Surefire Tip

THE TIP
Today Dr. South covered some historical perspectives on psychological testing.  This (and other lectures) can sometimes be difficult to know exactly what to take notes on and what is just fluff.  Well something that really helped me was to print off the study guides for each unit.  Then, as you are listening to lecture try to answer the questions on the review.  If you know all the information on the study guides then you will be about as ready for each Exam as you can be.


WHY
The real reason this will be so helpful is because for each exam we went through each question and tailored the study guide for the specific questions on the exam.  To be real, it is not all of the information you will need.  You should still read and pay attention to class lecture.  But it is an amazing resource that is guaranteed to help.

Psych 370: Somatosensation 1

PROPRIOCEPTION

This is basically knowing where your body is in space.  Without proprioception you wouldn't be able to do something as simple as touching your nose with your finger.  Proprioception depends on your muscle tendons.

Perphipheral Neuropathy

This is widespread degeneration of large myelinated fibers in the PNS.  A man named Ian Waterman had this.  He had peripheral neuropathy and it degenerated until he had no proprioception.  Ian had to spend copious amounts of time in order to relearn how to move his body.

SKIN

Skin is not the largest organ but it is the heaviest organ.  Epidermus is the outer layer of skin.  The dermas is below and it contains mechanoreceptors that respond to different physical stimuli.  There are four different types of mechanoreceptors; merkel receptor, meissner corpuscle, ruff ini cylinder, and the pacinian corpuscle.

Merkel Receptror (slow SA1)
Disk shaped and located between the epidermis and the dermis.  These continue to fire even under continuous stimulation.

Meissner Corpuscle (rapid RA1)
Stack of flattened disks in the dermis. Fire at stimulus onset and offset but they adapt pretty rapidly.


Ruffini Cylinder (slow SA2)
Branched fibers inside a cylindrical capsule.  These continue to fire even under continuous stimulation.


Pacinian Corpuscle (rapid RA2)
Onion like capsule located deep in the skin.  Fire at stimulus onset and offset but they adapt pretty rapidly.

SPATIAL PROPERTIES

This is the idea that you get different detailed resolution from different parts of your skin.  

Psych 382: Final Exam Review

THIS IS A COMPREHENSIVE EXAM

1. Stress, Pleasure & Addiction
1. Stress
1. Perception, Coping, Modulation
2. Importance of prediction and control
1. Prediction is only helpful if you can control the situation (medium level stress with time to change = good if you can predict)
2. Control is good is you can control it but not good if you think you have control but you really don't
2. Pleasure
1. Brain (pleasure pathway), Stress
1. Limbic System
2. Ventral Tegmentum goes from limbic system to the prefrontal cortex
3. Think of the main parts of the Triune brain (the pleasure pathway cuts across all of that)
3. Addiction
1. Dopamine, stress
1. Addiction chances are much higher if you are stressed out
2. If you eat junk food when stressed then it maximizes the pleasure of the food (emotional eating)
3. Dopamine is the key neurotransmitter in the pleasure pathway
2. Adrenaline junkies should really be called?
1. Glucocorticoid Junkies or Cortisol Junkies
2. Stress & Placebo
1. Placebo
1. Define
1. Something that is not real but you get a physiological response based on perception
2. Pathways
1. The pleasure pathway is involved with dopamine playing a key role
3. Effects (centrally mediated)
4. Parkinson's as a Powerful Case
1. This is where you have too little dopamine
2. Placebo's given to these patients show an increase in dopamine
2. Placebo Surgery
3. Stress & Placebo
1. Stress key in placebo (as is emotion)
2. Stress management helps us harness power of placebo
1. If they perceive less stress they perceive less pain
3. Stress & Depression
1. Depression is stress
1. Radical statement
1. the same physiology between depression and stress response
2. Unipolar depression increasing rapidly
1. One  of the key factors of unipolar depressions is that stress is a predictor of your first major depressive episode
2. Biology of depression
1. Neurotransmitters
1. Seratonin
2. Dopamine
3. Norepinephrine: behavior and activity
2. Brain Regions
1. Limbic system
2. Hippocampus (shrinks in depression)
3. Prefrontal cortex (shrinks in depression)
3. Role of cortisol (glucocorticoids)
1. Cortisol is very high
2. Metabolic hormone (higher in the morning, lowest at night)
1. For depressive patients their nighttime cortisol is elevated
2. They are looking at ways to reduce cortisol to reduce depression
3. Stress
1. Anti-depressants-placebo
1. If you have mild to moderate depression
2. Interventions (exercise)
1. This helps anti depression about as much as zoloft which is a common anti depressant
3. Stress Theory (psychodynamics, learned helplessness)
1. The common underlying aspect of depression is stress
4. Stress integrates theories
4. Stress, Anxiety, & Hostility
1. Personality
1. We differ in support, control, and coping
2. Stress prone personalities tend to over respond to stress & don't use coping resources
2. Anxiety
1. Define
1. Constant vigilance for threat, anticipate the worst
2. Too much sympathetic activation (norepi, epi)
1. There is a high correlation between depression and anxiety but here the focus is norepi and epi instead of cortisol
3. Impacts hippocampus and amygdala
3. Hostility
1. Type A
1. Hard driving business person
2. Hostility is the key component of type A
3. Synically hostile person who see's others as challenging or threatening
4. It is circular because this type of personality pulls out a hostile reaction
2. Repression
1. Many hostile people try to repress their hostility
5. Stress & Cardiovascular Reactivity
1. Heart & Stress
1. Stress & Death
1. Causes of death past & present
2. Hypertension
1. 90% of hypertension is unknown about the cause
3. Inflammation
2. Reactivity Hypothesis
1. Chronic over response to psychological stress
1. Time of Recovery is more important that reactance
2. Mechanisms
1. Lack of recovery leads to heart disease
3. Key Studies
1. Bowman Gray Medical School studies using cynomolgus monkeys
1. Looked at diet and housing conditions
2. They were able to show that monkeys develop a hierarchy and they would stress them by mixing them each week
3. High fat diet vs social stress
1. Both stress and high fat diet both alone will predict high plaque buildup and together it caused the most plaque buildup and heart disease
6. Stress & Social Factors
1. Social Neuroscience
1. Cool area
2. House 1988
3. Uchino 1996
4. Cole 2007
1. Genetics underlying loneliness
2. higher in loneliness had more inflammatory factor expression
5. Gallo 1999
1. Looked at hostility
2. Social support does not benefit people who are hostile
2. Religiosity and Culture
1. Effects of religion
1. can be good or bad for your health depending on your perception
2. Effects of Culture (Donnison & Blood Pleasure)
1. Donnison went to kenya and found blood pressure does not have to rise with age
1. It is still said here that age is a predictor of blood pressure 
3. Social Status
1. Social gradient
1. income and education predict health better than diet
2. Cultural gradient
1. non western cultures don't value income and education like they do here so you don't see the effects of the social gradient
3. Hispanic Paradox
1. The idea that recently arrived immigrants are one of the poorest groups in the US but also one of the healthiest.  This is a confound to the social gradient.
7. Overall
1. The quote
1. We can change our health through thoughts, emotions, and memory
2. Acute stress response
3. Sympathetic and Parasympathetic
1. Sympathetic: fight or flight energy
2. Parasympathetic: rest
3. you need to have both of these but they need to be balanced
4. HPA axis
1. Hypothalamic Puituitary Adrenal
5. Stress management (don't need to focus too much on this)
6. Stress & Health
7. Go through all the power points

382: Stress, Pleasure, & Addiction

PERCEPTION & STRESS

One of the biggest discoveries in stress research is that stress deeds on our perception.  So how then do we appraise the stressor? We think about this in different ways.  We may think that we will do well, or that there is no possible way that we will do well.  We could keep our focus simply on our studies, or we could keep in mind that when it is done we don't have to worry till the fall.  The basic idea is that different people have different strategies on how to deal with stressors.

COPING WITH STRESS

Outlets for frustration such as exercise, beat someone up, etc.  Social supports also help you cope; having good friends vs frenemies, and having a happy marriage.  Two key issues with coping include predictability and control.   These are the two strongest predictors of PTSD.  Predictability makes stressors less stressful and lets you know when not to worry.  Control is a belief of your own ability to control situations and make stressors less stressful.

WHEN PREDICTABILITY DOESN'T WORK

The basic idea is that if you don't have enough anxiety it is boring and you will perform poorly where if you have too much anxiety then you will also perform poorly.  Predictability doesn't help with rare or frequent stressors.  Timing is another that if something is to far away then it won't matter and if you have a pop test it won't matter because you can't do anything about it.  Predictability  really just helps with medium level stressors.

WHEN CONTROL DOESN'T WORK

If you believe you have control but you really don't and something bad happens you will be more stressed because of your perception of control.  Especially if you still think you have control because then you might think something is wrong with you.  There is something known as the internal locus of control which is this idea of thinking you can control something when you can't.

We can increase our stress response by: not having outlets, not taking time for relationships, perceiving things as only getting worse, not being good at predictability and control.  Perception is the key.

THE BRAIN AND PLEASURE

Key neurotransmitter on the test is Dopamine.  The dopamine kicks in not just as you are doing something exciting (cliff jumping) but the whole process of preparing to do the exciting thing will release dopamine.    In many ways dopamine is an anticipatory neurotransmitter.  This goes from the ventral segmental area to the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala.  Opioid peptides, natural endorphins, also kick into this process.  The frontal cortex, cingulate cortex, and the amygdala also play a role in if something is pleasurable or not.

In the striatum there is the densest area of dopamine centers.  There is actually a strong correlation between drug addiction and base jumping, those who are looking for that next big rush.

What is Pleasure
Pleasure is not the actual event.  Dopamine is highest for a base jumper right as she is starting to run.  So the anticipation is the most pleasurable and after it is over the dopamine levels decrease significantly.

Delay of Gratification
If you come from a high stress environment with little pleasure in your life then you don't delay gratification when the opportunity arises.  Those who do wait, however, have much more successful futures (marshmallow study).

Dopamine & Pleasure
Dopamine increases in the anticipation of pleasure.  It will energize you to respond to incentives.  It also is tied to infatuation however, it is not tied to mature love.

STRESS & REWARD

Uncertainty and context matter.  Sometimes a situation will be benign and sometimes it will be malevolent. Tickling is not something you want for a long period of time or it will become uncomfortable and it needs to come from someone you trust to be enjoyable.

GLUCOCORTICOIDS AND PLEASURE

Glucocorticoids lead to increased dopamine at least transiently in moderate amounts.

Adrenaline Junkies
Really this should be called glucocorticoid (cortisol) junkies.

ADDICTION

Dopamine in the ventral tegmentum nucleus acumbens pathway is a key area.  Cocaine and these other drugs increase this pleasure response from dopamine exponentially which is why it is so addictive.  Taking drugs while stressed will increases the likelihood of you becoming addicted and decreases (momentarily) CRH and glucocorticoids.  People fell less stressed and anxious when taking drugs (withdrawal effects).

PLEASURE AND MODERN ENVIRONMENT

We are overly stimulated in our modern environment (electronics).  We don't have to have quiet time because we can feel every second with something.  We rapidly habituate to novelty because the next novel experience could be right around the corner because of this.  We are not as impressed by new things anymore.  Even food is engineered to produce an addictive effect.  

370: Music Perception Pt1

IMPORTANCE OF MUSIC PERCEPTION

Music can affect your mood.  In class he gave the example of the opening scene in the movie "Up" and how it can go from happy to dramatic to sad and then back again.  His point was that, although the movie/picture that goes with the music is important you can still get the emotion from the song without the movie/pictures.

Music as a Therapy
There are many mental and physical health benefits.  Some of the physiological changes include serotonin levels rise, change in heart rate and muscle activity, etc.

So how do we perceive music?  To understand this you need to break music down into it's basic features so first, what are some of the basic features of music?  These include notes and pitch (pitch = frequency).  When we talk about pitch equalling frequency then the assumption is that closer pitches will be closer in pitch, however, we see that octaves seem to break this rule.  For example, 440 Hz is an A and 880 Hz is an A and even though there are notes between them in frequency these two sound more similar in pitch than any of those notes between these two A's.  So musical pitch has more to it.

MUSICAL PITCH

Musical pitch has tone height and tone chroma.  As you increase the frequency the tone height gets higher. Tone chroma is based off of octave relationships where doubling the frequency results in an octave where the two notes in the octave are perceived as the same note.  So why does tone chroma have this effect.  The answer could be in place coding and in temporal coding.

Place Coding
This is the audio map.  It is based on where the neurons are in the cochlea which tells us where that frequency is at.

Temporal Coding
This allows the neuron to fire at a different rate based on that frequency.  This does not work above 5000 Hz which makes octave relationships hard to discern and melodies are not perceptually organized as melodies at that level.

When it comes down to it we don't really know if place coding or temporal coding is the answer to tone chroma but they seem to be a piece of the puzzle.

Cultural Effects
Different scales use different number of notes between octaves.  The fewer notes there are between octaves then the more acceptable variation in frequency to create a note (e.g., 440 Hz is always an A in heptatonic scale.  Pentatonic or Javanese scales could play a note at 410 Hz and it would still be an A because there are fewer notes between scales).

How many notes we put between octaves, the octave relationship, is a learned behavior.  Infants can notice bad notes in either scale (heptatonic or Javanese) equally well.  Adults however seem to be more limited to detection of bad notes in the scale they are familiar with.

PUTTING PITCHES TOGETHER

Chords are three or more pitches played simultaneously.  You can have consonant chords or dissonant chords both of which are based on ratios consistent with chroma.  No matter what tone height you play a chord at you will have the same variation between notes.

MELODY PERCEPTION

Melodies can be perceived at a very young age.  Testing 7 and 8-month-old babies are behaviorally able to discriminate both simple and complex melodies that they've heard from new melodies.

So what is a melody exactly?  Perception scientists define it as a sequence of pitches that is perceived as one coherent stream or structure based on the pattern of rising and falling pitches, not the pitches themselves.  That is to say, the melody pattern is more important than the key that the melody is played in.  The pattern is dependent on pitch height, duration of pitches, speed at which sounds are presented (tempo), and durations relative to each other to create rhythm.

RHYTHM

Rhythm is not unique to music since many activities have rhythm.  We impose rhythm even when there isn't any.  Thomas Bolton did a study where he presented a series of evenly spaced, identical sounds and listeners reported sound groups of two, three, or four and even perceived an accent on the first note in their perceived groups.

Listeners expect a fairly constant beat such as the first note in a group will be accented and the accent will occur in a steady pattern.  Composers then use a technique called syncopation where the accents are varied to create more exciting rhythms.  

375: Problem Solving Pt1

WELL DEFINED vs ILL POSED PROBLEMS (TA taught this lesson and it sounded like he got a lot of his material from the book)

Ill posed problem involves the ambiguity of solving certain problems.

Well-defined Problem
Intial state is where you begin.  Like hunger before a meal.  Then you move on to your goal state and finally to the subgoals state.  The final state is also known as an operator.

Ill-posed Problem
Basically what makes a problem ill-posed is that there are no steps to reach your goal.  There are no set criteria to solve the problem.  You can come up with different ideas on how to solve the problem but really there are an infinite number of ways to solve the problem.

TYPES OF THINKING

There are two types of thinking; directed and undirected thinking.  Directed thinking is anything where we have a goal in our mind and we work towards that.  Undirected thinking is the opposite of that, it is more daydreaming and artistic thinking.  Another two types include reproductive and productive thinking. Reproductive thinking is using past knowledge to solve your new problem and productive thinking would be a completely novel idea (even though that doesn't really exist).

ALGORITHM vs HEURISTICS

Algorithms use a trial and error systematic search.  Heuristics work backwards using analogies and finding a means end analysis.  

370: Auditory Grouping

ILD & ITD

These are not effective for judgements on elevation since in many locations they may be zero.

JUDGING ELEVATION & DIRECTION

Hoffman had people come into the lab and try to judge where sound was coming from.  They are pretty good judges before anything happens to them.  Then they change the shape of the pina so they no longer have spectral cues.  So they can still tell left to right but they have no idea what height the sound is coming from.  However, after having this thing in your ear for 19 days you find that people start to acclimate and they can now tell where sound is coming from.  So what if you take it out?  People would basically just go right back to where they were.  So basically the shape of your ear helps you determine where sound is coming from (up or down).

Owls have feathers that grow in the same direction on both sides of their head.  This makes it so they can hunt in complete darkness.  They are a really good model if you want to study hearing ability.

The superior olivary nucleus (not sure what this word actually is) has these same type of coincidence detector neurons.  The idea is that if you have sound coming from both ears if they hit the olivary at the same time then they know something is coming from straight above, below, in front, or behind the person.

So you have coincidence detectors that only fire if they have two inputs at the same time.  If a detector takes longer to get stimulated then the side that took longer to reach the detector is the direction the sound is coming from.  Also there are different rows of coincidence detectors for different frequencies of sound.  So how do you figure out which frequency is which?  For example, if two people are singing the same not but on different sides of you (same frequency) how can you tell which is which?  Basically you can tell the difference between the timbres but we do not know how our brain is able to do this.

AUDITORY GROUPING

We can group things based on what frequencies are coming from a similar location.  Single sound sources tend to come from one location.  A single sound source tends to move continuously which is  called smooth motion (e.g., doplar effect).  Similarity is the idea that similar frequencies tend to produce sounds of the same timbre.  So the things that are closer together get grouped together.  Stream segregation is something that, when sped up, you hear sounds start to segregate into multiple melodies.  So if a low and high not alternate slowly they seem to jump back and forth between each other but if it is sped up then the high and low notes seem to be two separate melodies.  This is similar to the idea behind gestalt principles.  If the frequencies are close together it is harder to segregate notes.

EXAMPLES OF SOUND EFFECTS

There are cumulative effects of repetition on streaming, meaning that if something is played together for a short amount of time it won't segregate but if you play it for longer periods of time it can start to segregate over time.  Melodies can pop out.  We also segregate high notes from low notes.  Grouping in timbre seems to overcome grouping high and low notes in the crossing trajectory example.  There is also a "common fate"thing going on when common frequencies change.  Adding vibrato to a chord causes it to sound like a voice.  There is a type of auditory occlusion if a sound is played between a sound where if it was silence instead of a sound is seems that the sound cuts off instead.  A similar effect to this is the picket fence effect with speech.

375: Reading

FROM WORDS TO SOUNDS

Which comes first, the sound or the meaning? Or is it possible that you access both at once?  Turns out that we can dissociate between these two things.  There are three sort of possibilities.  ONE is a lexical lookup (irregular).  For this you have to use meaning first because it doesn't sound like it looks like.  TELF is a direct construction (pseudowords).  WON is a combination of lexical lookup and direct construction (irregular).

The brain has separate processes for this.  There is something called acquired dyslexia, which is acquired later on in life.  Surface dyslexics are impaired on the lexical route.  This means that you will be impaired at irregular words, fine with non words, and ok at regular words.  Deep or phonemic dyslexics are impaired at the contraction route.  This means you can pronounce both regular and irregular words but you cannot pronounce non-words or pseudo words.

Regular, then irregular, then lastly pseudo words are listed in order of which route is quickest to use to pronounce a word.  Lexical always win which is why you don't mess up when pronouncing words like ONE.  However when construction and lexical are close in a word then there is delay before you are able to pronounce the word.  We don't necessarily have to use the meaning to get the sound but this is the usual route.

USE SOUNDS TO ACESS MEANING

Van Order had people decide if words were real words or not, and then if the word is the member of a category or not (e.g., is meat part of the food category?  How about rock?)  Meat would be endorsed in this category of food 100% of the time.  Meet is endorsed about 25% of the time.  Melt is endorsed 10% of the time.  Rock is endorsed 0% of the time.  In meet and melt people will sometimes initially use the sound to get the meaning but then they will realize their mistake.  This shows that sometimes sound is used before meaning.

READING: EYE MOVEMENT

When you read what do your eyes do?  They will fixate and saccade.  Fixation will last for about 200-250 ms then it will jump between fixations (lasts about 25-50 ms & jumps 7-9 characters) and this jump is known as a saccade.  You do not actually process any information in this jumps.  So the question is how much info can you extract with each fixation?

The fixation point is about the size of a quarter held at arms length.  That is not very big so are we only able to see detail in this point or can we see details from the whole scene or page?

Eye Tracking
How do we see these saccades?  People have volunteered to let researchers put a camera close to their eye and track the movements.  They found that a person who is reading has smaller times for fixation than people doing a visual search. The visual searchers also move backwards sometimes.  Visual search in dyslexics is pretty similar to normal but in reading by someone with dyslexia it was very jerky and random seeming.

Moving-window Technique
If you mask out the letters that are outside the fixation point then it was found that people didn't notice.  So the words in the fixation point were normal (about 15 characters long) and there were random jumbles of letters outside of the fixation point.  They also did this with X's instead of random letters but that was a bit more noticeable.  The reason we don't notice is that we are not attending to that information.  It was also found that we read about 2 words at a time (normal reading rate is 330 wpm, 1 word takes us to 200 wpm, 2 words is 300 wpm, & 3 words is 330 wpm).  Good readers process the currently read word plus the next word at the same time.

Perceptual span is where you are fixating plus a little bit to your right (or left if you read right to left).  You can switch fluently between these two (left or right) if you start reading in a different direction.  What if you could increase the perceptual span?

INCREASING THE PERCEPTUAL SPAN

Just & Carpenter took these speed reading classes and measured their saccades to see if the speed reading classes really did what they claimed to do.  They found that reading speed increased but comprehension did not improve.

CONTEXT ON WORD IDENTIFICATION

Do you read faster if you know what is coming up next?  Yes.  So for example if you see a sentence with a baker taking a bomb to a wedding or a baker taking a cake to a wedding you will process the second sentence faster because it is normal but the surprising bomb would cause you to process the information slightly slower.

382: Exam II Review

1. Lecture 10 Stress Management
1. Successful Aging
1. Successful Aging
2. Harvard Study
1. some people are more extroverted
2. high social status and prestige is related to longevity
3. happily married = longevity
4. No smoking or alcohol
2. Stress Management
1. lifestyle
1. best exercise is to do one that you enjoy/like
2. Psychosocial factors
1. Religiosity and Meditation
1. These do not work for everyone.  You have to enjoy it.
2. People that don't like to meditate don't get help from it.
3. Methods
1. Learning to Breathe at your resonant rate (5 or 6 breaths/minute)
2. Visualization
3. Imagery
4. Progressive Muscle relaxation
5. Body scan
6. Autogenics: my body is warm and heavy (associated with parasympathetic system)
7. Sleep heigene: consistent sleep time, don't exercise right before bed time, no TV in your room, cool temperature of the room, comfortable quiet dark environment, only sleep on your bed
3. Breathing
1. Braking: learning to breathe deeply
1. If you do four hours of training you usually have developed the habit well enough to do it on your own
2. Breathing
3. Awareness
2. Lecture 12: Stress and Your Heart
1. Stress and Health
1. Stress and Death
1. 5 steps of stress response
1. get energy now
2. move energy
3. stop long term projects
4. blunt pain
5. increase cognitive function
2. Allostasis
2. Hypertension
1. Defined
1. 115/75
2. 140/90 is hypertension
3. Pre hypertension is
2. Mechanisms
3. Heart Health
1. LVH
1. Left Ventricular Hypertrophy
1. Your heart beats harder and develops the muscles more but the bulky muscles causes less flexible heart
2. Hypertension is really the result of a high stress lifestyle
3. Ischemia
1. lack of oxygen to the heart pump/muscle
2. even though all the blood goes through the heart the heart is not fed by that blood.  It is fed by it's own arteries on the outside of the heart that feed the heart and those are what get blocked.
4. SNS/PNS balance
1. SNS can contribute to heart disease but we need it for energy.  The biggest thing is that we need to have balance between SNS and PNS
3. Lesson 13: Stress and EAting
1. Food Principles
1. Eating Guides
1. myplate.gove
2. Eating Principles
1. all fat is not bad.  Emphasize omega 3 and poly & mono unsat fats
2. 
   
3. The future
2. Eating and Disease
1. Disease
1. heart disease and diabetes type II
2. 2 years ago in texas was first type II diabetes case in a 12 year old
2. Metabolism
1. affected by stress and what you eat
3. Stress and Appetite
1. Cortisol
1. after you have been through a stressor cortisol will increase your appetite
2. Evolutionarily stress implies a use of energy but in our society now stress does not always involve using energy but we still get the craving
2. Craving
1. We crave sugar and fat
4. Lecture 14:Stress Management - lifestyle
1. Time management and personal Values
1. Covey Big Rocks example
2. Priorities
1. it is important to start with time management
2. Exercise and Diet
1. Exercise
1. if you do an exercise you don't enjoy your amygdala will activate fear and threat making it hard to continue
2. Diet
1. eat a balanced diet
3. Sleep/Your Goals
1. Sleep
1. sleep principles
2. increase sleep quality will decrease your cortisol and stress levels
2. Your Goals
5. Lecture 15: Stress and Growth
1. Prenatal Environment
1. FOAD
1. fetal origins of adult disease
2. Fetal environment predicts significantly the adult diseases you will or won't have
2. Fetal Stress
1. What the mother experiences the baby experiences
2. They will both have stress
3. Dutch Hunger Winter
1. 2nd and 3rd trimester is when metabolism is programed for the baby.
2. Lack of nutrients means the baby will have a thrifty metabolism to adapt to famine.  They will store food and will be more likely to have obesity.
3. This is passed on to kids and grandkids
2. Responsive Brain Video clip
1. Defined
1. Baby got messages gained weight quicker and got discharged earlier
2. Jan Berry stressed dwarfism
3. Orphans that have been psychologically deprived and then placed into a loving family will grow 10 inches in a year and thrive
4. Fish
1. environment impacts physiology
2. Mechanisms
3. Postnatal Environment
1. Epigenetics
2. Environment
6. Lecture 16: Stress management relaxation
1. Basic Concepts and Practice
1. Concepts
2. Regular practice
3. Website
2. Body Focused Relaxation Techniques
1. Breathing
2. Body scan
3. Prog muscle
3. Mind Focused relaxation techniques
1. Visualiz
2. Auto
3. Self
7. Lecture 17:  Stress and Health Pain & Memory
1. Physical Pain
1. Definition
2. Pathway
3. Gate Control Theory
1. Hypothesized to be in the spine
2. If you are more anxious you are more sensitive to pain
3. Closing the Gate
1. Social Support
2. Acute stress can blunt pain (
2. Social Pain
1. Eisenberger
1. Social pain lights up the same areas in the brain as physical pain
2. Tylenol
1. Gave tylenol for 3 weeks and they found that people feel better socially because they were less hurt by social pains
3. Memory
1. Acute Stress: increases memory
2. Chronic Stress: decreases memory
8. Lecture 18: Stress Management - Self-talk basics
1. Basics
1. Concepts (perception, narrative
2. Practice
2. Self-Talk
1. Automatic thoughts
2. Schemas:since childhood you look at the world in a way that is not always adaptive
3. Mediation
1. Concepts
1. This can be hard for religious people because it is difficult to be accepting and let things go
2. Religiosity
1. Gratitude, compassion, and forgiveness
1. Forgiving people are much less stressed because they can let go of anger
2. The person you really punish is yourself when you are unforgiving
3. Forgiveness is really a religious concept
9. Lecture 19: Stress and Health - Sleep and Aging (today is on the test)

382: Stress & Health - Sleep and Aging

SLEEP

REM Sleep
Why is REM sleep called paradoxical sleep?  It is because you are paralyzed.  Your brain is extremely active during REM sleep so this paralysis is something that is essential for us to keep us from acting out these activities.

Consolidation
We consolidate our memories during our sleep.  The brain is exercising pathways that were underused during the day.  If you don't get adequate REM then you will mess up your cognition which means you will not learn or remember things as well.

Limbic System & Dreaming
The limbic system is active during REM sleep which contributes to our dreams being full of emotional content.  The prefrontal cortex is inactive during sleep which contributes to the impracticality of dream content.

Sleep Deprivation: Stress
Sleep deprivation is a stressor.  Delta sleep factor is a corticotropin inhibiting hormone which means that CIH inhibits glucocorticoids or CRF. When you have elevated glucocorticoid levels you sleep onset will be disrupted and it will also disrupt energy restoration in your brain.  This creates a vicious cycle of stress decreasing sleep and lack of sleep making it you feel more stress (this contributes to insomnia).  Anticipating poor sleep increases glucocorticoids.

AGING

As humans we have this idea that as we get older we just naturally get more fragile.  However, many species do not age and throughout their life they have about the same amount of health and then they die.  But mammals seem to have a more obvious aging process.  Why does this happen?

As humans we are very adaptive in our earlier ages.  But this adaptation often has a cost associated with it which makes us much more susceptible to disease later in life.

No Free Lunch Hypothesis
This is basically the idea that evolutionarily, to propagate our genes, we are very adaptive to change in the early stages of our life but eventually we pay the bill by aging later in life.  Negative pleiotropy is the notion that a genetic trait give you advantages earlier in life at the cost of disadvantages later on.

Stress
Aging is a time of life when organisms don't deal with stress very well.  Mistakes are made in copying DNA with creation of new cells which happens frequently.  Lots of stress through the lifetime can accelerate the aging process.  So what you see is that lack of stress can cause the body itself can act as a stressor.  Just being alive is stressful for mammals.

In humans glucocorticoids levels stay about the same until extreme old age and then rises with age.  They have found that the amount of glucocorticoids released during stress does not change with age and the recovery time from stress increases.

Biological Processes
Neurogenesis in hippocampus decreases with aging.  They have also found that if you give someone an anti-cortisol pill then their hippocampus will improve.  It will increase neurogenesis in the hippocampus to help fight against the decrease in neurogenesis caused by aging.  

375: Semantic Memory Pt2

MODELS OF MEMORY ORGANIZATION

There is a similarity idea that we organize things in terms of similarities.  This can account for typicality effects.  So if he gave you a few hundred star constellation pictures after a while if you get a new picture you will be able to categorize things because you will have a mental representation of the average of all the constellations you have seen.

375: Semantic Memory Pt1

SEMANTIC MEMORIES

So far we have talked about episodic memories which are memories about events in your life.  Semantic memories are memories for factual types of information such as "who was the first president of the United States."  We all know who it is but we don't have a specific event in memory of when we learned this information.

ORGANIZATION OF SEMANTIC MEMORY

How do you organize your memories?  Is it nice and organized or maybe more like a bunch of random piles of information.  Theories of how we organize this need to account for accessing relevant information when crucial information is not stored.

Something very impressive is that we can use our semantic memories in novel ways.  For example if we were to drop an egg off of the Eifel Tower would it break?  Well we know that it would break because we can use other semantic information that we have and use it in a flexible way.

CATEGORIZATION

1. Categorization
1. Semantic Memory
1. Category VS Exemplar: group of objects that have something in common VS particular instance of a category
2. Concept: Mental representation to compare to novel object
3. Generalization: ability to gather info about one exemplar and compare it to another
4. Typicality effect
1. Effects how quickly you categorize and how you reason about things
2. How do you know if something is typical?
5. Typicality - levels
1. Basic level (e.g., "Maple")
1. most inclusive but members still share most of their features
2. Superordinate level (e.g., "Trees")
1. category is one level more abstruse; winged or not, tailed or not, warm blooded or not...
3. Subordinate level (e.g., "Sugar Maple")
1. categories are less abstract than basic level
6. Some people argue that the basic level is psychologically privileged.
1. This means that when we are thinking about cars what we imagine is on a basic level

370: Binocular Cues

ANGULAR DISPARITY

Angular disparity is the difference between the angle of light hitting the retina in the right eye minus the left eye.  For all the angles that = 0 degrees creates what is known as the horopter.  The horopter is an imaginary line around you where there is 0 disparity between your two eyes.  Well what about things closer than the horopter.

Closer than the Horopter (Crossed)
Things that are closer yield what is known as cross disparity which is a disparity that is greater than 0.  The closer something is the more cross disparity there will be.  With a magic eye illusion if you focus closer than the horopter you will see the image pop out towards you.

Further than the Horopter (Uncrossed)
Things that are further away yield disparity that is less than 0 and it is known as uncrossed disparity.  The further away something is the more negative the disparity will be.  With a magic eye illusion if you focus further than the horopter you will see the image pop out away from you.

STEREOPSIS

Your brain is seeing two different images (angular disparity) but through stereopsis these two images are fused.  This fusion gives you very fine depth information but the degree of depth information depends upon the amount of disparity between the two images.  So for example, if you have one image taken from above an object, say from space, then you will not be able to see depth.  However, if you instead take two images and present those two pictures to two different eyes you will then be able to see depth of objects.

CORRESPONDENCE PROBLEM

This is the problem that if we are seeing two different images in our eyes how is it that we are able to line those images up to perceive only one image.  It is a matter of what depth you would need to focus on in order to get the two images to line up.  Usually we solve this by things like, images correspond if they are on the same horizontal plane.  We really don't know how the correspondence problem is solved by the brain.

A Study
When people were presented with random patterns and told that some of the patterns had a face and some did not about 40% of the time people would say they saw a face when there wasn't actually a face there.  The researchers took the average of all the ones they said there was a face and the ones where they said there was not a face and they found that there was a face in this average and people will pick up on this pattern and do so consistently.

304: Wechsler Intelligence Scale Pt2

WAIS-IV SUBTEST STRUCTURE

Vocabulary Subtest
This is simply the ability to define words.  This is the most stable measure of intelligence.  This means that injury does not affect it as much so it is a good estimate of pre-morbid intelligence.  Because of this ability to measure pre-morbid intelligence through vocabulary it is often referred to as a "hold" subtest.

Similarities Subtest
Consists of paired items of increasing difficulty.  You would basically get to words such as rhinoceros and elephant, and then you would be asked how they are alike.  This is a "non-hold" subtest.

Information Subtest
Still on the WAIS but it is now an optional subtest on the WISC.  This probably indicates that it is not going to be a part of the test much longer.  The information subtest includes the ability to comprehend, follow directions, and respond.  It seems that college students do really well on this and it is VERY culturally specific.

Block Design
This uses 9 colored blocks and you will get a picture shown to you in a booklet that you will have to make with the blocks.  This is also a non-hold subtest.  It is not the most stable subtest but it is a really good predictor of g.

Matrix Reasoning Subtest
This is where you get a number of pictures that form a sort of pattern and you have to identify the missing picture that would fit into the pattern.  This is non-verbal, not very biased, and a very nice measure of fluid intelligence.

Digit Span Subtest
You simply repeat a list of digits that the tester gives to you back to him.  Sometimes you need to repeat them as he said them and sometimes you need to repeat them backwards.  The tester has to read them at a smooth and easy pace because if he is too fast it is much easier to remember the digits.  You should practice reading them at about 1/second.  Non-intellectual factors easily influence performance on this subtest such as anxiety, distractions, inattention.

Digit Symbol-Coding Subtest
Requires the subject to copy symbols.

CALCULATING INDEX SCORES

Say Ronald, a 10 year old,  got a raw score in vocabulary of 37.  So you just add up all his points and you get 37.  Remember that you are normed to the age for each subtest.  So you would look up vocabulary and his raw score to find his scaled score which in this case is 12.  This scaled score is where he gets compared to other people of his age.  So with a score of 12, what does this mean in comparison to other students of his age? If he were 12 years old instead of 10 and still got a vocabulary score of 37 his raw score at age 12 would instead be 9.  What does a raw score of 9 mean in comparison to other students?  Make sure that you know the mean, SD, and range of both scaled score and index score.  There is a slide on this with a nice little table.

PATTERN ANALYSIS

If the IQ is not interpretable due to variability then you want to ask yourself, "where does that variability come from?"

370: Sound 2 - The Ear

SOUND QUALITY

Timbre
All qualities of sound except loudness and pitch are what constitute timbre.

Complex Sounds
Higher frequency elements of a sound are called overtones or partials.  Partials whose frequency is a whole integer multiple of the fundamental frequency are called harmonics.  Together, the partials that make up a sound are referred to as its frequency spectrum, which is in part responsible for a sound's timbre.  Good musical instruments produce sounds which have mostly harmonics and not many non-harmonic partials.  He played 3 piano example and some of them have extra harmonics and frequencies that are non-harmonic partials and the last one was a Stienway which has very few of these non-harmonic partials and it sounded much better.  Class members described the sound of the non-harmonic partials as making the piano sound tinny.

HOW DO WE GO FROM A PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE TO A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE?



Here is a video clip that was shown in class.

Outer Ear
Pinna helps with sound location.  Auditory Canal is 3 cm long tube-like structure.

Middle Ear
Separates the inner from the outer ear.  Contains the malleus, incus, and stapes.

Inner Ear
The main structure is the cochlea which is a fluid filled snail-like structure that is set into vibrations by the stapes.  The organ of corti is where transduction is actually happening.

Outer and middle ear are filled with air where the inner ear is filled with a more dense fluid.  This increase in density makes it so pressure changes in the air transmit more poorly; this is why it is harder to hear underwater.  Ossicles act to amplify the vibration for better transmission to the fluid.

The Organ of Corti
Some of the key structures included the basilar membrane, the inner and outer hair cells, and the tectorial membrane.  The basilar membrane moves up and down and the tectorial membrane moves side to side in response to the basilar membrane.

NEURAL SIGNALS FOR FREQUENCY

The cochlea is sensitive to different frequencies.  There are two ways that nerve signal frequency; you want to know which are signally and how they are signaling.  Berkesy come up with a place theory of hearing.  He determined that frequency of sound is indicated by the place on the organ of corti that has the highest firing rate.  He determined this with direct observation of the basilar membrane and by building a model of it.  The base of the membrane is 3 to 4 times narrower than tat the apex and...

375: Language Pt2

WHY ARE WORDS HARD TO UNDERSTAND?

Initial research showed us that our brain had a hard time understanding words that were miss-said, like hack instead of hat.  But later, Gaskell et al found that people are actually faster for natural changes than they are for unnatural changes (e.g., pime bench would be interpreted as pine bench because the m in pime seems to be preparatory for the b in bench).

WHY ARE SENTENCES HARD?

He gave the example of the sentence "Time flies like an arrow" and how this particular sentence could have many different meanings.

Sentence Processing
To understand sentence processing we need to understand about syntax and grammar.  Grammar refers to a set of rules that describe the legal sentences that can be constructed in a language.  Proscriptive grammar is telling a person what to do and descriptive grammar is a description of what grammar is being used.

Syntax & Semantics
"The psychologist slept fitfully, dreaming new ideas." or "Fitfully the slept new, ideas dreaming psychologist" or The new ideas slept fitfully, dreaming a psychologist" show that sentences can have grammar, it can have semantic meaning, it can have both or it can have neither.

WORD CHAIN GRAMMARS

We have a tendency to select grammatical sentences word by word and we can fill in blanks because there are certain words we would expect to be next.  For example, "the boy hit the ____ with the bat" we would usually say "ball" but it could be any number of other things.  When we select a word to start a sentence we now have a specific path we have to follow because some words don't pair up such as "I" and "are."  We know that those two words don't go together but instead we would pair "I" with "am."

Dependencies
The basic idea behind word chain grammar and dependencies is that the verbs must agree; "either" implies "or," "at" implies a noun.  Dependencies like these can be embedded in each other.  When it comes down to it, word chain grammars don't work to explain sentence structure because they can be continually embedded in each other.

PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR

These use hierarchical organization and not linear organization.  They also specify a limited number of sentence parts and a limited number of ways the parts can be combined.  So how do we get embeddedness?  Basically the words themselves have meaning imbedded in them in this type of grammar.  What cues does the parser use to decide which phrase structures are which?

Cues
There are four specific cues that we use to decide phrase structures; key words, word order, context, and principle of minimal attachment.

Phrase Structure Ambiguities
Phrase structures can account for (some) ambiguities of language.  Ambiguity is basically the idea that interpretation of a phrase can be one way or another and it is not clear exactly which way is the "correct" way.  Our top-down expectations are what make us hear a sentence one way or another.

304: Wechsler Intelligence Scale

WAIS-IV

A good book about this is called "Essentials of WAIS - IV Assessment" that Dr. South has his graduate students read each year.

David Wechsler
Wechsler defined intelligence as "the aggregate or global capacity to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with the environment."  He didn't like the idea of a single score representing someone's "intelligence" so he took into account the non-intellective factors in his theory.  He designed a test for adults.  He de-emphasized speeded, timed portions and considered that cognitive skills declined with age.  

370: Sound I - The Sound Stimulus

What are some of the functions of sound?  Well one important reason is that we can't see everything.  We need sound to alert us to certain stimuli.  What are two possible definitions of sound?  There is a physical definition and a perceptual definition.  The physical definition is pressure that changes in the air or another medium.  The perceptual definition is the experience we have when we hear.

SOUND WAVES

Objects make sound by moving back and forth rapidly through a medium.  There is a difference between water and air waves.  Water waves are transverse moving up and down, but sound waves move side to side.

Pure Tone
Pure tone is just a sine wave of a certain frequency.  It is the simples form of a sound wave and all other sound waves are composed of pure tones.

Natural Sounds
These are relatively simple sounds, such as those mad by musical instruments, and are made up of many pure tones.  Complex sounds have every at a broad range of frequencies and the relative energy at the different frequencies determine the pitch.

AMPLITUDE AND FREQUENCY

AMPLITUDE AND LOUDNESS: PHYSICAL VS PERCEPTUAL

The larger the amplitude is the larger our perception of that sound will be.  The amplitude of sound waves is the difference in the pressure between these things.  High pressure differences means that it has a high amplitude.  This pressure is typically measured in micropascals but perception is typically measured in Decibels (dB).

Decibels
The log nature of the decibel scale compensates for the response compression of the auditory system.  So what is the response compression?  The idea is that you are more sensitive at the lower end but the louder the sound gets the harder it is to differentiate between differing sounds.  This is a non linear relationship.  So for example, if you increase the amplitude by 10 the perception in dB increases by 20, then amplitude going from 10 to 100 the dB goes only from 20 to 40, then the amplitude going from 100 to 1000 the dB only go from 40 to 60, and so on.  If I were to say that something is twice as loud usually this speak is referring to dB and not amplitude.

FRQUENCY

Frequency is the number of amplitude cycles per second and is measured in Hertz.  The higher we perceive frequency the higher the pitch.  Tone height is the increase in pitch that happens when frequency is changed.

Musical Scales and Frequency
The letters  in the musical scale repeats and notes with the same letter name have the same tone chroma, they sound similar.  So if you were to take a low A, 27.5 Hz, then each octave higher would be double of the A one octave lower.

THE AUDIBILITY CURVE

The idea is that the audibility curve tells us the relationship between frequency and your perceived loudness (dB).  Our hearing range is 20 to 20,000 Hz with greatest sensitivity to 2,000 to 4,000 Hz.  The audibility curve shows the threshold of hearing.  For really low turns it takes much more amplitude for us to be able to hear it.

EQUAL LOUDNESS CURVES

This is where you take 2 tones played at the same frequency but one with double the dB of the other.  then you change the frequency of one of these sound curves and ask how the dB changed compared to the unchanged frequency.  The basic idea of this curve is that low pitches have to be louder.

375: Language

LANGUAGE DIVERSITY

There are about 6-7000 different languages worldwide, however, more than half of those languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people.  Some people estimate that perhaps 90% of these languages will be gone within 100 years.

LANGUAGE CHARACTERISTICS

Communicative


Semanticity
Must stand for something other than itself.  A grunt has no semanticity for example.

Arbitrary
Relation between sound and reference is unimportant.  Different languages have different mappings.

Structured
Pattern of symbols is not arbitrary


Generative
The basic units can be used to build a limitless number of utterances.


Dynamic
Language is always evolving.

In general all languages share a few more characteristics; children can learn them, adults can speak and understand each other, they capture the ideas that people normally communicate, and they enable communication amongst groups.

So lets say that Dr. Kirwan is a super nerd and has learned to speak Na'vi.  He goes to a convention and speaks Na'vi with another nerd there.  Does this then qualify as a language under these conditions?  Maybe, it does allow communication between adults and groups but children probably don't learn this very often and it also lacks a certain amount of vocabulary.

SEMANTICS

Semantics is the study of meaning and, in this case, how people mentally represent the meaning of for words and sentences.  A related concept is a morpheme which is the smallest unit of speech used to code a specific meaning (e.g., s at the end of the word changes the meaning so s is a morpheme).  Phonemes build up to Morphemes which build up to Mental Lexicons.  Mental Lexicons is what assigns meaning to all your different utterances.  Syntax is the grammatical rules that specify how words and morphemes are arranged to yield acceptable sentences.

PHONEMES

Why is phonemes differentiation so hard?  Part of the reason is that we produce them so quickly.  We did a quick activity were he played different people with differing accents speaking the same paragraph then asked us to guess where they were from.  The dialect for each person was different but what made it possible for us to differentiate between a southerner, a northeaster, and a scottish speaker was the accent created by the different phonemes.

Coarticulation 
"Vowel" vs "Vole."  You start to form the vowel before you start the buzzing noise with your lips that produces the v sound.

Perception of Phonemes
They found that we automatically fill in some phonemes based on the context of the phoneme when part of the word is indistinguishable due to a cough.  People will not even notice when they are filling in for words that they didn't entirely hear.  For example, the *eel was on the axle and the *eel was on the shoe sound the exact same but when we hear them we know that the first one is wheel and the second is heel without even realizes we are hearing the same word in both situations.

The McGurk Effect
What you hear can be very influenced by what you are seeing.  Youtube the McGurk effect and you will find some pretty cool videos.  An interesting application of the McGurk effect is that when you speak to someone in person and then on the phone you will understand that person better than if you only spoke to them on the phone.

The Phonetic Boundary
From about 0-30 ms people reliably identified the sound as da then there is a dramatic decrease in response reliability (called the phonetic boundary) until around 50-80 ms people would reliably identify the sound as ta instead of da.

370: Optic Flow Pt2

THE OCCLUSION HEURISTIC

Researchers wanted to know how does the visual system interpret ambiguous apparent motion situations?  We assume ecological plausibility, or that things don't disappear or fuse but that two things turning into one thing probably means that one of them is just covering the other.

IMPLIED MOTION

Still pictures that are of an object that would be moving if it were real stimulate the MT more than just still images of an object at rest.  

375: Visual Imagery Pt2

IMAGERY IS LIKE PERCEPTION

Imagery is much like perception.  The idea is that in a bottom-up process you have memory representations.  You don't usually have a memory representation unless you first have a visual experience (e.g., you can recall what your parents house looks like).  He made a quick explanation that we do actually remember auditory experience as well, without a visual representation.

Confusability
Perky took people and had them sit in front of a screen and imagine a banana.  A banana that is as lifelike as possible.  Unknown to the subjects he very faintly flashed a banana on the screen and then asked them what type of banana they imagined.  And in almost every case they described the banana that was flashed on the screen.  This shows evidence that vision and memory are very similar processes.

Other evidence for the similarity between vision and memory would be giving someone a high imagery phrase and a low imagery phrase.  Visual interference task shows subjects a 1 or 2 and have to remember the other number.  Auditory interference does the same but with sound.  Visual interfering task causes a big effect on high imagery pairs and auditory interfering task causes a big effect on low imagery pairs.  (Sorry if this is a bad description, I didn't understand his explanation very well).

Damage
Damage to ventral impairs visual imagery and damage to dorsal impairs spatial imagery.

IMAGERY IS NOT LIKE PERCEPTION

Heuristics
The rotation heuristic is where we imagine things that are tilted as much more straight then they really are.  The alignment heuristic is where we believe that Philadelphia is further north than Rome when it is not.

Some of the things that imagery allows you to do is mental inspection.  When we do mental transformations we are able to get them correct about 60% of the time.  The point is that images can be inspected to some extent but it is not as clear as perception.

Distortions, inspection and it is difficult are reasons it is not like perception.

WHY DO WE HAVE IMAGERY?

Memory
One idea is that it helps with memory.  We remember words that are concrete better than abstract words because we can make a mental image of them.  Mentioned the dual coding process as a process where you only have meaning with abstract words but there is an image with concrete words so with an image you can do deeper semantic processing.

Another idea is that if you have concrete words you can imagine them interacting bizarrely to help with memory.  Of course this is non conclusive but some of the evidence shows that bizarre interaction helps memory more than non-bizarre interaction.

Make Implicit Knowledge Conscious
Imagery helps us take implicit knowledge and make it conscious knowledge.  For example, is the writing on the coca-colo logo cursive?  To answer this question most people will visualize the coke can to remember the writing.  So the answer to a question like this is in an image that we remember but we have yet to encode and extract this specific information, per se.

Prepare for Future Actions
One reason to have visual imagery is so that we can prepare for future situations.  For example trying to decide if a bed will fit into a room.  How do we do that?  We imagine it.

382: Stress Management Through Relaxation

Relaxation

TECHNIQUES

Breathing

An effective and easy way to train your breath is to use an analog clock on the wall.  Inhale for 5 seconds and then exhale for 5 seconds and do this for about a minute a few times each day.  You will be surprised how quickly you can train your breath.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Slowly work your way through every muscle group systematically first tensing the muscle group for 10 seconds and then relaxing for 30 seconds.  The first time you do this start with small muscle groups, about 16, and then as you get better at this technique you will eventually be able to separate your muscles into only  4 groups.

Body Scan

A body scan involves close to the same process as progressive muscle relaxation but only cognitively.

Visualization and Imagery

Autogenics

Imagine that your hands are warm and heavy.

Self-hypnosis

This involves deepening processes, such as counting down as you imagine yourself descending in a visual scene.

304: General Mental Intelligence

General Mental Intelligence

THE CONCEPT OF g

Today in class we talked about the concept of g, or a general mental intelligence.  Binet took the concept of g and adapted it to include two kinds of intelligence; fluid and crystalized.  People can have a fluid intelligence, these are the abilities that allow us to reason, thin, and acquire new knowledge, or crystallized intelligence, which is the knowledge and understanding that we have acquired.  So what is your understanding of intelligence?  Is there really some sort of general mental intelligence that could encompass all types of intelligence or does it need to be more specific?

THE FIRST IQ TEST

The Binet-Simon Scale (1905) was designed to identify children with mental limitations.  It was revised in 1916 and the concepts of intelligence quotient (IQ), mental age, and chronological age were introduced into the results (the Binet today has a mean of 100 and a SD of 15).   

SUBTEST SCORING

There are 10 subtests and they all have scaled scores (mean of 10, SD of 3).  To be a scaled score is like being a z-score except they have a different mean and SD.  

370: Optic Flow

OPTIC FLOW

As you move through your environment you see everything moving by you 

but your perception is that they are stationary.  

APPROACHES TO OPTIC FLOW

Behavioral Approach

There is a local disturbance in the optic array (e.g., you fixate on the environment and something moves across your vision)  There is a local disturbance in the optic array when you move your eyes to follow the stimuli that moves across the scene.  A global disturbance is when everything seems to be moving because in fact you are the one that is moving.

Physiological Approach

Vestibular information is your sense of motion so when spin for a while even when you stop spinning you will feel as though you are still spinning.  This is an example of when vestibular information is contrasting with your visual information.  Why would you feel nauseous in these types of situation?  The reason for throwing up is to get rid of toxins in your body so if you activate this area of postrema (the area that controls vomiting) you will throw up.  If you feel dizzy then that is a good indication that you have toxins so your body will interpret that something is wrong and probably a toxin so it is adaptive to throw up.

COROLLARY DISCHARGE THEORY

The idea is that if you move your eyes there is a signal sent to you eyes to move eye muscles that we call a motor signal (MS).  There is a copy of the motor signal called the corollary discharge signal (CDS) that goes to the visual system and converges with the image movement signal (IMS), that comes from the eye, and if there is a difference between the IMS and the CDS then we perceive movement.

Some of the prediction of this theory include...

If you were to immobilize your eye muscles you could still get a CDS but not an IMS which means that the world will appear to be spinning around you.  This is because the eye will remain stationary when you try to move it.  

If I shine a light at your eye and then turn off all the lights and then you move your eye what would happen with the after image?  You will get a CDS but no change in the IMS so the after image will appear to be moving.

If an object moves and your eyes move then the image of the object will not move.  You will get an CDS but not an IMS change since you are following the image so you will perceive movement.

REAL-MOTION NEURONS

How do we go from V1 neurons only being able to see one portion of the scene to seeing everything?  It needs lots of inputs.  We have a global motion detector that takes these inputs from a layer right above V1 and combines all the information together to determine the global bit of motion that is going on.  Basically you are just taking a lot of bits of information and combining it to get the whole picture.  

MIDDLE TEMPORAL AREA (MT)

How sensitive are MT neurons to motion.  The idea is that you show these monkeys randomly moving dots and the question is  how coherent does the motion have to be to perceive movement.  You can vary experimentally the motion and monkeys are taught to judge direction of dot motion.  As the coherence of dot motion increased so does the firing rate of the MT neurons.  The actual percentage of coherence that you need to perceive motion is as low as 1-2%.  If there is an MT lesion then monkeys don't respond until about 20%.  

What if you stimulate MT?  Can you simulate motion?  The short answer is yes, you can. 

BIOLOGICAL MOTION

Biological motion is processed in the superior temporal sulcus (STS).  We are very good at identify biological motion even if we aren't quite sure what the actual object is.  An application of this type of biological motion is the recording of joints on the actor who played Gollum.  The reason that movies use people instead of just relying on animators is because even when there is a slight mistake in motion we are able to detect that something is off.  

375: Visual Imagery

Visual Imagery

MENTAL MODELS

We construct mental models of situations.  When we read a sentence, for example, we create a mental picture of what we are reading.  Dr. Kirwan used a specific example of a fantasy novel describing a group of people walking in single file then suddenly talking to each other side by side.  These were two contradicting mental models.

Early on it was thought that these types of mental models were remembered in semantic categories.  Usually these semantic mental models were be explained in sentences.  A type of abstract representation of this is shown in an analog vs proposition of "a ball is on a box."  In proposition you have a relation, syntax, a truth value, it is abstract and it is not spatial.  Another possibility is an analog presentation (e.g., a picture of a ball on a box) and this analog presentation has no distinct relation, no syntax, no truth value until it is described, it is concrete and it is represented in a spatial medium as a picture.  We took a got in the class as to how we experience this sentence (a ball is on a box) and we all agreed that we imagine a picture instead of a proposition.  This was controversial in the 70's but it is becoming clear that this type of analog imagery is more correct.

MEMORIES AND MENTAL MODELS

If you have hippocampal damage how do you do at these types of imagining tasks?  It turns out that people with this type of damage cannot do this very well because we draw on memories to create these imagined scenarios.  So damage to the hippocampus means you will have damage to your memory system which makes it difficult to draw on memories in order to create a mental image/model.  This could be part of the reason why our memories are so susceptible to change based on new information.  We are usually pretty good at keeping imagination and memory separate but it can create some confusion.

PROPERTIES OF MENTAL MODELS

Property 1: Rotation

This is a type of spatial rotation.  There are also sex effects for this where men are slightly quicker and more effective with this than women.  It turns out that the further degree of rotation the two objects are different from each other the longer it takes to do this mental rotation.  This seems to indicate that people are actually visually imagining this mental rotation.  If people were doing this propositionally then it wouldn't take extra time.

Property 2: Size Zooming

A task that exemplifies this property is asking people to imagine a tiger in a small pink square and then tell me what color the tigers nose is.  The smaller the box is the longer it takes to answer this question.  This indicates that we are doing a sort of zooming in to determine what the color of the nose is.  Again this is in opposition to proposition.

Property 3: Scanning

Your task is to view an island with some fictitious landmarks such as a well, a tree, etc.  Then you take the map away and are asked to imagine going from one landmark to another.  If those landmarks are close together your response is faster than if you are asked to go from landmarks that are somewhat further away.  This indicates that people are scanning across the map and is again in opposition to proposition.

Property 4: Brain Locus

If these mental models are represented by language then as you do these tasks your language centers should be activated or if it is visual your visual centers should be activated.  It turns out that the dorsal stream, a visual center, is activated when a person is asked to do these tasks.  Language centers remain inactive.  

THE PIAZZA EXPERIMENT

Imagine that you are in the city square sitting on the cathedral steps looking south, tell me what you see.  Now imagine you are on the other side, now what do you see.  Undamaged people can do this task with little difficulty.  With unilaterally left neglect patients they could only focus their attention on half of the visual scene even for internally generated scenes.  The point is that mental images require you to focus attention on them and that mental images are intact in neglect but there is an attentional problem.

304: Theories of Intelligence and the Binet Scale

 WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?

“general potential, independent of previous learning” ~ Saccuzzo

INTELLIGENCE

In class there was a general consensus that intelligence has a lot to do with cognitive functioning.  But where intelligence begins or ends is much more difficult to decide.  For example, at what point can we say that a person’s response is an intelligent response?  Is it just when the answer is correct or is there more to it?  Another example would be from a gymnast (Jennifer in class) who is flying through the air in a flip that almost any other person could not do.  Is this an example of intelligence?  How much of a physical flip is cognitive and how much is physiological?

Saccuzzo, the author of the text we are studying, said that intelligence is a person’s  “general potential, independent of previous learning.”  If intelligence is independent of previous learning, then why is there an information section on current intelligence test that look at your acquired knowledge?  Alfred Binet has given an alternate definition of intelligence when he said it is “the tendency to take and maintain a definitive direction; the capacity to make adaptations for the purpose of attaining a desired end, and the power of autocriticism.”  This definition is one that is much more recognized in the psychological community.

TYPES OF INTELLIGENCE

There are three main ways to define intelligence; the psychometric approach, the information-processing approach, and the cognitive approach.  The first is the psychometric approach.  This is the oldest approach and the focus of chapter 8. 

The second is the information-processing approach.  This approach is the newest approach that is used most often today.  They believe that the scores a person receives are interesting but even more interesting is the way that the participant approaches the test. 

The last is the cognitive approach.  This focusing on how people adapt to real world demands.

GENERAL ABILITIES INDEX (GAI) – on the test!!!

The general abilities index (GAI) is what you calculate when the four scores on the full scale intelligence quotient (FSIQ) are not lining up.  The FSIQ is scored on working memory, processing speed, verbal intelligence quotient (VIQ), and the (PIQ).  You use the GAI usually because working memory and processing scores are not reliable so the GAI ignores those two scores.  This seems to provide good evidence that one need not concern themselves with a FSIQ and just concern themselves with individual scores and what those specifically mean.  However, this would eliminate the concept of spearman’s g.

THE HISTORY OF INTELLIGENCE QUESTIONING

Alfred Binet defined intelligence as the capacity to 1. Find and maintain a definite direction or purpose 2. Make necessary adaptation to achieve that purpose and 3. Engage in self-criticism so necessary adjustments in strategy can be made.  He believed that intelligence expressed itself through judgment, attention, and reasoning.  It is guided by 2 principles underlying all modern intelligence theories; age differentiation and general mental ability.

Age differentiation’s goal was to find tasks in which the age group completion would be 66.67 to 75% (2/3 to ¾)  General mental ability is the total product of the various separate and distinct elements of intelligence.  Binet essentially wanted talks with a strong correlation with each other.

The next big contribution to intelligence testing after Binet came from Spearman.  As we all know Charles Darwin theorized about natural selection.  His brother, Sir Francis Galton, took this idea and wanted to come up with a way to decide which humans are better than others.  Spearman is a student of Galton.  Spearman came up with the positive manifold where he took two tests and if you did well on one test then you could do well on the other.  From this relationship between these two tests he he started to come up with the concept of a general intelligence which he called g.  

375: Memory Distortions & Semantic Memory

MEMORY: NOT AS GOOD AS YOU THINK IT IS

We know that we forget stuff but of the stuff that we remember we generally think that we are remembering correctly.  Well that is not the case.  But first lets take a step back.  What is the point of memories?  From an evolutionary perspective we basically remember so that our genes can propagate themselves into the next generation so we remember what keeps us alive and what helps us get a mate.  Basically the whole point of memory is to influence our future behavior.  Having a vertical (accurate & truthful) memory is exceptionally useless.  We shouldn't need to remember specific dates but general information seems to be much more evolutionarily helpful.  So what we are really doing is modifying our memories.

MEMORY MODIFICATIONS

A study was done were subjects viewed a car accident and then asked questions about how fast they were going when they contacted each other and how fast they were going when they smashed into each other.  The harsher word choice of "smash" made speed predictions go up significantly and other things, like broken glass, also change.  So something as simple as word choice will alter a person's memory.

THE MISINFORMATION PARADIGM

Depending on your questions you can have people remember things that were actually never there.  For example if you ask someone how fast they were going at a yield sign or stop sign they will then remember a yield sign or stop sign depending on which one you ask.

Bartlett's Experiment
He gives kids ghost stories from different cultures.  Found that kids would add details to show continuity and take away some things they thought were illogical and they changed the terminology to be terms that they know better.  Because of this Bartlett was the first person to start promoting schemas, a sort of script for how things go.  This is was causes us to have false memories.  We remember things differently because it helps these things to fit our memory schemas.

SEMANTIC MEMORIES: REMEMBERING VS IMAGINING

There is not very much difference between the processes for remembering and for imagining.  If you have damage to the hippocampus you are not very good at imagining future events.  You need to be able to draw on past events to generate future events but it is also because this brain regions seems to be involved in imagining the future.

HOW IS SEMANTIC MEMORY ORGANIZED

One way to organize semantic memory is to take everything we know and through it into a large room.  But how efficient is this?  Not very efficient.  So really our memory probably isn't organized in this way since we are able to almost immediately recall information and answers to certain questions.  So this suggests that there is some sort of organization but how is it exactly that we organize this information.  One way to do this could be by using a system like the dewy decimal system and alphabetize things.  But again he is just giving us examples that is not the right answer.

382: Stress Management: Lifestyle

1. Take Home Message...
1. "We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." ~ Aristotle
2. Quadrant I, II, III, IV
1. Quadrant I
1. Urgent and important
1. crises
2. pressing problem
3. deadline-driven projects
2. Quadrant II
1. Not urgent and important
1. Prevention
2. relationship building
3. recreation
4. new opportunities
3. Quadrant III
1. Urgent and not important
1. Interruptions
2. some phone calls
3. some mail
4. some meetings
5. popular activities
4. Quadrant IV
1. Not Urgent and Not Important
1. Trivia
2. Some mail
3. Some phone calls
4. Time wasters
5. Pleasure activities
3. Exercise and Diet
1. Exercise and diet are key elements of our stress management.

304: Interviewing Techniques

1. Gave the example of Eliza the computer therapist
2. Responses to Avoid
1. Judgmental Statements
2. Evaluative statements
1. using terms such as good, bad, terrible, etc.
3. Probing Statements
1. appropriate only wit mental retardation, highly anxious or withdrawn persons, and kids
4. Hostile Responses
5. False Reassurance
3. Ping-pong transitional phrases
1. Verbatim playback
2. Paraphrasing and Restatement
3. Summarizing
4. Clarification response
5. Empathy & understanding
4. Structured vs Unstructured
1. Structured
1. Everyone gets the same questions in the same order
2. Disadvantages
1. requires cooperation
2. Relies exclusively on the respondent making the assumptions questionable
2. Unstructured
5. Sources of Interview Error
1. Largest source of interview error is JUDGING
2. Halo Effect
3. General standoutishness
4. Physical appearance
5. Cross-cultural considerations
1. Increase cultural awareness
2. know yourself
3. Be flexible
4. Look beyond yourself
6. Consider interview data as tentative
6. As a therapist, how much personal experience should you add?

304: Test Administration, Interviewing Techniques

1. Test Administration
1. Halo Effect
1. Ascribing positive attributes independently of the observed behavior
2. Dr. South thinks we are all fantastic (despite some observed behavior)

Interviewing Techniques

1. Interviewing Example
1. Dr. South brought up two students from the class.  He gave them some smarties and instructed them not to talk unless they had the smarties in their hand.  One student interviewed the other and we then discussed the different aspects of this interview.
2. Interview a neighbor assignment.  DON'T FORGET!!
2. The "ping-pong" theory of interviewing
1. The idea of keeping the interaction going and "hitting" responses back and forth
2. How are interviews and tests similar?
3. The reciprocal nature of interviewing
1. Social facilitation: we tend to act like the models around us
1. This is VERY important in interviewing
1. If you project a mood, then the interviewee responds in kind
2. You exhibit the qualities you want in your interview
3. Role of Attitude
1. Is interviewing more attitude or skill?
1. Interpersonal influence: the degree to which one person can influence another
2. Interpersonal attraction: the degree to which people share a feeling of understanding, mutual respect, similarity, etc.