Cognitive Processing in a techonolgical world

PP

- 29 year old male who had reported PTSD for 6 months after 10 year iraq postage - intruded opon other memories and thoughts - Poor concentration, negative mood and irritability, sleep disturbance, often resulting in cold sweats, strong response, hyper vigilance.

Participants

- 44 college students (22 female; 22 male) - Uni. from North-East of the USA - researchers interested to see the extent to which doodling on laptop effected learning in class

Strengths:

- Both subjective & objective measures of symptoms were used - both clinican and self report were used - internal validity= high - direct application good

Emotion and Cognition in DT

- Emotional variables are an integral part of cognitive processes such as thikning and decision-making. - Emotional reactions can modify our memory and trigger speical memeory mechansism ex. Flashbulb mem -

Strengths:

- Field experiment - high ecological validity - Replication study used test-retest method checks for external reliabilty

Strengths:

- Findings provide good evidence that VWM may be responsive to training, useful for educational context when trying to improve cog skills - Motivation and enjoyement were excluded as confounding vartiables that may have effected improvement -

Limits:

- Low gen. (all male and small) - No explanation of why improvenemnt was seen on some VWM tets and not others. - time consuming - replication= difficult

Limits:

- One pp means low gen although can be used to generate theory - no indication for longevity of improvemnt in symptoms - difficulty in replication - time consuming and expensive

Reults:

- Open laptop performed significantly worse than those with closed laptop when tested on recall and recognition of lecture contents - Longer browsing= worse memory performance - Brief distractions did not impair memory performance

Results:

- PTSD scale scores decreased significantly by 56% - PSSR scores also decreased significantly

Main comments and Fidnings:

- VRET has great potetnital for mental health, helps them interact with the "world" - allows patient to be guided in the simulated env. - Show long term effects, show crossover from VR to real world - Helps diagnoze abstract disroders (schiz) - what exactly causes the extreme paranoia/ symptoms - can be used for substancve disorder - VR can elicit strong need for smoking/ general use - Little research for eating disorder

Procedure

- took place during a lecture - one group used laptop during lecture; one didn't (seperate tests) - immediately tested (20 questions, focused on recognition and recall related to the contents of the lecture) - Conditions repeated for both groups 2 months later

Limits:

-Snapshot design leads to high risk of extraneous variables (students may have felt less engaged just on the day, crucial reasons for checking email, content of lecture was percieved differently, etc.) - low gen. (small sample size)

Conclusion:

Action video games may direcly improve VWM or improve it through the enhancement of selective attention (direct psotiive impact on VWM)

VR exposure therapy

Behavioral treatemt of PTSD - Targets behavior that people engage in, in response to sitautions or thoughts and memories taht are viewed as firthgeting. anx. provoking.

Procedure:

Case study in which pp completed series of questionnaires regarding his mood and cognition including anx. and dep. inventories - Most traumatic thing identiifed - Undrewent weekly 90 minute VRE sessions; exposed to two reps of trauam memory - repoted feelings and reactions after each session including 1-100 SUDS rating

Aim

Investigate the extent to which action video games may improve quantity/quality of info. stored in the visual component of working memory

Results:

No sign. differene in motiavtion and engagement - 15 of 17 action people improved during training, all control group improved - Action group demonstrated significant improvenemnt on one mnoeasure of VWM (change control task), small on color wheel, and none on complex span task - No control group improvenent

Procedure

Researchers reviewed findings of 285 studeis in which VRET had been used to treat anxiety disorders (192) schizos (44) eating disorder (18).

Conc:

Sustained multi-tasking in classroom reduces memory for the content of the lesson

Aim:

To evaluate the effectiveness of virtual reality exposure therapy for treatmnet of PTSD in an Iraq war verteran and found it to be effective

Aim-

To examine the effects of multi-tasking in the classroom.

Aim

To review the ffectiveness of VRET over the first 20 years of its use in mental health settings

Procedure:

Two conditions: control- played sims exp- played shooting/action games (ACTIVE AND DYNAMIC) -pps trained 30 hours over 30 days. - asked how motivated they were before (=lly motivated)

Conclusion:

VRE may reduce anxiety related symptoms of PTSD that reult from cognitive processing of the event. - emtion effects way memories form seen in guy - tech sued to make treatement of cognitions abnormal - met with moderate sucess - removed emtion from memory

- conclusion

VRET can aid the understanding mental diorders - simpler psychological treatments can be succesfully administered in VR env.

Participants:

Volunteer sample consisitng of 34 male universtity students

Reliability of cognitive process

accuracy and performance

Digital Technologies

electronic devices and systems that generate process and sotre data - brain/ cog processes undergoes changes due to these

Performance

failure to store or process info.

Postive effects of DT on cog proc.

found to aid learning in some ways. (assisting)

myth of multitasking

humans can't multitask, they switch from task to task very fast - leads to errors being made.

Accuracy-

leads to bias

Negative effects of DT on cog proc.

overloads visual working memory - decreases cognitive performance