Task 3 Flashcards
History introspection
- William James: introspection was primary means of studying consciousness and the mind
- > most british psychologists did not distinguish between consciousness and mind
- Behaviorists: introspection was rarely used
introspection
- looking into mind, observing components
- reflective consciousness
- introspection is really retrospection -> observing our remembered past conscious experiences
introspective verbal report
-verbal description of your conscious experience
ordinary verbal responses (compared to introspective report)
- responses to primary cognitive tasks of an experiment (tasks requiring memory, judgment, or decision making)
- > could in most cases be replaced by simple mechanical responses (e.g. pushing buttons labelled by appropriate words)
analytic introspection
- classical introspection
- describe conscious experience in terms of their elementary constituents
- e.g. table = rectangle with edges
- if you say ‘i see a table’ that’s a stimulus error
- advocated by Edward Titchener
- structuralism -> believe that conscious experience is constructed from a limited number of ‘elements’
- unreliable, no understanding of practical applications
- behaviorism was an alternative to structuralism
descriptive introspection
- description of conscious experience in natural language terms
- what! did i perceive/think/feel?
- concerns meaningful events, objects and people
- reflective consciousness
- naturally involves categorizing experiences but no analysis or interpretation of their causes
Interpretive introspection
- why! do i feel this?
- discover antecedents of thoughts/feelings/actions
- e.g. is love a directly felt conscious experience or is it an inference based on how we behave when we are in love?
Limitations of introspective verbal report
1) forgetting
2) reconstruction error
- recalling more than one actually remembers
3) verbal description difficulties
4) distortion through observation
5) censorship
6) experimental demands
- subject tries to figure out what the experimenter expects
7) lack of independent verification
- not possible to independently check on accuracy of subject’s report
8) substitution of inferences for observations
- > when doing interpretative introspection
- > inferences are heavily influenced by a priori theories about causes of human actions
Methods of obtaining introspective reports
1) thinking out loud
2) thought sampling
- whenever a signal occurs -> one has to report what they were thinking at that moment
3) retrospective reports
4) event recording
- to know how often someone has a particular type of thought -> subject notes each occurrence of the type of thought
5) diaries
6) group questionnaires
How can we figure out the neural correlates of conscious visual awareness?
- we have to contract NC of stimulus processing with awareness with NC of stimulus processing without awareness
- we have to erase an otherwise visible stimulus from awareness -> degraded visual stimulation
- difficulties: we need conditions that aren’t necessarily everyday-situations; often we can’t use the same stimulus for both conditions
Visual Backward Masking
- brief target stimulus followed shortly thereafter by a mask
- > target can be erased from visual awareness
- different stimuli, only short period of time
- > stimulus may be unidentifiable but yet detectable
visual crowding
normally visible figure can be unrecognisable when flanked by other nearby stimuli
- peripheral visual field only, so not where awareness is ordinarily focused
- may be unidentifiable but yet detectable
Bistable perception
-ambiguous figures
-> fluctuations in perception despite unchanging visual stimulation
-given perceptual awareness moves in and out of awareness
-changing pattern sin neural activity despite invariant stimulation
+perceptual state lasts for seconds, alternate states are mutually exclusive, figures can be large
- inability to predict when perception will change, not a lot of figures
Binocular rivalry
-presenting different image to each eye -> produces fluctuations in visual awareness
+ wide variety of patterns that can be strategically designed to target specific brain areas
+ can see whether visual patterns remain effective when suppressed from awareness
-unpredictable switches, periods of mixed dominance
motion induced blindness
- stationary visual stimuli disappear as if erased in front of an observer’s eyes when masked with a moving background
- small object embedded in larger optic flow field
- object can disappear from awareness for several seconds at a time
- unpredictable fluctuations in visibility, stable fixation
