testretestandtestagain

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Until We Meet Again

So this is it, I have completed my course on Human Cognition, and while I have more questions than answers this has been a fun ride. Learning about how the human mind might work, writing out silly blog posts, and trying to figure out how all of this relates to the world I live in.

This is not Good Bye, I will probably have to repurpose this blog at some point or another for another Psychology or Sociology class. 

But Until We Meet Again, This is Me, signing off.

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Computers = Conscious?

Question?

Talk about the main points of the article in regards to psychological research.

Answer?

So we have switched this week from the Textbook which I have finnnnally finished reading. (I should be less sarcastic about that, the textbook was a good length and had lots of knowledge in it, but I want school to be over yesterday so…) This week the reading assigned was Allen Newell’s (1973) Article “You cannot play 20 questions with nature and win: projective comments on the papers of this symposium”.

There are no fun questions, I just get to talk about the article and how it might relate to psychological research. 

So in his article Newell (1973) talks about how flawed psychological research is. Literally he is asking why psychology as a science has backed itself into a preverbal corner. It’s not seen as a real science and Newell explains why. 

Pits opposing ideas against one another, and assumes both could be true

That psychology is subjective and not objective

That statistical analysis is not done properly

Newell points out solutions to these problems. 

To focus on the bigger picture and strive to find one answer instead of fifty

That psychology should always strive to be objective, but when needed can be subjective

Because researchers can manipulate the data, we should have a more standardized system of statistical analysis. 

Another part of Newel’s article that touches on psychology but does not relate to what I have said above is the topic of Computers. “For example, Alexa and other AI programs are conscious in their own way.” (Michelle) Newell talks about how smart computers have become. And that in some ways they have become as smart as humans. Providing a good sounding board for psychological research. 

As for psychological research today, I believe that psychology has still clung to the tenants of the past and many of these problems still persist today. We may never know the reasons why, but if Psychology wants to make itself a science, to be remembered, it needs to take what it’s got (Computers, Objective Studies and Statistical Analysis, and more streamline processes) and run with it.

Test, Retest and test again folks. 

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Bow Down, To The Robot Overlords

Question

1) In light of evidence and arguments presented in this chapter, could a computer ever be conscious? Does a computer need something like “executive control”? (Think about the circumstances or achievements for which humans seem to need executive control; does that help with this question?) Would a computer ever need something like qualia?

Answer

Computers, they make our lives infinitely easier, they make our lives better, and they do it without complaint or payment. But there has always been the speculation that one day computers would come alive, that they would become conscious.

So are these theories of our Robot Overlords just fantasies? Or could computers one day be more conscious than we are?

I’m going to take a little detour in answering this question, because on the one hand there will be my completely biased opinion, and on the other there will be the facts of the world we currently live in.

Detour Starts Here:

One of my favourite Star Trek episodes is from Season 2, its Episode 9 and the title is “The Measure of A Man”, the short version, of the problem faced by the crew of the star ship Enterprise, is the question of sentience. In the episode Data, an android made by a human, is put to trial to see if he is or is not sentient. The Captain of the Enterprise believes that Data is sentient, but the main antagonist just wants to take Data apart and build more. It deals with other issues besides sentience, but that’s a lot more of a detour than I have time for.

Sufficed to say this whole episode hits it’s climax in a court room scene, where the two sides lay out their arguments.

Picard, the captain of the Enterprise, brings up sentience and asks the main antagonist what makes me, a human, sentient but not Data?

The response is three fold, 1. Intelligence, 2. Self-Awareness, and 3. Consciousness.

The main antagonist says that Data is not Self Aware. 

Detour Ends Here.

We can say with a good amount of certainty that our technology is intelligent, we can get it to learn and adapt. But for my money, I would say that at this point our computers are not Self Aware, and I think that self-awareness is a big part of having consciousness.

Self Aware- Conscious of ones existence and actions, aware of oneself and ones ego.

To further my point, todays hypotheses of Consciousness talks about the network of information that we have in our brains, being connected by a set of workplace neurons that connect all of the information that we have together (well not all of the information being connected with every other piece but you get the point), A computer has lots of information, but it would never connect pictures to text unless we ran a program that told the computer to do so. At this point we are the executive controllers of our computers. We write the programs and tell the computer what to think, it does not.

Now as for the question of could a computer ever be conscious, well I’d like to say yes. It is in my mind entirely possible that humanity could create an Artificial Life Form that is conscious. Will it be realized in my lifetime? I honestly do not know.

The more scientific argument would say that computers cannot be conscious, that human consciousness could never be transferred to a machine because the frame work just is not there. We have computers that can adapt, learn and be intelligent but they are not really self aware, which means they cannot be conscious. (But we do not even have a good description of what consciousness is)

So this is my completely biased opinion on computers and consciousness.

Till next time, Live Long and Prosper.

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To “Opt” or not to “Opt” That Is the Question

Question

1) Science is usually concerned with what is. Scientists typically leave it to others (philosophers, social theorists, policy makers) to decide what should be. In the domain of decision making, though, many psychologists do make policy recommendations – for “opt-out” procedures rather than “opt-in”, or for specific decision-making practices that (according to research) will make people happier. Should scientists take these steps? Or should the highly subjective realm of “what is valuable, what is “desirable” be kept separate from the realm of objective scientific study.

Answer

I will start with a little bit of an explanation, “opt-out” and “opt-in” is the debate of whether citizens should be able to “opt-in” to become an organ donor, or “opt-out”, because in certain countries citizens are organ donors at birth (not 100% sure about this, might be 18+) but can “opt-out”, and in others you are made an organ donor by saying I “opt-in”. Its a little confusing at first, at least it was to me, because I wondered why this would be a debate. 

So here’s the story, in my country of Canada we have the “opt-in” option, you only become an organ donor if you want to be one. (It’s a weird process, because even if you opt-in your family members might opt you out when you die…and I’ve never encountered solid paperwork on opting-in, which is to say I want to be an organ donor when I die, I mean I’ll be dead so what’s the point of burying or cremating parts of me that could be beneficial to someone else.) With all of that in mind the rate of people who are organ donors in Canada is less than 20% of the population, but 90% of Canadians support organ and tissue donation (so says transplant Canada’s website). 

I scratch my head too when I see that.

But here’s the other side of the coin, to “opt-out” other countries only allow you to cease to be an organ donor if you tell them you do not want to be an organ donor. Austria is one such country, and there organ donor rate is around 99% with very few people making the decision to “opt-out”.

Under the umbrella of Psychology and decision making, the “opt-in” “opt-out” frame work looks at how decisions are framed. Depending on how a question/problem/situation is framed can lead to how most people will respond with an answer or solution. In the case of “opt-in” “opt-out”, I can say that I want to “opt-in” but I am more likely to be an organ donor if I lived in a country that has the “opt-out” option. (If you want to fact check me, heres a link to a study that talks about this https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1324774)

So there you have it. There are other ways in which psychology can show us the best path to take, but now we have the underlying framework and question. Should psychologists push to have the scientific method instated, what research says is best, as law or just present their evidence and let the rest of humanity decide whether it is valuable or not.

Personally, I vote for science taking over the world. My reason, Global Warming, we know it exists, there is waaay to much research that says Global Warming exists, but do we as the bulk of humanity listen? Not really, even I am at fault in that category, and our prospects for the future look grim. This is not the life of someone who needs a new organ, or the happiness of a few hundred people, this is the Earth. And as a people we are destroying the only place we can viably live on (until we build proper space crafts that is). If science had more say, I think we would have solved that particular problem a long time ago, but say la vie. We will just have to wait and see what happens next.

Till next time, on the Star Ship Enterprise.

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Schadenfreude

Question

1) There is no question that some languages capture, in a single word, ideas that in other languages can only be described with a long phrase One example is the German word “Schadenfreude,” which translates as “a feeling of joy that comes from learning about another person’s troubles.” Do you think this difference matters for cognition – so that people who know this word can think more efficiently, or more effectively, than people who don’t know this word? If so, how is this different from the hypothesis offered years ago by Whorf?

Answer

Ok, so Benjamin Whorf was a guy in the 19hundreds who came up with the theory that the language you speak has a major influence on the way you think, or a certain “mode” of thinking.

The example that was given to me, was that english speakers predominately focus in thought and speech on the individual or the I. The language being more geared in that direction. Spanish speakers predominately focus in thought and speech on the community or surrounding environment because the language is not geared toward the I. Or that’s what the textbook says, so if I”m wrong go after them not me.

Now that I have laid the frame work, I will not attempt to ask the questions above. Schadenfreude is personally my favourite non english that I have in my vocabulary. As for thinking more efficiently, I would have to say that learning words that have no english counterpart is always fun because it does allow for easier access to describe how I might be feeling in a given situation. Which would make it faster to think, but in conversation it would depend on how many people actually know the word that you are speaking and its meaning. Otherwise you would say Schadenfreude and everyone would be confused and you would have to explain what you just said. So faster thinking maybe.

As for Whorf’s theory, there probably is a grain of truth to what he says, but the problem is causation. In Whorf’s theory he makes a casual argument, that the language that we learn shapes our thinking but what is language but a way to express ideas. It would probably be better to say that when a language was being created the words made were made in relation to the situations and thoughts of the people creating the language. A correlation might be more accurate, but I’m not sure I was not around and no nothing about the creation of any language. 

That’s just what I think anyway, peace. 

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Knowledge?

Question

1) You easily understand the following sentence: “At most colleges and universities, a large number of students receive financial aid.” But how do you manage to understand the sentence? How is the concept of “financial aid” represented in your mind? Do you have a prototype (perhaps for “student on financial aid”)? Do you have some number of exemplars? A theory? Can you specify what the theory involves? What other concepts do you need to understand in order to understand “financial aid”?

Answer

The above questions all ask about my knowledge and the concepts that I use to understand the world around me. So I’m going to go at this question by question and do a little introspection.

The sentence is “At most colleges and universities, a large number of students receive financial aid.”

In managing to understand the sentence I first need to understand that colleges and universities are post secondary educational institutions where the general population  can work towards a degree. And students are the label that these members of the general population who attend these institutions are called. And financial aid is when students are given money to attend these institutions, students who under normal circumstances would not be able to afford to go the college or university.

But you have to realize that all of those concepts stem from other ideas as well, education, post secondary, institutions, people without wealth. I could break the sentence down further just from there. Hopefully though you get the picture that knowledge is built from every day concepts that we have.

For me the concept of financial aid is being given, or loaned money for the betterment of the individual. Now you could have other ideas or definitions, I am only saying that this is my all encompassing definition.

Ok, now you are probably like, this is boring, what does it mean?

Well scientists were curious about how we acquire and use knowledge, how does it help us with day to day tasks, and what theories can be made to explain this. Because knowing more about how our brains work can help us to become better smarter individuals. (Lesson of the day, learning about our brains can make us better, smarter people!)

So one of these theories is prototype theory, it is a theory that says that knowledge is based on central concepts. These “prototypes” may not be real, in the sense that you would have never actually seen them in reality but they are the core idea/image/concept that your mind goes to when dealing with a piece of information. One example of this that is used is the core concept for dog, now when I was a kid we used to have a big (to me, so in reality medium sized) dog, who was super fluffy. But I also remember Air Bud, the amazing golden retriever who goes on adventures. So my prototype for dog is a big fluffy golden retriever. Now that might not be your prototype for dog and that’s fine because knowledge is based off of experience and everyones experiences are different.

As for a prototype for a student on financial aid. I would have to say a young person, fresh out of high school with a sharp mind but no family financing to get them further educated. This person would receive financial aid to help them attain a degree and a well paying job. 

Another theory is the theory of exemplars, which is the theory that instead of a central prototype, instead when asked (going back to my dog example) “Is that a dog?”

We do not look at a central image of what we imagine dogs to be like me and my keeshond (family pet) and golden retriever mix, we instead look at earlier examples in our lives of dogs. 

Breaking that down a bit, seeing the above image, “Is that a dog?”

Well my brother/uncle/girlfriend/roommate, has a pet, it looks almost identical to this pet so I would have have to say that yes that is a dog.

Going back to the question above, I do not have any present exemplars of people that I know personally who have received financial aid. I probably know people but off of the top of my head the only person I know who has received money for schooling is myself. 

So um yeah, I’m in my 20’s from a middle class family and I’ve had good grades most of my life. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on who you ask “it builds character.”) I and my parents (because they love me and want to see me get a good job and be happy) cannot afford out of pocket for me to go to University. So I have to ask for financial aid to go to school.

And there you go an exemplar from me to you, enjoy…

And now… I get to tell you to throw away everything you just read. Not literally but file it away because this is SCIENCE FOLKS and Science is all about different or competing ideas.

Another idea about knowledge usage is Explanatory Theories, which involves the use of a network of beliefs and ideas to come to conclusions about objects, things and people around us. 

I would describe it like a big neural web and when you think dog, you know, for example, that dogs bark, have four legs, fluffy ears and so on. And when working with this theory a researcher would look at the way you categorize information. 

Collins and Quillian, said that our minds are far to smart to store redundant information, so instead it puts items into categories that link together. They had people do sentence verification tasks to see if this was true. The results showed that people would be quick with “A canary can sing,” but slowed down with “A canary is a bird.” and slowed a little more with “A canary is an animal.” The explanation is that it takes time to jump from connection to connection in the neural web, especially when items are not directly linked. 

Canary to Bird, Bird to Animal.

Tying that into our student on financial aid, we could make a huge web of all of the connections in my head between student and financial aid but I think you would probably get bored really fast. 

Lastly, we need to put all of the pieces together. “At most colleges and universities, a large number of students receive financial aid.” I only did a general overview of how we understand this sentence but, Think about it. Our minds are amazing, because almost all of us understand that financial aid is a useful tool used by students to get a higher education. But to even understand the concept of financial aid we have to think about a million different little things and experiences to come up with what is financial aid. And that is truly amazing. 

You are more special then you even realize, because without you even knowing it your mind has done so many little things that you don’t even think about throughout the day.

Till next time, keep on trucking.

[testretestandtestagain]

Memory?

Question

1) People sometimes compare the human eye to a camera, and compare human memory to a video recorder (like TiVo or the video recorder on your smartphone). Ironically, though, there are important ways in which your memory is worse than a video recorder and also important ways in which it’s far better than a video recorder. Describe both versions of this comparison – the ways in which video recorders are superior, and the ways in which your memory is superior.

Answer

Memory, is such an amazing but misunderstood part of being human. Like the question asks above, memory is sometimes compared to a video recorder. But in some ways it is far superior and in others it just can’t hold up. So there is good new and bad news because these differences can lead to problems, especially if you do not know how memory works.

Lets start with the good news. Unlike your video recorder that only records for set amount of time and then is done, memory is always recording. But that isn’t even the best part, our mind takes these memories and connects them in a “web”, called a schema in scientific terms. An example of this would be memories of your best friend, if you only had video recordings of them you would have to pull them up systematically to remember key pieces of information, like their birthday, but our memory recalls information in a less linear and more compact way, so we don’t have to search systematically for the information that we are looking for. 

But here is the bad news, memory unlike your video recorder is not 100% reliable. What is encoded into our minds is not always what we remember and in some cases we can total make up memories that in fact never happened. False memories, can be accidents of every day life, because we link up pieces of information that we think have happened to us. 

But the scary part of false memories, at least for me, is how easy it could be to have someone insert them into your mind. Like someone with really good video editing skills who takes your friends video of them at some party, and replaces your friends image with your own image. Scientists have done studies in which they “implant”, because they can’t actually go into your head and put new information in there, false memories. A scientist will give a participant a list of stories from the participants parents, some of which are true, but one of those stories will be false. In some of these cases participants will remember that story as thought it actually happened. And if the scientists can doctor evidence, photoshop a photo, of that experience then the participant is even more likely to “remember” that event happening. 

It is crazy how our minds can just make up memories that never happened. But here is the kicker…participants when quizzed later about these events were confident that these memories were real, sometimes even after they where told that in fact they were fake. 

What does this mean? Well on the one hand it says that our minds can be confident about information that isn’t real, and that sometimes our memories mess up and we get things wrong.

But, it is not the do all end all. Most of the time our memories work pretty well if we have trained them right and know our facts. So here is the fun fact of the day, our memories might not be perfect but if we exercise them right they will preform phenomenally even when we get old.

Until next time, Live Long and Prosper.

[testretestandtestagain]

Deja vu?

Question

1) Some people describe the eerie sensation of “déjà vu” – a feeling in which a place or face seems familiar, even though they’re quite certain they’ve never been in this place, or seen this face, before. Can you generate a hypothesis about the roots of déjà vu, drawing on the material in the chapter?

Answer

Deja vu, the stuff of legends, horror stories, and sometimes the most epic sci fi movies out there. Deja vu, is described as a feeling of already having been in/experienced a present situation. That of course is just a quick google description, but lots of people describe Deja vu as seeing people or places in a context were you are almost 100% that has already happened. 

I had a friend, who every once and a while would get into a conversation with someone. They/We would be chatting about something or another and then he would seem to guess where the conversation was heading. He told me once that every once in a while he would have very realistic dreams in which these conversations and sometimes events would happen and then upon waking up either that day or a few days later the conversation or events would come to pass. Very deja vu like, maybe, maybe not?

I’m sure that there is some scientific explanation or what have you. Extra Sensory Perception and all that fun stuff cannot be real? Although some days I hope beyond hope that it is, how much easier would life be? But then how much more difficult as well…

Ok back to Deja vu, my textbook chapter for this week talked about implicit memory, or as one of my professors liked the put it, the memory of knowing what you know because you know you know it… yeah very scientific. 

Implicit memory is considered unconscious or automatic memory in which no prior explicit/episodic memory is used/needed to do/complete a task. 

So my hypothesis is (I could be very very wrong) that deja vu is caused by the firing of neurons linked to another person, place, thing or event that is familiar in implicit memory which leads to a feeling of familiarity that cannot be placed, because these implicit memories do not have any episodic memories in which to compare with. Which in turn would cause the person to feel psychological arousal because they cannot recall the source stimulus for this familiarity. 

Many studies have been conducted which shows that items can be put into implicit memory, and then retrieved to form false biases because a participant has been primed with that previous information creating a bias which favours that information over other, sometimes more factual information. (Begg, Armour, & Kerr, 1985; Brown & Halliday, 1990; Fielder, Walther, Armbruster, Fay, & Naumann, 1996; Moons, maki, & Gracia-Marques, 2009; Unkelbach,2007)*

Increased familiarity with certain persons, places, things and events can probably lead to a misfiring/crossing of wires in the presence of a different person, place, thing or event. Maybe because that (gestures at above sentence) shares common features with this different familiar person, place, thing, or event. 

Our brains are not perfect computers, and sometimes we get mixed up. It is the sad reality of being human, but hey maybe next time you get that eerie feeling like, this has totally happened before. Just remember, its probably your brain playing tricks on you. Or this is the matrix and the robots are just re-writing our brains at that moment. (shrug) 

Till next time, stay frosty.

*(I total stole these from my textbook, which is Cognition Exploring the Science of the Mind, 7th Edition by Daniel Reisberg, from chapter 7, the section on Implicit memory and the “Illusion of Truth”)

[testretestandtestagain]

You! Yeah You, Let Me Show You a Better Way To Study!

Question

Imagine that, based on what you’ve read in this chapter(memory), you were asked to write a “training pamphlet” advising students how to study more effectively, so that they would remember what they studied more fully and more accurately. What would you write in the pamphlet?

Answer

When learning something new or studying for a test, you first need to encode that information into Long Term Memory, also called the LTM for short. 

But by just simply reading the material and attempting to memory it is not a sure fire way to encode a new theory or concept.

Because after encoding we need to be able to retrieve the information, and it has been proven that just reading, and quick memorization/saying the information word for word, leads to bad recall.

So Insightful person I hear you ask, how do I study in a practical manner that will guarantee I can learn this new subject matter I need to know so that I can recall it to ace this very important test?

The answer is simple, you just need to engage in a meaningful way with the information.

Now I can hear you groaning, the answer might be simple but implementing it is a different ball of wax all together. 

To engage in a meaningful way is to add more connections to the retrieval process. In order to do that you have to think about what you are learning and connect with it, put it in your own words, find real life examples in your own life, and most importantly you need to practise recalling this information over the course of a few weeks, so that the pathways strengthen and when you need the information it is there. 

Once you’ve done that memorization will be a snap, not literally but you get the point.

I now give you the official title of Master Studier.

Until next time, peace.

[testretestandtestagain]

Question

People claim that some forms of meditation training (including Buddhist meditation) can help those who do it become better at paying attention – staying focused and not suffering from distraction. Does the chapter help you in understanding why that might be? Explain your response.

Answer

I remember a time a long long time ago, back when I was in high school, ok maybe not that long ago…its been maybe a few years. When you had mandatory classes and electives, as a student with no ambition to use certain electives to get into University I found myself enrolling in drama classes. 

It was in one of these such classes where the teacher had us do some meditation exercises, I cannot for the life of me remember why she made us do this. I think it was more for our benefit than anything to do with learning how to act. 

We all lay on our backs flat on the floor, the lights were dimmed and we were instructed to do your basic breathing exercises or something like that. The part of the exercise that made this more memorable than any other mediation I had every tried up to that point, (honestly had not tried that many but most were boring or not helpful), was what she had us focus on. For 5-10 minutes the teacher first asked us to only focus on what we could sense going on outside of the classroom, random people walking, hall conversations and the general noises of the school. Then she asked us to focus only on the noises in the classroom itself, other people breathing, her walking around and so forth. Finally the teacher instructed us to only focus on the noises within ourselves, our breathing, heartbeats and whatever other noises happened to arise at that occasion. 

I bring up this memory because I think that Buddhist monks training is probably similar. In Human Cognition attention is thought of in terms of a spotlight that we train on certain persons, places or things that catch our eye. When we try to harness this attention and put it to use to see or experience something we shift the spotlight to do so. 

A common problem with attention however is the tendency to get caught up in something else more interesting. But mediation like what I described above, especially when done regularly, would probably hone that spotlight so that it would focus solely on what we want it to be focusing on. In short training our spotlight to experience only what we are interested in and not some random conversation thats happening near us. 

Or well that’s what I think anyway. Till next time, Peace and Long Life.

[testretestandtestagain]

Question

The chapter emphasizes the active nature of perception – and the idea that we don’t just “pick up” information from the environment; instead, we interpret and supplement that information. What examples of this pattern can you think of – either from this chapter or from your own experience?

Answer

It is interesting to actually think about what I see as I see it. Instead of just seeing and working off of that. Of course I cannot do that all of the time but in quiet moments when I catch something that does not seem right I am brought back to thinking about what I am seeing. 

There have been a few times in my life when in the periphery of my vision I will see something odd but when I look at it straight on it will turn out to be a person or nothing of great interest. I’ve caught myself a few times pausing now before I look to try and guess what my brain is thinking before I use my central vision. In one of these instances my brain saw someone wearing a bright red coat but when I finally turned to look at them it turned out to be a black coat. 

Of course central vision is not the do all end all of seeing exactly what something is. Most of the time we take in visual stimulus without even thinking about what we are seeing, when we are walking our body uses that stimulus to get us from point A to point B. On some of my favourite walking trails I do not even need to look ahead anymore because I already know the pattern of where I am going and what obstacles will be in my way. And if something darts across my path I’ll be more likely to believe that it was a rabbit than anything else. (They are the most common animal I see when I’m walking)

I find myself daydreaming as I walk, and as my brain goes off to Jupiter my body just wanders along the paths until it gets me back home. And if you asked me what I saw on that walk, I’d probably have to answer with space but in all honesty I was a million miles away. 

If we could not set these patterns into our brains, I would have to be conscious of exactly where I was and what obstacles were in my way the entire time I was walking, but because of how our brains work most of the time my brain will see an obstacle and just without my having to really think about it. 

So these are my thoughts, could be right, could be wrong, but hopefully you enjoyed them. Till next time, Live long and prosper.

[testretestandtestagain]

Hello

And Welcome to my Blog. This blog, in all honesty is an assignment that has to be done weekly so that I pass a class I am currently taking in University called Human Cognition. 

So to all of you fun people out there, this blog is going to be my thoughts, almost chapter by chapter, of Cognition Exploring The Science of the Mind by Daniel Reisberg the 7th Edition. These thoughts will be based off of questions that I will put ahead of my answers, so that you can judge me or whatever else you would like to do.

All in all, enjoy if you can and don’t forget to um like, comment, and subscribe in the… Wait…. dang it wrong platform… um just ❤️ if you think what I am saying makes any sense what so ever. It’ll keep me from crying into my cereal in the morning. Why are University classes so hard?

So um yeah, Welcome to The attempt at Art and Science, on my blog on Human Cognition.