Cognitive psychology

Period

The period of a sound wave is the duration of an oscillation cycle Can be measured as the time between two peaks.

Zhong and Liljenquist 2006

lying on phone leads to a preference for mouthwash over soap and vice versa for lying in an email • people don't realize they are being influenced to make these decisions

Anterograde

loss of memories for information after brain injury (hippocampus isn't able to encode this information)

Retrograde

loss of memories for information before brain injury

Klink (2000)

sound symbolism in brand names • "Which brand of ketchup seems thicker? Nidax or Nodax" • certain pattern in these imaginary brand name

Another example of less is more Hsee (1998)

value two dinner sets (in a clearance sale) one of which contains all the items in the first, a few more good items, and several broken items • In a direct comparison the set with more items is valued higher • But when the values are given by different people, the set with fewer items is valued higher (less [fewer!!] items, more value)

Mussweiler 2006

walking slowly primes words associated with old age • as people walked down corridor he timed how quickly they walked and people who solves them associated with elderly people walked more slowly

Recognition

•single/multiple items •forces choice •studied items are present but must be identified from distractors

Middle ear SUMMARY

•protection •impedance match

These principles help minimize ambiguity, but they don't eradicate it

consequence of linguistic economy, take risk of being misunderstood

The Episodic Buffer

"A limited capacity temporary storage system capable of integrating information from a variety of sources" • Episodic: integrates information across space & time o Can be preserved in densely amnesic patients with impaired long-term episodic memory • Multi-dimensional coding (not phonological, visual or spatial in nature) • Enables long-term memory to interact with working memory • Controlled by the central executive • Supports conscious experience

Prediction using "multiple regression" Robyn Dawes

"The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making" • Statistical prediction works well, even if the predictors are not (properly) weighted (usually, if all the decent predictors are equally weighted) • The weights in a multiple regression equation often reflect vagaries of the sample, rather than real world effects

Ferreira, Christianson, & Hollingworth (2001)

"While Anna dressed the baby spit up on the bed" • Did the baby spit up on the bed? • Did Anna dress the baby? "While Anna dressed, the baby spit up on the bed" The first bars, the percentage of incorrect yes response, even when reanalysed and come correct to conclusion that Ana did not dress the baby, the still answer yes "Comprehenders can be remarkably insensitive to discrepancies between the interpretation they obtain and the one that is appropriate given the content of a sentence"

Working Memory Model: Baddeley & Hitch (1974)

"Working with Memory" • More of an active process • Baddeley and Hitch argued that working memory must comprise different components • Phonological- more verbal • Central executive- switching between the different stores

Unconscious Influences on System 1

- Not caught by System 2 Bateson et al 2006 - picture of face (eyes watching you) vs flowers • picture of face increased money put into honesty box for coffee in academic kitchen Mostly these priming effects are not noticed (by system 2) and there is a disinclination to believe them because system 2 is not aware of their influence and thus they are not part of the story of why we behave as we do

ssues with Standard Model of Consolidation

1. Amnesics can acquire new semantic knowledge in some circumstances (e.g., fast mapping conditions, developmental amnesia) 2. Spared remote episodic memories may not be truly episodic (e.g., narratives are based on semantic information)

Is speech CP unique to humans?

1. Identification No - Chinchillas and quails show the same VOT boundary as humans for the /da/ - /ta/ continuum • Identification curve similar to human (inverted 2 shape) • Trained to respond differently to the endpoints of the VOT continuum 2. Discrimination Macaques show discrimination peaks at human VOT and place-of-articulation boundaries. So suggests that human speech exploits low level discontinuities in the way that vertebrate auditory systems represent sound • Perceptual system has not adapted to speech as we produce it, on the contrary it's the speech that we have evolved, the production speech that has adapted to discontinues in our perceptual system • If sounds perceived as category, language has evolved to use these categories to increase the intelligibility of speech

Evidence for Phonological Store

1. Phonological Similarity Effect 2. Word Length Effect 3. Irrelevant Speech Effects 4. Brain Evidence

Sound

A local pressure disturbance in a continuous medium that contains frequencies in the range of 20 to 20,000Hz A single sound wave is caused by an increase in pressure at a certain point in an elastic medium which causes a "domino effect" outward. If the perturbation is repeated periodically, then it generates a series of sound waves: • The crests correspond to the high pressure points and the troughs correspond to the low pressure points.

Language is designed for communication

A maximally expressive language might have a different word for every unique event, thing, person, action etc. in the world • Advantage: minimal room for misunderstanding • Disadvantage: overloaded with unnecessary detail à communication becomes impossible

Two selves

1. The Experiencing Self 2. The Remembering Self Note that these do NOT correspond to System 1 and System 2 • Confusing experience with the memory of it is (another) cognitive illusion

Other Deviations from the Normative Theory (Utility Theory)

1. The endowment effect 2.Probabilities 3.Allais Paradox 4.Mental accounting 5. Framing

Sound SUMMARY (2)

1. The outer ear: captures sound signals, amplifies mid-frequencies. 2. The middle ear: impedance matching. 3. The cochlea: translates vibrations into neural responses: a. Frequency analysis i. Sharpening (OHC) ii. Place theory iii. Temporal (phase locking) theory b. Intensity coding

Memory retrieval SUMMARY

1. To describe and understand different types of memory retrieval and different retrieval processes Recognition memory is typically easier than free recall. When we retrieve memories they are either recollected or just familiar. 2. To understand why some events are better remembered than others Several aspects explain why some memories are remembered better, such as emotion or the significance of the event. Although we may be more confident about flashbulb memories it doesn't mean that we will recall them accurately. 3. To identify and describe evidence for the (re)constructive nature of memories Memories are constructed, thus are prone to distortions, as reflected by the misinformation and DRM paradigm. Entire autobiographical memories can be implanted in some circumstances. Because of this constructive aspect, memory is similar to imagination.

Encoding and consolidation SUMMARY

1. To identify and describe different theories of memory encoding and retrieval Encoding depends on the type of processing that occurs during learning (Levels of Processing), retrieval (Transfer Appropriate Processing), and the context of encoding can influence what retrieval cues will be effective for accessing memories (Encoding Specificity, Context Dependent Memory). 2. To understand encoding related mechanisms that support long-term memory (or how to revise better) Memory is better when information is organized, retrieval cues are compatible with the context of learning (self-generated cues and testing effect), and when learning is distributed over time. 3. To compare the standard model and the multiple trace theories of consolidation in long-term memory and how these relate to amnesia There is much controversy regarding the consolidation of long-term memory across different brain systems, particularly with respect to the temporal gradient in retrograde amnesia and the involvement of episodic and semantic memories overtime.

Working Memory SUMMARY

1. To identify and describe evidence supporting the components of Baddeley's Model of Working Memory The phonological loop is supported by phonological similarity, word length, irrelevant speech & brain evidence. Other evidence supports the visual spatial sketchpad. The central executive controls both of these, but is less specified 2. To understand why the episodic buffer is needed in Baddeley's Revised Model of Working Memory The episodic buffer accounts for issues with the phonological store by allowing for the integration of multi-dimensional information.

Long term memory SUMMARY

1. To identify and describe the different types of long-term memories Long-term memory is composed of declarative and non-declarative memories that differ in their involvement of conscious awareness or no awareness, respectively. 2. To identify and describe evidence supporting the distinction between episodic and semantic memory Episodic and semantic memories differ in a number of properties, including their content, consciousness, and brain regions- but they can also interact. Episodic memory is affected in amnesia, but semantic memory is intact. 3. To identify and describe evidence supporting procedural memory Procedural, or motor memories, are are not affected by amnesia- but they are impaired in other neurological patients. The development of procedural memories suggests that they are initially declarative. 4. To identify and describe evidence supporting perceptual and conceptual aspects of priming Priming evidence suggests that many of our memories are implicit or without awareness, and that amnesics are not impaired on priming when it relies on pre-existing representations.

Experimental evidence of CP: discrimination

3. Run a discrimination experiment • synthesis/generate pairs so each pair varies by small in term of slopes of second formant • play pairs of stimuli and ask people if they are the same or different people tend to perceive stimuli as similar even though they are not similar within the ba and da category and perceive them different at boundary of two phoneme peak of discrimination corresponds to phoneme category boundary

The middle ear

A cavity that contains three ossicles: the malleus (hammer), the incus (anvil) and the stapes (stirrup). • Transmit vibrations from eardrum to smaller oval window. • Impedance matching: enables air vibration (sound) to be efficiently transformed into fluid vibration. • Turns a large amplitude vibration in air into a small amplitude vibration (of the same energy) in fluid. Without a middle ear most of the sound would just bounce off the cochlea. The large area of the eardrum compared with the small area of the stapes (oval window) and the lever action of the ossicles enable Impedance Matching.

Heuristic 2: Availability

A person is said to employ the availability heuristic whenever he estimates frequency or probability by the ease with which instances or associations could be brought to mind

Adopted the Norman & Shallice (1986) model of attentional control

Actions are controlled by two processes: 1. Habits or schemas guided by environmental cues 2. An attentionally limited controller (supervisory attentional system) The CE carries out processing such as monitoring behaviour, switching attention, inhibiting inappropriate actions, support how we direct information into two systems

Memory Consolidation & Amnesia

Amnesia is split into anterograde and retrograde components: 1. Anterograde 2. Retrograde Retrograde Amnesia is Temporally Graded: • If we look at people memory for before amnesia, there is a temporal gradient pattern • Recent memories are more affected by injury than remote our memories may require some amount of time to become more stable

Complex sounds

Animals, humans and most musical instruments usually generate periodic sounds which have energy at more than one frequency. These sounds are called "complex sounds" • These sounds are composed of more than one pure tone. • Examples: speech sound, red deer roar • Distribution of energy is not random

Pulvermüller et al. (2005)

Applied TMS (heighten or supress brain activity) to motor regions of the brain for the arm or the leg • Faster lexical decisions for leg-related words ("kick") with leg region stimulation and faster decision for arm-related words ("pick") with arm region stimulation • those parts of brain that actually form or involved in the actual doing such as picking are activated when concept or word itself is activated Language is not modular or abstract but an integrated part of experience

Irrelevant Speech Effects Baddeley (1984)

Articulatory Suppression (aka "yada yada yada") Recall series of visually presented digits: While repeating an irrelevant word out loud: "the . . . the . . . the . . . the" Results: • Recall is disrupted •Articulatory Suppression prevents refreshing of visual information in the phonological store via articulatory loop (internal speech) •No word length effect & no phonological similarity effect when items presented visually à prevents mechanisms supported by the articulatory loop •Same effects when people hear speech (Salame & Baddeley, 1982) Having people repeat word out loud disrupted how well they were abel to recall these letters having people say words outloud is supressing rehersal mechanism through articulary rehearsal that allows information to come into phonolohial source

Attetion SUMMARY

Attention is hard to define but can be measured: • Eye movements • Reaction time • Error rates • Self-report • Neuroimaging

ATTENTION SUMMARY (2)

Attention may be determined by: • Top-down goals • 'Bottom-up' properties of the stimuli • Value? There are competing theoretical viewpoints regarding the relative importance of each of these factors: • Initial selection is entirely bottom-up • Only abrupt onsets can produce bottom-up attentional capture • Attentional capture is entirely contingent on top-down settings

The temporal (or "phase locking") theory of pitch perception for pure tones.

Auditory nerves connected to inner hair cell tend to fire at the same phase of the stimulating waveform - independently of position along the basilar membrane Intervals between spikes tend to be whole-numbers of cycles of the stimulating waveform. The brain times these intervals to estimate the frequency of the tone. Only for relatively low frequencies (<5 kHz in humans)

categorical perception of the ba / da continuum

B and D are two voiced stops differing by their place of articulation: • B is bilabial (contact of lips) • D is alveolar (contact of tongue and alveolar region • Affects the second formant

Theeuwes (2004)

Bacon & Egeth's task reduced local salience of singleton • Colour singleton DOES interfere when target non-singleton • IF local salience is maintained • Odd one out shape become less salient when all other things for display Made display bigger • Less local feature contrast did get inference from colour singleton

Evidence supporting Load Theory

Behavioural measures of distraction: • Similar effects found with other measures • E.g. Irrelevant distractor measure • People with low load task are slowed when SpongeBob pops up • Effects of distractors was eliminated under high low

Roberson et al. (2000)

Berinmo tribe of New Guinea • Berinmo has five basic colour terms (vs English eleven) • Across tasks (similarity judgements, category learning, recognition memory) categorical perception of colour was aligned with colour terms Suggest that perception/thought is guided by language categories (Cf Kay & Regier)

Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals: Remembering

Bialystok et al. (2004): bilingual advantage on Simon task for more complex paradigm requiring working memory Bialystok, Craik, & Luk (2008): no advantage on pointing task, found an advantage on Corsi (sequence remembering task) • Block task for younger but not older bilinguals Feng (2008): No advantage on Corsi Block task

Goetz (2003):

Bilingual children better on perspective-taking and false-belief tasks

Bilingualism SUMMARY

Bilingualism is challenging to study but highly informative • Representative of how the majority of the word uses language Both languages are always available (joint activation) • Bi-directional influence of L1 and L2, even if lower deficiency in one of those languages • Code-switching requires inhibiting one or another language Advantages and disadvantages of bilingualism • Both persist throughout life, but some protective effects of bilingualism against age-related cognitive decline

Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals: Memory

Bilinguals have to learn and remember multiple words for the same/similar concepts/ideas So: They may be better at remembering

Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals: EF/Inhibition

Bilinguals must manage two competing, overlapping language systems So: They may be better at executive function/inhibitory control Bilingual children better at: • Finding embedded figures (Bialystok, 1992) • Identifying correct grammar in odd sentences "Apples grow on noses" (Bialystok, 1988) Bilingual adults better at: • Stroop task (Bialystok et al., 2008) • Simon task (Bialystok et al., 2004) • Interaction with age: older bilinguals showed a greater benefit Counterexample: Kirk, Scott-Brown, & Kempe (2013) with older bilinguals

Aphasia: Lessons for Language Miozzo (2003)

Case study of English speaker AW • Given a word and asked to produce: • Past tense for verbs: walk walked, find found • Plural for nouns: glove gloves, child children • Significantly less accurate for irregular forms (found, children) than for regular words

What is categorical perception

Categorical perception is the perception of different sensory phenomena as being qualitatively, or categorically, different. Occurs when "a change in some variable along a continuum is not perceived as gradual, but as instances of discrete categories" When categorical perception occurs, we tend to be good at discriminated small differences at categorical boundaries but loose ability to perceive small differences within the category

Linguistic Relativity: Colour Categories

Categorical perception: continuous quantities divided categorically Where are the boundaries between colours? • Depends on the language (Berlin & Kay, 1979) • Continuous category of colours Roberson et al.

How do we investigate sensation and perception?

Cell Staining Single cell recording (electrophysiology) fMRI

Cerebral Achromatopsia

Damage to small cortical region, loss of colour perception • Humans with lesions in extrastriate visual cortex (e.g., V4/V8) • Functioning cones, can record activation at V1 in response to colour BUT, things don't appear coloured • Can affect one visual field • Illustrates importance of cortical processing

What are birds?

Classical view: necessary and sufficient conditions Assumptions: • Concepts have defining features • All-or-none assumption: either a member of a category or not Semantic and hierarchical network models • Birds: have feathers, have wings, lays eggs, etc... • Some have additional features (penguins can't fly, can swim) Feature models • Set of bivalent features: bird is +ANIMATE, +FEATHERED, etc

Vocal tract length affects voice gender in adults:

Combined with body size differences (males are about 10% taller than females), the secondary descent of the larynx results in a 1.2 sexual dimorphism in vocal tract length: • The adult male vocal tract (16.5 cm) is longer than the female vocal tract (14 cm) • As a consequence, formants are on average 20 % lower in adult males than females (Rendall et al. 2005) In order to make male a female voice, just changing the pitch doesn't make it sound female, only if you change the pitch + formants up 20%

Storage vs computation: Testing

Common testing ground: compound words (home + work --> homework) Three frequencies of interest: • Whole compound: homework • Constituents: home and work If response times change depending on whole-compound frequency: • Indicates the whole compound has been lexicalized If response times change depending on constituent frequency: • Indicates the constituents are accessed during processing

Synaesthesia and Language: Compounds

Compound word: composed of two constituent words • rain + bow = rainbow • If you have rain and bow, what colour is rainbow? Number of colours as a measure of lexicalisation • One colour for rainbow stored as a whole word lexicalised • Two colours for rainbow stored as constituents decomposed

Problems with the classical model

Concept don't have defining features! • Eas(ier) for naturally occurring things (dogs, birds, etc.) • What are the features of the concepts games, or truth, or furniture? Concepts are not arbitrary • There are good, medium, and poor exemplars of categories • Robin is a pretty good bird, while penguin and ostrich are rubbish birds • Typicality effect: people respond faster to typical exemplars Concepts are not all-or-none à rather fuzzy • Is tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Is clock a type of furniture?

Consonants

Consonants are speech sounds characterised by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. Place of articulation: • Bilabial (p, b, m), articulators = lips • Labio-dental (f, v), articulators = lips +teeth • Alveolar (t,d,n,s,z,l), articulators = tongue + alveolar ridge • Palatal (j), articulators = tongue + hard palate • Velar (k, g, r), articulators = tongue + velum

Della Sala et al

Corsi Block(visual task) Tap sequence of blocks in same order as the experimenter Pattern Span(spatial task) Fill in shaded areas of cells on a blank array Results:Double dissociation -viewing abstract pictures interfered with visual task -tracing the outline of a series of pegs on a board interfere with the spatial task

Gladwell, 2005, "Blink"

Decisions about whether relationships would last (based on short video clips) • Only worked if the talk was about the relationship Decisions about whether doctors would be sued for malpractice • Based on conversations between doctors and patients • Info about training, or actual mistakes was not useful Quick decisions were better than more deliberate ones

Categorical perception: experimental definition

Defined as: 1. Sharp phoneme boundary 2. Discrimination peak at phoneme boundary 3. Discrimination predicted from identification (only sound "different" if identified as different phoneme)

Other neural keystones

Direct cortico-laryngeal connections (Kuypers / Jurgens hypothesis) • Only humans have direct connections to the laryngeal motor neurons that control the muscles of the larynx. • In nonhuman mammals, cortical neurons make no direct connections to the neurons that control the muscle of the tongue and larynx.

Distributed vs. Mass Learning (Litman and Davachi)

Distributed learning (DL) Mass learning (ML) Single session only (SS) Results: • On first test on day 2, no difference between two groups so if oyu cram and tested immediately after • If you bring people in next day and test memory and there's a drop-in performance for cramming on only one day learning • SS learning is always worst • DL & ML memory same in Test 1 • ML memory worst than DL in Test 2 Memory is better when it is spread over time. Don't just cram DL supported by consolidation processes that strengthen memory

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Does the language you speak shape the way you think? • we assume that language reflects and represents thought • If two languages have different features, this means the speakers of those languages might think differently Versions of this theory: • Linguistic relativity: Features of language influence/bias patterns of thought(language imposes different categories) • Linguistic determinism: Features of language determine/constrain patterns of thought If your language doesn't have "a word for" a particular idea/concept, you can't conceive of or understand it "untranslatable words"

Stream of processing

Dorsal (where) •Back of the brain • This is where the visual information gets streamed (location of things) and it heads to the motor system (movement) Ventral (what) • The streaming information which gets specialized to tell what's out there and runs along ventral surface of the brain • Along pathway gets more specialized • Specialised processing (useful for detecting faces) Processing hierarchy • More complicated structures need more specialized stimuli

Theewes: Stimulus-driven selection Bottom-up BEFORE top-down

Drawing on traditional two-stage approach to attention (e.g. Broadbent, 1958; Treisman & Gelade, 1980) • Pre attentive step is bottom up process • First he argues when presented with scene our attention system bottom up and calculates local salient what we see • Model made with visual references First stage: • Initial sweep across visual field, entirely bottom-up • Calculation of local salience (How much does this differ from surrounding image attributes along some dimension such as colour, shape, luminance, size etc?) • Attention location with highest local feature contrast or salience Second stage: • Is selected item target? If not location inhibited. • Attention then shifts to item that is next in line with respect to salience. • Order of attention doesn't have anything to do with goal but with salience

Evidence for multiple STM Stores; Baddeley & Hitch (1974)

Dual Task Method Press a button to indicate whether the sentence is True or False: • A precedes B - AB (true) • B does not follow A - AB (false) Repeat a string of digits at the same time. Results: Increasing digit load increases reasoning time, BUT no effect on errors. perhaps our short term memory reflects we can take information into visual-spatial sketchpad and on other hand when repeating using phonological store

Thierry & Wu (2007):

ERP evidence of simultaneous language use Chinese-English bilinguals: are two words in English semantically related • Some of these pairs, when translated into Chinese, have a repeated character Results • No behavioural (RT difference) of R+/- • BUT changes in N400 ERP signal • Indexes semantic priming • Same pattern in Chinese monolinguals Evidence of joint activation, even when doing task in English, you are still processing second language

Memory SUMMARY

Early Selection theories: • Irrelevant information is filtered, or attenuated, at perceptual stage of processing. • Semantic information not processed Late selection theories: • All stimuli is processed to the point of meaning • Selection takes place at later stage of processing and may involve inhibition Load Theory: • Both early and late selection are possible depending on perceptual load of task stimuli

Representing sound: spectrograms

Enable to visualise the distribution of the energy (amplitude) in two dimensions: time (s) and frequency (Hz). Dark area- lots of energy at frequency

Cognitive economy and prediction

Enable us to generalize from past experiences to new observations • If you meet a dog, you might know what you're dealing with Conceptual hierarchies economy of representation • Decreases the amount of information that must be perceived, remembered, or recognized Allows us to predict new outcomes

Outcome bias

Events (and the choices that led to them happening) are judged by their actual outcomes, not by whether the decisions were good ones when they were made

Rapid new learning of information

Evidence for Learning New Semantic Knowledge in Amnesics Fast Mapping Condition: Amnesic Patients (with hippocampal lesions) perform the same as healthy controls Explicit Encoding: Amnesic Patients perform more poorly than healthy controls

Problems with the standard model

Evidence of Integration Among Slave Systems: Visual similarity affects the span for verbal materials (Logie et al., 2000) • Indicates that phonological and visual information are combined in some way Irrelevant speech disrupts performance on a spatial location test (Jones et al., 1995) • Interference across modalities suggests that there are common processes to both tasks Binding problem • If visuospatial information about objects is stored separately from verbal information about the same objects, the system must have a way of keeping track of which information refers to what object

Issues with Multiple Trace Theory

Evidence of spared retrograde amnesia for vivid episodic memories when damage is restricted to the medial temporal lobe (MTL) Previous studies did not control for extent of brain damage

Language and Thought: Arbitrariness

Ferdinand de Sausurre • Founder of semiotics (study of signs and meaning) Connection between signifier and signified is fundamentally arbitrary

Constant control of air pressure

For proper control of intonation, the air pressure in the trachea, just below the larynx must remain constant regardless of how full the lungs are. To achieve this complex control, we use the muscles of the thorax (intercostal muscles) and the abdomen, which are directly controlled by the thoracic region of the spinal cord. This is called "thoracic breathing". The thoracic vertebral canal is considerably larger in modern humans and Neanderthals than in other primates and in our ancestors, including Homo erectus (McLarnon & Hewitt, 1999). So, early humans (before 1.6 mya) were probably not capable of the sophisticated control of breathing needed to produce speech.

Representing sound: Spectrums

Frequency / amplitude representation. The time dimension is removed

Mental lexicon

Idiosyncratic words must be stored find --> found Fully transparent words can be computed walk --> walked

Storage vs computation: Frequency

Frequency: how often a word appears in the language • High frequency (used to words): computer, dog, happy • Low frequency: dubious, incorrigible, aver More frequent words have quicker reaction times (Oldfield & Wingfield, 1965) • Lexical decision: Is this a word? (Yes/No) • Lexical naming: Read this word The more often you see a word, the easier it is to access • Processing a word (breaking it down into pieces) takes more time • Reaction time as an index of lexicalisation If a complex word is common enough, can it become a single, stored unit? • home + work homework (a compound word) Does this word eventually become lexicalized? • Stored on its own as a word

Two functional components: the source and the filter

Go through trachea and set vocal vibration in larynx, then signal goes through supralaryngeal tract Speech result from a two-stage process: • a periodic wave (called the glottal wave) is generated in the larynx (= the source), by vibration of the vocal folds. The rate of vibration determines the fundamental frequency of the signals, which affects the perceived pitch of the voice. • this wave is then filtered in the "supralaryngeal" cavities of the vocal tract (= the filter), creating broad bands of energy called "vocal tract resonances" or "formants".

Cone photoreceptors

Human Trichromacy: Three cone types, maximally sensitive at short (S), middle (M) and long (L) wavelengths

The two problems with using Representativeness

Ignoring base rates • Computer science graduate students were relatively rare when the experiments were first carried out • They knew base rates were but they ignored them Using poor (or even useless) information • The information in the description of Tom W is described as old, and based on "psychological tests of uncertain validity"

Another example of (misleading) numbers

Imagine you drive 10000 miles a year Which has most impact? • Switching from a 12MPG vehicle to a 14 MPG one • Switching from a 30MPG vehicle to a 40MPG one Which has the most impact? • Switching from a 0.083 gallons per mile vehicle to a 0.071 GPM one (.012 gallons saved per mile) • Switching from a .033 GPM vehicle to a .025 GPM one (.008 gallons saved per mile)

What is aphasia?

Impairment or loss of language production or comprehension due to brain damage • Typically stroke or head trauma • Does not imply impairment of intelligence • Separate from apraxia (impairment of motor function)

Vocal tract length adjustments affect voice gender in kids:

In children, body size is identical in boys and girls, and the vocal apparatus is not sexually differentiated before puberty. No differences in F0. • However we can discriminate between boys and girls: Why? • 5 y-old girls "talk girl" and boys "talk boy" despite no difference VTL before puberty: boys round (protrude and constrict) their lips, whereas little girls pull their lips slightly back and tend to talk with a "smile" (Sachs, Lieberman & Erickson, 1973). Children learn to achieve gender differences by imitating differences that exist between adults., by adjusting length of their vocal tract

Role of the Outer Hair Cells: Sharpening

In contrast, the outer hair cells mainly have synapses from the efferent fibres, providing a mechanism for the brain to control the mechanical properties of the ear. • Receive information from the brain • They exhibit motility: act as tiny motors that amplify the mechanical movement of the basilar membrane. • They are responsible for the high sensitivity (low thresholds) and sharp tuning (high frequency resolution) of normal hearing. • Their damage is the most usual cause of sensori-neural hearing loss o We lose ability to perceive soft sounds and sensitivity/ability to discriminate small changes in frequencies

Heuristics 1: Anchoring & Adjustment

In order to make judgment, make first guess (anchor) and then adjust that guess • A wheel of fortune is rigged to stop at either 10 or 65 • People are asked to read the result, decide whether the proportion of nations in the UN that are African is larger or smaller than the number, and then to make a numerical estimate • 10 -> 25% • 65 -> 45% • Currently, the correct figure is just under 30%, and was similar when the experiment was carried out. • Final judgment still affected by the wheel of fortune 10 and 65 are called anchors • People do not adjust enough from poor or even arbitrary anchors • Anchors can be used in negotiations, such as prices for used cars

The need for a big brain

In order to process language, the neocortex of the human brain must be able to store unprecedented amounts of information acquired through learning Increase in brain size is an essential prerequisite for the emergence of language in human communication. But remember correlation does not equal causation

fMRI response competition (e.g. Bishop, 2009)

Incongruent versus congruent distractions associated with • Reaction time interference • Frontal recruitment: o Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) o Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) People high in anxiety recruited less DLPFC and ACC and greater behavioural interference recruiting these frontal regions helps you control attention and focus it on what you are doing • Frontal regions also activated during sustained attention

Lagrou, Hartsuiker, & Duyck (2011)

Interlingual homophones in Dutch and English • Interference found for both languages • Influence of second language also extends to auditory domain (sound the same but different meaning) The second language (L2) can influence the native language (L1) • Even when not fully influenced in second language, it can still influence native language

Linguistic relativity Who dunnit Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010

Is there a difference in how often Spanish and English speakers use these agentive ("She broke...") vs non-agentive ("It broke") constructions? uDo these differences in language correspond to a difference in memory for the same event? Linguistic Relativity: Who dunnit? Task: watch videos of both kinds of events Study 1: "What happened?" Study 2: "Who did it?" Study 1: Differences in language • For intentional events: no difference • For accidental events: English speakers used more agentive descriptions ("She broke...") than Spanish speakers Study 2: Differences in memory • For intentional events: no difference • For accidental events: English speakers remembered the correct actor more frequently than Spanish speakers Object orientation memory task: no baseline language differences in memory ability Conclusion: differences in language influenced the encoding/memory of the event the differences in language influences the way that memory of seeing an event happen was encoded

Problems with the standard WM Model

Issues with the phonological store: Articulatory suppression only reduces digit span for visually presented words from 7 to 5 • But not a devastating impact! • It should prevent information from getting into phonological store! A span of around 16 words is possible if the words are presented as prose (e.g., a meaningful sentence)

Framing

Kahneman and Tversky • Would you accept a gamble with a 10% chance to win £95 and a 90% chance to lose £5? • Would you pay £5 for a lottery ticket that gives a 10% chance to win £100 and a 90% chance to win nothing?

Regression to the Mean (another example of poor statistical intuition)

Kahneman's experience with flying instructors in Israeli air force • Praise for a well executed manoeuvre was often followed by poorer performance next time • Criticism for a poorly executed manoeuvre was often followed by better performance next time

Planning Fallacy

Khaneman and Tverksy -predictions about how much time will be needed to complete future task display an optimism bias and underestimate time needed

Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals: Disadvantages

Language acquisition in children • Critical milestone: vocabulary of 50 words • Both monolingual and bilingual children achieve by about 1 ½ years in total vocabulary size (Pearson et al., 1993; Petitto, 1987; Petitto et al., 2001) • However, bilingual children know fewer words in each language (Pearson et al., 1993) • Subject to the usual difficulty with counting words

Biological requirements for the emergence of language and speech

Language requires large cognitive capacity • Ability to learn and memorise large numbers of symbols • Syntactic, recursive "thought": the ability to organise and embed a series of ideas. • Ability to learn via imitation (social learning) Speech requires specific articulatory and anatomical features • Ability to plan, produce and perceive flow of complex sounds (articulation) • Vocal control (sophisticated control of articulators and breathing) • Vocal apparatus capable of producing a large variety of sounds

A challenge: How to study the evolution of language?

Languages evolved only in our species, in only one way, without real precedent or parallel. But studying the evolution of human language is a perilous task, as: • The voice and soft tissues of vocal anatomy and human brain do not fossilize • No animal analogue to human language • No direct evidence or longitudinal record available prior to the invention of writing, 5000 years ago, and more recently audio recording. In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris even banned all discussion on this topic (slowing research for an entire century). An interdisciplinary approach (paleoanthropology, neuroscience, comparative animal communication and cognition, evolutionary biology and linguistics, genetics) can together yield a probable scenario.

Retinal ganglion cells

Last stage in retinal processing: • Large Parasol ganglion cells • Small Midget ganglion cells • Code different properties • Cells have 'Receptive Fields' Receptor fields depends on number of photoreceptors connected

American Goodness and Identification results

Listeners identified and rated the goodness of individual stimuli • Anything to left of boundary as ra • Anything to right la • At the extreme, the variance is better example

False Memories: Misinformation Paradigm

Loftus & Palmer (1974) Two groups of participants watched the same video of an accident, but were asked different questions: 1. how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other? 2. how fast were the cars going when they hit each other? A week later they were asked whether there was any broken glass at the accident à there wasn't any broken glass in the video Results • People in the smashed group were more likely to falsely report that there was broken glass in the video than people in the hit group. • Misinformation presented during memory retrieval becomes part of the original memory illusion of memory

Dawes-type examples ("improper linear models")

Marital stability = frequency of love making - frequency of quarrels • Equal and opposite weights for the two predictors The Apgar test for worryingly poor breathing in newborns • Rate 5 criteria, as 0, 1, 2 and add up o Appearance o Pulse o Grimace o Activity o Respiration • The 5 components are equally weighted

Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang (2010)

Measured receptive vocabulary in monolingual and bilingual children • Monolinguals scored higher than bilinguals (indicating larger vocabulary) However, depends on the type of word • Words from school (astronaut, rectangle): no difference in scores • Word from home (squash, pitcher): lower scores for bilingual children • It may be that they do know these words, but in a different language (L2) Some suggestion that differences in vocabulary size may persist into adulthood (see e.g. Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008) Slower at lexical retrieval (e.g. picture naming) • Frequently replicated (e.g. Roberts, Garcia, Desrochers, & Hernandez, 2002; Gollan, Montoya, Fennema-Notestine & Morris, 2005; Kaushanskaya & Marian, 2007) • Also experience more tip-of-the-tongue states (Gollan & Acenas, 2004) • Suggested due to interference of other language

Standard model of consolidation

Memories become more stable overtime, and are stored in different brain systems • For more recent memories this depends more on hippocampus (what affected in amnesia) • But over time the hippocampus become less essential for memory and memories can be stored and retained in other cortical regions in the brain • Hippocampus highly active in recent memories and cortex less active and opposite pattern for more remote memories Predictions: • Declarative memory (both episodic & semantic) depends on the hippocampus for retention in the recent past • All amnesic patients with hippocampal damage have anterograde amnesia • Remote declarative memory (both episodic & semantic) depend on cortical areas outside the hippocampus

Cone opponency

Output from three cones combined & contrasted to give three 'cone-opponent' channels: • 'red-green' • 'blue-yellow' • 'black-white' They are more accurately expressed as: • cherry-teal (LM-axis) • lime-violet (S-axis) • Achromatic (luminance axis)

Top-down effects (Hansen, Olkkonen, Walter and Gegenfurtner)

Memory of the typical colour of objects influences actual perception of colour • Colours of objects remembered as more saturated than really are (e.g., banana remembered as more yellow) • If asked to make image of banana grey, people actually make it bluish-grey (overcompensation) • No error if simple patch of colour

Genetic colour vision deficiency

Monochromats • Lack colour vision • Dark/light distinction Dichromats • Protanopia - lack "red" cone (i.e. long-wavelength) • Deuteranopia - lack "green" cone (i.e. medium-wavelength) • Tritanopia - lack "blue" cone (i.e. short-wavelength) Anomolous trichromats • Deuteranomoly (M cone shifted towards L) • Protanomoly (L cone shifted to M) Overall 8% men, <1% women genetic deficiency Also acquired colour vision deficiency (ageing, drugs, hormones)

Loss aversion

Most people are LOSS AVERSE - the prospect of losing a certain amount is more aversive than gaining the same amount is tempting • "losses loom larger than gains" Note that loss aversion is NOT incompatible with risk seeking for losses (when all possible outcomes are losses)

The descent of the larynx: When?

Neanderthal's larynx was probably descended However, Neanderthal's oral cavity was so long that the larynx would have had to be located in the thoracic cavity in order for its vocal tract to be composed of two tubes of equal length. • Thus, neanderthal could probably speak, but using a limited range of sounds. • Could not produce the vowels [i] and [u] which optimize the acoustic distinctiveness of human speech. "Our findings imply that the evolution of human speech capabilities required neural changes rather than modifications of vocal anatomy"

The capacity to imitate: neural underpinnings?

Neurobiologists (Rizzolati, 1996) have discovered neurons in monkey's brains that fire both: • When the animal grasps food with its own hand. • When it observes the experimenter grasping food with his hand. These neurons are located in both hemispheres in the area F5 of the premotor cortex, the homologue of Broca's area in the human brain. Mapping of perception onto execution provides a natural starting point for the evolution of imitation abilities required for language

The place theory of frequency analysis

Neurons have different characteristic frequencies depending on their position along the basilar membrane High frequencies only excite neurons near the base (position 2), while low frequencies only excite neurons near the apex (position 1). Tonotopic organisation of the cochlea (mirrored in the primary auditory cortex).

Individual differences in working memory capacity (Engle and colleagues)

Operation Span (OSPAN) task: • Ability to manipulate lots of information at the same time in working memory • Simultaneously perform simple maths and read words • Test recall of words • OSPAN related to fluid intelligence • Argued to assess efficiency of prefrontal functioning

Does language = thought?

Or: can we think without language? yes Prelingual babies show evidence of conceptual categories • For example: phoneme discrimination Pathology: speech and language impairment don't necessarily destroy thought and reason Language and thought are closely linked but not the same thing

Managing Two Languages: Separate or connected?

Overwhelming and consistent evidence for joint activation • Both languages are active even when only one is being used Bidirectional influence of between languages • Even true for highly proficient bilinguals, and in strongly monolingual contexts Why would a parsimonious language system have this feature? Cognates- same word has same meaning in language Homographs- same word but different meaning

Colour at the cortex

Patches of cells (blobs) responsive to colour at primary visual cortex (V1) Other areas of visual cortex process colour (e.g., V2, V4/V8) Sent to temporal cortex (ventral processing stream, what)

Blasi et al. (2016)

Patterns in certain sound-meaning connections across thousands of languages • e.g. "small" and i, "full" and p or b

Aphasia summary

Patterns of impairment and recovery can reveal underlying linguistic structure • Implications for Language in general, mental lexicon, bilingualism, etc. Proceed with caution... • Each impairment is unique and may affect cognition differently • Recovery/plasticity may reshape connections in unexpected ways • Affected regions may include functions in addition to those of interest that have an effect on performance

Memory is Constructive

People's knowledge, experiences, expectations, etc. influence how memories are encoded and later retrieved

Bottom-up processing

Perception starts with physical characteristics of stimulus and basic sensory processes (e.g., feature detectors).

Features of the Phonological Loop

Phonological store • Auditory presentation of words has direct access • Visual presentation only has indirect access • affected by phonological similarity Articulatory process • converts visually presented words into inner speech that can be stored in phonological store • affected by word length & irrelevant speech By auditory rehearsal, a representation in the phonological store can be maintained

Word length Effect: Baddeley et al., (1975)

Presented lists of 5 words to write down in order • List A: some, harm, bond, yield, hate • List B: ... • List C: ... • List D: ... • List E: association, considerable, representative, individual, immediately Results: 1. Correct recall related to number of syllables. 2. Faster speakers recall more words than slower speakers. (using articulatory recall method) number of syllables dictated proportion of words people could keep in the memory

Role of development/Critical periods (Blakemore and Cooper, 1970)

Prevalence of neuron types shaped by environment experienced early on • Kittens raised in striped tubes from birth, vertical or horizontal stripes • 5 hours per day in tube and darkness • 5 months later: no response to orientation not in tube • Recorded from cells in visual cortex: no neurons that respond to orientation absent in tube Neural plasticity, 'use it or lose it' • If you go beyond critical period when brain is developing there aren't any cells responding to horizontal orientation

So, language must also be efficient

Principle of parsimony • Occam's Razor: avoid needlessly multiplying entities (fewer words to get ideas across) But too much efficiency ambiguity • All smallish furry animals: fluffle o Very efficient o Only one word to remember o All share common attributes Each language strikes a different balance Linguistic economy Languages rely on contextual, cultural, social knowledge to fill in the gaps

The eye

Pupil: light enters eye Iris: adjustable aperture, constricts in high light to make pupil smaller Cornea and lens: focuses light on retina, If doesn't focus on retina short or long sighted Accommodation: ciliary muscles change shape of lens to bring objects into focus at different distances

Simple" sound-waves: pure tones

Pure tones are single frequency tones with no harmonic content (no overtones). This corresponds to a sine wave. Examples of pure tones: whistles, most electronic "beeps". • Only have energy at one frequency, no energy below and above 0.5 • No variation in quality

Types of memory retrieval

Recognition Recall

Recollection versus familiarity

Recognition memory has been proposed to involve two independent processes (Dual-process theory). When we see a stimulus that we have seen before we can judge its prior occurrence on the basis of: 1. Recollection: we retrieve the specific instance where we saw it before (linked to the concept of "episodic memory") 2. Familiarity: we feel that we have seen it before, but cannot retrieve any additional details about where and when

Differences to Spoken Languages

Reilly et al., 1990: Grammaticized facial expressions • Particular facial expressions are obligatory for grammatical communication • Children acquired the signs and expressions incrementally (hand sign first) • Leads to enhanced facial discrimination ability (Bettger et al., 1997) Iconicity? • Sign symbolize what they mean • Sign languages are not gesture or pantomime - but contain iconic elements (Perniss, 2010) /some symbolize what they are supposed to represent Can be used to test theories of embodiment/ grounded cognition (Borghi et al., 2014) • Whether sign makes use of metaphorical mapping to sign abstract concepts • Embodied cognition that represents reality that makes sense to us

Results Asian Flu Problem

Results • Gains' version: A is preferred (on average) o Programme A: save 200 people o Programme B: one third chance of saving 600 people, two thirds of saving none • 'Losses' version: B is preferred (on average) o Programme A: 400 people die for certain o Programme B: one third chance that no one dies, two thirds chance that 600 people die • However, A and B are the same in two versions o You just convinced yourselves that they were o People prefer the sure thing for good outcomes, but choose the risky option for bad outcomes (as predicted by Prospect Theory)

Evidence of levels of processing Craik & Tulving (1975)

Results: 1. The deeper the people are processing the word the more likely they are able to recognize the word increase in proportion of words 2. Recognition memory is better (i.e., greater proportion recognized) for words that were studied as part of sentences than phonetic or structural processing. 3. Also, pattern of results the same irrespective of whether participant answered "yes" or "no" during memory encoding (although memory was better for "yes" responses) Recognition memory is better the greater the depth of processing during encoding.

Phonological Similarity Effect

Results: • Couldn't recall many of the words from list A, people didn't show any decrement of performance people have a capacity for number of items but if phonological similar uses up capacity of phonological store 1.Large effect of phonological similarity 2.No effect of semantic similarity

Neural Evidence for Encoding/Retrieval Overlap

Results: • Visual cortex was active during study of words paired with pictures, and visual cortex was reactivated during correct recognition memory for words paired with pictures during study. • Similar findings were found in the auditory cortex for words paired with sounds during study. The same brain regions that were active during study were reactivated during correct recognition memory for the words.

Context Dependent Memory (Godden and Baddeley)

Results: Crossover interaction! •Words studied on land were better recognized if tested on land. •Words studied in sea were better recognized if tested under sea Memory is influenced by the context of learning Also, (mood) state dependent memory (Eich & Metcalfe, 1989)

More than just a camera

Retinal ganglion processing • Poor at spotting gradual change • Good at picking out sharp edges • Filters the input for useful information --> there is this property where the surround and centre has different effect but if you put them together, you get primitive edge detector

Roediger & McDermott (DRM) Paradigm

Roediger & McDermott (1995): Participants studied lists of words highly associated with a non-presented critical lure • 65% of studied items were recalled True Memories • 40% of critical lures were recalled False Memories Critical lures were more likely to be recollected than familiar • Participants were highly confident they had seen the critical lure

Probabilistic view of concepts

Rosch & Mervis (1975): no defining features, only characteristic ones Concepts are represented by prototypes that have all or most of the characteristic features • Poor exemplars share fewer or lesser-known features • Explains lack of clear boundaries

Experimental evidence of CP: identification

Run an identification experiment • Play different stimuli and ask if hear ba or da • Because perceived categorical, listeners will rate almost 100% as ba for first variance • At boundary of phoneme, abrupt change and everyone hears da

Attentional capture and Cognitive Load (Lavie & de Fockert, 2005)

Same effects found with different distractor task • Cognitive load increases interference from colour singleton distractor • Increased when doing high cognitive load task cognitive load increases distraction

How do two languages exist in the brain? Miozzo et al.

Selective deficits in bilingual aphasic patients • Found that the same linguistic features were selectively impaired across languages (deficit is between both language) • Shared neural substrate between languages that represent/process morphological and lexical information (building words that underlie same system in different languages)

Disadvantages: Verbal Fluency

Semantic fluency (name category members) • Bilinguals produce fewer words (e.g. Bialystok et al., 2008) • Due to smaller vocabulary size, language competition? • English-speaking students in Spanish language environment for one year performed worse on this task than untraveled monolinguals (Linck, Kroll, & Sunderman, 2009) Phonological fluency (initial letter) effortful production • Requires monitoring and controlling attention • Bilinguals should (in theory) be better at this task • When vocabulary is matched, bilingual disadvantage disappears for semantic task and advantage emerges for phonological task. but it looks like disadvantage because of vocabulary size (Luo, Luk, & Bialystok, 2010)

Parts of the filter

Sensory store Filter Detector Short-term memory

Is sign language a language? yes

Sign languages are distinct languages from the spoken "version" • BSL and ASL are not dialects like British and American English o Share some similar words but are not mutually intelligible • Also different from Sign-Supported Language or Makaton Arises independently from the surrounding spoken language • Example: spontaneous development in Nicaragua (see Senghas, Kita, & Özyürek, 2004) developed new sign language Lesions to the left hemisphere, and Broca's and Wernicke's areas specifically, result in similar patterns of impairment • Sign language recruits the same brain areas as spoken language

Morford, Wilkinson, Villwock, Piñar, & Kroll (2011)

Similar paradigm but with sign language • ASL/English bilinguals asked to judge whether two written English words were semantically related • Some of these word-pairs had ASL signs with similar forms Judgements were: • Faster when the words were related and the signs were similar • Slower when the words were unrelated and the signs were similar • The sign language sign was similar but the words were semantically different Joint activation also occurs crossmodally Joint activation means both languages are always active How do bilingual speakers use one and not the other? • "Code-switching" switching between languages, especially mid-conversation or mid-sentence

Ganglion cell receptive fields

Single cell recording from retinal ganglion cells • If there is no light on region of retina, the cell gives off baseline activity, neurons occasionally just fire • If the light fills the area, also baseline activity • If light fills the centre, activity increase • If light fills surround- if goes below baseline Found • On centre, off surround retinal ganglion cells RF • Lateral inhibition

Causes of death study

Slovic, Lichtenstein, Fischhoff - causes of death study Effect of media coverage • Deaths by accident overestimated compared with deaths following strokes • Death by lightening underestimated compared with death from botulism • Etc.

The Illusion of Skill

Some "Experts" are not expert Barber and Odean (2002) - analysis of about 163,000 stock trades by brokers • On average the bought stock did WORSE than the sold stock by 3.2% • Brokers who made least trades tended to do better • Year on year correlations in success were low to zero Tetlock (2005) - 80000+ 3AFC predictions from political pundits • Performance on average was worse than just assigning one third probability to each outcome

Human Tetrachromacy (Jordan, Deeb, Bosten & Mollon, 2010)

Some women have four cone types! • Usual 3 cone types & shifted red or green cone type • Does an extra cone mean they can see more colours? • Psychophysical tests & genetic analysis • Only one woman behaviourally tetrachromatic --> could never find a match that satisfied her • Still need cortical processing of extra signal

Reconstructing Memories

Sources of Potential Errors - Why the details change over time Two general areas that errors occur in memory reconstruction: 1. Information before the memory occurred may interfere (i.e., pre-existing knowledge, schemas) 2. Information that is encountered after the memory occurred may interfere (e.g., misinformation effect, implanting memory)

The crucial factor

Sparsely populated • Small sample, so greater variability If the same study were done 1 year later, the same general pattern would be found... • but the particular counties with high and low prevalence rates would differ Human intuitions about patterns of data arising from statistical processes are poor

Helps map language ability to brain area

Specific area of damage results in a particular impairment • Lesion in Broca's area results in meaningful but effortful/agrammatical speech • Therefore Broca's area must control fluent, grammatical speech production

Speech production SUMMARY

Speech is produced by articulation: • Vowels are characterised by an open configuration of the vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis • Consonants are characterised by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract Co-articulation: • Consonants are not represented by invariant acoustic phenomena. • Facilitates the encoding of high rates of information, but... • makes speech recognition and synthesis more difficult, as there is no "alphabet" of speech sounds.

Control of breathing

Speech requires sophisticated control of breathing, different from regular 'quiet' respiration which uses the diaphragm and is controlled by the vagus nerve. During 'quiet' breathing: 40% inhale, 60% exhale. During speech: 10% inhale, 90% exhale (we speak on exhale). DEMO: Breathe in instead of out while talking (inspiratory phonation

Aphasia: Proceed with Caution Fabbro, 2001

Studied 20 Italian-Friulian bilingual aphasics • 13 showed parallel recovery (similar impairment in both languages) • 4 showed greater L2 impairment, and 3 had greater L1 impairment (differential recovery, imbalance between level of impairment) Why is one language more impaired than the other (or not)? • There doesn't seem any basis, not language which you know first, not where lesion is no one knows

Verifying Synaesthesia: Consistency

Synaesthetes are extremely consistent in their colour associations • All letters and numbers presented 3 times in random order • Score = distance in colourspace between 3 colours • Score below 1 (Eagleman et al., 2007) or 1.43 (Rothen et al., 2013) is "genuine"

Mankin et al. (2015): Tested compound words with synaesthetes

Synaesthetes could choose up to two colour for each word • High frequency rainbow vs low frequency seahorse • High transparency birdhouse vs low transparency hogwash Effect of frequency: higher-frequency more likely to have one colour • No effect of transparency • Lexicalisation takes place at earlier stage evokes colour and meaning comes later Synaesthetic colours reflect frequency and morphology • Can use synaesthesia to investigate storage and processing of words

Interactions Bankieris & Simner (2015)

Synaesthetes performed better than non-synaesthetes at guessing the meaning of words they didn't know • Sound symbolism and synaesthesia may have similar underlying connections Atkinson et al. (2016): Fingerspelling-colour synaesthesia Simner & Ward (2006): In tip-of-the-tongue states, lexical-gustatory synaesthetes experience the word's taste before they can retrieve its form

Verifying Synaesthesia: Neuroimaging

Synaesthetes show activation in hV4 (colour processing) areas when looking at black and white text (Hubbard et al., 2005) Processing colour when looking at numbers

Stanovich and West

System 1 - fast, automatic, little or no effort, no voluntary control • usually highly active (when we are awake) System 2 - slow, allocation of effort, complex "computations", feeling of agency • Might be identified with the self • usually runs in a "low effort" mode • When it has to switch to high effort, attention becomes focused • Extreme example "invisible gorilla"- when people are dancing and gorilla walks around in the back

More on System 1

System 1 doesn't deal in ambiguities • It is biased to believe - hence confirmation bias (If it comes to a conclusion it accepts that to be true) • It sees causal patterns, even when they don't really exist (Michotte, Heider) • It uses prototypes - so good with averages, but poor with sums

Unconscious Influences on System 1

System 1 is subject to a variety of influences that we are not aware of, and which influence our thinking in ways that System 2 (or logic more generally) might not approve of Bargh et al. (1996) Mussweiler 2006 Strack, Martin and Stepper 1988 Berger et al. 2008 Vohs 2006 Zhong and Liljenquist 2006

Are Flashbulb Memories Special?

Talarico & Rubin, (2003): Tested people's memory for the 9/11 attacks on the world trade centre and an everyday event occurring around the same time Results: • Similar linear decrease for detail for flashbulb versus everyday event • Rate of forgetting of details is the same for everyday events and "flashbulb" events BUT, difference in the belief that the memory is accurate, flashbulb high in belief

Priming: when it is impaired in amnesia (Shimamura & Squire (1989))

Task: • Study embedded words in sentences • "A BELL was hanging over the baby's CRADLE" • Sentence completion task "BELL - CRA___" (same) or "APPLE - CRA___" (different) • To what extent do people complete the sentence with the primed word? Results: • Controls showed priming for same but not different word pairs • No priming at all in the amnesic group Amnesics cannot show priming for new associations Priming relies on pre-existing representations amnesiacs show conceptual priming, but when requires making new associations, amnesiacs re impaired

Priming: evidence in healthy adults (Tulving, Schacter, & Stark (1982))

Task: • Word Fragment (implicit) vs. Recognition Memory Test (explicit) • Tested same day or a week later Results: 1. Recognition memory was much worse at a delay, but there was no effect on priming (so priming is happening different memory) 2. Priming effects were as large for the words identified as "new" in the immediately preceding recognition test as they were for the words identified as "old Priming is independent from recognition memory, and is a more durable memory, so its maintained over time

Conceptual Priming: when it is not impaired in amnesia (Graf et al., (1985))

Task: Study list of randomly presented words with exemplars from different categories (e.g., Fruit: avocado, pear, raspberry, pineapple, kiwi; Furniture: bookcase, cabinet, bench, rocker, footstool) 1. Recall Test (explicit): write down words that were studied 2. Word Production (implicit): write down exemplars that fit the category cues (some categories were studied, others were not) Results: 1. Amnesics (AMN) were impaired on recall compared to healthy controls (HC) and alcoholic controls (ALC) 2. There was no difference in performance on word production in the different groups (priming reflected by increase in production of target words from studied than non studied lists) Conceptual priming (implicit test of memory) is intact in amnesia, but episodic memory (explicit test of memory) is not. relies on pre-existing knowledge to know these different exemplar are from different categories

Neurological Evidence for Episodic & Semantic Memory: Graham, Becker, & Hodges (1997)

Task: Two tasks in patients with semantic dementia (damage to lateral temporal cortex), and Alzheimer's disease (damage to medial temporal lobes) 1. Episodic Memory: Recognition memory for objects (was the object previously studied, yes or no)? 2. Semantic Memory: Is this object a real or non-real animal (yes or no)? Results: • Semantic dementia patients have spared episodic memory compared to controls, but impaired semantic memory. • Patients with Alzheimer's disease have spared semantic memory, but impaired episodic memory. Double dissociation! Semantic and episodic memory are spared or impaired depending on neurological damage to different brain regions.

BUT Recognition Memory Can Sometimes Be Worst (Thomas and Tulving)

Task: glue: chair OR ground: COLD Memory tested in two ways 1. no cues (recognition) 2. cued recall test Results: • People fail to recognize some words, but then are able to recall it • When gave cue to recall item- people could actually now recall chair even though they said they didn't recognize the word Recognition failure of recallable words Availability vs. Accessibility of Memories (memories might be available in our storage but depending on what retrieval cues we use to get out the information we may not be able to access this information sometimes) Cues match better the original encoding context (i.e., Encoding Specificity)

Neuroimaging evidence (Schwartz et al., (2005))

Task: • Low load: Detect red cross • High load: Detect conjunction (e.g. yellow upright) • Ignore background High perceptual load reduces visual cortex response to background (Early selection is kicking out some signals at early stages) • High perceptual load reduces amygdala response to fearful faces (Bishop et al., 2007) • High low task brain wasn't recognizing emotion of the brain

Procedural Memory in Amnesic Patients: (Milner (1962))

Task: • Mirror Tracing task over consecutive days in patient HM Results: • By third day hardly any mistakes anymore • Even though he cant remember doing this task, he shows memory • Patient HM, with damage to the medial temporal lobe and impaired episodic memory, showed fewer errors on the mirror with practice • BUT he never remembered the learning trials themselves Procedural memory is intact in amnesia

False Memories for a Museum Tour St. Jacques & Schacter (2011)

Task: • On Day 1, participants went on a museum tour while wearing a camera that automatically takes photo • On Day 2, back in the lab, they retrieved memories from the museum cued by photos, but they were also shown new information about the tour (e.g., misinformation). o Degree of retrieval was manipulated based on encoding specificity (better/worst match of photo cues). • On Day 3, they were shown photos taken at the museum and asked whether it showed an exhibit they had visited. o Some of the photos showed stops they visited during the tour o Other photos showed misinformation presented only on Day 2. Results: • Participants had false memories for events they had never experienced at the museum • BUT, the effect depended on how well they retrieved the memories on Day 2. More false memories if retrieval cues matched encoding than if they didn't match (e.g., encoding specificity). The way that we retrieve memories can affect how constructive memory processes will lead to later false memories.

Procedural Memory in Huntingdon's disease (Butters et al., (1990))

Task: • Pursuit-Rotor Task • Track or pursue a target on a rotating turntable Results: • Healthy controls (NC), amnesic patients (AMN), and patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) showed normal performance on the pursuit-rotor task • Patients with Huntingdon's disease (HD), who have damage to the basal ganglia, were impaired • Basal ganglia important in procedural memory Procedural memory is not intact in Huntingdon's disease

How Durable are Priming Effects? (Mitchell (2006))

Task: • Shown pictures, then tested on fragmented images 17 years later! • Tested on ability to identify the object based on the fragmented picture. Results: 1. Significant effects of priming were seen 17 years later (longitudinal group) compared to new participants (control group) 2. Priming was unrelated to conscious experience: "Don't remember anything about it." (participant with 33% priming) Priming is very long-lasting

Development of Procedural Memories (McLeod et al. (2005))

Task: • Tie Shoe Laces • Tie shoe laces with eyes closed or open. Results: • Adults showed no difference in time required to tie shoe laces with eyes opened or closed. • Children were slower to tie shoe laces with eyes shut. Skill changed from being declarative to non-declarative • Children were more accurate at describing the sequence of movements and the correct description of how they tied their shoelaces • Adults were unable to pick out the video that showed the method they used to tie their shoelaces

Perceptual priming: amnesia (Warrington & Weiskrantz (1970)

Task: 4 tests for a list of words in Amnesics & Controls 1. 1.Free Recall (explicit) 2. 2.Recognition (explicit) 3. 3.Fragmented Words (implicit) 4. 4.Initial Three Letters (implicit) Results: • Explicit memory was impaired in amnesics, but implicit memory was not Perceptual priming spared in amnesic patients In contrast, other patients with damage to the visual cortex do show deficits in perceptual priming (Gabrieli et al., 1995)

Salient 'singletons' Theeuwes (1992)

Task: Find circle • Colour is irrelevant to shape-based search task /no reason why you should be looking out for colour, so any influence of colour on attention is due to bottom up • Can top-down mechanisms focus attention only on shapes? Result: • Color "singleton" increases search RTs • People cant just focus on the shape • Colour is irrelevant to shape-based search task • Can top-down mechanisms focus attention only on shapes? NO • Theeuwes' interpretation: complete top-down selectivity not possible even though colour in irrelevant people still processed it and slowed them down

Recognition Memory Can Sometimes Amazingly Good! Brady et al. (2008)

Task: Participants studied 2500 pictures of objects! Recognition memory test in which participants were shown pairs of pictures and asked to choose the studied object from the following types of distractors: 1. Novel- New picture of object from an unstudied category 2. Exemplar - New exemplar of object from same category as studied object 3. State - New picture of studied object in a different state Results: • Not much of a difference • People can recall more than 85% of objects (> 2125 objects)!! • In some cases people can recall a lot of information when we use recognition type of task Long-term memory has a remarkable capacity, particularly when people are given a recognition memory test

Self-Generated Cues (Mantyla (1986))

Task: Participants wrote "cues" for 504 separate words, then given a surprise cued-recall test in which they were given cues and had to identify the word. Two Retrieval Groups: 1. Shown their own cues 2. Shown someone else's cues 3. Control group that had not studied the words Example of Self-generated Cues: • Leaf - Maple, Canada • Exam- grading, deadline Results: • Participants who were shown their own • cues had near perfect memory, 90% correct Self-generated retrieval cues are highly effective for accessing memories Such cues may be more distinct and better match the encoding context (i.e., encoding specificity)

Manipulating the Central Executive: Baddeley et al. (1998)

Task: Random number generation (tapping number keys) while simultaneously engaging in other tasks Results: • Redundancy in randomness (i.e., being less random) increases with digit load • Increase digit load, people become less random • Interfiering with central executive You become less random and repeat numbers

Temporally Graded Retrograde Amnesia (Manns et al. (2003)

Task: Recall for prominent news events occurring from 1955 - 2002 was tested in amnesic patients (hippocampal group) and controls e.g., What software company was accused of running a monopoly? Results: • If memory after injury- huge difference • Years before anmnesia- over time, the further in the past from amnesia they look more like control are able to recall some ifnroamtion before injury but more for remote type of events • Recall performance for news events occurring after their injury was severely affected in amnesic patients compared to controls. • Recall performance for news events occurring before their injury was worst for recent events compared to remote events. Temporally graded retrograde amnesia

Evidence for spared remote episodic memories (Baylel et al (2005)

Task: Tested amnesic patients with damage limited ot the medial temporal lobe, patients with damate to the MTL and other brain regions, and controls on remote episodic meorie sand semantic memories Episodic task: eg. Descibe a specific episodic event from your childhood Semantic task: eg. What school di you attend in childhood? Results 1. MTL patients had intact episodic and semantic memory for childhood 2. MTL+ patients were severely impaired on episodic and semantic memory for childhood damage to the MTL alone does not impair remote memories impairments in remote episodic and semantic memory depend on the extent of brain damage

Testing Effect (Roediger & Karpicke (2006)

Task: Two groups of participants read a passage followed by distractor task (math problems). 1. Testing Group: Has recall test (Study, Test) 2. Rereading Group: Rereads the passage (Study, Study) After a delay (5 min, 2 days, 1 week), a recall memory test is given. Results: • No difference between after 5 min (when memory tested immediately) • As we increase the delay, the group that had been tested once and seen passage less time, they were retraining more information from the passage following a week delay • The testing group recalls more information from the passage than the rereading group, especially at longer delays. Studying and then testing yourself leads to much better retention (difference between passive and active type of studying)

Organisational Strategies (Bower et al., (1969)

Task: Two groups of participants. 1. Organised Group: study four separate organisational "trees" (minerals, animals, clothing, transportation) 2. Unorganised Group: study four trees of randomised words Both groups tested on word recall. Results: • Organised group recalled more words (72 correct) than unorganised group (21 correct). Organizing information during encoding improves memory. It can provide better retrieval cues when trying to recall the information later(e.g., encoding specificity).

Top-down processing

The perceiver constructs their understanding of external stimuli based on their past experience and knowledge. •Through our senses we have patchy information (ambiguous) and brain has to do work to separate different interpretations and make the most plausible •Ex. With half covered stop sign

Bartlett's "War of the Ghosts" story

The "War of the Ghosts" supernatural tale from Canadian folklore (participants were Edwardian British adults) Participants recalled story across several years • The story became shorter and more coherent • "No trace of an odd, or supernatural element is left: we have a perfectly straightforward story of a fight and a death." • Omissions: e.g. ghosts omitted early • Rationalization: growing coherence among parts • Transformational of details into more familiar and conventional • Changing order of events --> Story became "Westernized"

Speech does not have invariant acoustic targets:

The acoustic realisation of the consonant changes with the vowel: • For example compare /s/ in "si" with /s/ in "su" This is due to co-articulation.

Amplitude, SPL and loudness

The amplitude is the magnitude of the change in sound pressure within the wave. • It corresponds to the maximum amount of pressure at any point in the sound wave. • It is also called "Sound Pressure Level" and measured in decibels, a logarithmic (perceptual) scale.

Organ of Corti

The arch in the middle of the organ of Corti separates the Inner Hair Cells from the Outer Hair Cells. On top of these sits the tectorial membrane which is attached only along its inner edge. The stereocilia (hairs) of the Outer Hair Cells are embedded in the tectorial membrane, but those of the Inner Hair Cells are free and moved by movement of the fluid (endolymph) that fills the space between the hair cells and the tectorial membrane. When a sound reaches the middle ear, the activity of the stapes against the oval window causes pressure changes across the basilar membrane: the membrane bends and generates flows in this endolymph. Vibration bend sterocilia, movement of sterocilia releases neurotransmitter and transform sound signal into a neural signal

Disadvantages of co-articulation

The disadvantage of co-articulation for perception (or machine recognition) is that there are no constant acoustic targets in speech. The same consonant can be represented as different sounds in different contexts Conversely, the same sound can be heard as different consonants in different contexts Lack of invariance

Perception of vowel sounds

The ear = a sound analyzer which can detect formant frequencies by the different amounts of excitation at different places along the basilar membrane Different F0 but same formants = same vowel

Inner hair cells

The fluid movement bends the hairs on top of the inner hair cells. • When the hairs are bent towards the tallest stereocilium, the cell's voltage is increased. More neurotransmitter is released and the auditory nerves connected to the hair cell increase their firing rate. • When the hairs are bent away from the tallest stereocilium, the cell's voltage is decreased. Less neurotransmitter is released and the auditory nerves connected to the hair cell decrease their firing rate. Inner hair cells turn mechanical movement of the basilar membrane into neural firing of the auditory nerve.

Freuquency

The frequency of a sound is the number of air pressure oscillation cycles per second. It is the multiplicative inverse (or reciprocal) of the period: F = 1/T As we age, loose ability to perceive high abilities

Control of articulators and vocal tract

The hypoglossal nerve (XII cranial nerve) controls the sophisticated movements of the tongue that enable humans to modify the shape of their vocal tract during articulation. The examination of the hypoglossal canal, at the base of the skull, shows that Neanderthal and early Homo Sapiens had modern hypoglossal nerves (Kay et al. 1998). • So, Neanderthals, like modern humans, were probably capable of complex articulation behaviour (speech sounds). • Speech capabilities could date back to the human/Neanderthal common ancestor, at least 500 kya - much earlier in time than the first archaeological evidence for symbolic behaviour (but see: De Gusta et al. 1999).

Role of inner hair cells

The inner hair cells excite the synapses of fibres of the afferent auditory nerve. Each of the ~3,000 inner hair cells has about 10 auditory nerve fibres attached to it. These fibres have different diameters, different spontaneous rates, and different thresholds. The role of the Inner hair cells is to turn the movement of the basilar membrane into changes in the firing rate of the auditory nerve (transduction)

Control of the vocal folds vibration rate

The length, the mass, the tension & stiffness of the vocal folds affect the fundamental frequency: • The longer & the heavier the folds, the lower the pitch • Gender/age variation: F0 Children > F0 women> F0 Men • Control of F0 affects the intonation

Is our memory flawed?

The malleable nature of memories allows us to update our memories with new information, and to imagine entirely new events that could happen to us in the future, but sometimes makes memories prone to certain kinds of distortion

The outer ear

The pinna affects the high frequency sounds by interference between the echoes reflected off its different structures. • Different high frequencies are amplified by different amounts depending on the direction of the sound in the vertical plane. • The brain interprets these changes as direction. The meatus (ear canal) links the pinna to the eardrum. • Resonates at around 2kHz so that frequencies in that region are transmitted more efficiently to the cochlea than others (human speech frequency region)

Pitch of a voice

The pitch is the perceived "height" of a voice (Titze, 1994) It is mainly determined by the fundamental frequency of the sound. • 60Hz- very low • 140 Hz- male • 200Hz -female • 300-500Hz - child (very high) Pitch goes up to 1.4 kHz (whistle register - female singers only).

The descent of the larynx

The production of the full range of vowels that compose human speech requires a two-tube vocal tract, composed of the oral cavity and the pharynx. Nonhuman great apes do not possess a pharynx, and traditionally have been thought to be very limited in the range of sounds that they can produce, hence their very limited abilities to produce human speech sounds.

Linguistic Relativity: Summary

There is evidence that particular features and categories encoded (or not) in a speaker's language may influence or bias their cognition • Colour categories (Berinmo) • Agentives and memory (Spanish) Do not get carried away

Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals: Advantages

There is overlap between the brain areas that control language and cognitive functioning in general (e.g. Garbin et al., 2010) Do bilinguals perform better than monolinguals on particular cognitive domains or tasks? (review: Abutalebi & Green, 2007) • Executive function/Inhibitory control • Theory of mind • Memory

Linguistic Economy: So What?

These principles help us study: • What structures and assumptions underlie communication • How people infer information they don't explicitly have • How people make sense of ambiguous or confusing sentences

Rods

contain rhodopsin, respond in dim light, none in fovea

Heuristic 3: Representativeness

Tom W experiments Three tasks: • rank base rates for graduate students in 9 areas of study • Rank each area for how well a description (old, and based on poorly validated tests) of Tom W fits typical graduate student in that area • Rank areas for how likely Tom W is now a graduate student in that area Results for Tasks 2 and 3 are very similar, suggesting substitution of question don't take account base rates

Brain Evidence for Central Executive D'Esposito et al. (1995)

Two Tasks: 1) Semantic judgement task (is it a vegetable?) on verbally presented words, and 2) Spatial rotation task on visually presented items. Performed separately or together (dual task). Results: • No activation in prefrontal cortex if the tasks are performed separately (but activation elsewhere in brain) • Activation in prefrontal cortex if tasks are performed together Prefrontal cortex supports central executive

Evidence for encoding specifcitiy (Tulving & Thomsen)

Two different test of memory 1. Free recall: recall the words 2. cued recall: recall the words from categories Results: • At 12 item list- not such a huge difference • As there are more items to remember, the advantage of presenting participants with a cue to help them recall that information starts to get huge • More words were recalled in the cued-recall compared to the free recall condition, especially for longer word lists Memories can be available in storage, but not accessible for output from storage depending on the retrieval cue used information is in storage (longer temr system) but just need some cues to ge them out that system

Evidence for Transfer Appropriate Processing (Morris et al)

Two retrieval conditions 1. Standard recogntion: have you seen this before 2. rhyming recognition: did you see a word that rhymes with this one before? Results: Crossover interaction • Proportion of words recognized- semantic words were better recognized on standard memory test • Words coded in rhyming were better recognized on rhyming task • Words studied semantically were recognized better if they were tested in the standard condition, but not in the rhyming condition. • Words studied by rhyming were better recognized if tested in rhyming condition, but not in standard condition. Testing memory using the same processing as encoding will improve memory

Fundamental frequency and harmonics in complex periodic

Typical vocal sounds are composed of several sinusoidal waves which appear on spectrograms as evenly spaced, parallel, narrow frequency components. • The lowest of these parallel frequency components is called the fundamental frequency (F0). • The harmonics are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency: H1 = 2F0, H2 = 3F0, etc • The fundamental frequency determines the pitch of the tone (how high or low it is perceived to be). • The variation of F0 with time determines the fundamental frequency contour. In speech it affects the intonation.

Synaesthesia and Language: Prosody

Typically a word is coloured by a particular letter (Ward et al., 2005) • First consonant: R rain; first vowel: A rain • Vowels carry prosody (stress, length, intonation) Simner, Glover, & Mowat (2006): contrasting stress for vowel-colour • Cannon "CAN-non" vs cadet "ca-DET" • Word was coloured like the stressed vowel • Synaesthesia sensitive to intonation/prosody even in purely visual input (they gave them colour of stress vowel) • When read written word, still analysing how when it is said

Managing Two Languages: Code-Switching Christoffels, Firk, & Schiller, 2007

Unbalanced German-Dutch bilinguals to name pictures in either German (L1), Dutch (L2), or switching between the two • Either cognate or non-cognate names Results: • Overall cognates faster than non-cognates • In the mixed language condition (switching between German and Dutch), the cognate effect was stronger for German (L1) than for Dutch (L2) (facilitation effect for first language) • In the blocked language (no switching) condition, the cognate effect was stronger for Dutch than German Suggests in switching contexts, L2 has more of an influence on L1

Philipp & Koch, 2009

Under some circumstances disadvantageous Trilingual English/German/French participants had to name a number • 2 "two"/ "deux" / "zwei" Findings • Naming slowed in ABA compared to CBA sequences • ABA: English/German/English CBA: French/German/English • ABA requires global inhibition of English (A) to access German response (B) • Negative priming then slows responses in English (A)

Ambiguity Resolution

Van Gompel et al. (2005) I read that the bodyguard of the governor retiring after the troubles is very rich" • Actually easier to process than disambiguated sentences: "I read that the governor of the province retiring after the troubles is very rich" • No harder to process than unambiguous sentences Suggests that when encountering ambiguity, the reader chooses a single interpretation probabilistically (based on the most likely situation) • Difficulty results when this reading becomes implausible or ungrammatical • At that point, the sentence is reanalysed (a new interpretation is chosen)

Linguistic Economy

Verb system: How do we know who is doing the action? • Conjugate (add morphemes to the verb) to mark the subject Verb system in English • How do we know who's doing the action? "I see the girl" (look to the left) English: Rigid word order • The subject always comes before the verb German: Less rigid word order • The verb is marked so the subject can move • "Das Mädchen sehe ich"

Matching Tasks (Paulescu et al. (1993))

Verbal Task: Monitor each letter & press a button if it rhymes with "B" "B", "Y", "L", "P", "S" Press a button if the letter rhymes with "B" Visual Control Task: Monitor each Korean character & press a button if it matches Does the character match? Match item always present on screen so the verbal task does not require phonological store but does require articulatory loop

Short-Term Memory Tasks (Paulescu et al. (1993))

Verbal Task: Participants rehearsed a string of letters followed by a question "B", "Y", "L", "P", "S" Was the letter "E" present? Visual Control Task: Presentation of Korean characters followed by a question Was the character present? Verbal task requires both the phonological store and articulatory loop

Managing Two Languages: Code-Switching Van Assche, Duyck, & Gollan (2013)

Verbal fluency task: name words starting with a particular letter • When bilinguals did this in their L2 first, they were slower to do the same task with the same letter in their L1 • No effect of naming repeated pictures after a language switch Shows global (whole-language) vs local (lexical-item) inhibition (keep yourself from not responding in the language you are not supposed to and when responding in it, you have left over inhibition so find it harder)

Green & Bavelier (2003)

Video game players remained distracted under high load Similar effects found in relation to: Video game players (VGP) showed same amount of distraction regardless of load still processing it • Autism • Age • Congenital deafness

Visuospatial Sketchpad: Neuroimaging Evidence Smith, Jonides, & Koeppe (1996)

Visual Task: Keep an array of letters in mind over a delay and indicate whether the test letter was in the array Spatial Task: Keep an array of dots in mind over a delay and indicate whether there was a dot in the test location Results: Double Dissociation • Visual task recruited left hemisphere of brain • Spatial task recruited right hemisphere of brain

Voice production SUMMARY

Voice production is a 2-stage process: • The glottal wave is produced in the larynx by the vibration of the vocal folds, the rate of vibration determines the fundamental frequency (f0) which affects the perceived pitch of the voice. • The filtering of the glottal wave in the supra-laryngeal vocal tract superimposes resonances (formant frequencies). Longer the vocal tracts produce lower formants. Age and gender variation affect F0 and Formants: • Adult men have lower F0 and formants than women • Before puberty, boys have lower formants than girls, but the same F0

Vowels and Consonants

Vowels = speech sounds characterised by an open configuration of the vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis. Consonants = speech sounds characterised by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract

Problems with prototypicality

What about ad-hoc categories? • No obvious prototype or better/worse exemplars Conceptual combination • Taking two prototypes and putting thme together and making new prototype

Formants in a wide-band spectrogram

What causes us to hear the consonants "w" and "g" are the formant transitions = changing formant pattern at the start of each syllable.

Early versus late selection

Where is the bottleneck that prevents us from attending to everything? • Described as what is happening to the conversation we are ignoring • We get information and process it at early characteristics (audio stimuli) • Later on once sound is processed u process the meaning and other characteristics • Cheese and onion ignoring • Interesting lecture (our conversation) • All you hear may just be the pitch of the other persons voice • Early selection is that the filtering out of irrelevant material happens at early state • Late selection- everything is processes at physical characteristics and passed through so you can recognize the meaning - can even listen to crisp, even though that's not the conversation you are concentrating on • Selection is taking place at post reception and processing meaning • End result of both selection is the same focusing on your conversation

Organ donation

Whether you consent to be an organ donor can be "framed" as: • an opt in choice o carry a card, or similar, only if you agree to be an organ donor • an opt out choice o Carry a card, or similar, only if you want not to be an organ donor Opt in vs opt out question can change rates dramatically, e.g., from 86% in Sweden to 4% in Denmark

Whorf and Linguistic Relativity

Whorf: Look at the patterns a language does/doesn't have • Claimed that Hopi (Native American language) has "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time'" and therefore the Hopi had "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past" (Whorf, 1956)

Aesthetic response to colour

Why do we prefer some colours more than others? • Biological Components Theory (Hurlbert & Ling, 2007) • Ecological Valence Theory (Palmer & Schloss, 2010)

Beliefs

about how the world is and what the outcomes of actions might be subjective

Iris

adjustable aperture, constricts in high light to make pupil smaller

Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom's

argued against Chomsky and Gould. Natural selection is more than sufficient to explain the evolution of the entirety of human language. Human language meets the criterion for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: • Complex design for some specific function • Absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity

Noam Chomsky and Stephen Gould

argued that language could not have evolved through direct natural selection, but rather, "as a by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form". • No genetic variation among species • Confers no selective advantage • Would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available (Chomsky argues that language emerged by a single chance mutation 200-60 kya). The complexity of the human brain is itself an evolved adaptation, whereas language arises from such complexities (Gould argued that many important human phenomena-like language, art, war—are mere by-products of a large human brain).

The law of small numbers Kahneman and Tversky

argued that people take small samples to provide accurate estimates just as large samples do (the law of large numbers) • People appear to believe in "the law of small numbers" In fact, small samples yield extreme results (in both directions) more often than large samples do

Nielsen & Rendall (2013):

bias in both vowels and consonants • Program which generate round or spikey shape and different options for names • There was a systematic corresponding between spikey imagery and explosive sounding consonants • Between curved images and more rounded consonants and vowels

Photoreceptors

cells with light sensitive photo pigments in outer segments

Imai et al. (2008):

children learn sound-symbolic verbs more easily

accomodation

ciliary muscles change shape of lens to bring objects into focus at different distances

Northcraft and Neale (1987)

estate agents valuing real properties with high and low anchors, showed an anchoring effect of 40% • The anchoring effect is the difference between the final estimates divided by the difference between the anchors o So, 40% of the difference That size of anchoring effect is typical over a wide range of situations

Domestics Ross and Sicoly (1979

estimates by members of couples of their relative contribution to household chores • Results usually added to > 100% • Your own contributions are more readily accessed from memory than your partner's • People also overestimate their contribution to causing arguments

Corne and lens

focuses light on retina, If doesn't focus on retina short or long sighted

Strack, Martin and Stepper 1988

holding pencil in mouth to cause frown (lips) vs smile (teeth - TRY IT!) made Far Side cartoon less or more amusing

pragmatics

how context, prior knowledge, etc contribute to meaning

Syntax

how words are combined into meaningful sentences

Globally ambiguous

impossible to determine "correct" reading

Skill and prediction Meehl

landmark study of Clinical vs Statistical prediction • In low-validilty environments, in which prediction is difficult, so better but not much better than chance • For longer-terms predictions, rather than those that can be verified at the time in a single clinical interview Typical results: • simple statistical prediction does better than clinical in ~60% of cases and it does as well in the other 40%

Wernickes area

language develpment

Pupil

light enters eye

More examples are harder to recall •Schwartz

list 6 or 12 instances of recent situations in which you have been assertive, then rate how assertive you are • Asking for 12 instances led to lower ratings, presumably because the last instances were difficult to bring to mind • A cover story - background music makes things harder to remember - can reverse the effect • A feeling of power can enhance reliance on (system 1 and) availability

Flashbulb memories

memory for the circumstances surrounding hearing about shocking, highly charged events Flashbulb memories may support vivid memories due to emotional responses that modulate memory related processes

Berger et al. 2008

more likely to vote for increased funding for schools if voting station is in school

Lavie's Load Theory

o BOTH early and late selection are possible o The stage of selection depends on availability of perceptual capacity, which in turn depends on the perceptual demands (or "load") of the task stimuli. Load Theory o Perceptual capacity is limited /we are only able to perceptually process a certain amount of information and automatic o Tasks with high perceptual load exhaust capacity o Irrelevant distractors are filtered or attenuated at early, perceptual stage i.e. Early selection o Tasks with low perceptual load leave spare capacity o Irrelevant distractors are processed o Late selection

A Consequence of Substitution - Incorrect Judgements Todorov et al.

people can form an evaluation of dominance and trustworthiness from a face very rapidly o From chin and smile respectively • Election winners 70% of time score higher on these measures • But, There is no evidence that these measures correlate with how well people do in office

"Scheherazade Effect" hypothesis (Miller)

refers to possible tactics used by ancestral women to appeal to a mass conventional skills to keep them around • Verbal skills as an indicator of gene quality. Selected for by sexual selection.

Locally ambiguous

sentence only has one reading • Garden path sentences: the "default" reading of the ambiguous section doesn't turn out to be the right reading by the end of the sentence (go back and read it again) • Often happens in headlines "crash blossoms"

Broca region

speech production

Vohs 2006

subtle money primes make people more individualistic and selfish (e.g. spent less time helping someone else having difficulty with an experimental task)

Neisser and Harsh

tested memory for the Challenger space shuttle mission --> Flashbulb memories are not necessarily accurate!

• Morphology

the smallest meaning-bearing elements of a language

• Phonetics/phonology

the smallest meaningful sound units of a language and how they combine

Embodied Cognition and Metaphor Lakoff & Johnson (1980)

these embodied concepts underlie thought and language through conceptual metaphors • you have a concept in physical experience of real world and use these experiences metaphorically as a fundamental way to conceptually understand abstract ways Example: an abstract state of being is a container • I'm in the room. He fell into a hole. You'll never get out of this lecture hall. • I'm in love. He fell into depression. You'll never get out of trouble. Not just "figures of speech" but fundamental conceptual frameworks

Cones

three types with photopigments most sensitive to different wavelengths (long, medium, short), daytime vision

Bargh et al. (1996)

unscramble words to form sentences. If words are associated with elderly, when you walk out of experiment, you walk slower (ideomotor effect).

• Semantics:

what (and how) a word means

Desires

what the person making the choice likes or wants to happen subjective

Co-articulation

• /b/, /ae/ and /g/ are "squashed together" into the syllable-sized unit /baeg/. • The articulatory gestures characteristic of each isolated sound are never attained in isolation • but melded together into a composite characteristic of the syllable. (from Lieberman & Blumstein 1988)

Cold Pressor Experiment Kahneman et al. 1993

• 60 secs with hand in water at 14° • As above plus 30 secs at 15° • Within S and then choose which you would prefer to repeat • 80% chose 2nd • An example of "less is more" and of System 1 using prototypes/averages rather than sums

Visual cortex

• >50% of cortex dedicated to vision (visual cortex) • Primary visual cortex / V1 / striate cortex • V1 contains a map of visual field • In cortex large areas for centre of vision

Base Rates vs Causal Stories

• A cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. Two cab companies, the Green and the Blue, operate in the city. • 85% of the cabs in the city are Green and 15% are Blue. • A witness identified the cab as Blue. The court tested the reliability of the witness under the same circumstances that existed on the night of the accident and concluded that the witness correctly identified each one of the two colors 80% of the time and failed 20% of the time. • What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green knowing that this witness identified it as Blue?" o Correct answer 41% o Mean answer 80% • If the problem is changed to "85% of accidents are caused by drivers of Green cabs" • Performance improves considerably • Simple (statistical) base rates are hard to engage with and use • Causal base rates can more readily be incorporated into a plausible story

Abrupt onsets

• Abrupt onset = something which suddenly appears • Another theory: Only abrupt onsets can produce stimulus driven capture Task: Is there an S present? • Singleton was not predictive of target location • Measured how much people where speeded up when target was there • And could be either colour singleton, or onset • Onsets produced attentional capture but colour singletons didn't

(Anchoring and) Adjustment

• Adjustment can occur as a deliberate process (system 2) • But also subject to unconscious influences o Epley and Gilovich - interference from other processes; shaking head leads to moving further from anchor, nodding head to less • There is also evidence of a priming (system 1) component to anchoring via evoked images

Emotions and the Affect Heuristic

• Affect heuristic (Slovic) - our likes and dislikes determine our beliefs • Furthermore, with emotions, System 2 is more likely to endorse System 1, than to question its conclusions (which it is more likely to do in other domains) • Magical thinking (e.g. Contagion - would you wear Hitler's sweater?) as a case where System 2 doesn't question System 1 output System 2 processes are not correcting what might be regarded as what is in system 1

Phonation: Vibration of the vocal folds

• Air expelled out of the lungs provides energy to the oscillators = the vocal folds. • This cyclic opening / closing of the glottis generates a sound wave called the glottal wave. • The rate of vibration determines the Fundamental frequency or pitch of the voice.

Central Executive

• Most complex and least understood component of WM model • The CE coordinates processing in the slave systems by controlling and allocating attention

Primacy effects (Asch 1946)

• Alan - intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious • Ben - envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, intelligent • You get more positive judgements about Alan

Cognitive ease vs Cognitive strain

• Alter et al. 2007 - Slightly difficult, trick maths questions were solved more successfully in difficult to read font • Better at making decisions when in a 'good' mood • Zajonc - mere exposure effect Good mood increases the likelihood of guessing in 2 secs whether there is a solution to a Remote Associations problem - Bolte et al 2003 • But not if good mood can be ascribed to external stimulus e.g. music playing in background

Are Episodic & Semantic Memory Truly Separable?

• Amnesia patients can sometimes learn new episodic information (but much more slowly). • Autobiographical memories, or memories for personally relevant events, integrate both episodic and semantic memories. o E.g., Memories for repeated events like holidays contain both episodic information ("Last year we burnt the turkey") and semantic information ("I never eat the Brussels sprouts")

Issues with Standard Model of Consolidation

• Amnesics can acquire new semantic knowledge in some circumstances (e.g., fast mapping conditions, developmental amnesia) • Evidence of spared retrograde amnesia for vivid episodic memories memories when damage is restricted to the medial temporal lobe (MTL) • Also, decades long memory consolidation doesn't seem very adaptive

Broadbent's Filter Theory (1958)

• An early-selection model - filtering occurs before incoming stimuli are analysed to the semantic level (e.g. surface features are analysed but not meaning analysed)

Filter

• Analyses messages based on physical characteristics like tone of voice, pitch, location of stimulus (which ear)

Big brain is costly

• As adults, our brain takes up 2% of our body weight yet consumes 20% of our energy. • Human babies are born "premature". (pregnancy should last 17 months!) • There needs to be strong selection pressure (adaptive benefit) for such a costly trait to evolve

Pecher et al.

• Asked participants: "Is it found in the sky?" or "Is it found in the ocean?" • Stimuli: helicopter, whale, submarine, etc. Fidings • When asking about ocean, people were faster • Whena skign about found in sky and asked helicpopter, they were faster • Where they were positioned influenced how fast (helicopter faster at top of sky) influenced concept and spatial has influenced this cognition

Contingent capture (Folk & Remington (1992))

• Attentional capture NOT stimulus-driven (might be involuntary side effect of goal) • Attention can only be captured by stimuli relevant to our goals • Although in some cases this relevance may be less obvious Task: Is target = or X ? • Cues valid or invalid • Target defined by onset (target appeared suddenty) • Target defined by onset or colour • Cue also defined by either onset or colour RESULT: • Invalid cues produced slower RTs suggesting attentional capture • BUT this was contingent on relation to task: o Colour cues capture attention when target was defined on colour o Onset cues captures attention when target was defined on onset o But not vice versa So if people were looking out for onset target the colour cues didn't capture its attention

Psychophysics study finds disrupted biological motion in children with autism

• Autism- social conditions but also experience certain perceptual symptoms • Biological motion task, asked with and without autism to judge if it's a person • Global form task- how can u put pieces together to make a whole picture • Poorer performance than control children for biological motion, not for global form task

Value and money

• Bernoulli introduced the idea that the value of a fixed sum of money decreases as the amount it is added to increases (marginal utility) • He used this idea to explain risk aversion • A sure offer of £50 is preferred (by most people) to equal chances of having £0 or £100 o Because the second £50 has less (subjective) value than the first

Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals: Theory of Mind

• Bilingual children must realise that different people speak different languages • Some people understand them in one language, some in another • Other people must think differently than they do So: They may be better at theory of mind

Bilinguals vs. Monolinguals: General Cognition

• Bilinguals show improved performance on particular cognitive tasks • Due to increased demand for managing two language systems

When did hominids acquire a big brain?

• Brain size reaches a maximum with Neanderthal - however organisation less sophisticated than in modern humans (larger brain, but smaller prefrontal cortex) • Planning/decision making can increase fitness in nonlinguistic tasks (e.g. hunting, nonverbal social interaction) • Recent MRI studies show that lemurs, gibbons, chimps, and other primates have roughly the same proportion of brain tissue devoted to the frontal cortex as humans

Recognition Memory: Explicit Test of Memory

• By directly asking about your memory for words on the list you were consciously aware that you were completing a memory test.

Animal lesioning

• By knife (but also cuts axons) • By neurotocins (only destroys nerve cells) Disadvantages • Ethical issues • Studying a faulty system • Brain changes in response to damage

A Mismatch in a Real-World Situation Redelmeier and Kahneman 1996

• Camera inside you for diagnostic purposes • at the time vs after the event judgements of pain in (real) colonoscopies • Retrospective judgements seemed to be based on worst moment + end moment • Total duration did not matter (duration neglect)

Cognitive Ease (when thinking seems easy)- leads to reliance on System 1

• Can lead to illusions of truth - System 1 tends to accept things at face value • If you make things harder to make judgement/decision gives system2 to kick in • Woes unite foes/enemies - rhyming version found more insightful • Shah and Oppenheimer 2007 -people gave more weight to a report on shares from Turkish company "Artan" than "Taahhut"

Memory Trace

• Change in our brain that represents experience

The Wug Test

• Children learn morphology (and phonology!) as they acquire language •to investigate acquisition of morpohone in english

The Asian Flu Problem (Kahneman and Tversky, 1981)

• Choose between two programmes for tackling a dangerous disease • 'Gains' version (presented in terms of lives saved) o Programme A: saves 200 people (out of 600) o Programme B: one third chance of saving 600 people, two thirds of saving none • 'Losses' version (presented in terms of lives lost) o Programme A: 400 people die for certain (of 600) o Programme B: one third chance that no one dies, two thirds chance that 600 people die • Convince yourself that the two are the same!!

Different conclusions from Life Evaluation and EWB

• Colostomy patients, paraplegics, etc. (after the initial phase) typically have relatively normal EWB • But they state they would make large sacrifices (e.g. In terms of life expectancy) to be free of their conditions • Poses problems for health care policy

Ecological Valence Theory (Palmer & Schloss, 2010)

• Colour preference due to colour-object associations • WAVE (how good/bad objects associated with that colour are)

Bacon & Egeth (1994):

• Colour was a singleton and shape was a singleton • Search for singleton shape singleton detection search strategy • i.e. "spot the odd one out" • Therefore, singleton colour IS relevant to top down goals Task • Look for circle • Shape target no longer singleton Result: Colour singleton no longer interferes

Interim Summary (concepts)

• Concepts are the foundational building blocks of thought • Language and thought are not exactly the same thing o Concepts and relationships are distinct from language o However, linguistic symbols are closely tied to conceptual information • How fundamentally related are concepts and language?

The limits of intuition Kahneman and Klein

• Confidence in an intuition is not a guide to its validity Two crucial conditions • Regular environments • Practice in those environments Compare Gladwell - intuitive judgements are best made by experts in their domain of expertise

CP: Summary

• Consonantal speech sounds perceived categorically. • Some of this effect is due to speech exploiting low level discontinuities in the way that auditory systems represent sound (present in newborn/animals - auditory level of processing). • Some of it is due to cultural differences, acquired in the first year of life (phonetic level of processing)

fMRI spatial cuing studies (e.g. Hopfinger et al., 2000)

• Cueing task looking at cross and have a cube and get target if it appears on left or right • People slower when invalid cue • Visual cortical response to cued location: Effect of attention • More attention greater brain response • Frontal-parietal activation at time of cue: Mechanisms orienting attention

Cell Staining

• Dead brain tissue and put stain on it • Use stains to highlight different receptors or neuron and show structure • Due to staining we are able to reveal diff structures

Quick vs Considered Choices Dijksterhuis and van Olden (2006)

• Do we make (our best) decisions by careful explicit thought? Experiment: Choose among 5 posters under three conditions • Deliberate consideration • Make quick decision • Look at posters, solve anagrams, make quick decision Results: • Immediately after, the deliberation group were most satisfied with their posters (which they were given at the end of the session) • A month later, the third group were more satisfied

How are words built and stored?

• Dog" is a simplex word (or free morpheme) can stand on its own • Only one basic unit of meaning (non-decomposable)

Voice-onset Time (VOT)

• Duration of silence that follows after burst of energy • Short silence gives rise perception of bit, but if silence is around 40ms, it gives rise to perception of pit • Vary duration of silence and if we do it progressively we start to perceive pa

Divided attention

• E.g. multi-tasking • Another way of looking at capacity limits

Multiple Trace Theory

• Each time a memory is retrieved a new memory trace is created, so that remote memories are stronger than recent ones Predictions: • Episodic memories, particularly vivid ones, always depend on the hippocampus • Semantic memories become gradually stored in the cortex • Multiple trace theory distinguishes difference show episodic and semantic memories becomes consolidated in the brain and what particular brain regions are important for doing that If remote episodic memory is spared, it is because some hippocampal tissue is still functioning - older memories have more traces so they are more robust to injury

Where in the visual system do you think these processes begin?

• Edge detection - retina • Motion perception - thalamus (LGN) • Orientation detection - cortex • Contrast detection - retina • Face detection - cortex

EWB vs Life Evaluation

• Education - increases life evaluation, but may decrease EWB because of stress • Ill-health, religion (positive effects), having kids (negative) - primarily affects EWB • But if look back they think having children positive effect • Wealth, increases life evaluation, but has little effect of EWB above about $75K per household in high cost areas of the US o Poverty does have severe impacts

Encoding Specificity Tulving & Thomsen (1973)

• Effective retrieval cues are determined by the encoding operations performed on stimuli • Information stored in memory with the context in which it was learnt • Better "match" between retrieval cues and the encoding context improves memory.

Implications for individual differences

• Efficiency of selective attention depends on availability of perceptual capacity and that may vary o Individuals with high perceptual capacity need more load to avoid distraction • Capacity differences associated with: o Autism (greater perceptual capacity, if they are doing high low task they are less perceptual to inattentional blindness but more distracted) o Age (children and older adults have reduced capacity) o Video game experience (people who play a lot have greater perceptual capacity and process more stimuli under high load)

Issues with Levels of Processing Craik & Lockhart (1972)

• Elaboration is a widely used memory aid o Mind maps, methods of loci (using a "mental walk") • Descriptive rather than explanatory What about processing during retrieval? • But is this argument "circular"? how do we define depth?

Evidence for Recollection & Familiarity Processes

• Encoding manipulations affect recollection & familiarity differently: o Encoding things more deeply (i.e., Levels of Processing) increases recollection more than familiarity o Emotional stimuli are associated more with recollection than familiarity • Retrieval manipulations affect recollection & familiarity differently: o Familiarity responses occur more quickly during retrieval than recollection • Recollection is affected more in amnesia & healthy aging • Recollection & familiarity rely on different neural mechanisms BUT, are these qualitative or quantitative differences? Recollection frequently reflects stronger memories

Japanese MDS Solution

• Everything is compressed in horizontal dimension • The perceived phoneme is ra with exception • Much more dissimilarity along the second formant than third formant • Slope of third formant is not used to make any phoneme distinction in Japanese listeners

The "Social Brain" Hypothesis (Dunbar 1998):

• Evolution of increased brain size is a result of selective pressures favouring individuals capable of dealing with increasingly complex social relationships (as social group size increased) Mean group social group size increases as neocortex ratio increases in monkeys and apes the more individuals you interact with, the larger your brain has to be

Reaction time experiments: Visual search

• Ex. Find green O • If the target pops out (ex. Other colour) increasing non-targets doesn't affect RT attention prioritises the unusual • But if target is conjunction, RT increases with number of non-target (ex. Both x and O in green)

An example closer to home: double marking

• Examiners sometimes overmark a piece of work and sometimes undermark it • For two well calibrated examiners, the best prediction, before anything is known about their marks for a piece of work, is that both will give it the same mark • If the mark of the first examiner is known, the best prediction is that the second examiner's mark will be closer to the overall mean • If the mark of the second examiner is known, the best prediction is that the first examiner's mark will be closer to the overall mean • Other things being equal, the spread of marks given by the two examiners will be the same

Familiarity/expertise can influence attention

• Experts in American football faster to notice changes in football related images (Werner & Thies, 2010) • Expert musicians more distracted by musical instruments

Fast-Mapping

• Familiar (eg. Zebra) and new item (eg. Numbat) are presented • By comparing new items with the familiar, people infer that the numbat is the nsame of the unknown item • Memory of new item is then tested and compared to a standard explicit encoding task (eg. Remmebr the mangosteen)

Linguistic Relativity

• Features of language influence patterns of thought • What people can or do notice, discriminate, or remember • Testing using objective differences

Selective attention

• Focusing attention on certain information, while ignoring other information

Diagnosis Example - Probabilities

• For a particular disease there is a .008 chance that any particular person has it • There's a test, but it's not totally reliable • If you have the disease the probability of testing positive is about .88 • If you don't have the disease, the probability of testing positive is about .07 • What's the probability of having the disease if you test positive? • A physician said 'Bad new, about 90%'

Categorical Perception & the speech mode of perception

• For most "ordinary" continua, such as frequency, loudness, brightness etc, our ability to discriminate far exceeds our ability to label • Continua that show Categorical Perception are different from this norm: we seem to better at labelling than discriminating.

A cure for colour vision deficiency? (Mancuso et al)

• Gene therapy turns dichromat into trichromat! o Insert new genes into organisms • Dichromatic male squirrel monkeys • Red opsin gene, virus & DNA injected into some cones • Can see colours previously not seen! • Brain able to use new signal even though circuitry not in use early on in life

ow information is presented

• Gerd Gigerenzer argues that information about risk is often presented in a way that makes it difficult to assess

Schemas and memory Brewer &Treyens (1981):

• Had participants wait in an office • Given a surprise memory test for what was in the office • Some critical objects were not in the office but were often recalled (e.g. 30% reported having seen books) The participants had a mental "schema" for the types of objects they expected to be in an office

The Endowment Effect: Experimental Demonstration Kahneman, Knetsch & Thaler (1990)

• Half of participants are arbitrarily given a $6 mug, then asked to name a selling price. The other half of the participants are buyers who have to bid with their own money o Average (named) selling price was approx 2 x bid price for buying • Evidence for apes and monkeys showing effect • Endowment effect smaller in the UK than in the US in mugs studies • The endowment effect is explained in Prospect Theory in terms of asymmetric responses to losses (selling item) and gains (buying item) and of loss aversion

Bare skin: socio-sexual signals from blood oxygenation

• Having another cone gives us another dimension of colour • Monochromatic- have skin covered with fur • Dichromatic have a little more exposed skin • Trichromatic - more skin shown

Frequencies and Probabilities

• He argues, generally, that people are better at dealing with absolute frequency information, rather than probabilities or proportions • Furthermore, there are many cases, particularly in diagnosis, where probability or proportion information is misleading

Experienced utility

• Hedonic experience - pleasure and pain • Bentham and Utilitarianism as a theory of ethics

Sensory store

• Holds incoming information for a short period of time

Short-term memory

• Holds information for general processing

Seeking and Avoiding Risks

• Most people are risk seeking for gains and risk averse for losses in these problems • Where the uncertain gains or losses are low probability

A Consequence of Substitution - Incompatible Judgements Strack et al 1988

• How happy are you these days? • How many dates have you had in the last month? • In this order there was no correlation between answers to the questions • In the other order there was a high correlation way you think about a particular situation depends on context

Links Between WM & Long-Term Memory

• How temporary store relate to long term store • Include visual semantic, episodic and linking phonologic loop to language Because number of problems with standard • Phonological information that didn't seem to add up • You can remember more items if words are presented as prose

Detailed investigation of visual cortex

• Hubel & Wiesel found that in V1 cells that respond to particular orientation • They were recording from a cell that was interested into the line • V1 is organised that it is oriented into pin wheel structure • LGN can be wired up with simple circuitry to detect an edge oriented in a particular direction • As we go through further through the visual system he specificity increase in terms of what the cell is interested in becomes more specific

Substitution

• If trying to make difficult decision, what we might do when making quick decision from system 1 is substituting in different question • System 1 makes basic assessments of things in the world all the time • Sometimes we have to make more difficult assessments • We often do so by substitution of a simpler question for a harder one (the simple question often relates to a basic assessment) Aided by • Translation of values across dimensions • Mental shotgun - one assessment triggers others

The Endowment Effect and The Birth of Behavioural Economics

• If you focus on the wine (not the money) the asymmetry between losses (selling the wine) and gains (buying the wine) in prospect theory can explain the endowment effect • This was the birth of behavioural economics

Effect of experience on perception: the ra / la continuum

• In English perceive first variance as ra then suddenly ra, and peak discrimination at category between ra and la • Japanese all perceived as ra and no peak in discrimination bevause there is no boundary between the categories

Diagnosis Example - Frequencies

• In every 1000 people eight have a certain disease and 992 do not • There's a test but it's not totally reliable o About 1 in 8 people with the disease, nevertheless have a negative test result o About 7 in 100 who don't have the disease will have a positive test result

The Illusion of Validity

• In the Israeli Army, Kahneman (and others) assessed officer potential of recruits by observing them in a "leaderless group challenge". • Although their judgements were confident, they were little better than useless, as shown by feedback on how individuals actually performed later in their training. • This feedback did not affect the confidence the assessors felt in making later judgements. • Confidence reflects coherence and ease of making a judgement

Propagation and speed of Sound

• In the atmosphere, sound propagates from the source at equal speed in all three dimensions, therefore sound waves are spherical waves. • The speed at which sound propagates depends on the type, temperature and pressure of the medium through which it propagates.

Evidence supporting Load Theory (Inattetional blindness)

• Inattentional blindness • Based on "Gorillas in our midst" study by Simons & Chabris (1999) • Large number of people didn't notice gorilla walking around high load task and therefore gorilla didn't get processed • Inattentional blindness • Cartwright Finch & Lavie (2006) • 6 trials - unexpected stimulus on final trial (searching for K and P) • people who did low load task noticed it and people with high low didn't notice as many

Individual differences in working memory capacity

• Individuals with low WM capacity show increased: o Stroop interference. o Response competition interference o "Own name breakthrough" in dichotic listening People who had higher working capacity (better prefrontal control processing) detected own name less • High WM participants detected name 20% • Low WM participants detected name 65%

Is CP innate or acquired?

• Infants are born with the ability to make many speech discriminations that they subsequently cannot make. • Animals can make many of these (due to lowlevel auditory processing). Adults (and 1-year-old infants) lose the ability to make distinctions that their language does not use • we are born with ability to make many distinctions but also preserve the ones relevant to language we have acquired Hence difficulty to acquire new languages: hard to segment words into phonemes, different phonemes sound the same, difficult to articulate. • CP is acquired by reduction of perceptual sensitivity within native phoneme boundaries. within the categories, we lose ability to perceive small difference • Sensitivity can be re-acquired with intensive training

Advantages of co-articulation

• Information about different segments is spread across time. • You know that a /u/ is coming because of the type of /s/ you have heard. • Spreading across time makes it easier to transmit information at a fast rate (Alvin Liberman)

Detector

• Information is processed to determine meaning

Encoding

• Input to memory, the transformation/conversion of sensory information into a memory representation (i.e., initial registration of information that leads to the formation of memories)

Conclusions about judgements

• Judgements are easy to make • BUT Correct judgements are often hard to make • We use heuristics to make judgements, often for good reasons o They are quick and reasonably accurate in a variety of circumstances o Doing better would take much longer And often would not be worth it

Preference Reversals

• Judgements made in single and joint evaluations are not always consistent o Joint evaluation is another example of broad(er) framing

Most useful sounds are periodic

• Most sounds are generated by oscillators (strings, vocal folds, resonators, etc...) • Therefore most natural sounds are are periodic. • The pressure variation of a periodic sound is an oscillation with a given period and a given amplitude.

Fundamental concepts

•each of these use diff types of energy •thalamus- gate way of perceiving information •feedback affects perception- bidirectional

Inside and outside views

• Kahneman - was involved in an Israeli government project to develop a curriculum and textbook for Judgement and Decision Making in High Schools. • After initial planning, the team judged the project would take 1.5 - 2.5 years to finish • A member of the team with admin experience reported that 40% of similar projects were abandoned after this stage, the others took 7 - 10 years to complete • The J&DM project eventually took 8 years • Inside and outside views on forecasting • Inside view leads to Planning fallacy o Another example - Scottish Parliament building, originally forecast to cost £40M, eventually cost over £400M • and Irrational perseverance

The Kroisos Kouros and the Getty Kouros

• Kouros: an ancient Greek statue of a nude male youth standing with the left leg forward and arms at the sides.

The capacity to imitate

• Language requires a capacity for vocal imitation, via learning and mimcry. • Humans are excellent at this! But so are many birds. Thus vocal imitation can exist in animals without a capacity for language. • Unlike birds and humans, nonhuman primates have limited abilities for vocal learning: apes can't learn to produce many sounds outside their species-specific repertoire; can be trained to modify their calls but amount of acoustic variability is small. Cetaceans and seals exhibit the most highly developed vocal learning for a nonhuman mammal: • Dialects and vocal learning in humpback whales, pod-specific vocalisations in killer whales (social facilitation?) • Individually distinct signature whistles developed in bottlenose dolphins through learning • Beluga whales and common seals can imitate human speech

Interim Summary (2) (concepts)

• Language, thought, and concepts are fundamentally intertwined • Concepts derive from the embodied experience of existing in the world o Language and thought therefore also reflect these relationships

Attention and cognitive control SUMMARY

• Load Theory: Attentional control, or "Late selection", draws on cognitive control processes o cognitive load increases distraction and reduces inattentional blindness • Neuroimaging studies: Attentional control draws on frontal-parietal regions • Individuals with more efficient cognitive control generally show better performance on attention tasks • The relationship between frontal executive control mechanisms and mind-wandering is complex, and a challenge for future research

Consequences and origin of loss aversion

• Loss aversion can make some kinds of bargaining difficult. Concessions on one side are losses, which loom larger, but to the other side they are gains that loom less large • Reforms that have winners and losers are hard to push through because the losers fight harder • Loss aversion may have an evolutionary explanation - severe loss leads to inability to pass on genes

Late selection models can explain

• MacKay (1973) Dichotic listening o Attended stream: Ambiguous sentence (throwing stones at bank) o Unattended stream: Biasing word Money River • If " money ", "bank" was more likely interpreted as financial institution • Biased word is affecting peoples interpretation of attended stream • Response competition interference (e.g. Eriksen & Eriksen (1974) • Incongruent distractor in irrelevant location slows RTs • Distractor identity processed • Task: - Search line for K or P - Ignore letter presented above or below line • Incongruent distractor in irrelevant location slows RTs • Distractor identity processed • If attention is compeletly affective accfording to early selectin you should be able to block out letter but incogrunet slows reaction time

Sustained attention

• Maintaining focused attention or 'vigilance' • E.g. Security guard monitoring surveillance camera

Storage

• Maintenance of long-term representations of memories (i.e., memory traces or engrams), which involves a process of consolidation that stabilizes memory traces

Functional Neuroimaging Evidence of SCM & MTT

• Majority of studies show that the hippocampus is active during retrieval of both recent and remote episodic memories (e.g., Gilboa et al, 2004) o When people in fMRI recalling recent or remote they are recruiting the hippocampus • Other studies show that the hippocampus is only active during retrieval of recent episodic memories (e.g., Piefke et al., 2003) o Left hippocampus only for recent memories but not childhood events

Some facts about life evaluation

• Marriage has little overall effect, but probably because it makes some things better and some worse (time with friends, housework) • Focusing illusion - nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it People think Californians are happier than average because they enjoy their climate • They do like their climate, but they don't spend much time thinking about it, so it doesn't have much impact

Single cell recording (electrophysiology)

• Measure the action potentials coming from particular neurons • Inserting electro into live tissue • Action potentials of neurons recorded with microelectrode inserted close to cell. • Cortical recording requires section of skull to be removed. • Only on humans if medical operation (e.g., for epilepsy). • Identified selective cells (e.g., for certain orientations, direction of motion, faces) Quian Quiroga, Kraskov, Koch & Fried, 2009

Measuring thresholds

• Method of adjustment - change intensity of stimulus until can no longer detect it. • Forced-choice procedure - Which side has the stimulus? • Psychometric function-starts at 50% and rises up to 100 when level of contrast gets higher

Mind-wandering and external attention

• Mind-wandering positively relates to external taskirrelevant distraction: • Mind wandering more also show more reaction time interference • If more distractible by external things, you are also more distracted by your thoughts and therefore there must be common mechanism • As well as to failures of sustained attention

Perceptual priming (sometimes called "repetition priming")

• Modality specific o Abolished by a modality change such as visual-to-auditory • Does not depend upon semantic or elaborative encoding • Tested by perceptual identification (flashing a word up briefly), fragment completion, etc. • Spared in amnesia

Problems with early selection

• Moray (1959) - Subjects heard their name in the unattended stream • Treisman (1960) Bilinguals influenced by unattended stream if it is in second language • Gray & Weddeburn (1960): o Response should have been "Dear 7 Jane" o But subjects said "Dear Aunt Jane" o Their expectation of what made more sense influenced what they reported

Franconeri & Simons (2003)

• Moving, or looming stimuli also capture attention • But receding stimuli don't • If something is moving away from you, you detect it less only looming stimuli capture attention • In these tasks the target appear as offsets so onsets should be irrelevant to top-down goals

Controversies: Language and Natural Selection

• Natural selection. A process that enables differential survival and reproduction of organisms with characteristics that enable them to better utilize environmental resources. • In the 1800's Charles Darwin began to speculate that language evolved via natural selection, as an adaptation "The distinction of language in man is very great from all animals, but do not overrate—animals communicate to each other" • Darwin noted similarities between human vocal expression of emotion, its development in infants and its social function, with that of other animals

Late selection models can explain(2)

• Negative priming: Responses to previously ignored stimuli are slowed. MOUSE • E.g. Tipper & Driver (1988): o Task: Categorise red stimuli, ignore green. o Result: Responses to word slowed when preceded by semantically related IGNORED picture (when they had to ignore animal it makes it slower to respond to it in the second trial) o Suggests ignored stimuli is semantically categorised and inhibited

Consolidation

• Neural changes that occur after encoding to create a memory trace. • In order to preserve information in long term • A change in the brain that represents the experience

Effects of attention on neural processing

• Neural response is boosted for covertly attended stimuli (e.g., Wojciulik et al., 1998), Vuilleumier et al., 2001) • Two regions known to respond selectively to specific stimulus categories: o Fusiform Face Area (FFA) o Parahippocampal place area (PPA) • Central fixation • Covert attention to faces increased FFA response. • Covert attention to houses increased PPA response. attention is able to upregulate areas of the brain

Two Systems

• Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that there are two types of reasoning (or thinking more generally) • And that there are circumstances under which the fast "intuitive" system is better than slow deliberate reasoning

Hindsight Bias Fischhoff and Beyth

• Nixon's visit to China o Will he or won't he meet Mao? • Probabilities of 15 possible events estimated before Nixon went to China (e.g. Will Nixon meet Mao?) • Then people reconstructed their predictions after he returned • Those events that happened had (memories for the predicted) probabilities revised upwards • Those that did not happen had (memories for the predicted) probabilities revised downwards

Speech perception: conclusions

• No clear acoustic correlates of perceived phonetic segments. Complex acoustic cues cause perceptual experiences of phonemes. Some evidence that articulatory gestures are the objects of speech perception • Speech perception is not entirely special (does not involve entirely different processes from ordinary non-linguistic audition), nor entirely uniquely human. • But speech clearly special for humans (special sensitivity for speech sounds).

Speech is a continuous phenomenon

• No gaps between words • Smoothly changing sound from one speech sound to the next • So you can't just shuffle the acoustic "words"

fMRI

• Non invasive method • Blood flow (oxygenated and deoxygenated blood)

Conceptual priming

• Not modality specific • Benefits from semantic encoding • Tested by category instance production tasks (given category cue: "fruit", participants produce previously studied exemplars, e.g. "kiwi", "pear") • Not always spared in amnesia

Self-report measures

• Often used to test effects of attention on awareness. • Also subjective phenomena such as mind-wandering • People who report more mind-wandering also show more RT interference on measures of distraction... • ...and more errors on sustained attention tasks.

Crucial assumption of Prospect Theory

• Outcomes should be defined in terms of gains and losses (changes from the status quo) not in terms of absolute utility level

Retrieval

• Output of memory, process of reactivating a memory trace and bringing it back to an active state in working memory

Andrews, Miller, & Rayner (2004): Eye-tracking with compounds

• Participant's gaze duration was influenced by all three frequencies • Evidence of both lexicalization and decomposition dual-route • While word and pieces are stores in the brain and accessed at different rates

Colour-opponent cells in the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus

• Parvocellular = colour (red-green) • Koniocellular = colour (yellow/blue) • Magnocellular = luminance (black-white)

De Renzi & Nichelli (1975)

• Patients with right hemisphere brain damage were had impaired spans as measured by the Corsi block tapping task (so issues with visuospatial sketchpad) • Patients with left hemisphere brain damage had impaired spans as measured by digit repetition (so issues with phonological store) Evidence for a neuropsychological double dissociation in working memory systems left side more important for language aspect and right side more spatial aspect

Phonological Store: Brain Evidence

• Paulesu et al., 1993 - Functional imaging of the phonological store • Greater left-sided brain activity • STM for English versus Korean letters activated Broca's area in the frontal lobes and the inferior parietal lobe • Judging rhymes versus how visually similar Korean letters were only activated Broca's area Articulatory loop associated with Broca's area whereas phonological store associated with inferior parietal lobe AND patients with brain damage here have poor verbal working memory, areas recruited during tasks involving articulatory loop area important in verbal memory

Cognitive Load and awareness

• Perceptual load reduces distractor processing and increases inattentional blindness • Cognitive load increases distractor processing

Marantz (2013): "No escape from morphemes"

• Stockall & Marantz (2006): all words stored in pieces Kuperman et al. (2008): Probabilistic multiple-route model • Eye-tracking: Early effect of compound frequency • Interaction between whole-compound and constituent frequencies o Depending on both aspects of word, you have different access time o Suggest readers integrate multiple strategies online

Phonetic v.s. Phonemic sounds

• Phone (phonetic sound) = a particular (physical acoustic) sound used by any language e.g. the sound [r] or the sound [l] • Phoneme (phonemic sound) = a sound used in contrast to another in a particular language e.g. the category /r/ as distinct from /l/ • Phoneme = group of different phonetic sounds which speakers of a language perceive as the SAME sound (called allophones). • Different languages make different phonemic contrasts.

Minimal pairs

• Phonemes in a particular language are defined by minimal pairs. • i.e. since in English "lice" and "rice" have a different meaning, then they contain different phonemes: /l/ and /r/ which constitute a minimal pair. • But there is no such minimal pair in Japanese, so they have a single phoneme /r/ /r/ - /l/ ; t1, t2, t3 Each language has its own distinctive set of phonemic categories • English distinguishes /r/ from /l/ but Japanese doesn't. • Tamil distinguishes dental /t1/ from an alveolar /t2/ from a retroflex /t3/. English doesn't.

Retina and photoreceptors

• Photoreceptors: • Rods: • Cones: • These signals received and processed by horizontal cells and bipolar cells • Then we have the ganglion cells, receive input and process

Formants in a wide band spectrogram

• Place of articulation affects formant transitions

Dichotic listening task (introduced by Colin cherry)

• Present different messages to each ear • Subjects attended one ear and ignored the other • Repeat attended message out loud - shadowing Results • Participants shadowed the attended message /people were able to do this affectively • When asked about the unattended message o Physical characteristics (eg. Sex, large change in pitch) usually reported o But not much else • Rarely notices when unattended message was in foreign language or if its was real speech (revered speech) • No content remembered • Even when the same word was presented 35 times in a row This supports early support and says that it only goes to physical characteristics and unattended disappears and doesn't go any further

Priming

• Priming occurs when the presentation of one stimulus (the priming stimulus) changes the response to a subsequent test stimulus (the test stimulus) How do we know that priming is not due to explicit memory? • Use tasks that are not obviously memory tests o Speeded reaction time tests (does this word have 4 letters?) o Word stem or fragment completion tasks (give a word that starts "par___") • Demonstrate that performance on an explicit memory test for the same materials is worse • Demonstrate that patients with amnesia still show priming

Transfer Appropriate Processing

• Processing is goal directed • Memory performance is better if the type of processing that occurs during encoding is the same at retrieval • A "shallow" processing task might be better if retrieval uses the same type of "shallow" processing

What is the function of language? Why was language selected for?

• Proposed that language '[grammar] is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface' • The language "organ" is no different from the vertebrate eye / elephant trunk, its origin can only be explained by the theory of natural selection. Geoffrey Miller (evo psychologist) argued further that human language, among other traits (capacity for art, music, writing, creativity) evolved via sexual selection - female mate choice and male-male competition. • Verbal skills functions as an indicator of gene quality. A big vocabulary is sexy! • "Scheherazade Effect" hypothesis

Virtual lesions

• Pulses of magnetic energy disrupt activity in a small part of the brain for a short period • Can be used to investigate sensation and perception • E.g. biological motion o With healthy person you can just switch of part of the brain Grossman, Battelli & Pascual-Leone

Evidence supporting Load Theory Behavioural measures of distraction:

• Response competition effects found under low load (K stands out from P) o Reaction times are slowed when incongruent distractor o late selection • Reduced or eliminated under high load (tell letter apart from many different letters and not just 1) o No difference on what the distractor was o Identity of distractor was not processed o early selection

Effects of Cognitive Load Lavie et al. (2004)

• Response competition flanker task 1 • Participants asked to remember digits during each trial. • Either low cognitive load (1 digit) or high cognitive load (6 digits) • Have to maintain something in their working memory while doing task • Distractor interference increased under high cognitive load. more distractor • One experiment compares cognitive and perceptual load both perceptual are high for cognitive, people more distracted when remembering 6 numbers • People more distracted under low than high • Perceptual load reduces distraction and cognitive increase distraction

Synaestheisa: Colouring trends

• Results for both synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes suggest that meaning associations are important even at the letter level (persists into adulthood) • Implications for how letters/literacy are represented and acquired

The difficult problem of vision

• Retina gets 2dimensional projection of 3d world • The shape of car projected onto retina depends on the angle • Brain has to unpack these things in order to construct what is out in the world since it gets 2d projections of the world

Minimal pairs in ASL Emmory, 1993

• Same location, configuration, location and movement with different meaning depending on mixing up different element

Perceptual Load v. Cognitive Load?

• Searching for a friend in a crowd =p • Doing complex mathematical calculations=c • Recognising which is our friend and which is his twin=p • Finding a needle in a haystack=p • Figuring out the solution to a complex problem=c

Priming: Implicit Test of Memory

• Seeing the studied words affected how you completed the word fragments (it was easier, faster, and more successful).

Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia

• Seeing words or letters automatically and consistently evokes experiences of colour: Where do these colours appear? • Associator: in the mind's eye • Projector: in the visual field o Some coloured letters, some patches of colour

Stimuli associated with value capture attention

• The stimuli associated with financial reward captured attention similar to colour singleton • Distractor which was In the colour associated with money

Late selection models (e.g., Deutsch and Deutsch (1963), Kahneman (1973), Duncan (1980))

• Selection happens at a latter point • Processing everything regardless if you are ignoring it • Brain taking both information and computing the meaning and making analyses based on meaning what is more important • Both attended and ignored inputs processed to stage of semantic (meaning) analysis • Selection: o takes place at higher stage of processing o based on analysis of which input is most important/demands a response

What is synaesthesia

• Sensationalistic: a "mixing of the senses" • Scientific: a neuropsychological condition in which a stimulus presented in one sensory modality automatically and consistently induces a concurrent experience in the same or different modality • One particular stimulus that evokes congruent sensation

The Modal Model of Memory:Atkinson & Shriffin

• Sensory Memory: Large multi-modal capacity, but very brief • Short-term Memory (STM): Limited Capacity Storage + duration (7+ items), 15 - 30 seconds, information easily lost • Long-Term Memory (LTM): Unlimited Storage, encoded based on meaning • We don't need to rehearsed everything that get into long term memory- that we haven't intentionally rehearsed

Similarities to spoken language

• Sign Languages have their own grammar, vocabulary, prosody, slang, etc • Also their own "phonology" - handshapes, expressions, movements, etc Major parameters of sign language phonology (see Sandler, 2012) • The form or configuration taken on by the hand • The orientation the hand takes on while making the sign • The location in which the sign is performed • The movement the hand describes • Babies exposed to sign "babble" with their hands the same way speech-exposed babies do with sounds ("ba ba ba") (Pettito & Marentette, 1991; Pettito et al., 2004) • Distinguish between linguistic cues and non linguistic cues by the frequency of movement

Sign Language Summary

• Sign languages are productive, fully realized languages entirely separate from the spoken languages native to the same country • They share underlying brain areas with spoken languages • They can provide insight into how language is acquired and used

Ruth De Diego et al

• Similar evidence from two Spanish-Catalan bilingual aphasic patients • When they had regular word, they were much better than if they needed to retrieve irregular form Different systems in the brain may encode regular vs irregular forms because differential impairment of these systems

Quian Quiroga, Kraskov, Koch & Fried, 2009

• Single-cell recording • Single neurons can encode multimodal representations of people. • Epilepsy patients implanted with depth electrodes, recording from single cells • Presented with photos, text name and spoken name of multiple people • Selective neurons in medial temporal lobe represent individuals in multiple sensory modalities • There are neurons which have very narrow tuning, its not just appearance its about the idea of the person (ex. Name, picture, name spoken)

fMRI Attentional Capture (de Fockert et al., 2004)

• Singleton distractors present or absent • Presence vs absence associated with: o Reaction time interference o Frontal and parietal activation Frontal activation negatively predicted behavioural interference • People who recruited the frontal regions more had less distractor helping late selection process

Reaction time experiments: Spatial cuing

• Slowed to respond to target when invalid cue compared to valid cue suggests spatial attention moved to cued location • This works with both endogenous cues • And exogenous cues (ex. If box is in red) covert spatial attention can be voluntary and involuntary

Distortion of Probabilities

• Sometimes very small probabilities are ignored, but if they are not they are overweighted • When outcomes are not monetary, probabilities play much less of a role • Much greater difference for money (than roses) between the 84% and 21% gambles • Kahneman explanation - vividness of outcomes

How does the cochlea analyse sound frequency?

• Sound produces a travelling wave down the basilar membrane. • Different frequencies of sound give maximum vibration at different places along the basilar membrane: near its basis the membrane is narrow and stiff, while towards its apex (helicotrema), it is wider and more flaccid. The vibration to high frequency tones peaks nearer the base of the membrane than does the vibration to low frequency sounds. The place of maximum vibration indicates the frequency of the sound wave.

Waveforms

• Sound waves can be represented as the temporal variation of sound pressure at a fixed point in space - for example the membrane of a microphone. • When we record a sound - we record this temporal variation.

Sound SUMMARY (1)

• Sounds are audible vibrations that can be described in terms of amplitude, temporal structure and frequency spectrum. • Most vocal or musical sounds are generated by oscillators and are therefore periodic (they have a fundamental frequency - responsible for the perceived "pitch"). • Most vocal or musical sounds are also complex (they have harmonics which are integer multiples of their fundamental frequency).

Frequency resolution problem:

• Speech contains 20 to 30 meaningful sound segments /second • But we can only identify 7 to 9 segments/second • we hear a tone above 20 segments / second.

McGurk effect

• Speech perception is multimodal: integration of visual and auditory cues Articulatory gestures influence auditory perception.

Purkis, Lester & Field (2011):

• Spider-phobics showed attentional capture by spiders • But Doctor Who fans showed attentional capture by Doctor Who images

Kovacs (2009): Three tasks

• Standard ToM task - false-belief task • Modified ToM task designed to mimic language-switch scenario • Control task Bilingual children performed better on both ToM tasks but not on control task

Treisman's attenuation model

• Still an early-selection theory • Key modification to filter theory: o Unattended messages attenuated (reduced) rather than lost completely

Outer ear SUMMARY

•captures sound signals, amplify mid-freqs •vertical direction coding

Recall

•cued recall •free recall •minimal information provided, person must generate information and identify studied items

Fundamental frequency, age and gender

• Strong sexual dimorphism: males have longer vocal folds than females. • In pre-pubertal children, there are no differences in vocal fold length and pitch between boys and girls. • However a dramatic enlargement of the larynx occurs in males at puberty. • Castrated males have female voices, and females treated with testosterone develop male voices. • The larynx is 40% bigger in males than in females (Titze, 1994) "Adam's apple"

Synaesthesia Summary

• Synaesthesia is meaningfully mapped onto features of language • Word frequency and morphology • Prosody and stress • Sound symbolism and iconicity • Synaesthesia as "enhanced" language ability? • Evidence of enhanced creativity, memory, etc...not the same thing • Use synaesthesia as a tool to study normal/general language processes

System 1 and 2 SUMMARY

• System 1 is mostly accurate ("tuned by evolution") but sometimes makes errors (visual illusions, cognitive illusions, errors of judgement about people) o Animal in wild have to make quick decisions for survival • System 2 may not recognise that such errors have been made o But can do, e.g. if the lines in a Müller-Lyer illusion are measured

Danziger et al., 2011 - parole decisions

• System 2 being lazy and missing mistakes • A bat and ball cost £1.10. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? • 50% students say 10p People who don't check (system 2) the plausible (system 1) answer are more likely to be impulsive, impatient and in trouble • more likely to get into troublw with law in longer term

System 2 - "logical" but lazy

• System 2 is lazy and easily fatigued • When remembering digits - more likely to chose choc cake over fruit salad (Friese et al. 2008) • Baumeister - ego depletion - doing a difficult task has consequences afterwards (in some sense linked to motion of the self) • Danziger et al. 2011 - parole judges grant 65% of applications following a food break falling sharply (to the default "easy" option of denying parole) before next food break.

Cognitive Load and awareness (Carmel et al., 2012)

• Task: o Classify names o Ignore faces (distractor) • Surprise memory test for faces • Low load: Chance level (50%) accuracy in memory test • High load (remebring number): ~80% accuracy because they were processing the faces

Dijkstra, Grainger, & van Heuven (1999):

• Tested Dutch and English words Compared to control words, bilinguals were: • Faster at lexical decision for cognates ("piano") • Slower for interlingual homographs when the pronunciation was different ("pie") • No effect for monolinguals Suggests the two words in the two languages conflict with each other (or accessing both of them at once) Lexical access is not language-specific

Allais Paradox

• The Allais Paradox arises because, when people make choices between individual gambles, their choices cannot be reconciled (within the framework of utility theory) with their choices between more complex gambles, which, although it is not immediately apparent, are just combinations of the simple gambles • Prospect theory explains away the paradox because, when the gambles are combined, the probabilities of the outcomes move along the (distorted) value scale

WYSIATI (Kahneman)

• The Behaviour of System 1 can be summarised as: What you see is all there is (WYSIATI) • Dont see other alternatives, just make judgements what you see at the given time • System 1 is insensitive to quantity and quality of information • Jumps to conclusions that make sense (cohere) WYSIATI explains: • Overconfidence • Framing • Base-rate neglect

The size exaggeration hypothesis (Fitch & Reby, 2001)

• The descent of the larynx in human could be analogous to the descent of the larynx in red deer, in that it could have originally served a sexually selected function and later exapted to allow human speech.

Vocal tract resonances = the formants

• The distribution of the energy is not uniform across frequencies: • The peaks and valleys represent the resonances that take place in the cavities of the vocal tract. • Called "formants" (in latin "formare" = "to shape") because they shape the spectral structure of the speech signal. • Formants are central to human speech as they provide the acoustic variation at the basis of vowels and consonants (see part 2). • Longer vocal tracts produce lower formants and vice - versa.

The endowment effect

• The effect of "ownership" • 'This pattern—the fact that people often demand much more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it—is called the endowment effect (Thaler, 1980).' • The endowment effect contradicts the Coase theorem, and is described as inconsistent with standard economic theory which asserts that a person's willingness to pay (WTP) for a good should be equal to their willingness to accept (WTA) compensation to be deprived of the good, a hypothesis which underlies consumer theory and indifference curves.

In Market Transactions

• The endowment effect may not be seen in normal trading (e.g. buying shoes) where the primary application of Coase's theorem should be seen. • A person who owns shoes to sell them, rather than to wear them, feels no special attachment to them.

Embodied cognition

• The experience of living, sensing, and perceiving the world fundamentally informs our conception of it Example: the experience of being in a room ie containment • You understand containment because of the embodied experience of: o having been contained (locked in a room, being in an airplane) o knowing that the human body is subject to certain restrictions

Innear ear: The cochlea

• The function of the cochlea is to transform a mechanical signal into neural responses in the 8th cranial nerve (auditory vestibular nerve). • Snail-shaped, three-chambered tube. • Two of the chambers are separated by the basilar membrane, on which sits the organ of Corti

Coding of intensity

• The louder a sound is, the more frequently the auditory nerve fires. • Each Inner Hair Cell has about 10 auditory nerves attached to it. Different nerves have different thresholds. • Most have low thresholds and saturate at the level of normal sounds. • The minority have higher thresholds and don't saturate until sounds are loud. allow brain to discriminate low from high amplitude sounds

Mental accounting

• The overall loss is the same in both cases • Result can be explained by assuming we allocate resources to different "accounts" and reason about gains and losses within particular accounts

Conclusions - Two Systems

• There are two main ways in which we can think • Automatically, associatively, about what is immediately presented to us (System 1) • With effort, using more complex, STM-based procedures (System 2) • System 2 can, with effort, check the work of System 1, but it doesn't always, especially in the case of emotional responses of System 1

Probabilities

• These increases are not psychologically the same • Decision weights are NOT equal to probabilities

When do fast decisions go wrong (more from "Blink")?

• Thinking tall people will make good presidents or CEOs (the halo effect) • Judgements about unfamiliar types of item (Kenna's music; the radical office chair) Judgements made out of context • The Pepsi challenge and the New Coke fiasco o Blind sip tests don't reflect preference for whole cans of named drinks Judgements under stress • Police gunmen not reading information from faces correctly if under stress

Grossman, Battelli & Pascual-Leone

• Trancranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) over posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) disrupts biological motion • Disruption of upright biological motion over posterior STS (Right T6), but not over motion area of visual cortex (V5/MT)

Lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN)

• Two of those • The LGN in left hemisphere receives information from right visual fields • Layered structure • At LGN we separate information into different pathways • Midget cells connect to parvo pathway (colour) • Parasol connect into magnocellular pathway (movement)

Framing in a real medical context

• Two treatment for lung cancer: radiation, surgery o Surgery riskier in short term, but better in long term

Optical imaging/near infra-red spectroscopy (NIRS)

• Using powerful camera of taking picture of brain you are interested in- give oyu a sense of structure/receptors are in tissue • NIRS- invasive way what the brain is doing- works by firing infra redlights to the skull and that is able to penetrate skull and reflect of the brain and detect the signals, gwt idea of blood flow through the brain

Prospect theory

• Utility Theory is a NORMATIVE THEORY, which tries to prescribe what should happen (on the basis of certain assumptions). • Psychologists need descriptive theories of how people actually make decisions • Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky) is a major example of such a theory, which has been highly influential in the founding and development of behavioural economics o And has won Kahneman a Nobel Prize o Tversky died before the award, and only living persons can receive Nobel Prizes

Natural auditory categories

• VOT and place-of-articulation dimensions show these natural auditory categories. • Auditory processing at the basis of CP is low level, not speech-specific processing.

Vision: from retina to cortex SUMMARY

• Vision is harder than it might seem, we are just very good at it • The circuitry in the eye operates on the photoreceptor input making it more than just a camera • A great deal of vision might be possible with simple circuitry gradually getting more and more elaborate

decision utility

• Wants and desires • Based on memory and projection • Economic utility theory

The role of the 'Attentional window':

• We are able to make location base criteria • Preattentive analysis takes place only within attentional window • Spatial cues can vary size of attentional window • Singletons outside cued location do not capture attention (e.g. Theeuwes, 1991)

Reaction time experiments: Attentional capture

• We assume attention has been "captured" by a stimulus if it slows us down when it is irrelevant • Task: Find circle Color "singleton" non-target increases search RTs / we have to process colour /its important Color "singleton" target reduces search RTs Taken as evidence of "attentional capture" by salient stimuli

Reaction time experiments: Distractor effects

• We assume attention has been distracted by a stimulus if it slows us down when it is irrelevant Stroop task: • Name ink colour of word suggests that we are unable to ignore the word meaning Response competition Flanker task: • Is central letter X or N Responses typically slower when distractors are incongruent compared to congruent or neutral Suggests even spatially separated distractors cannot be ignored

Conclusions - Two Selves

• We can make judgements about things, and especially how good or bad they are, as they happen (Experienced Well Being) • We can also make retrospective judgements ("Life" Evaluation) • The two types of judgements are not always consistent - a fact that has far reaching, but not always easy to resolve, consequences

Why is attention important

• We can't look at, listen to, feel, and think about everything at once. • Suggests that attention is associated with some kind of limitation o Attention as a limited capacity resource o Or processing "bottleneck" -one car slows down all other cars, attention can also be limitied

The Illusion of Understanding

• We construct simple narratives • We focus on what happened • We have difficulty considering things that didn't happen but might have (WYSIATI) • We believe that our narratives explain what happened (we often belief that what happened was inevitable) and that we understand the world

German MDS Solution

• We have same identification as americans • But spacing is more complex exactly same variance in physical domains leads to different percept's/sensations in terms of what a consent is perceived depending on the language you speak

Optimistic Bias

• We tend to have a bias toward being optimistic, which is not justified by the facts, and leads to... • Planning Fallacy • Belief in a Benign World • Belief in the Ability to Forecast Future • However, Optimists tend to do better in life, to be more influential, and to be healthier

Decisions SUMMARY

• We want to make decisions that have good outcomes for us • We (often) judge outcomes not absolutely, but in relation to the status quo • Losses loom larger for us than gains of a similar size • Because we are bad at judging probabilities, we don't weight outcomes "properly" • Prospect theory incorporates such effects and explains phenomena such as framing and the endowment effect

Inner ear SUMMARY

•frequency analysis •transduction

Psychophysics

• Whats the psychological response to physical stimulus Quantifying the relationship between physical stimuli and sensation and perception. • Threshold: change from one perceptual experience to another, e.g., now you see it, now you don't! • Absolute threshold: smallest stimulus intensity needed for detection • Differential threshold: smallest difference between two stimuli that can be detected, 'Just-noticeable difference' (JND)

American MDS Solution

• When things are further apart- rates as more different • Perceptual space is reorganized with compression within category and dissimilarity between category

Sunk cost fallacy

• Which of two sports fans is more likely to set off to drive through a forecast blizzard to see a game? o One who paid £40 for a ticket o One who intended to buy a ticket but was given a free one • Note that there can be different perspectives on sunk costs o An organisation's CEO, whose reputation may be linked to the (failed) project on which costs have been sunk, may be less willing that the organisation itself to simply sink the costs o Reason for getting rid of CEO even if not generally incompetent • Inclusive (rather than topical) accounts lead to "better" decisions

Mind wandering and working memory capacity

• Will increased working memory capacity be associated with more or less mind-wandering? • Mind wandering is using same regions • Kane et al (2007): High WM (working model) capacity associated with reduced mind-wandering during attentionally demanding tasks o Mind wandering= executive failure, not exec function? • Levinson et al (2012): High WM capacity associated with increased mind-wandering during low perceptual load response competition task

Versions of the Two Systems Theory

• William James - distinction between associative (intuitive) thought and reasoning (think things through deliberate ways) • Newell and Simon, and others, distinction in problem solving between heuristic and algorithmic methods • Sloman - similarity/contiguity vs rule-based systems • Kahneman - intuition and reasoning • Over and Evans - two types of rationality (also Anderson) - follow a normative standard, such as logic, vs achieve goals in world (adaptive)

So how does this explain "breakthrough"?

• Words need to meet a certain threshold of signal strength to be detected • Thresholds for certain words lowered so more easily detected • E.g. own name, or words primed by context o Only need very low signal for own name • Popular words have medium threshold • Unusual words have a high threshold to detect it

Subjective(Expected)Utility Theory

• You should make choices that have the highest utility (subjective value) for you • For a choice between objects (cars, textbooks, etc.) each object has multiple attributes, some of which are more important than others o MAUT (multi-attribute utility theory) says weight the attributes according to their importance and combine the values of each object on each attribute to get an overall utility • To calculate the average (or expected) utility of an action, each outcome must be weighted by its probability (which may be objective or subjective)

The "Social Contract" hypothesis (Deacon, 1997):

• a large brain / and language, evolved to facilitate Symbolism. Symbolism is necessary to enable the coordination of complex social contracts (e.g. marriage) rendered necessary by hunting.

Perceptual Illusions:

• both the objective and subjective versions can be continually experienced

Reactivation

• bringing information back to mind

Neuropsychology

• damage to brain due to stroke, trauma, road accident, boxing etc. Disadvantages: • damage can be diffuse • Individual variation in damage

Adaptation

• feature that evolved through the process of natural/sexual selection to enhance fitness through its current purpose or function. Complex design for this function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity.

Exaptation

• feature that is fitness-enhancing, but that did not originally arise for its current use, rather was later co-opted for the new purpose or function (i.e. a 'by product'). — Includes two subcategories: pre-adaptations and spandrels.

Receptive (or Wernicke's) aphasia

• impairment of comprehension • Fluent but meaningless speech • Difficulty understanding

Expressive (or Broca's) aphasia

• impairment of fluent production • Effortful, ungrammatical speech • Comprehension unimpaired

Levels of processing (LOP) Craik & Lockhart (1972)

• it depends how deeply you are processing the information you are studying and not how many times you look at it • Processing of information (rather than structure) of memory is critical • How well an item is subsequently remembered is not related to rehearsal but the level, or the depth, to which it is processed • Processing operations both modify and leave a memory trace • Items are not constructed to be remembered but memories are the after-effects of processing

Memory Illusions:

• only the subjective version remains (i.e., we don't often have accurate records of our experiences) • Memory illusions will go unnoticed because, unlike perceptual illusions, there is nothing objective to compare with your internal representation.

Sensation Perception Cognition

•Registering stimulation of the senses •Processing and interpreting sensory information •Using knowledge/experience/perceived information to learn, classify, comprehend

SMC versus MTT

•The evidence is mixed •No argument that the hippocampus is necessary for the encoding of new episodic memories •No argument that semantic memories are ultimately stored in the cortex •New semantic learning is probably supported by episodic memory but can sometimes be learnt in amnesics •Issue of determining whether remote episodic memories are truly episodic

Gibson - "Direct Perception" (1950s)

•The information coming from sensory receptors is enough for perception to happen - complex thought is not necessary. •The environment contains sufficient cues to provide context to aid perception - e.g. texture can indicate depth. •Perceiving depth is complex thing for brain to do •Basic sensory information can see depth of information (more stones at front so nearer, less at the back so further away)