Task 3- Consciousness Flashcards
What is introspection?
- looking into one’s own mind and observing its contents
- observing your conscious experience
What is an introspective verbal report (IVR)?
verbal description of your conscious experience
What are the characteristics of IVR’s?
- case of reflective C (thinking about one’s conscious experience)
- is selective (you select what’s relevant)
What are other ways of giving responses that do NOT contain introspection?
- ordinary verbal responses (to cognitive tasks of an experiment)
- simple mechanical responses (e.g. pushing buttons to indicate answer)
What is assumed that indicates anything about conscious contents?
concordance between behavior, mental processes, and conscious experience
What are the 3 kinds of introspection?
- Analytic introspection
- Descriptive introspection
- Interpretive introspection
What is analytic introspection?
- attempting to describe one’s conscious experiences in terms of their elementary constituents
- Titchener -> structuralism; different parts analysing
What are the disadvantages/cons of analytic introspection?
- CON: Wertheimer and other Gestalt psychologists: objects are perceived as unified configurations rather than as sets of elementary sensations (The whole is more than the sum of its parts)
- CON: imageless thought -> described a sequence of thoughts or images, each one leading closer to the goal. The subjects were not, however, consciously aware of any process that guided the sequence and accounted for the transformations between one thought and the next (determining tendency)
- CON: it was largely sterile, for it led to no understanding or practical applications regarding complex thinking, motives, emotions, and overt behavior
What is descriptive (or phenomenological)
introspection?
- Simplest form
- “What do I feel?”
- description of one’s conscious experience in natural language terms. E.g. “What did I perceive/think/feel?”; concerns meaningful events, objects and people, and thoughts about them, rather than abstract generalizations; can be about dreams/ daydreams and actual/ real perceptions and actions
- matter of reflective consciousness
- no analysis or interpretation of causes of experiences
What is interpretive introspection?
• intended to discover the causes of our thoughts, feelings, and actions
• “Why do I feel this way?”
–> valid?!
What is introspection NOT?
- NOT equal to having conscious experiences; act of reflexive C; selective; limited by gaps and distortions; does not deal with all conscious experiences
- NOT a sensory process; it’s a matter of verbal thinking (homunculus fallacy)
- NOT a brain scanner
- NOT simply the making of inferences about our mental states, based on our overt behavior
- NO direct inner observation
What IS introspection; which characteristics does it have?
- thought process
- thinking about one’s primary conscious experiences for the purpose of describing and interpreting them
- data comes from memory (is actually retrospection)
- either about info from STM or LTM
- act of introspection is not the same as the experience that is introspected
What does the ‘constructivist theory of perception’ say?
when we are describing something that we currently perceive in the world we are describing our conscious experience and not the object or scene itself
What are the limitations of IVRs?
- Forgetting
- Reconstruction errors (filling in gaps with plausible details)
- Verbal description difficulties: you cannot describe feelings of strong emotions or novel sensations (pain, odors); ineffable experiences
- Distortion through observation
- Censorship
- Experimental demands
- Lack of independent verification
- Substitution of inferences for observation
What are different methods of obtaining introspective reports?
- Thinking out loud
- Thought sampling
- Retrospective reports
- Event recording
- Diaries
- Group questionnaires
What do you generally need to do when doing an experiment for finding the NCC?
- One needs to contrast neural correlates of stimulus processing culminating in e.g. visual awareness from neural correlates of stimulus processing unaccompanied by awareness
- NCC of visual awareness (=NCVA): By rendering an otherwise visible stimulus invisible
- —> Dissociation of physical stimulation and conscious awareness
How does ‘degraded visual stimulation’ work?
- remove visual stimulus from awareness so that’s its difficult to detect
- Participants learn from it
- Central point focussing
- Peripheral: smth moving -> you don’t see it/ you don’t observe motion
- It is presented too shortly for you to see
- You are primed -> influences your behaviour; implicit learning
- Two different task
- Superimpose NOISE: at same time as stimulus
- Degrading: either present it too briefly or show noise
How does ‘disruption of awareness by masking and crowding’ work?
- crowding (only works in peripheral vision; when seeing several circles with different gratings)
- masking mask (picture dissimilar to stimulus) appears before or after stimulus (masking -> close proximity in time; invariant stimulation)
What are bistable figures?
Ambiguous figures (e.g. Rubin’s Vase or Necker’s cube) –> You don’t know when perception changes (fluctuations); long lasting
How is binocular rivalry induced?
Different picture to either eye or two pictures on top of each other; due to visual conflict; unpredictable switches –> any dissimilar pattern can be used
What is motion induced blindness?
Stationary visual stimuli disappear when masked with a moving Background –> size of point needs to be small within a larger motion context; unpredictable
What is inattentional blindness?
lack of awareness in a situation
e. g. gorilla in video –> not focusing on it
- -> does not work for everyone
What is change blindness?
slow changes without noticing them
e.g. video with carrousel
What is ‘attentional blink’?
two targets quickly one after the other -> miss second one because focus of attention still on first one
–> only works if shown shortly
What is used to measure the strength of the different psychophysical techniques?
- Variety of stimuli
- Stimulus size
- Visual field location
- Temporal aspects of stimulation
- Unambiguous invisibility
- Invariant stimulation
- Duration
- Predictability
- Can you use many types of stimuli?
- Can you use any stimulus size? (good if you can use any)
- whether it works equally effective in central and periphery
- How long stimulus needs to be present
- Whether you can be sure that stimulus is invisible
- Does physical stimulation remain invariant when visual awareness fluctuates? (e.g. motion induced blindness-> points always there but our v. awareness changes)
- Do the periods of unawareness last for longer than a few hundred milliseconds?
- Is the onset of unawareness controllable, and are the durations of unawareness predictable?
