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1936 results in Cognitive Psychology

Page 12 of 97

Bodies and Other Objects
  • The Sensorimotor Foundations of Cognition
  • Rob Ellis
  • Published online:
    22 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018
  • Bodies and Other Objects is written for students, scholars and anyone with an interest in embodied cognition - the claim that the human mind cannot be understood without regard for the actions and capacities of the body. The impulse to write this book was a dissatisfaction with the inconsistent, and often shallow, use of the term 'embodied cognition'. This text attempts to reframe cognitive science with a unified theory of embodied cognition in which sensorimotor elements provide the basis for cognition, including symbolic exchanges that arise within a society of agents. It draws ideas and evidence from experimental psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and anthropology in reaching the conclusion that human cognition is best understood as the means by which exchanges within a constantly evolving network of skilful bodies and objects are regulated so as to further human interests.

  • 11 - Recognition

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 286-311

  • Summary

    Ever since Superman first appeared in 1938, a running joke in the comic has been that, when he puts on a pair of glasses and a hat, he is no longer recognizable as Superman. However, as will be discussed below, a hat and glasses together do reduce recognition. The disguise posited in Action Comics #1 was not silly, therefore, but prescient. The human recognition ability is more than adequate for its primary task, to recognize kin and friends. However, outside its central social role, recognition is much less robust.

    As described in Chapter 7, the match between the perceptual target representation and an episode in semantic memory produces a semantic response. In other words, if the perceptual representation of a face on which you fixate matches the representation of your best friend's face, then it activates everything you know about your friend. The semantic response has three parts. The last time you saw your friend it was at a particular place and time. His or her representation was encoded as part of an episode describing that event; saying good night after going to the movies. If any part of that episode is activated by seeing the face again, this contextual information about when and where you saw him or her becomes part of the recollection. Furthermore, you have had many experiences with your friend, which have resulted in many episodes containing his or her face. Collectively, these episodes determine his or her familiarity. If you have just seen the same face moments before in the hall it will appear recent when you see it again in the classroom. As mentioned in Chapter 10, the short-term perceptual representation of the instrumental system is experienced as a feeling of recency.

    Thus, recognition occurs when a perceptual target is compared with semantic memory and matched with one or more episodes.

  • 7 - Semantic memory and language

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 160-200

  • Summary

    Some 60,000 years ago, at the end of an ice age, there were humans over much of the world. They all encoded their world into episodes and used tools to act upon it. After the ice age ended, the descendants of one family who lived in east central Africa began to migrate north, and then west into Europe and east into Asia. Wherever they went, the people who already lived there went extinct (there was a small amount of interbreeding in Europe). Everyone in the world today is therefore descended from this one family. Clearly, this family had some enormous advantage that allowed them to conquer the world. One likely possibility is the invention of human language.

    The fundamental unit of memory is the episode, in which a voluntary action to a target in a specific context, and its result, are encoded. This is a polymodal representation involving more than one sensory modality and more than one representation. So, when a visual target is matched to a representation in memory, the response is the activation of an entire episode that includes a previous action to the target in a specific context and its consequence. This knowledge of the previous encounter with the target may be used to guide behavior during the current event. As mentioned in Chapter 2, this kind of knowledge is called declarative knowledge. Declarative knowledge is of two kinds: semantic knowledge and episodic knowledge. Semantic knowledge is knowledge of what something is, and episodic knowledge is knowledge of when it has been encountered previously. Episodic knowledge will be discussed in Chapter 12. We begin the discussion of semantic knowledge here. The representation of semantic knowledge is commonly called semantic memory.

    The components of an episode – the target, the action, etc. – are associated with verbal and written labels called words. When a visual target is matched to a representation in memory, the response to it includes the word naming it as well as the episode. Conversely, when a word is heard, the episode whose component it names is activated. Consequently, when people encounter or hear about a target, everything they know about it immediately becomes available to guide their action.

    Essential as they are, individual words are limited in how much information they communicate. To let someone know what you wish to do or what you have done, entire sentences are necessary.

  • 6 - Vision

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 122-159

  • Summary

    In November 1966 a twenty-five-year-old soldier who was home on leave accidentally suffered carbon monoxide poisoning from leaking gas fumes. This accident was a serious one, since exposure to carbon monoxide can cause brain damage and death. Following resuscitation, the soldier was able at first to converse with relatives. But the next day he lapsed into a coma, from which he recovered only slowly. In a month he was alert and talkative again. However, he experienced severe visual problems.

    Seven months after the accident the soldier was admitted to Boston Veterans Administration Hospital for extensive tests. Most of his cognitive abilities, such as language use and memory, appeared normal. Most of his perceptual system was also intact. He could readily identify and name things through their feel, smell, or sound. In addition, his most elementary visual abilities were also preserved. He was able to identify colors, discriminate between lights of different intensities, and tell in what direction an object was moving. Nevertheless, the soldier's visual perception was severely impaired. He was unable to recognize objects, letters, or people when he saw them. His impairment was so severe that on one occasion he identified his own reflection in a mirror as the face of his doctor!

    A common factor in these recognition failures appeared to be the inability to identify any visual shape or form. To test this hypothesis, two neurologists, Benson and Greenberg (1969), gave the soldier a variety of tests in which he had to verbally identify a pattern, copy a pattern, select which two of several patterns were the same, or simply say whether two patterns were the same or different. The results of a typical task are shown in Figure 6.1. In this task the soldier had to mark which one of four comparison patterns was the same as a standard pattern on the left. He was unable to match any of them correctly. All the results from this and similar tests were equally dismal. The soldier was simply unable to distinguish visual shapes from one another. He could not even tell a circle from a square.

    The soldier's disorder dramatically demonstrates that pattern perception requires much more than the eye's ability to detect a beam of light.

  • 5 - Serial learning, perceptual skills, and talent

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 100-121

  • Summary

    Once upon a time I was a projectionist for a college film club. Each movie reel was a half-hour long and each projection booth had two projectors. About five seconds before the end of a reel a large colored splotch appeared in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, as a signal to the projectionist to be ready to turn on the second projector. This is easy to do, so the audience never notices that the reel has changed. Nor does the audience notice the splotch in the corner of the screen. However, for some years afterwards, whenever I sat in the audience, as a former projectionist I always noticed the splotch in the corner. There are two morals to this story. The first is that no one sees everything. The second is that sometimes it is a disadvantage to see too much, and an advantage to see only what is necessary.

    The tendency to notice the splotch in the upper right-hand corner was the result of a visual scanning strategy encoded by the habit system. The habit system does not just encode actions. The habit system encodes sequences of actions, such as the sequence of actions to traverse a maze (Chapter 2). Performing a sequence of actions in the correct order is essential for performing the routine tasks that are part of daily life. The encoding of sequences of actions by the habit system makes possible such mundane skills as washing, dressing, and cooking. These are not merely motor skills, as described in Chapter 3, but perceptual–motor skills, requiring the identification of a sequence of targets. The age of the cellphone has increased the importance of order, as this is what defines phone numbers, passwords, etc. Therefore, the ability of the habit system to encode target sequences is an essential twenty-first-century cognitive ability.

    The ability to encode a sequence of actions is called serial learning. In this chapter we will see the following.

  • • Serial learning is performed by the habit system, yet involves the encoding of the spatial location of responses.

  • • Serial learning is the basis of the encoding of the predictable spatial locations of the targets that make possible the rapid encoding of targets in familiar visual tasks such as reading. It is essential for the skillful navigation of daily life. […]

  • 9 - Categorization and causal learning

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 233-249

  • Summary

    Despite his scientific approach to detective work, Sherlock Holmes had a peculiar idea about human memory. Watson was surprised to discover that Holmes knew nothing of astronomy and was going to try to forget what Watson had told him. Holmes thought that humans could remember only a limited amount of information and that he shouldn't waste any space on facts irrelevant to solving crimes. In fact, there is no evidence that human memory ever becomes completed filled. Furthermore, as long as information is organized efficiently, it barely matters how much there is, as long as access is available to all of it rapidly. As children learn about the world, they organize the information into categories that make it possible to rapidly generalize actions to new targets in new contexts that share some features with old ones. Once knowledge of the world is organized by hierarchy of categories, it provides an efficient guide to learning ever more about the world, because new information is encoded by elaborating the existing representation.

    Organization is essential to cognition. It turns mere information into knowledge. However, organization involves a choice. To organize one's knowledge of the world in a particular way that makes some relationships easy to comprehend necessarily makes other relationships difficult or impossible to comprehend. It is also difficult to begin a new topic and to start to learn about something you know nothing about. However, for different reasons, it may be just as difficult to learn something new about a topic you know a lot about. For example, at the end of my course on human cognition, I give my students the same final examination twice in a row. It is a multiple-choice exam. First, the students answer the questions without having access to their textbooks or notes. So, this test is a retrieval test, based on what the students learned during the semester in the course. Immediately after the first test the students again answer the same questions, but this time each question is accompanied with a paragraph that contains the answer. So, now it is a reading comprehension test. The proportion correct is exactly the same on both the retrieval test and the comprehension test (Glass and Sinha, 2012). Once you think you know something, it is difficult to accurately comprehend something that contradicts what you think you already know.

  • 10 - Semantic learning

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 250-285

  • Summary

    I once heard two students talking after an exam. One student said to the other, “It's amazing how much clearer things are if you study when you are sober.” The student had discovered an important fact about alcohol intoxication: its devastating effect on learning. However, it is also interesting that it took a sober episode to produce this insight. Often even good students have no insight into what makes learning easy or difficult.

    As first described in Chapter 2, and repeatedly mentioned throughout the text, two distinct but integrated brain systems, the instrumental system and the habit system, make declarative learning possible. The human declarative learning system is remarkably sophisticated at remembering what is important and forgetting what is not. The representation of the immediate experience is immediately classified as familiar or novel. Novel experiences that may be important for future action are remembered but already familiar experiences that contain nothing new are not. Consequently, we all know how to order food from the drive-up speaker of a fast food restaurant without remembering every occasion on which we have done so.

    Declarative learning begins with an initial encoding stage followed by either rapid forgetting or long-term retention. Long-term term retention of the episode is the result of the following.

  • • A novel event eliciting a strong emotional response is remembered because the instrumental system creates an enduring representation of it in memory.

  • • A routine mundane event is remembered when the event is repeated before it is forgotten because the habit system creates a more enduring representation of it.

  • • A novel mundane event may be deliberately remembered through a mnemonic action, which is an action that creates a more enduring representation. This action controlled by the instrumental system results in a more enduring representation being created by the habit system.

    • Initial encoding

    As discussed in Chapter 7, people do not see colored shapes but familiar objects. Learning begins with recognizing objects in the immediate environment and sorting the immediate experience into what is familiar and what is novel. The task of the instrumental system is to encode and preserve what is novel about the experience. For example, when a visual display is a display of letters, what is novel is the precise set of letters in the display, so that is what must be encoded.

  • 8 - Infant learning and language learning

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 201-232

  • Summary

    Carolyn Rovee-Collier gave birth to her first son while she was a graduate student. She was faced with the difficulty of taking care of a newborn and writing a dissertation at the same time. As she attempted to write at her desk, her son was in the crib by her side. Hanging from the crib was a mobile that was intended to hold his attention. However, every time she tried to write a sentence, her son would cry, and she would have to stop writing to shake his mobile for him, which quieted him. Was there any way that she could get her son to entertain himself, so that he would stop interrupting? After all, she was a psychologist. She should be able to think of something.

    What she thought of was to tie a ribbon from her son's ankle to the mobile hanging over the crib (Figure 8.1, top). Now, when the boy squirmed and moved his leg, the mobile moved as well. The movement instantly caught his attention, distracting and quieting him. Within a few minutes he learned that he could make the mobile shake by moving his leg. This delighted him no end. Transfixed, he would give his leg a quick jerk, observe the result, and laugh. Soon he laughed and squealed even before he kicked, anticipating what was going to happen. This left his mother free to complete her work. What was more remarkable was that, when Rovee-Collier attached the ribbon to his foot the next day, he started kicking straight away. He remembered how to make the mobile move.

    This simple tale of infant learning illustrates the close connection between learning and action. From infancy, people remember the consequences of their actions. Then, in similar circumstances, it is possible to act effectively. After his initial discovery, every time Rovee-Collier's son saw the mobile to which he had been tethered he tried to move it with a kick.

    This discovery of the learning ability of a newborn (Rovee and Rovee, 1969) was a major surprise. Anyone who has ever taken care of a newborn can be excused for considering it to be little more than a digestive tract.

  • 1 - The evolution of the pre-cognitive control of action

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 1-19

  • Summary

    If you dropped a newborn infant into a swimming pool, do you think that it would swim? Remarkably, it would. A newborn infant cannot roll over and can barely manipulate its fingers. Yet, when placed in a pool, the infant swims both vigorously and happily. I can still remember the first time I saw this, in a grainy movie shown in an undergraduate developmental psychology class. It seemed almost too amazing to believe. I had to wait many years to confirm it, and then my son was born, and as soon as we got him home I took him to a pool, placed him in it, and let go. He swam from one end to the other. So, I can assure you from my own experience. Infants can swim!

    Why infants can swim illuminates one of the important milestones in the evolution of cognition. The evolution of cognition begins with the control of action. Almost all animals, except for the very simplest, are born with a set of automatic responses to things they will encounter in the world. Though not of importance to human survival, the infant swim reflex is a reminder that we evolved from creatures for which automatic action was a larger portion of their behavior than it is of ours. Initially, the nervous system evolved to automatically control action. Little learning was possible and reasoning was unnecessary.

    The control of action

    Cognition evolved from the control of action. An action is the movement of a body part in response to some target perceived by an animal. So, falling off a cliff and being blown in the wind do not count as actions. Rather, action implies sensation, because the animal must be able to detect the stimulus that the action is in response to. If you cannot move about and have an effect on your place in the world then there is no value to you in perceiving and thinking about the world. That is why there is a psychology of animals but there is not a psychology of plants. There is no survival value in being able to perceive the world around you if you cannot respond to what you perceive. The sole purpose of cognition is to make action more effective (Barsalou, 2008).

  • 14 - Reasoning

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 365-393

  • Summary

    You know a lot of things that you have never learned. If a pair of jeans are too small for you, then you will try on a larger size, not a smaller size, because you know that an even smaller size cannot fit you. Such a deduction is obvious, but it is not trivial. After all, it provides you with a strategy for finding a pair of jeans that fit. Deductive reasoning greatly expands what an individual knows about the world by making explicit information that is implicitly encoded in semantic memory. Reasoning involves both visual and verbal representation. The visual representation provides the intuitions that make many inferences possible, such as which jeans might fit.

    Deductive reasoning may be contrasted with inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is based on the intuition that things that are similar in some ways are similar in other ways as well, so that any one golden retriever will be as friendly as any other. As this example indicates, inductive reasoning is often used to predict behavior, and so is a core social skill.

    Human reason is directed by the prefrontal cortex. This should be obvious, since the prefrontal cortex directs all forms of cognitive processing, and human deduction and induction are forms of voluntary (mental) action. The decision system in the prefrontal cortex supplies the “Why?” to the “What?” of the instrumental system and the “How?” of the habit system.

    Human reason provides information about the world that supports effective voluntary action. A decision is a choice among different actions.

  • 15 - Problem solving and intelligence

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 394-420

  • Summary

    At an intuitive level, everyone knows what kinds of tasks require problem solving. All problem-solving tasks have a goal, which is a description of what would constitute a solution to the problem. What makes a problem a problem is that the statement of the goal does not act as a cue for its own solution. If your friend asks you to get her a can of diet Coke from the refrigerator in your room, that is not a problem. But, if your friend asks you to get her something to drink, that is a problem statement, because there are several ways that you can formulate and solve your task. Problems vary in the extent to which they are well defined (Newell, 1969; Reitman, 1964; Simon, 1973). In a well-defined problem, such as solving a crossword puzzle or selecting a good chess move, the set of possible actions and the goal are all completely specified. In ill-defined problems there may be uncertainty concerning the possible actions that can be taken, and a variety of solutions may therefore be possible. Despite the slightly negative ring to the term “ill-defined,” many ill-defined problems are very creative tasks, such as painting a picture, designing a house, and writing a story. Virtually all real-life problems, from preparing dinner to losing weight, are ill-defined in some way. In a crime story, both planning a murder and solving it describe solutions to ill-defined problems.

    Problem solving is a special case of decision making tasks requiring reasoning, which were described in general in Chapter 14. What all problems have in common is that an ad hoc action must be taken in a novel situation. The neural decision-making system described in Figure 14.1 engages in the reasoning necessary for problem solving.

    The process of solving a problem has three major steps (Figure 15.1). The first step is forming an initial representation of the problem. The second and third steps are the same as described for physical action in Chapter 3: planning and execution. The second step is generating and evaluating potential solutions. The third step is executing a procedure to carry out the planned solution that appears to be correct. The execution of a plan has already been described in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Here, the first and second steps are described.

Page 12 of 97