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
