Cognitive processing in the Digital world (HL)

Key study: Feng

Action video games, girls and mental rotation Plenty of research shows that mental rotation skills, a high level spatial sekill, can be learned and that training is long-lasting and transfers to different tasks. Closing the gender gap and keeping college students in STEM fields are important. Boys play action video games far more than girls and the trick is to get girls to use them. Feng's experiment demonstrates how first person action games can benefit girls. The aim of the study was to see if 10 hours of action video game playing changed mental rotation skills (the dependent variable) of males and females more than a non-action game. All 20 participants had no gaming experience before the study. Same-gender pairs were created and then one of the pair was assigned to the action game group and the other assigned to the non-action game group, the independent Variable. The procedure involved testing both groups for mental rotation skills before and after playing the games. The action game group played 10 hours of Medal Of Honor: Pacific Assault. This is a first person shooter game and participants must pay close attention and make quick decisions. The other group played 10 hours of Balance, a puzzle game where the object was to guide a ball through obstacles. Results showed that males and females in both groups showed improvement but the difference was significant only in the action game condition. In addition, the improvement was greatest for females playing Medal of Honor. The authors concluded that action video games can improve mental rotation skills in females and might be a strategy to improve women's participation in STEM fields.

Key study: Frenda

False memory of political events A recent study of readers of an online news source demonstrated how easily people can be made to remember false events happening, as manipulated through the spread of fake news. The study sampled 5,269 readers of Slate Magazine, which is a US-based news outlet focusing not on breaking news, but on more contextualized coverage of current events, politics, art, and so on. The researchers billed this as 'the largest false memory experiment ever conducted' (Frenda et al. 2013). The participants were drawn from a diverse population of varying ages, ethnicities, genders, and political orientations. What is fake news, how does it spread, and what does Macedonia have to do with anything? The study is remarkable in its design, because it used an actual news outlet to distribute fake news events to participants, which places the research in a real-world context with relatively high ecological validity. Few studies achieve this level of realism. Additionally, memory research has shown that false memories are more likely to be implanted when they're based on highly credible suggestive information, such as that source from a reputable news outlet. The research presented a unique opportunity to investigate false memory on a large scale with a varied sample of participants. Given the history of research establishing that false memories can be created through doctored photographs, the researchers manipulated false memory by presenting participants with four real photos and captions and one false photo and caption, all based on US political figures including Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the like. The fabricated events were created by altering photographs and then labeling them with inaccurate captions. For example, two of the fabricated photographs included: A picture of President George W. Bush entertaining major league baseball pitcher Roger Clemens at his ranch during Hurricane Katrina. A picture of President Barack Obama shaking hands with the President of Iran at a United Nations conference. Neither event happened, but the photographs were convincingly altered to look real. Participants completed the study through an online survey posted on Slate.com. Participants were presented with five photographs: three true, one false, and then one true. The fabricated photograph was randomly selected from a pool of five doctored photographs. After seeing each picture and caption, participants were asked to indicate whether they remembered the event happening by choosing one of the following options: I remember seeing this. I don't remember seeing it, but I remember it happening. I don't remember it. I have a different memory of how it happened. Participants were also asked to report their own political orientation as progressive, moderate, conservation, or not applicable. This was meant to help determine whether social groupings had any effect on false memory. Finally, participants were informed that one of the events was not true, and that it had been inserted to see whether history could be rewritten or altered, and they were then asked to identify which event they thought was false. Surprisingly, or not, the participants not only reported remembering the false events, but many remembered seeing the false event happening on TV. Such is the effect of confabulation. Participants elaborated upon their memories in an optional free response, and while not many actually responded, those that did indicated that the false event was somehow 'consequential for their own thoughts and feelings at the time'. In other words, they had formed a personal connection to the false memory. When participants were debriefed and then asked to guess which event was false, it became clear that false memory could be persistent: 63% correctly identified the false event post-debriefing 53% of those who reported remembering the false event correctly identified it as false post-debriefing 24% reported remembering the false event, and could not identify it as false post-debriefing Furthermore, the researchers found that for two of the doctored photographs, false memory varied with political ideology. The two pictures in question were identified previously—the one with President Bush and the professional baseball player at the ranch, and the other one with President Obama shaking hands with the President of Iran. The researchers interpreted this congruence of attitudes as indicating that a person's pre-existing attitudes and schemas towards a public figure or public event have a major influence on false memory formation. Conservatives remembered President Obama shaking hands with the President of Iran, because it 'fit' with their perceptions of Obama, no matter how false the photograph. Similarly, liberal participants remembered President Bush hanging out with Roger Clemens during the Hurricane Katrina crisis for the same reason, because it 'fit' with their pre-existing memories and perceptions of Bush. The findings of Frenda et al. (2013) indicate two main conclusions about the effects of digital media on the reliability of cognitive processing: False memory can be implanted through fabricated photographs depicting false events Social groups and individual factors influence which fabricated photographs are remembered The results have clear implications for the social contagion of memory through social media networks. It appears as though collective memory has the same problems with reliability as individual memory.

Key study: Kramer et al.

Field studies are being used in psychology to study the effect of technology on our cognitive processes.. However, attempts to avoid demand characteristics by carrying out field experiments have raised serious ethical concerns with regard to informed consent. Interest in how we study the impact of the digital world on the way we think, the decisions we make and our emotional state intensified following the publication of a study often referred to as a 'secret experiment' conducted by Facebook. Many people were angry that the study (Kramer et al, (2014)) had manipulated the information they received in their Facebook feed in order to test how this slight manipulation might affect them emotionally. Despite widespread and high profile criticism, Kramer responded with a passionate defense of the study. This research raises important questions about the way in which research should be conducted as well as the extent to which corporations should be bound by the same rules as academics. The study was conducted as part of an internal investigation within Facebook, thereby falling beyond the scope of the ethics committee at the relevant university. Facebook confirmed that the manipulation fell within their own Data Use Policy. It is worth considering the fact that everything that appears in your Facebook feed does so. The study: Kramer et al (2014) wanted to test the idea that information in an individual's Facebook feed could cause emotional contagion - that is, the transfer of emotional states from one person to another. Emotional contagion is well established as something which can happen in face to face interaction and it seemed clear that this could also occur in response to the information we see in our Facebook feed. To test this possibility the research team collaborated with Facebook to alter the content of the news feed seen by 700,000 Facebook users. The research used an existing Facebook algorithm and a software system to identify posts containing positive and negative words. For some participants between 10% and 90% of the 'positive' posts (posts containing one or more positive words) of their friends were omitted from their feed. For other participants, 10% to 90% of the negative posts of their friends were omitted. A control group for each condition was also assessed, where a proportion of their feed was omitted at random. Importantly, researchers never viewed or altered any posts manually; this was all done automatically by algorithms. The words used by participants in their own posts were analysed during the week of the experimental manipulation and the percentage of positive and negative words used in these posts was recorded. As expected, when participants had the positive content of their news feed reduced, they were less likely to use positive language in their own posts. Also as expected, when participants had the negative content of their news feed reduced, they were less likely to use negative language in their own posts. Kramer et al concluded that the emotional content to which we are exposed through our Facebook feed does indeed affect our own emotional state; when we see fewer positive posts we are less likely to post positive events or positive opinions of our own. The manipulation of news feed was done remotely and without any direct involvement of any researchers or Facebook staff. All participants were still able to see all posts if they took the time to view their friend's 'wall'. Kramer has argued that the research was important given the scale and intensity of social media use, especially Facebook. However, as none of the participants were aware of any manipulation, there is little reason to suppose they would do so. Kramer argues that the benefit of such research outweighs the costs of failing to provide any form of consent.

Key study: Blacker

Aim: To see if action video game training caused improvements in VWM capacity and encoding precision. Method: Male college students were randomly assigned to one of two training groups, one playing the first person shooter action video games Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Black Ops or a control group playing The Sims, a strategy game where the player takes on the role of a character and makes decisions. The two groups are the independent variable conditions. For the procedures, participants trained with the games for 30 hours spread over 30 days. After the 30 days, VWM was tested with several tasks, and one was a change detection task similar to the colored circles you saw in Bavelier's TED Talk. Participants saw 32 trials of a blank screen, and for each trial were told to remember groups of colored squares, then saw another blank screen, and last had a test where the groups of squares were the same as before except that one was a different color. Participants pressed a key to indicate the two pictures were the same or different. In response to criticisms that video games studies were inaccurate because of design flaws such as failing to control for participant expectancy, this study was the first to ask participants if they expected to get better or worse during the training. No differences were found between the groups. Everyone in the sample, both experienced and naive gamers, should have the same expectancy for making progress (see Boot, et al., 2011 below). Results: participants in the action video game training condition had significantly improved VWM capacity and encoding precision than the control group (Blacker, et al., 2014). It was not known if the action games directly enhanced VWM or if it improved via improved selection attention.

Key Study: Sparrow

Arguably, the greatest advantage of the internet is the ease of access to a world of information, literally at one's fingertips. The internet has essentially become a massive store of external memory, stored collectively, and accessible by anyone with an internet connection. It might seem at first that such access to an unlimited store of information should improve cognition, but technology changes quickly, and this appears to be having a negative effect on human memory. The problem is that this easy access to information may be changing how people remember—actually, it may not be a problem, depending upon who is asked. When faced with a difficult question, the first response nowadays is not to think about it, but to Google it. Betsy Sparrow (2011) and her fellow researchers conducted a series of experiments testing relationships between memory, technology, and ease of access to information. They were primarily interested in whether internal encoding increases for the information itself, or for where the information is to be found. In other words, they were investigating whether internet search engines have allowed people to offload memory processing. When taking in new information, there may not be much point in encoding it if it can just be found through Google later. In really simple terms, Sparrow's research seems to suggest that digital technology has led memory processing to focus not on 'what', but 'where.'

Study: Berger

In a pair of experiments conducted offline, Jonah Berger investigated the hypothesis that emotion-evoking information is shared more than other information, and that high-arousal emotions lead to more sharing than low-arousal emotions (Berger 2011). According to the hypothesis, an angry tweet is more likely to be shared than a sad tweet or a contented tweet. Given the influence of social media on memory, and the influence of emotion on social media, this is a rather important question. The first experiment was conducted as follows (Berger 2011): 93 undergraduate participants watched either a neutral film clip (control condition) or an emotional film clip. The emotional film clips were further broken down into high-arousal, low-arousal, positive emotion, and negative emotion conditions. Participants rated their own emotional arousal, and the researchers used this to form an arousal index. Then social transmission was measured as participants were shown an emotionally neutral article and video, and asked to rate how likely they were to share it with friends. The results showed that willingness to share was related with the high-arousal conditions, but it didn't matter whether the emotion was positive or negative. Berger verified these findings through a related experiment manipulating physiological arousal. Forty students were split into two conditions, one sitting still and the other jogging lightly while performing a visual perception task that provided the 'cover story' for the actual dependent variable. Participants were then asked to read an online news article with emotionally neutral content that could be shared by email to anyone. Once again, arousal boosted sharing, with 75% of the jogging group sharing the article compared to 33% of the sitting group (Berger 2011). While none of this research was conducted online or using technology, it has clear implications for technology, emotion, and cognition, as it indicates that emotionally-arousing content is more likely to be shared via social media and thereby influence memory through the processes discussed in the previous sections.

Key study: Gonzalez Heydrich

VIDEO GAMES may have a reputation for being violent and overly stimulating, but in a new study led by Harvard psychiatry professors, one video game appears to help kids with severe anger problems gain control of their emotions. The pilot study at Children's Hospital Boston tests an intervention that features a video game based on the 1980s arcade favorite Space Invaders. Players shoot down space aliens, but with an important modification: they wear a monitor on one pinkie that tracks heart rate as they play. If that indicator rises above resting levels--signaling that they're overexcited--players lose the ability to shoot. The study subjects are patients in Children's inpatient psychiatric unit. "These are kids who have high levels of anger and hostility, often with explosive behavior," explains assistant professor of psychiatry Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich. They commonly resist psychotherapy, and usually don't want to try anger-management techniques such as relaxation, "yet they will spend hours trying to master a computer game," Gonzalez-Heydrich continues. Succeeding at the game, known as RAGE Control (Regulate and Gain Emotional Control), is a careful balancing act. "You need to learn how to control your level of arousal," he says, "but just enough that you can still react rapidly and make quick decisions." Participants play during sessions with Peter Ducharme, a licensed clinical social worker who has adapted traditional anger-management therapy to complement the game. During the course of five hour-long sessions, he teaches kids strategies to regulate their emotional states--including deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation--and then encourages them to experiment to see which strategies aid their game play. Gonzalez-Heydrich developed the game with Jason Kahn, a software developer and postdoctoral fellow at Children's, hoping that it would both engage kids and allow them to practice these skills in ways that translate into other areas of life. Typical anger-management therapy teaches patients to step away from difficult situations and use techniques such as visualization to imagine themselves in a calm setting. In contrast, RAGE Control requires patients to soothe themselves in the midst of a high-pressure activity while simultaneously exercising key executive functions, such as the ability to "inhibit," or stop shooting, when friendly spacecraft swoop across the screen. This study is based on a long-standing hypothesis that children with severe anger problems have what amounts to a learning disability, triggered by flaws in portions of the prefrontal cortex responsible for emotional regulation. Over time, the game may strengthen these brain areas in the same way that physical therapy helps a stroke patient regain use of a limb. "We're giving that part of the cerebral cortex and the network that connects it a way of getting exercise," Gonzalez-Heydrich says. "Our theory is that this will help these kids improve." The researchers are less than halfway through this small pilot study led by assistant professor of psychiatry Elizabeth Wharff. Although it's too soon for definitive conclusions, patients so far have enjoyed the game, and "their heart rates during the game have shown improvements with each round, which indicates their ability to learn self-regulation with targeted practice," Ducharme says. The team plans to apply for funding to launch a longer controlled trial eventually at Boston's Manville School, which serves children with emotional and behavioral disabilities. They're also developing a multiplayer version of the game for family therapy, which may help address the dynamics that contribute to angry outbursts. The entire family will wear heart-rate monitors, and if anyone's pulse escalates, everyone loses the ability to shoot. "The trick is to not only get yourself calm, but also promote emotional regulation in your family members," Gonzalez-Heydrich says. "The usual response of these kids would be to yell at their mothers, which makes Mom's heart rate go even higher. We hope kids will learn that the right approach is to say something supportive." Many parents, he adds, will benefit from the emotion-regulation practice as well. The enthusiastic response from patients, parents, and therapists gives Gonzalez-Heydrich hope that RAGE Control may eventually offer an alternative to the powerful psychotropic medications often used to treat these children. He concedes that a shooting game is a surprising way to address anger disorders, but points out that RAGE Control lacks the "graphic reality" of many current video games. "We have to meet these kids where they are," he stresses. "If we had a game where they were, say, picking daisies in a field, these kids just wouldn't be interested."