cognition
Developmental Stages: New Age concurs
Dec 24th
I recently came across a series of article by Bill Harris, director of Centerpointe institute, regarding cognitive development and I found them relatively well-informed. Bill is a new Age Guru, but his articles were relatively well -informed regarding Piaget’s developmental stages; moreover he shares my enthusiasm for developmental stages and believes in extending these stages beyond Piaget’s four. The series is still incomplete and I link to the first two posts in the series.
I liked his linking these stages with the Jean Gebser‘s structure of consciousness and the consequent archaic, magical, mythical, mental and integral stages. I also liked his emphasis on perspective taking as an integral part of developmental process and I have covered that in detail here. However, he doesn’t differentiate between the stages whereby one starts understanding that others have a different viewpoint/ perspective ( social-informational perspective) vis-a-vis when one starts adopting the viewpoint of another (self-reflective perspective). See my earlier post for more on these perspective stages as outlined by Robert Selman.
What I didn’t like though, and found many issues with , was the various pathologies he associated with failures of developmental tasks at each stage. These he seemed to just pull out of his hat , with neither empirical support or strong theoretical foundations. Nevertheless, the series of articles may serve as a good refreshed for Piaget’s theories of cognitive development for readers of this blog.
Some excerpts:
Cognitive development refers to our ability to perform various types of operations on what we encounter in the world and in our awareness. To live in the world, accomplish various things, and deal with the challenge of being human, we first learn to ”work with” (deal with, manage, get things done with) our body, then with objects, then with symbols, concepts, and ideas, and–if development continues to the highest transpersonal or transrational levels of development–we eventually add ways of dealing with life that are beyond the realm of ideas.Sensorimotor, Piaget’s first stage (the stage before preoperational), is sometimes referred to as archaic in other naming conventions (in this case, in that of Jean Gebser).
Piaget divided cognitive development into four broad stages: 1) sensorimotor (0-2 years), 2) preoperational, or “preop” (2-7 years), concrete operational, or “conop” (7-11 years), and formal operational, or “formop” (11 years onward). Each of these can be divided into several substages. The ages are averages, and since a person could stop and remain at any level, you can find many adults at each level (though not many are found at the sensorimotor stage).
In this discussion I’ll also use some of the stage names used by Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber: archaic (similar to sensorimotor), magic (similar to early preoperational), magic-mythic (late preoperational), mythic (early concrete operational), mythic-rational (late concrete operational), and rational (formal operational). This is just to confuse you, of course.
In the sensorimotor stage, the infant uses senses and motor abilities to understand the world, beginning at first with reflexes and eventually using complex combinations of sensorimotor skills. At the beginning of this stage, the infant cannot yet distinguish itself from its environment (what some have called an experience of oceanic oneness). This has also been called a state of “primary narcissism,” because the infant is embedded in or undifferentiated from the environment.
I suggest, this should be enough to whet your appetite and that you go to the original source to get additional servings.
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Simulating the future and remebering the past: Are we prediction machines?
Mar 28th
This post is about an article by Schacter et al (pdf) regarding how the constructiveness of memories may crucially be due to the need to simulate future scenarios. But before I go to the main course, I would like to touch upon a starter: Jeff Hawkins Heirarchical Temporla Memory (HTM) hypothesis. I would recommend that you watch this excellent video.
As per Jeff Hawkins, we humans are basically prediction machines, constantly predicting the external causes and our responses to them. Traditionally, the behaviorist account has been that we are nothing but a bundle of associations- either conditioned pavlovian associations between stimuli and stimulus-response or a skinerrian association between our operant actions and environmental rewards. Thus every behavior we indulge in is guided by our memory of past associations and the impending stimulus. Jeff Hawkins refines this by postulating that we are not passive responders to environmental stimuli, but actively predict what future causes (stimuli) are expected and what our response to those stimuli may be. Thus in his HTM model, the memory of past events not only exerts influence via a bottom up process of responding to impending stimulus; but it is also used for a top-down expectation or prediction of incoming stimulus and our responses to it. Thus, we are also prediction machines constantly using our memory to predict future outcomes and our possible responses.
Now lets get back to the original Schacter article. Here is the abstract:
Episodic memory is widely conceived as a fundamentally constructive, rather than reproductive, process that is prone to various kinds of errors and illusions. With a view toward examining the functions served by a constructive episodic memory system, we consider recent neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies indicating that some types of memory distortions reflect the operation of adaptive processes. An important function of a constructive episodic memory is to allow individuals to simulate or imagine future episodes, happenings, and scenarios. Because the future is not an exact repetition of the past, simulation of future episodes requires a system that can draw on the past in a manner that flexibly extracts and re-combines elements of previous experiences. Consistent with this constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, we consider cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging evidence showing that there is considerable overlap in the psychological and neural processes involved in remembering the past and imagining the future.
As per the paper the same brain areas and mechanisms are involved in both remembering a past event and imagining a future one – and the regions involved include the hippocampus. These findings in itself are not so fascinating, but the argument that Schacter et al give for , as to why, the same regions are involved in both memory retrieval and future imaginings, and how this leads to confabulations and false recognitions is very fascinating. As per them , because we need to simulate the future events, and as the future events are never an exact replica of past events, hence we do not store the past events verbatim, but store a gist of the event, so that we can recombine the nebulous gist to create different possible future scenarios. Due to this fact (the need for simulation of future events), the memory is not perfect, and in normal individuals it is possible that they confabulate (attribute the source of their memory erroneously) or make false recognitions on memory tests like the DRM.
Fisrt a bit of background on DRM paradigm. In this test, a list of related words are presented to a subject: eg yawn, bed, night, pillow, dream, rest etc. All of these relate to the theme of sleep. Later in a recall test, when this thematically related word is presented to normal subjects, they most often say that they had encountered the word sleep earlier. However given an unrelated word like hunger, most are liable to recognize that the word was not encountered previously. What Schachter et al found was , that in those subjects that had damage to hippocampus/ other memory areas and were amnesics, this effect of confabulating the gist word was reduced. In other words, those with brain damage to memory areas were less likely to say that they had encountered the related word sleep during the original trial. this, despite their poor performance in overall remembering of old list items as compared to controls. This clearly indicates that remembering the gist vis-a-vis details is very important memory mechanism.
I believe that we should also take into account the prototype versus exemplar differences in categorization between the males and females into account here. I would be very interested to know whether the data collected showed the expected differences between males and females and hopefully the results are not confounded due to not taking this gender difference into account.
Anyway , returning to the experimental methodology, another sticking point seems to be the extending of results obtained with semantic memory (like that for word lists) to episodic memory.
Keeping that aside, the gist and false recognition data results clearly indicate that the constructive nature of memory is an adaptation (it is present in normal subjects) and is disrupted in amnesics/ people with dementia.
Thus, now that it is established that memory is reconstructive and that this reconstruction is adaptive, the question arises why it is reconstructive and not reproductive. To this Schacter answers that it is because the same brain mechanism used for reconstructing memory from gist are also used for imagining or simulating future scenario. They present ample neuropsychological, neuroimaging and cognitive evidence on this and I find that totally convincing.
The foregoing research not only provides insights into the constructive nature of episodic memory, but also provides some clues regarding the functional basis of constructive memory processes. Although memory errors such as false recognition may at first seem highly dysfunctional, especially given the havoc that memory distortions can wreak in real-world contexts (Loftus 1993; Schacter 2001), we have seen that they sometimes reflect the ability of a normally functioning memory system to store and retrieve general similarity or gist information, and that false recognition errors often recruit some of the same processes that support accurate memory decisions. Indeed, several researchers have argued that the memory errors involving forgetting or distortion serve an adaptive role.
However, future events are rarely, if ever, exact replicas of past events. Thus, a memory system that simply stored rote records of what happened in the past would not be well-suited to simulating future events, which will likely share some similarities with past events while differing in other respects. We think that a system built along the lines of the constructive principles that we and other have attributed to episodic memory is better suited to the job of simulating future happenings. Such a system can draw on elements of the past and retain the general sense or gist of what has happened. Critically, it can flexibly extract, recombine, and reassemble these elements in a way that allows us to simulate, imagine, or ‘pre-experience’ (Atance & O’Neill 2001) events that have never occurred previously in the exact form in which we imagine them. We will refer to this idea as the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis: the constructive nature of episodic memory is attributable, at least in part, to the role of the episodic system in allowing us to mentally simulate our personal futures.
I’ll finally like to end with the conclusions the author drew:
In a thoughtful review that elucidates the relation between, and neural basis of, remembering the past and thinking about the future, Buckner and Carroll (2007) point out that neural regions that show common activation for past and future tasks closely resemble those that are activated during “theory of mind” tasks, where individuals simulate the mental states of other people (e.g., Saxe & Kanwisher 2003). Buckner and Carroll note that such findings suggest that the commonly activated regions may be specialized for, and engaged by, mental acts that require the projection of oneself in another time, place, or perspective”, resembling what Tulving (1985) referred to as autonoetic consciousness.
This Seems to be a very promising direction. The ‘another time and place’ can normally be simulated withing hippocampus that also specializes in cognitive maps. We may use the cognitive maps to not only remember past events, but also simulate new events. In this respect the importance of dreams may be paramount. Dreams (and asleep) may be the mechanism whose primary purpose is not memory consolidation; rather I suspect that the primary function of dreams is to work on the gist of the memory from the previous day, simulate possible future scenarios, and then keep in store those memories that would help and are likely to be encountered in future. Thus, while dreaming we are basically predicting future scenarios and sorting information as per their future relevance. Not a particularly path-breaking hypothesis, but I’m not aware of any thinking is this direction. Do let me know of any other similar hypothesis regarding the function of dream as predictors and not merely as consolidators.
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Brave Heart: does will power reside in heart?
Mar 22nd
I have written earlier regarding the Heart Rate Variability, that is primarily caused by the Autonomous Nervous System (the opposite effects of PNS and SNS), and how a flexible HRV is related to better response to stress and reduced anxiety in face of external stressors. While looking at the evidence and linkages between HRV and emotional regulation, I had also speculated in it that a lower baseline or resting HRV may be reflective of depression and low regulation/motivation; while a high resting or baseline HRV reflective of Mania and high regulation/ motivation.
A recent study has looked into the issue of whether cognitive self -regulation (will power / motivation) is also associated with HRV. The study reported that higher baseline HRV was associated with more will-power and ability to resist temptation. Also, as they had surmised that will-power is a limited resource and hence the ability to resist temptation must exhaust the will- power ability, hence if the subjects showed higher HRV during the resisting temptation phase, then they would have exhausted their will-power reserves and would not persist in subsequent demanding tasks and this is exactly what they found.
The study consisted of measuring HRV, while the subjects were given a choice of eating cookies/candies or carrots. those who chose carrots over candies (thus exhibiting more will-power to resist the temptation of candies) also showed higher HRV.
In the second experiment, after the subjects chose candy or carrot , and hence supposedly exhausted their limited will-power cognitive reserves, they were asked to do a tough anagram exercise. Those who had chosen carrots were more likely to give up the task earlier. Yet those with higher baseline HRV showed high motivation and will -power regardless of whether they chose candies or not.
This I believe is a good corroborator of Higher resting HRV to be related to better self-regulation and mania , while lower baseline HRV to be related with depression and poor self-regulation. So maybe our hearts do tell us a lot about ourselves, our abilities to resist temptations and our will -powers.
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The courage of a mouse to say ‘No’: A case of metacognition or risk-aversion?
Mar 9th
A recent article in Current Biology by Foote et al (courtsey Ars Technica) posits that rats have metacognition abilities. till now only Humans and primates were assumed to have metacognitive abilities. One feature or defining characteristic of metacognition is knowing what you know and also knowing what you don’t know. It means one can think about one’s own mental states and determine what knowledge one already has and what knowledge one has not yet learned. So a related ability would be the ability to decline a test of knowledge if one thinks that one has not learned enough to ace the test. For those who gave GRE/ any other exam recently and maybe postponed that exam, they would have no difficulty appreciating this that postponing/declining a test involves metacognition.
Taking this line of reasoning further, Foote et al surmise that if a rat could decline a test, under conditions when the rat was not sure of its learned knowledge regarding the test and doubted its ability to successfully complete the test, then such a declining behavior would indicate that the rat has metacognitive abilities. I find no flaws in this reasoning, but have a few quips about their particular experimental setup, which may have confounded the results by not factoring in the risk aversion.
First regarding their hypothesis of the experiment:
Here, we demonstrate for the first time that rats are capable of metacognition—i.e., they know when they do not know the answer in a duration-discrimination test. Before taking the duration test, rats were given the opportunity to decline the test. On other trials, they were not given the option to decline the test. Accurate performance on the duration test yielded a large reward, whereas inaccurate performance resulted in no reward. Declining a test yielded a small but guaranteed reward. If rats possess knowledge regarding whether they know the answer to the test, they would be expected to decline most frequently on difficult tests and show lowest accuracy on difficult tests that cannot be declined [4]. Our data provide evidence for both predictions and suggest that a nonprimate has knowledge of its own cognitive state.
Now on to the actual experimental setup:
Each trial consisted of three phases: study, choice, and test phases (Figure 1). In the study phase, a brief noise was presented for the subject to classify as short (2–3.62 s) or long (4.42–8 s). Stimuli with intermediate durations (e.g., 3.62 and 4.42 s) are most difficult to classify as short or long [11, 12]. By contrast, more widely spaced intervals (e.g., 2 and 8 s) are easiest to classify. In the choice phase, the rat was sometimes presented with two response options, signaled by the illumination of two nose-poke apertures. On these choice-test trials, a response in one of these apertures (referred to as a take-the-test response) led to the insertion of two response levers in the subsequent test phase; one lever was designated as the correct response after a short noise, and the other lever was designated as the correct response after a long noise. The other aperture (referred to as the decline-the-test response) led to the omission of the duration test. On other trials in the choice phase, the rat was presented with only one response option; on these forced-test trials, the rat was required to select the aperture that led to the duration test (i.e., the option to decline the test was not available), and this was followed by the duration test. In the test phase, a correct lever press with respect to the duration discrimination produced a large reward of six pellets; an incorrect lever press produced no reward. A decline response (provided that this option was, indeed, available) led to a guaranteed but smaller reward of three pellets.
The test they have used is a stimulus discrimination test. Their results indicated that indeed the rats declined more often on difficult trials (trials in which the stimulus were closely spaced around the men of 4s) as compared to easy trial (in which they had to discriminate widely spaced stimulus (say 2s and 8s). This neatly demonstrates that the rats were internally calculating what their odds of passing the test were, and in case of the difficult test they took the better option of choosing the decline-the-test condition. However I would like to see more of their data and factor out the effcets of risk aversion.
We all know that humans are prone to risk aversion. That is if I present to you an option of choosing a sure amount of 100 rs or a 50% chance of winning 200rs , you would normally choose the fist option, though if one compares the utility function it is the same. In first case you have and expected value of 100 and in the second case too you have an expected value of 100 (0.5*0 +0.5*200). Thus it doesnt make much sense why one would use one over the other. This becomes more interseting when we increase the amount of the risky option. suppose we now have 100 rs assured vis-avis a 50 % chance of 300 rs still , most of us end up choosing the assured sum.
In this setup the utility of declining the test is 3 pellets; while if we assume that the rats have not learned how to discriminate the stimuli; then assuming that they press the levers at random and thus each option of the test condition is equally probable we have the utility as 0.5 *0 +0.5 *6 = 3 pellets. so we have the same situations as with humans. Now taking risk aversion into account, one would find that the rats would decline the test more often in the difficult stimulus conditions as that is a safe and assured option as compared to the take-the-test condition. As a matter of fact I am surprised that there were some rats who did choose the take-the-test condition. I guess men are more meek than mice!!
So the best thing to do would be to take risk-aversion into account and then after factoring it out decide on whether the rats knew (in a conscious sense) that the test is difficult. Risk aversion is mostly sub-conscious and would not involve metacognition. However, the trend of rising declining behaviors with test difficulty does point to the fact that the rats did have some metacognition.
I would love to have this study replicated using a maze (mouse trap sort of) task. In a amze the cognitive map of the maze provides a good indicataor of how much the mice know about the test/ test difficulty and measuring the declining in this case may be directly related to their meta-cognitive abilities.
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Religion continued: Throwing the baby with the bathwater?
Mar 8th
I recently came across the work of Norenzayen et al regarding the linkage between religion and tolerance (courtesy Mixing Memory) and found some surprising commonalities with the views I have espoused earlier.
For one they talk about the need for religion and accept it as a human universal. They also note some aspects of the religious belief that are universal.
Anthropologically-speaking, there is a near universality of 1) belief in supernatural agents who 2) relieve existential anxieties such as death and deception, but 3) demand passionate and self-sacrificing social commitments, which are 4) validated through emotional ritual (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). There are salient similarities to be found between even the most radically divergent cultures and religions (Norenzayan & Heine, 2005).
One can see that these have clear parallels with the autism/ schizophrenic differences on four dimensions I highlighted yesterday. Specifically:
- Agency: belief in supernatural agency in religious people
- Meaning: religious beliefs give meaning and relive existential anxieties like those of death (Terror Management theory)
- Causal and Magical thinking: leading to rituals, and pro-social behaviors in the religious people
- Experience: An emotional and ecstatic experience of oneness with others in the devotees and mediators.
The book chapter goes on to describe the two aspects of religiosity: a subjective/natural one and a objective-coalitional one. To put in simple words, one is belief in a personal , felt and experienced god (combining 1 and 4 above) and the other is the traditional scripture and culture driven coalitional religion that binds people together and provides them wioth a sense of meaning and purpose (combining 2 and 3 above).
For centuries, those who have attempted to explain religion (and even those who have propagated certain religions) have often distinguished two aspects of religion, treating them not only as distinct but also as opposites.
Dual understandings of religion generally consider a sense of the omnipresence of the divine (whether sensed directly and spontaneously or with the aid of prayer, meditation or drug-ingestion) more subjective/natural than it is socially transmitted/cultural.
Some illustrative examples are: James’ (1982/1902) distinction between the “babbling brook” from which all religions originate (p. 337) and the “dull habit” of “second hand” religion “communicated … by tradition” (p. 6) as well as that between “religion proper” and corporate and dogmatic dominion (p. 337); Freud’s (1930/1961) distinction between the “oceanic feeling” as an unconscious memory of the mother’s womb and “religion” as acceptance of religious authority and morality as a projection of the father; Weber’s (1947, 1978) distinction between religious charisma in its basic and “routinized” forms; Adorno’s distinction between “personally experienced belief” and “neutralized religion” (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950); Rappaport’s (1979) distinction between the “numinous”—the experience of pure being–and the “sacred” or doctrinal; and, more recently, Sperber’s (1996) cognitive distinction between “intuitive” beliefs—“the product of spontaneous and unconscious perceptual and inferential process” (89), and “reflective” beliefs “believed in virtue of other second-order beliefs about them.”
The authors then go on to synthesize material on tolerance- religiosity linkages and explain how the subjective-natural religiosity is inversely related to intolerance while the coalitional- objective religiosity is directly related to intolerance and co-occurs with intolerance and prejudice. A note of caution though, the authors do not consider the two dimensions of religion independent, but find a positive correlation between the two.
The measures we are most concerned with are those tapping religious devotion, rooted in supernatural belief, and coalitional religiosity, rooted in the costly commitment to a community of believers—a community that is morally and epistemically elevated above other communities. Religious devotion centers on the awareness of and attention to God or the “divine” broadly conceived.
Coalitional religiosity, on the other hand, should be approximated by validated scales measuring what social psychologists consider coalitional boundary-setting social tendencies, such as authoritarianism, fundamentalism, dogmatism and related constructs (e.g., Kirkpatrick 1999).
The authors then go on to explain coalitional religiosity in terms of sexual selection and costly signalling, instead of group selection as we had discussed yesterday.
Coaltional religiosity is likely rooted in the costly sacrifice to the community of believers that is the hallmark of religion. As evolutionary theorists have noted, sacrificial displays can be selected for if carriers of honest signals of group membership are more likely to be reciprocated by a community of cooperators. Even in rights-oriented “individualist” cultures, one is expected to sacrifice all selfish gains that might accrue from being on the benefiting end of injustice towards others. Atran (2002) and others (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Sosis & Alcorta, 2003) note that sincere expressions of willingness to make any kind of sacrifice (including the potential ultimate sacrifice of one’s own life) only occasionally necessitate actually following through on that sacrifice in a way that has long term costs to the potential for survival and reproduction of the genes carried by that individual. However, the material and social support benefits that can accrue to those who sincerely express or demonstrate such willingness are both more likely to occur and are of more obvious value to the long term survival of one’s genes—unless one is among the unlucky individuals whose sincere demonstration involves actually dying before reproductive potential is maximized (and even then, socially-given benefits to close kin may offset the genetic loss of one individual). This “adaptive sacrifice display” explanation for religious devotion is related to the evolutionary concept of “costly signaling”, a process that explains many forms of sacrificial displays in the animal kingdom, for example, why male peacocks who burden themselves with more costly plumage may nevertheless be more likely to pass on their genes, by increasing their chances of mating with a receptive female. Costly signaling theory offers an explanation of why humans engage in altruistic displays such as sacrifice and ritual without treating the group as a unit of selection (Sosis & Alcorta, 2003).
While I disagree with the above explanations for coalitional religiosity, I still believe that it works primarily to ensure altruism/ pro-social behavior and to manage existential anxieties. the evolutionary rationale for subjective or intrinsic religiosity (spirituality) is much more problematic. The authors believe it is selected as it enables us to empathize and to become transcendent to group boundaries.
That coalitional religiosity encourages intolerance towards outgroups seems obvious. But it is less clear why devotional religiosity can, under some conditions, foster tolerance. Some evidence from neuroscience may help us with a novel speculation as to the process by which devotional experience may lead to transcendence of group boundaries.Some investigations (e.g. Holmes, 2001; d’Aquili & Newberg, 1998, 1999; Newberg, d’Aquili & Rause, 2001) have found that when people are subjectively experiencing a transcendent or supernatural-oriented state, there is often decreased activity in the parietal lobe or other object association areas, where perceptions that distinguish self from non-self are processed…..These areas may play a role in any relationship prayer might have to greater tolerance, empathy or other-concern, since they all seem potentially relevant to whether sense of self is experienced in a more limited or more expansive way. Perhaps commonplace empathic experiences of seeing oneself in another or caring for another as one would care for oneself have some family relationship to rarer mystical experiences of ”oneness” and even to more extreme cases where the self-other boundary melts down completely.
They finally get to why transcendence is needed or what function it serves.
Coalitional religiosity arguably reflects a limited kind of self-transcendence that simply upgrades individual selfishness to group selfishness, sometimes with dramatically violent consequences. Yet religious devotion’s independent relationship to tolerance suggests that religion has the potential to transcend group selfishness as well. It is almost as if a more limited religious transcendence is in tension with a more thoroughgoing transcendence. What lies beyond group selfishness we may dub “God-selfishness,” a focus of oneself on a God or divine being or principle that is transcendent of all individuals and groups, including oneself and one’s own groups. God-selfishness would appear to be what religious devotion measures tap into when the variance of coalitional religiosity is controlled for. To the extent that this broader transcendence of self often manifests itself as a tolerant sense of kinship with all, then it would appear to render Dawkins’ pessimism about religion unwarranted.
With that note I’ll end the post and explore the readers not to throw the baby with the bath water, when it comes to religion/ spirituality.
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