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8687 results in Cognition

Page 200 of 435

  • 13 - Autobiographical memory

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 337-364

  • Summary

    The psychologist Jean Piaget began his book on memory with a story from his own life. When he was a young boy, he remembered when he had nearly been kidnaped in the park except for the alertness of his nanny. The one problem with this dramatic event is that it never happened. Years later the nanny admitted that she had made it up to explain a bruise he had received while playing. Piaget's vivid memory of an event that had not occurred makes an important point about the relationship between confidence and accuracy in autobiographical memory. The core of what we mean by memory is our own autobiographies, which we carry around with us all the time and are constantly updating. You may forget what you learned in school today but there is almost no chance that you will forget who you are. People have tremendous confidence in the accuracy of many of the autobiographical details that we all can recall. However, autobiographical memory is not a fixed record of the past but constantly subject to revision from the incorporation of post-event information.

  • • Autobiographical memory is organized by intentions and actions. Recall of life events is a process of reconstruction and storytelling that makes use of cues from a person's current intentions and general rules of how events are ordered to provide a coherent justification for recent and planned actions. The prefrontal cortex makes use of available cues to initiate recollection from the temporal cortex.

  • • The recollection of autobiographical memories makes use of both the instrumental system, to generate perceptual representations and an emotional response, and the habit system, to generate meaningful details. New details may be added to the semantic system at any time. Consequently, autobiographical memory is constantly being revised through the addition of post-event information to semantic memory.

  • Preface

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

  • Summary

    The modern study of cognition began with the associative theory in the eighteenth century. According to this theory, spatial contiguity and temporal contiguity cause more simple visual and auditory features to be combined into more complicated representations, and the manipulation of these representations corresponds to thoughts. Associative theory motivated the experimental studies that began the science of cognitive psychology in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century behaviorism provided an alternative theoretical framework for psychology, whose content was observable behavior instead of mental states. The focus on behavior led to important advances in the experimental methodologies for observing behavior coupled with a complete lack of progress in explaining the mental processes causing the behaviors. This non-mental psychology came to an abrupt end with the publication of Ulric Neisser's (1967) Cognitive Psychology. Although the theories that followed its publication were much more sophisticated, they were within the associative tradition. Thought was represented as the manipulation of sensory features. My contribution at that time was a textbook that was a best-seller and certainly influenced those that came after it. Even the most recent textbooks published today still follow the same basic organization and cover the same basic topics.

    Because of their theoretical orientation, all current cognitive textbooks are now out of date. The theoretical framework is not wrong but it is incomplete. The conceptualization of cognition in terms of the combination of sensory features suggests that a good place to begin is with perception – i.e. with the construction of a representation of the world from sensory features. Unfortunately, this means that we begin with a passive description of cognition. An observer is not doing anything other than constructing a representation of the surrounding environment. This leads to analogies with passive mechanical recording devices such as cameras. The passive, perception-first, approach to the study of cognition has dominated introductory psychology textbooks, as well as much research, ever since Neisser's (1967) seminal work. This was not Neisser's fault. The theory he presented, called analysis-by-synthesis, was an active approach to all of cognition, including perception. However, it was difficult to understand and not as influential as the classical organization of the material around perception.

Cognition
  • Arnold Lewis Glass
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016
  • Drawing on a modern neurocognitive framework, this full-color textbook introduces the entire field of cognition through an engaging narrative. Emphasizing the common neural mechanisms that underlie all aspects of perception, learning, and reasoning, the text encourages students to recognize the interconnectivity between cognitive processes. Elements of social psychology and developmental psychology are integrated into the discussion, leading students to understand and appreciate the connection between cognitive processing and social behavior. Numerous learning features provide extensive student support: chapter summaries encourage students to reflect on the main points of each chapter; end-of-chapter questions allow students to review their understanding of key topics; approximately two hundred figures, photos, and charts clarify complex topics; and suggestions for further reading point students to resources for deeper self-study. The textbook is also accompanied by eight hundred multiple-choice questions, for use before, during, and after class, which have been proven to dramatically improve student understanding and exam performance.

  • 3 - Motor action and motor skills

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 41-68

  • Summary

    There is a sense in which the entire modern age is a fortuitous consequence of the human ability to make an ad hoc voluntary response. People did not specifically evolve to be able to drive a car or to be able to type a text message into a smartphone. However, we did evolve to be able to do whatever we were able to imagine. There once was a one-legged high school athlete who played football without an artificial leg but who nevertheless could hop so quickly and forcefully that he could catch and tackle a runner. Such a skill demonstrates the flexibility, hence the robustness, of the motor system.

    In this chapter, we shall see that voluntary action involves two distinct stages: planning and performance.

  • • During the planning stage, involving the parietal and the premotor or supplementary motor cortex, various final postures from previous successful acts are retrieved, and one is selected and modified for the current situation.

  • • During the performance stage the plan is encoded for specific body parts in the motor cortex, initiated by the basal ganglia, and translated into a motor program for making the necessary muscle movements by the cerebellum. The neural system includes multiple top-down pathways that exert multiple levels of control of the action towards its target under the guidance of feedback. Furthermore, unrelated perceptual and motor activity is inhibited.

  • • A successful action results in the encoding of the final posture of the action. Over time, when a familiar action is repeated in a similar context, it is necessary only to retrieve and execute a posture plan for rapid, errorless performance. Skill learning is the result of the accumulation of posture plans.

  • • The ability to learn skills makes a wide range of actions possible. A boy does not even need two legs to be able to play football.

    • Consider all that is involved in the simple act of pointing at a target. In order to perform the action, the motor system must be able to encode the location of the target and the hand, initiate the movement of the hand, encode the changing location of the hand in real time, and use this information to adjust its motion to the target and initiate the movement of the fingers into a pointing posture.

  • 4 - Mental action: attention and consciousness

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 69-99

  • Summary

    People like to look for things. From Where's Waldo? to countless video games, searching for visual targets is considered by many people to be fun. Paleontologists hunt for dinosaur bones, anthropologists hunt for human bones, and archeologists hunt for the debris of ancient civilizations. Quarterbacks search for the open receiver and point guards search for the open shooter. Merchants stock miles of shelves in giant stores with confidence that customers will be able to find what they look for. People can routinely detect and respond to task relevant targets so quickly that they can drive vehicles through crowded streets safely much more quickly than any person can walk or run. The general name for this ability to control perception so that what is important is seen or heard is attention.

    Attention refers to voluntary actions that are used to control perception. Seeing and hearing are the consequence of looking and listening. The control of perception involves either of two tasks. One task is to select a single target for processing, such as when you listen to a single conversation during a party. The other task is to divide attention among several targets, such as when you drive a car down a crowded street. In this chapter we will see the following.

  • • Selective attention involves three stages: target specification, search, and target identification. The frontal cortex, where the target is specified, selects for the target by the inhibition of all perceptual input that is not target-related.

  • • Because the human information-processing system can plan and perform only one ad hoc voluntary response at a time, the bottleneck imposed by serial responding limits the number of targets that can be identified and responded to. Tasks that require independent ad hoc responses to multiple targets are called divided attention tasks. Divided attention inevitably results in missed targets and lower responses. Multitasking results in poorer performance than performing the tasks separately.

  • • Target selection is not entirely determined by top-down control from the prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex. Emotional arousal may also play a role. Emotional arousal increases the inhibition of distracters, narrowing perceptual processing to just the emotionally significant target. In other words, one cannot ignore something sufficiently threatening.

    • About attention

    People do not passively see and hear but actively look and listen. The same neural systems that evolved to control motor movements control perception as well.

  • 2 - The evolution of cognition

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 20-40

  • Summary

    Automatic responses play only a limited role in our behavior because life is not perfectly predictable. If a lifetime of events was perfectly predictable then every animal could be born able to automatically make every response it would ever need to make, and cognition would be unnecessary. However, life is not perfectly predictable. To make it possible to respond to unpredicted challenges in the world, an elaborated nervous system evolved that made voluntary action possible. The advantage of voluntary over automatic, involuntary action is that it can be ad hoc. Faced with something unexpected, an animal can craft a response it has never made before. Social creatures face a lifetime of new social experiences that require ad hoc responses. For example, dogs that are allowed on furniture often sit where other family members sit. This is how I came to share a chair with my golden retriever. The dog would have to move whenever I wanted to sit down. Across the room was the sliding door to the backyard. The retriever learned that, to go out, he should touch the door. One day, when I was sitting in the chair, the dog touched the door. I got up and walked over to the door. Before I could open it, the dog ran back and sat in the chair!

    Cognition begins with the control of voluntary action. In this chapter we will see that cognition evolved to make it possible for an animal to perform novel actions in response to novel, hence unexpected, events.

  • • To make voluntary action possible, at the top of the spinal cord, layer upon layer of representational, computational, and control structure was added, forming brains of increasing complexity, which provided increasingly sophisticated control of voluntary action. The great advantage of a voluntary ad hoc system of action is that it can craft new responses to novel situations, and so respond to change. The great advantage of learning is that successful new actions can be incorporated into future behaviors.

  • • Voluntary action is synonymous with consciousness. The control of voluntary action is synonymous with cognition.

  • • Social groups are so effective at dominating their environments that a member's success at raising a family depends more on his or her social standing than any other factor. […]

  • 12 - Recall

  • Arnold Lewis Glass, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    Cognition
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    21 March 2016, pp 312-336

  • Summary

    Before we went to Paris, I suggested to my eight-year-old son that it would be fun to walk to the top of the Eiffel Tower. At first he was dubious, but when we got there he embraced the task with great enthusiasm. Soon he was bounding up the stairs at rapid clip, and we reached the top far in advance of the rest of our party, who waited for the elevator. Very much pleased with myself, when we returned home I asked him what he enjoyed most about the trip to Paris. He answered, unhesitatingly, “The Empire State Building.”

    Clearly, this was a retrieval error. It demonstrates that encoding the representation of an object or event is not sufficient to ensure an accurate memory later on. A recall task requires you to respond with information not in the question – for example, what you enjoyed best on your trip to Paris. In a recall task, the cue may be distinguished from the target response it elicits. In a question-and-answer format, the question is the cue, and the answer is the target of the recollection. In a navigation task, the goal is the cue, the location of the goal is the target, and the mental map containing the sequence of movements to the goal is the recollection.

    Recall frees human thought and action from the constraints of the immediate environment. Recognition makes it possible to respond to whatever is immediately at hand (Chapter 10). However, self-cuing makes it possible to recall, hence think about, anything one has experienced.

Page 200 of 435