lives and society.

George also addressed the issue of Framing. When we address a certain issue in another person's life, we need to understand the mental model that the person has in order to bring out our issue effectively. Framing is somewhat similar to metaphors. Metaphors such as Up is good and Down is bad are learnt at a very young age, he mentions.



He also talked about Nurealistic Learning which is of interest. Will look into this aspect for deeper understanding.

Cognitive Engineering

The primary aim of designing experiments in Cognitive Engineering is to figure out what we do not know. Designing experiments help to develop an understanding of the situation or task at hand. This helps to also make sense of issues pertaining to the field of which might be unknown to the Cognitive Engineer and to understand the decisions made during the design phase of an engineering project.

The purpose of the Cognitive Engineer to develop these experiments, would have to be determined by higher management. There could be several reasons to. The first and probably the most reasonable intent, would be to better the performance of a project, and even so, performance can be measured in various forms. What are the measures that would determine the experiments focus. (i.e. Time to accomplish a specific task, Number of tasks accomplished.) Other measurements could include cognition measurements. Speed of learning, speed of decision making. Some tangible, some intangible. Intangible issues still need to be measured using quantatative methods in order to be of reasonable use, this can often be non-trivial.

Pointers that help in developing good experiments include,

1) Asking the right questions during interview of project team.
2) Selecting and limiting the right choice of test subjects.
3) Pre-determining exact experimental outputs and result goals.
4) Avoiding unintended systematic differences in conditions that explain data.
5) Controlling experiments using limited variables.
6) Encouraging generalizability of findings while balancing control.

Each point is delibrately succient to keep entry short but can be elaborated in greater detail in future.