People have overall brain functions {cognition}|. Cognition involves symbolic information processing, typically using syntax. Cognitive processing is like transitions between states or representations. Perhaps, cognition has semantic content. Attitudes and propositions involve rational cognition.
Cognition is making logic-like transformations over language-like representations [Dosher and Sperling, 1998] [Hochberg, 1998].
requirements
Cognition requires sensation, requires perception, and does not require awareness. Cognition can be conscious or unconscious. Cognition can be not intentional or logical. All mammals have cognition.
processes
Cognition includes attention, imagination, learning, memory, and perception [Best, 1992] [Goldman, 1993] [Kazdin, 2000] [Lindsay and Norman, 1977] [Poggio, 1990] [Reichardt and Poggio, 1981] [Savage, 1978]. Cognition also uses language and reporting.
Cognitive processes are selecting stimulus and then labeling or imaging it {encoding, cognition}, remembering, perceiving, generating ideas, evaluating, reasoning, and associating freely. Associating freely is dreaming or having random thoughts. Generating ideas is classifying objects based on attributes or making hypothesis.
behavior
Thought and reasoning cause behavior.
no cognition
Sense qualities, emotions, and reflexes do not involve cognition.
People often choose problem solution using emotion {atmosphere effect}.
Inconsistencies in themselves or environment can cause tension {cognitive dissonance}|.
People have mental images {cognitive map}| of environment around them [Järvilehto, 2000].
Humans and primates, and possibly other mammals and birds, can think about what is in memory and decide what to do {metacognition}.
Problem solving involves encoding, remembering, generating hypotheses, deducing, evaluating, and reporting {problem solving, cognition} [Bruner, 1956].
problem set
Problems have types {problem set}. Recognizing problem set makes similar problems easy to solve. When problem is of different type, assuming wrong problem set uses wrong memories. People can solve problems automatically by using problem set unconsciously, and this is intuition or insight [Berry and Broadbent, 1984] [Claxton, 1986] [Claxton, 1994] [Claxton, 1997] [Greenwald, 1992] [Lewicki et al., 1987] [Lewicki et al., 1988] [Lewicki et al., 1992].
verbal mediation
Problems typically involve concepts and principles, so talking to others or oneself can help find solution.
To respond to stimuli and perceive, people have fundamental mental processes {cognitive style}|.
People can orient toward outside world {field dependence}.
People can orient toward their bodies {field independence}.
People can immediately perform the first alternative {impulsivity}.
People can take time to think about alternatives {reflectivity}.
People can maintain reference frame {leveling}.
People can change reference frame {sharpening}.
People can use stimulus component {analytic thinking}.
People can use stimulus function {relational thinking}.
People can observe scenes and then concentrate on organisms, self, objects, features, times, or locations {attention}|. Attention is on whole-object center, not just to initial cue or feature. Attention can focus on objects of different sizes and at different distances, so size and distance do not matter. Attending reduces noticing other organisms, objects, features, times, and locations. Attention filters, amplifies, or suppresses data.
processes
To guide attention, mind uses hypotheses about scene or object to test if distinctive properties are at distinctive locations. General search method does not guide attention. Attention uses image spatial coordinates to move to locations. Body, head, eyes, and attention window move to focus on stimulus location. Minds shift visual attention to new object before saccadic eye movement [Culham et al., 1998] [Posner and Gilbert, 1999] [Umiltà and Moscovitch, 1994].
processes: selection
Attention can affect early information processing {early selection} and not cause later perception. Attention can affect responses, memory, or high-level information processing and not prevent later perception {late selection}. Attentional load studies indicate that attention affects early selection.
processes: figure
Attention selects figure from ground.
purposes
Attention to object allows quicker reaction, smaller stimulation, more accuracy, and better recall.
properties: attention to painting
In perspective painting, observer attention typically moves along eye-level line.
properties: distance
Attention does not decrease or increase perceived distance.
properties: EEG
Attention to object, to recognize it or use it, causes 40-Hz EEG oscillation.
properties: extinction
If stimulus is present in one visual field, it can prevent attention to later stimulus in other visual field, especially if the stimuli have similar positions.
properties: information
Minds track object parts with highest information and strongest features, which are often along outer contour.
properties: intensity
Attention does not increase stimulus intensity.
properties: time
Attention can turn off but only for short time.
causes: texture discrimination
Texture discrimination precedes attention and looks for visual-field texton-kind and density changes, in parallel. If elongated blobs are the same because blob terminators total same number, texture is the same. If texton changes, mind calls attention processes.
causes: pain
Pain causes attention to object and causes motivation and response to push object farther away and/or stop pain. Attention, anxiety, and prior experience influence pain. Pain makes other goals seem unimportant.
causes: pleasure
Pleasure causes attention to object.
factors: classifying
The categorizing process begins before attention and continues independently after attention.
factors: consciousness
Animals with consciousness can attend to something only if they are aware of it already. Attention can be faster than consciousness. Attention can distract before consciousness. Consciousness can be selective attention. Brain regions for attention, shape, planning, and goals are for sensory consciousness [Chalmers, 2000] [Ffytche, 2000] [Kanwisher, 2001] [Lumer, 2000] [Lumer et al., 1998].
factors: dreaming
In dreams, attention easily distracts, and people cannot consciously attend.
factors: emotion
Attention is before emotions associated with events.
factors: hypnosis
Hypnosis typically restricts attention to small field.
factors: learning
Rewards and punishments determine attention to features and objects, so learning affects attention.
factors: meditation
Concentrative meditation pays attention to one object or event, such as breathing or mantra.
factors: memory
Memories are weak if attention is weak. More attention strengthens declarative memory encoding, because more conscious processing makes more cues for retrieval. Animals with consciousness must pay attention to remember declarative facts. Animals with no consciousness can orient but cannot attend or use declarative memory. Making iconic memory requires attention. Attention to sensory memory causes automatic entry into verbal short-term memory. Attention is part of working memory, or working memory holds attended conscious content, and vice versa.
factors: near-death experience
Near-death experiences have focused attention.
factors: perception
Attention precedes perception and so is apperceptive.
factors: recognition
Recognizing object requires attention.
factors: sensation
Attention requires sensation and does not require awareness.
factors: sleep
Little sleep causes attention loss.
factors: will
Animals with consciousness must pay attention to take voluntary action. Animals with no consciousness can orient but cannot attend or perform voluntary actions.
effects
Attention can enhance all processing related to object attended.
effects: association
Attention to two object features associates their features. Attention can associate two features by placing them in same spatial location [Treisman and Gelade, 1980].
effects: orientation followup
The orienting response precedes slower process that gathers information about time, place, and person to recognize object {orientation followup}.
effects: orientation response
Response to new stimulus directs attention to spatial location {orientation response, attention}, probably before consciousness starts.
effects: binding
Attention can be necessary for binding. However, binding can happen for non-conscious information processing with no attention. Adjacent-object properties can bind to half-attended objects.
effects: response enhancement
Perhaps, attention to stimulus increases response of neuron that receives stimulus input.
effects: sharper tuning
Perhaps, attention to stimulus decreases stimulus range to which neuron responds.
effects: structural model
Attention selects one information channel, which has maximum serial information-flow rate.
biology: animals
All mammals have attention.
biology: excitation
Attention excites affected neurons temporarily [Chelazzi et al., 1993] [Crick and Koch, 1990] [Desimone and Duncan, 1995] [Kastner et al., 1998] [Lee et al., 1999] [Luck et al., 1997] [Miller et al., 1993] [Moran and Desimone, 1985] [Reynolds et al., 1999] [Reynolds and Desimone, 1999] [Rolls et al., 2003] [Rolls and Tovee, 1995] [Treue and Maunsell, 1996].
biology: neuron
Attention reduces neural responses in unattended cortex and increases neural responses and synchronous firing in attended cortex.
biology: development
At 6 to 7 years, ability to sustain attention increases greatly, in all cultures.
biology: drug
Drugs, such as modafinil, can provide atypical attention states [Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968] [Atkinson et al., 1999] [Atkinson et al., 2000] [Farthing, 1992] [Hobson, 1999] [Metzner, 1971] [Spence and Spence, 1968] [Tart, 1972] [Tart, 1975].
biology: synchrony
Awake brain has synchrony, which increases with attention and preparation for motor acts.
biology: fruitfly
In fruitfly, attention affects specific neurons [Heisenberg and Wolf, 1984] [Tang and Guo, 2001] [van Swinderen and Greenspan, 2003].
brain
Attention involves anterior attention network, cingulate nucleus, frontal lobe attentional network, hypothalamus, inferotemporal region, lateral pulvinar nucleus, lateral reticular system, locus coeruleus, orbito-frontal lobe, pons, posterior parietal lobe, prefrontal lobe, reticular formation, spatial attention system, superior colliculus, tectopulvinar pathway, tegmentum, thalamus, and ventral temporal lobe.
brain: anterior cingulate
Consciousness reduces anterior-cingulate-gyrus activity {anterior cingulate, attention} [Chalmers, 2000] [Ffytche, 2000] [Kanwisher, 2001] [Lumer, 2000] [Lumer et al., 1998].
brain: frontal lobe
Consciousness increases right-frontal-lobe attention-center activity [Chalmers, 2000] [Ffytche, 2000] [Huerta et al., 1986] [Kanwisher, 2001] [Lumer, 2000] [Lumer et al., 1998] [Schall, 1997].
brain: parietal lobe
Attention affects posterior parietal lobe [Bisley and Goldberg, 2003] [Colby and Goldberg, 1999] [Gottlieb et al., 1998].
brain: PIP
PIP controls attention [Chalmers, 2000] [Ffytche, 2000] [Kanwisher, 2001] [Lumer, 2000] [Lumer et al., 1998].
brain: prefrontal cortex
Focal attention originates in prefrontal cortex and can affect thalamus or sense-cortex areas [Boff et al., 1986] [Braun, 1994] [Braun, 2003] [Braun and Julesz, 1998] [Braun and Sagi, 1990] [de Fockert et al., 2001] [Lennie, 2003] [Li et al., 2002] [Reddy et al., 2004] [Rousselet et al., 2002] [Sperling and Dosher, 1986] [Strayer and Johnston, 2001] [Tsotsos, 1990] [Ullman, 1984].
brain: V1 region
Attention affects area V1 [Brefczynski and DeYoe, 1999] [Fries et al., 2001] [Gandhi et al., 1999] [Ito and Gilbert, 1999] [Ito et al., 1995] [Kastner and Ungerleider, 2000] [Motter, 1993] [Niebur and Koch, 1994] [Niebur et al., 1993] [Niebur et al., 2002] [Noesselt et al., 2002] [O'Connor et al., 2002] [Posner and Gilbert, 1999] [Roelfsema et al., 1998] [Somers et al., 1999] [Watanabe et al., 1998].
If second stimulus is 200 ms to 500 ms after attending first stimulus, people cannot perceive second stimulus {attentional blink}. People can accurately detect a stimulus in a stimulus series with separation 100 ms, because they can use immediate memory. People can somewhat accurately detect which stimulus preceded and which was later in stimulus series, if stimuli are less than 100 ms or more than 400 ms apart, but not 200 ms to 300 ms apart, because they cannot use immediate memory.
Attention can shift from object or location to another object or location {attentional shift}. Attention switches no more than twice per second. Attention shifts 50 milliseconds to 100 milliseconds after brain signal to shift attention. Attentional shift can involve eye movement {overt attentional shift} or no eye movement {covert attentional shift}. Attention shift uses dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, cingulate nucleus, frontal eye fields in area 8, area-7a posterior-parietal lobe, pulvinar nucleus, and superior colliculus.
Attention excites a neuron set and inhibits other sets {biased competition} [Desimone and Duncan, 1995].
People can prevent meaningful sounds received at unattended channel from becoming conscious {Broadbent filtering effect, attention} [Broadbent, 1958].
To steal food or to mate, primates distract others' attention {deception, attention} [Byrne and Whiten, 1988] [Whiten and Byrne, 1997].
While concentrating on other events or paying attention to one object, people do not necessarily see unusual events happening {inattentional blindness}, even in vision center. If attention is elsewhere, people do not necessarily see objects and events in scenes.
Even if attention is on location or object, people can still not notice, if they do not store enough object detail. People do not see unexpected objects and events [Gladwell, 2001] [Haines, 1991] [Mack and Rock, 1998] [Obrecht and Stark, 1991].
attentional load
If attentional load increases, inattentional blindness increases.
masking
Changes can have masking.
gradient
Change can be too gradual.
If stimulus is in contralesional visual field, such as when right brain has lesion and stimulus is in left visual field, people cannot attend to it {neglect, attention}. Neglect can be for object or body right or left side.
A cortical-area-6 map {orientation map} computes locations in nearby space, using body-based coordinates. Perhaps, it guides orienting responses, like tectofugal pathway.
Mental process {searchlight of attention} {spotlight of attention} {attentional spotlight} can focus attention on objects in mental space, to find, select, and recognize scene objects. Attention probably does not move across space or time, but jumps or expands and then contracts {zooming, attention} [Bergen and Julesz, 1983] [Cave and Bichot, 1999] [Julesz, 1971] [Julesz, 1981] [Sperling and Weichselgartner, 1995] [Treisman, 1988] [Treisman, 1998] [Treisman and Gelade, 1980] [Wolfe, 1992] [Wolfe, 1998] [Wolfe, 1999].
Researchers can ask people to name the color used for word letters, or to name color patch near black-lettered word {Stroop test}. The word is or is not the color name. If word is different-color name, color-naming response time increases, showing that attention and perception can conflict.
Sudden consciousness, of having no memory of just-passed time {time gap}, results from low attention and failure to register event times.
Consciousness of sense input has two forms, top-down and bottom-up, corresponding to the two attention stages. Quick consciousness {exogenous attention} {bottom-up attention} {saliency-based attention} is automatic, depends only on input features, and can use single neurons to detect perceptual features, as in orienting response [Braun and Julesz, 1998] [Duncan, 1998] [Duncan, 2001] [Egeth and Yantis, 1997] [Nakayama and Mackeben, 1989] [Shimojo et al., 1996] [VanRullen and Koch, 2003] [Watanabe and Rodieck, 1989].
Sense-input consciousness can be top-down or bottom-up, corresponding to attention stages [Bülthoff, 2002] [Hamker, 2004] [Hamker and Worcester, 2002] [Hardcastle, 2003] [Kentridge et al., 1999] [Lamme, 2003] [Lee et al., 1999] [Naccache et al., 2002] [Osaka, 2003] [Posner et al., 1980] [Reddy et al., 2002] [Rolls and Deco, 2002] [VanRullen and Koch, 2003] [Wen et al., 1997].
Long-term consciousness {top-down attention} {endogenous attention} {task-dependent attention} {volitional-controlled attention} {focal attention} is through will, has tasks, and uses focusing, short-term memory, and cortical and thalamic sense centers. Example is orientation sense. Focal attention uses locations, features, and objects.
Attention to sense input causes subjective feeling of emptying the head of other thoughts and feelings.
Stimulus can be held in memory without loss up to one second {attention span}|. Attention changes every few seconds.
If number of objects increases {attentional load}, perceptual-task difficulty increases. If attentional load increases, inattentional blindness and change blindness increase.
While looking at location or object, people can attend to another object or place {covert attention scanning} [Rizzolatti et al., 1994].
When organisms respond to environment changes, unconscious skin responses {electrodermal response} {electrodermal activity} can happen with orienting response (OR) or to defensive response (DR). Electrical skin activity changes skin potential {endosomatic response} and skin electrical resistance or conductance {exosomatic response}.
biology
Sympathetic nervous system controls electrodermal activity.
Bulbar reticular formation stimulation inhibits electrodermal response. Amygdala removal inhibits skin conductance.
factors: sweat
Sweat affects exosomatic responses.
factors: schizophrenia
Schizophrenia patients can have no or large electrodermal response.
Before people attend to stimulus or time or space location, they mentally prepare {preattentive processing}.
People can pay attention to different stimulus parts {selective attention} [Broadbent, 1958].
Perhaps, attention has one channel, with strength {attentional capacity model}. Attentional strength correlates with general intelligence and ability to block proactive interference. Attention tries to block interference and distractions. Attention tracks goals, activates data, and calls parallel subsystems.
Perhaps, attention binds related features to produce temporarily integrated scene {coherence field} {virtual representation} [Rensink, 2000].
Perhaps, attention and visual search first process basic visual features preattentively and automatically and then use attention to associate features with objects and find higher level properties {feature integration theory}. Attention integrates or selects basic features such as color and orientation [Chun and Wolfe, 1996] [Driver and Baylis, 1998] [Duncan, 1984] [Jolicoeur et al., 1986] [Kanwisher and Driver, 1997] [Rock and Gutman, 1981] [Wolfe, 1994] [Wolfe, 1999].
Perhaps, mind transforms information flowing through one information channel, which filters information at low rate to select high-priority information {filter theory}. Filtering can affect sense input, emotion, language, color, and response. People can control information channel to block or weaken incoming messages or to interpret information differently. For example, people can keep meaningful sounds received at unattended channel from becoming conscious {Broadbent filtering effect, filter theory} [Broadbent, 1958].
Perhaps, attention and visual search process basic visual features preattentively and automatically and then use that information to control attention processes {guided search theory, attention}.
Perhaps, image features compete in decision and attention processes as mind finds, selects, and recognizes object in image {preattentive task} {pop-out task}.
Perhaps, same neurons that tell eyes to move toward location are for attention to location {pre-motor theory}. Attention changes depend on plans to move eyes to new directions [Kustov and Robinson, 1996] [Rizzolatti et al., 1994] [Sheliga et al., 1994].
Perhaps, attention uses map {saliency map} with neurons that detect differences [Itti et al., 1998] [Itti and Koch, 2000] [Itti and Koch, 2001] [Koch and Ullman, 1985] [Treisman and Gelade, 1980] [Walther et al., 2002] [Wolfe, 1994] [Wolfe, 1999].
People can make attention metarepresentations {supervisory attentional system} [Shallice, 1988].
People can have anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise {emotion}|. Derived emotions are affection, annoyance, anxiety, awe, despair, ecstasy, embarrassment, forgiveness, guilt, hate, hope, humility, jealousy, joy, love, mercy, pride, rapture, regret, remorse, repentance, revenge, reverence, rue, shame, satisfaction, and sulkiness. Social animals can have shame and submissiveness.
types
The fundamental genetic emotions are anger, fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, contempt, and happiness [Damasio, 1999] [Dolan, 2002] [LeDoux, 1996] [Damasio, 1994] [Damasio, 2000] [Damasio, 2003].
Emotions are affection/eros/love, anger/hate, anxiety/fear, disgust, happiness, hunger, joy/elation, sadness, sexual desire, shame/guilt, surprise, and thirst. Higher emotions combine lower emotions: affection, anxiety, awe, contentment, despair, disgust, embarrassment, excuse, forgiveness, guilt, hope, humility, icy calm, ironic detachment, jealousy, mercy, pride, rapture, regret, remorse, repentance, revenge, rue, satisfaction, and shame.
Mental states compound emotions: ambition, belief, curiosity, humor, hypnosis, idea, imagination, insight, recognition, recall, stupor, and will.
cognition
Emotions are cognitive and can involve judgments. People can have a wide range of emotional responses to the same situation. People can hide emotions.
requirements
Emotion does not require sensation, does not require perception, and does not require awareness. People do not necessarily know the emotion they actually have.
properties
Human emotions are compound and complex sensations, have qualitative feel, and have facial muscle movements.
properties: intensity
Emotions stimulated by body or spontaneous emotions caused by signals from cerebral cortex have same intensity.
properties: timing
Emotions can be current, dispositional, or long-term.
properties: will
Emotions can be voluntary.
causes
Rewards and punishments cause emotions.
causes: visceral changes
Visceral changes do not account for emotions. Emotional behavior happens even with cut viscera-to-central-nervous-system nerves. Emotional behavior does not always happen when viscera respond to stimulation. Different emotions cause similar visceral changes. People cannot localize or differentiate changes to viscera. Emotional experience is relatively fast, but visceral autonomic nervous system responses are relatively slow.
effects
Emotions can cause fast autonomic responses, motivate action, make intimate bonds between individuals, affect memorization, and affect recall.
factors: behavior
Behavior types affect emotions.
factors: context
Context affects emotions.
factors: expectation
Emotions can relate to expectations. People can imagine emotion that they will feel in future situation, such as embarrassment, regret, or fear. People can become aroused and attentive just before situation. People can be happy that they anticipated situation correctly or unhappy that they anticipated situation incorrectly. People can react quickly to situation. People can react after deliberation about past situation.
People form impressions of each other by applying previously established expectancies.
factors: facial expression
In all cultures, the same facial expressions accompany the same major emotions. Facial expressions for different emotions are often similar.
Facial expressions used in emotions arose from other functions. For example, muscles surrounding eyes contract to protect eyes from increased blood pressure or from assailant's blow.
Repeated emotions, moods, and behaviors repeat facial muscle contractions and modify face bulges, lines, and wrinkles. People can determine emotions, moods, and character from facial expressions and features [Darwin, 1872].
factors: gender
Emotions have equal frequencies in men and women.
factors: color
Color can express emotions such as happiness, worry, sadness, fright, and anger. The same colors express same emotions over human history and among different cultures.
biology
Amygdala and/or hypothalamus stimulation can trigger emotions. Emotions do not require body stimulation or cerebral-cortex signals.
biology: animals
All mammals have emotions.
biology: baby
Babies show joy, anger, annoyance, and sulkiness, but brain regions for emotion have little activity.
comparison: drives
Emotions do not include hunger, thirst, or sexual desire, because they are biological drives.
comparison: feeling
People can have emotion without feeling.
Feeling emotion {affect, emotion} can lead to action.
Chronic fear or apprehension {anxiety}, without stimulus, can cause physiological discomfort.
guilt
People have feelings that they were, are, or will be at fault. Guilt is anxiety.
shame
People feel shame when they believe that others know their guilt.
types
Anxiety can be transitory {state anxiety} or long lasting {trait anxiety}.
causes
Traumatic, dangerous, unexpected, or embarrassing thoughts, events, or impulses, especially if they associate with pain or punishment, trigger anxiety. Worry or fear of something in the future can cause mental distress. Pain, severe punishment, frequent mood changes, guilty feelings, and inability to adapt can cause anxiety.
Anxiety can result from stimulus-punishment pair, such as sexual stimuli and aggression.
When mothers bear siblings, or people receive continual reproval, anticipating losing parent affection and nurturance can cause anxiety.
Unexpected people and events in familiar situations can cause anxiety.
Guilty feelings can be because one's thoughts and actions differ from high standards set by self or others.
effects
Anxious people can have rapid pulse, strong heartbeat, perspiration, trembling, throat and mouth dryness, and empty feelings in stomach.
effects: avoidance
Anxiety is an avoidance goal or drive, and danger signal arouses it. Behavior that reduces anxiety has reinforcement, so one response is to avoid signal.
factors: age
Anxiety can begin at age two or three.
factors: learning
People can learn anxiety arousal.
Contrasting emotion preceding emotion makes second emotion stronger {contrastive valence}.
Dying {death, psychology} adds fear, tension, and other emotions to life. Death makes one think of legacy. Death can be an escape. Death establishes deadline for activity.
feelings: dying
Dying people hope doctors or god will save them. They want to live. They want to know all about their case. They often talk about their philosophy.
People can face death by denial. People can face death by mastery behavior.
feelings: fear
People can fear death by imagining it or by fearing loss.
feelings: after death
After death, family is either angry or in despair. Mourners can be angry with dead person for leaving them. They can punish themselves, because they wished for person's death or feel that they caused death. They can want to elicit pity. They can need to talk, to free their emotions.
feelings: mission
People can give dying person mission.
feelings: problems
Financial problems, feelings of being a burden, loneliness, fear of pain, fear of dying, and fear for ability of loved ones to be able to adapt, all make dying harder.
feelings: reaction stages
If family member will soon die, family members go through same stages that typically happen during all life's changes: shock, denial, search for meaning, comfort, and hope.
The first stage in facing one's death is shock. Then comes denial and isolation. Partial acceptance follows. Anger can try to force another person to treat dying person as still a human being. People can project anger randomly. Bargaining is a brief attempt to offer good behavior to God to get favor. Bargaining can relate to guilt. Loss of body control, job, wealth, or ability to care for children can cause depression. Depression causes shortened sleep. Instead of depression, people can prepare for death, express and share sorrow, have long sleeping periods, and be silent. Then acceptance has tiredness, weakness, need for sleep, no feelings, no interests, desire to be left alone, and no talking.
factors: children's feelings
For ages up to three years old, death is like separation or like body mutilation. From three to five years old, death is like temporarily going away. From five to nine years old, death is person coming to take them away. After nine years old, death is biological death.
factors: custom
Customs can allow dying people to accept death. Customs can help people to share guilt or spread guilt over time.
factors: society
Death is more isolated, avoided, or ignored now than before. People have more fear of death, which relates to society violence level. Fewer people believe in life after death now. Suffering has no meaning now, so there is no reason to die or suffer.
Personality dimension is emotional reactivity {emotionality}, which varies from low to high.
All mammals have emotion cognitions {feelings}|.
People's general feeling about newly met people {impression}| depends on cold or warm personality or other basic trait. People recognize people quickly, using minimum evidence.
Non-specific mental feelings {mood, emotion}| include contentment, depression, mania, happiness, and calm. People can have tense-energy for flight-or-fight response, tense-tiredness for frustration or depression, calm-energy for euphoria, or calm tiredness for satisfaction [Thayer].
requirements
Mood does not require sensation or perception.
biology: animals
All mammals have moods.
biology: chemicals
Corticosteroid, adrenalin, and glucose concentrations in blood cause mood. High corticosteroid makes more tension. High adrenalin and glucose make more energy.
People can experience threats {threat} of bodily harm and react to that experience with heightened awareness and aggression. War and crime use threats.
properties: threshold
The consciousness threshold for threatening words or pictures can be significantly higher or lower than that for neutral ones.
causes: dominance hierarchy
Dominance hierarchy causes hostility to strangers, maintains peace in society, decreases new behaviors, and causes threats from younger males toward older males.
effects: aggression
Threat can cause aggression. Frustrations and threats can cause wishes for harm or actual harm to others.
effects: response
In response to threat, people can fight or flee.
biology: escape
Voluntary escape behaviors use small efferent fibers in spinal cord with long latencies and variable responses, which react to visual, tactile, and vibratory threats.
biology: sympathetic nervous system
Sympathetic nervous system nerves contribute to threat and aggression behaviors.
factors: games
Games involve threats to plans and goals [Chernoff and Moses, 1959].
factors: negotiations
Negotiations often involve coercive threats.
factors: posture
Threat postures can elaborate into symbols.
factors: schizophrenia
Schizophrenics can hear voices threatening to kill them.
factors: symbol
Raised fist or skull and dagger is for threat.
theories: dreaming
Perhaps, dreams are rehearsals or practice against threats {threat simulation theory, dreaming}.
Emotions can be body changes {bodily upset theory}.
Emotions can cause cognitions {emotivism, cognition}.
Emotions can be sensations {feeling theory}.
Innate behaviors triggered by another individual, or several individuals in preference order, lead to affection bonds {attachment behavior} {bonding}|.
biology
The young of all mammals have attachment. In humans, attachment behavior develops during the first nine months and can happen until end of third year. Children typically have special relation to adult, which is an innate response to stimulation by adult. Different emotions accompany attachment beginning, maintenance, disruption, and renewal.
Children develop schema for adult face at 3 to 4 months old. Later, face and feelings generalize to other people, who can then receive affection.
properties
Attachment causes pleasant feelings.
properties: care
Behavior goal is to receive care from others. Care-giving behavior from one person terminates attachment behavior in other person.
properties: location
If children know attached-person location, children do not show attachment behavior and explore environment instead.
properties: time
Attachments last many years.
causes
Connections between individuals develop because people reduce basic drives by such connections. Strangeness, hunger, fatigue, and anything frightening can activate attachment process.
purposes
Attachment protects young from predators and allows safe environment exploration.
factors
Learning to distinguish familiar from strange is main factor in attachment development. Conversation, rewards, and punishments have small importance.
factors: contact
Attachment behavior typically is between child and parent interacting in close physical contact, in supportive and comforting environment.
Continuing behavior despite fear requires courage {courage}|. Courage can be recklessness or stubbornness if activity has little value. People can learn to control subjective fear or achieve a fearlessness state. Preparing people to do dangerous jobs requires practice in actual tasks.
Apprehension {fear}| has associated physiological changes and/or behavior to avoid or escape specific and real danger in outside world.
biology
Fears can be innate.
causes
Traumatic stimulation, repeated subtraumatic situations {sensitization, fear}, direct or indirect fear-behavior observation, and fear-provoking information can cause fear. Fear ends after removing or avoiding stimulus.
therapy
Therapy can reduce fear directly, as in behavior therapy. Therapy can reduce fear by modifying causes, as in psychoanalysis. Therapy can reduce fear by desensitizing, flooding, or modeling.
After death, divorce, or crime, people experience feelings of loss {grief}|.
causes
Separation causes search for loved person or object. Grief is search frustration. Grief is over lost thing itself, not about symbolic significance.
factors: guilt
Grief does not associate with guilt.
stages
People go through stages when recovering from loss, death, or divorce. Stages are denial of loss, anger at God or other people, despair at low hope or bad life, and acceptance of fate and of consequences.
expression
People that do not express feelings can suffer delayed or distorted grief. Religious ceremonies about death allow expressions of sorrow, in all cultures.
Happiness {happiness}| strongly correlates with income and wealth.
causes
People can attain happiness in three ways.
One is to help other people. This gives satisfaction that world is becoming better. It also provides warm human contact. It makes the helper feel good.
Another is to do something creative. This can involve arts, such as music, painting, sculpture, and writing, but it can also be making new software, products, and inventions. Creative work keeps mind and hands busy at productive and constructive tasks. It also allows one new imagination and delight. It can also provide insights into nature and people.
The third is to love and have love. This means deep mutually shared love based on strong emotion and cognition. However, everyone knows it is also exciting and fun to meet someone new, have crescendo of sexual and warm feelings, and fall in love.
needs
Perhaps, these factors also meet human needs. Humans need another's touch, in hugs and embraces. They need to have freedom and telling stories, to experience the creative. They need to have meaning in their lives, which translates into how they deal with other people.
Something disgusting and negative, such as mutilated bodies, can cause a feeling {horror, emotion}|.
Fun {joy}| can depend on exploration and self-stimulation.
Sexual attraction, flirtation, and companionship {love}| are common love types in all societies. Obsession, self-sacrifice, and convenience are rare in all societies.
love
Strong sexual and aesthetic attraction involves one person, high intimacy, feeling of merging, need to know all about other person, and need to serve. Love is sexual attraction, affection, friendship, and desire for beauty in another, sometimes with power and control.
flirting
Flirtation or play involves several people, low dependence, low strength, and no attachment.
friendship
Friendship or companionship involves stable relationship, low passion, and emphasis on home and children.
obsession
Obsession involves jealousy, possessiveness, despair, and ecstasy.
devotion
Self-sacrificing devotion involves patience, low jealousy, love, caring, and no need for return of love.
compatibility
Compatibility and convenience involve rules based on mutual interests and needs.
People can have uncontrollable fear {panic}| in response to repetitive or imminent danger.
People often feel rushed, harassed, or overwhelmed by demands {stress, emotion}|. Environment often blocks people's will.
causes
Noise, smell, monotonous work, excessive information flow, or interpersonal conflict can cause stress.
effects: illness
Stress can cause myocardial infarction, high blood pressure, gastro-intestinal disorders, asthma, and migraine.
effects: escape
Stress can cause escape from situation.
effects: aggression
Stress can cause aggression.
effects: apathy
Stress can cause state with little emotion, listlessness, preoccupation with self, and detachment from environment.
effects: regression
Stress can cause regression to earlier life stages.
effects: fixation
Stress can initiate old, stereotyped response to new stimulus, such as obsessive or compulsive actions.
effects: withdrawal
Stress can lower one's aspirations, cause escape to fantasy, or result in not thinking about or acting on situations.
effects: projection
Stress can cause illogical action, attributed to another's orders.
effects: denial
Stress can cause denial of, or minimization of, stress.
effects: suppression
Stress can cause people to forget the problem, to try to be calm, or to reassure themselves.
effects: biology
In response to stress, sympathetic nervous system and adrenal medulla secrete adrenaline and noradrenaline, and pituitary and adrenal glands secrete cortisol.
factors
Stress increases with fear, dependency, and weakness.
factors: age
People learn some stress responses as early as infancy.
factors: arousal
Both low and excess stimulation affect arousal.
People can have thwarted desires, intentions, hopes, plans, and projects {suffering, emotion}|. There are degrees of suffering. Mind is necessary to have suffering, because suffering depends on expectations and desires. Ability to reason and ability to suffer differ but relate. Animals that are smart enough to suffer include horse, dog, apes, elephants, and dolphins, because they can do something about conditions that make them suffer.
People can have specific fear that evil events or actions are going to happen {terror}|. Terror relates to trembling.
Thinking about unobserved things {imagination, cognition} is under voluntary control and depends on physical and cultural reality. However, imagination can be about unreal, possible, untrue, incomplete, and opposite things. Imagination can be about negative statements, recursions, and contradictions [Johnson, 1987] [Morris and Hampson, 1983] [Popper and Eccles, 1977] [Sartre, 1948] [Zeki, 1992].
imagery
Imagery is under voluntary control and depends on physical and cultural reality. Making visual mental images depends on how grouping organizes information, how quickly perceptual units fade, and how quickly and how often mind can remake image. Imagery transfers from one eye to the other [Kosslyn, 1980] [Kosslyn, 1994] [Kosslyn et al., 1997] [Kosslyn et al., 2001] [Kreiman et al., 2000] [O'Craven and Kanwisher, 2000] [Sacks, 2003] [Shiekh, 1983] [Tomita et al., 1999].
People use viewer-centered coordinates in imagery.
comparison: hallucination
Hallucinations are unreal and involuntary, but imagery is under voluntary control and depends on physical and cultural reality. Imagination and hallucination differ.
comparison: reality
Compared to reality, imagination is less intense and changes more easily, voluntarily or involuntarily. They are distinguishable, because people have expectations about environment and body, but imagination has fewer constraints.
biology: brain
Premotor frontal lobe is for imagination.
biology: drug
Drugs can provide atypical imagination states.
biology: EEG
Alpha waves disappear when mental imagery begins.
factors: deafness
Deaf children use imagery instead of sound. They have same ability to solve problems.
factors: hypnosis
Imagination has no relation to hypnotizing.
factors: intelligence
Ability to use imagination is an intelligence factor. More intellectually gifted people have less vivid imagery [Galton, 1883].
factors: mnemonics
Mnemonics all use mental imagery.
factors: out-of-body experience
High imagination favors out-of-body experiences.
factors: personality
Authoritarian personality has little imagination.
factors: reporting
Reports can be about imagined things.
Making variations on themes {creativity, imagination} can find meaningful concept components and make new patterns. Creativity involves using irrational or unrelated ideas to construct something new.
requirements
Creativity requires alternating problem concentration and conscious-control relaxation.
factors
Creative people can be withdrawn, skeptical, preoccupied, precise, critical, dominant, introspective, restrained, solemn, independent, curious, hard-working, enthusiastic, motivated, confident, intelligent, unreliable, dirty, and irresponsible. They can avoid social contacts, avoid personal controversy, have high ego, control impulses, use abstract thinking, tolerate cognitive ambiguity, and be independent in judgment. Creative people tend to think about one problem only. Creative people like new, unsettling, challenging, asymmetric, complex, live, and playful things, and only moderate stress.
People can like new things, challenges, unsettling ideas, asymmetry, complexity, aliveness, to play with ideas, to do uncompleted things, and to analyze themselves and others.
Creativity associates with imagery use, fantasizing, hypnotizability, and absorption [Hadamard, 1945] [Hudson, 1973] [Poincaré, 1952] [Schooler et al., 1993] [Schooler and Melcher, 1995] [Smith et al., 1995].
If people see an object on a screen, and a dim object image projects onto screen, people can detect object more readily {Perky effect} [Perky, 1910].
Reality provides related events, times, and places that locate stimuli received from environment or body {source monitoring}, but imagination is not as constrained by background information. Knowledge of past, present, and future can distinguish imagination, memory, and reality.
People can attend to verbal or other stimuli with intention to remember facts or events {learning}|.
types: knowledge
People can learn facts and concepts about world, declarative knowledge. People can learn how to perform tasks in world, procedural knowledge [Campbell, 1994].
types: sense qualities
Sense qualities change with learning or training. Learning affects verbal and spatial abilities. Sights, smells, feelings, and sounds change as relations to other things change. Long training typically makes sense qualities less salient or makes them vanish, as people do more things automatically and/or become habituated to stimuli. Varying information flow changes seeing [Underwood and Stevens, 1979].
properties: relearning
Relearning same verbal-item sequence requires fewer repetitions than the first learning.
requirements
Learning requires sensation and perception.
processes
Systems can learn if they or outside forces can alter system relations. Learning uses input information to direct mechanism that can change system relations and/or rules. Learning leads to new states or new state trajectories.
processes: behavior
Learning requires both old and new behaviors to exist simultaneously for testing and comparison until one proves better. Old-behavior structures still remain and are available for other uses.
processes: cognitive map
Animals can orient themselves in space and make cognitive maps of environment to guide behavior [1950].
processes: cue
New learning requires distinctive stimuli {cue, learning} to elicit new responses. Cueing sends signals to lower elements to get responses, along paths to elements or around circuits. Cueing can search, question, request address, activate behavior, or change state.
processes: description
Learning combines several descriptions into one description, groups incompatible descriptions, modifies description, or integrates structures, functions, or actions.
processes: drive reduction
Learning can involve drive reduction. However, learning can happen without drive reduction.
processes: expectation
Association cortex compares expected to actual, to maximize new information. People know expected value because they encounter same situations many times. Perceptual learning requires ability to detect differences.
processes: experience
Perhaps, learning phenomenal concepts requires phenomenal qualities. Perhaps, learning phenomenal concepts is purely physical.
processes: goal
Learning sets goals. However, learning can happen without goal seeking.
processes: imitation
Animals can change behavior by imitation.
processes: information
Minds learn patterns that have least amount of new information, because they happen most often and so are most redundant.
processes: memory
Learning stores information in mind. Learning {verbal learning} and memory can be about words, sentences, and stories. People can learn word sounds and visual appearances.
processes: parameters
Task uses muscles. Signals to muscles are parameter or variable values, which have limited range. Success requires combining parameter values. To learn to perform task requires methods to set and remember variable values and record success or failure. Upon failure, system suppresses parameter settings. Upon success, system enhances settings. Systems cannot change variables themselves, unless they alter from outside or change system level.
processes: reasoning
Animals can change behavior by reasoning.
processes: result knowledge
Direct and precise knowledge of action results is best for learning.
processes: repetition
For verbal items, more rehearsal improves learning and recall. More repetition also results in fewer errors. Learning longer sequences requires more repetition to achieve same success percentage. For example, learning twice as many items requires more than twice as much repetition.
processes: reward
Learning is painful because it is hard, slow, and takes time from other activities, so later rewards must overcome current pain. Reward affects practice amount, not learning itself. Rewards assist learning if people have physical or psychological overt response. Cognitive or mediational response, like idea, logical deduction, perception, or definition, does not help learning.
Rewards strengthen successful subsystem processes or combinations.
Reward for proper behavior is pleasure and satisfaction.
Stimulation variety is itself rewarding. The penalty for not seeking and not finding stimulation is boredom.
People do not need to know rewards for them to be good rewards.
Reward should immediately follow success, but not every time, so people do not expect it.
If organism does not have essential needs, it becomes active.
The punishment for biologically wrong behavior is unhappiness.
Rewards and punishments determine attention to features and objects, so learning affects attention.
Something that animal chooses over something else is rewarding. Rewards are relative.
processes: visualization
If people can visualize referents, learning word sets is easier.
causes
Responses to successes or failures in performing functions can cause learning. Evaluation function sends input information.
effects
Learning does not change fundamental behaviors, such as postures, calls, and scratching behaviors.
effects: action coordination
Learning coordinates actions.
effects: emotion
Emotions are automatic but learning and consciousness can affect them.
factors: amnesia
Amnesia still allows short-term memory, procedural learning, and conditioning. People can improve performance even if they cannot remember previous practice [Farthing, 1992] [Young, 1996].
factors: activity level
Person's activity level affects learning rate and retention.
factors: body geometry
Learning new behavior depends on body spatial geometry.
factors: exploration
Active exploration aids learning. Scanning and exploration precede understanding and decision.
factors: motivation
Interest and concern aid learning.
factors: metaknowledge in learning
Knowledge about knowledge aids memory and learning. Metaknowledge includes perception, thinking, purpose, situation, mental process, function, and set patterns. It relates to previous knowledge. It relates learning to larger units. It finds learning patterns. It applies knowledge to new situations.
factors: stress level
Person's stress level affects learning rate and retention.
factors: temperature
Person's temperature affects learning rate and retention.
biology
All mammals learn.
biology: ape
Apes recognize objects using fast multisensory processes and slow single-sense processes. Apes do not transfer learning from one sense to another.
The bonobo Kanzi learned to use and understand 150 words, typically to express desires or refer to present objects, using instrumental association. The words probably did not refer to things, as humans mean them to do. Kanzi did not learn grammar [Savage-Rumbaugh, 1986].
biology: invertebrate learning
Bees can learn [Menzel and Erber, 1978].
Fruitflies can learn by trace conditioning or delay conditioning [Tully and Quinn, 1985].
Snails can learn [Alkon, 1983] [Alkon, 1987].
biology: drug
Depressants and stimulants affect learning.
biology: cerebellum
All timed perceptions and responses, such as eye-blink conditioning, involve cerebellum.
biology: frontal lobe
Frontal lobe damage causes impaired associational learning.
biology: immediate early gene
Learning activates immediate early genes, which use cAMP signal path.
ventral premotor area
New brain area in humans aided visually guided hand movements and learning by watching.
biology: zinc
Low zinc can cause slow learning.
People can learn behavior, perception, or statement {acquisition, learning}.
Remembering and analyzing stimuli and responses can form associations and generalizations from particular examples to class or set {chaining}| {verbal association}.
People can derive knowledge from experiences, perform other actions related to learned skills, predict future situations from past experiences, and make analogies {generalization, learning}|.
Learning {overlearning} can become automatic. Overlearning comes from frequently repeated experience.
Learning has stages {learning stages}.
stage 1
In learning stage, students follow rules, in proper order. Rules are "if A then B" statements. Rules can send student backward or forward to another rule or switch student to another rule set.
The first learning stage is to become familiar with situation, possible actions based on abilities, and possible goals, inputs, and outputs. Playing, reading, and wide experience all contribute to first stage. Students need time to gain experience in particular area and to organize data. Students do not take such time unless personal need or goal makes student want to take time to learn.
The first rules are general hypotheses and are often abstract and verbal, coming from parents or teachers. They can also be personal rules coming from previous situations.
stage 2
In learning stage two, students find rule incompleteness or inconsistency, or find cases not covered by rules, and modify rules to make them more complete, consistent, or specific to situation, based on environment facts. New statements have "if A" clauses including environment facts and "then B" clauses telling what to do if situation has that fact. Second stage is to pair input to output relative to task.
stage 3
In learning stage three, students reorganize rules to make hierarchy and group facts and rules. Rules and facts have importance. Learner makes overall action plan.
stage 4
In learning stage four, students see many similar situations and organize the whole scene or situation into a hierarchy. Students can have 10,000 to 100,000 possible situations. Rules can recognize situations.
stage 5
In learning stage five, students integrate goal, situation, and action into unconscious process and gain confidence and competence.
Strong reward is friend and parent affection and approval {social reinforcement}.
Learning skills or facts can affect performance on other tasks, as perceptual abilities and skills transfer from one body part to others {transfer of learning}| {learning transfer}. Learning transfer happens only in similar situations. Learning transfer can generalize stimuli to make a stimulus class. Perceptual-skill transfer goes from one sense to another sense. Motor skill transfer goes from one muscle to another muscle. Learning transfer can go from one body side to the other {bilateral transfer of learning}.
Learning can be physically disrupted {learning disorder}.
Neuron diseases {neurofibromatosis} can disrupt learning.
Organizing information using standard and general memory techniques {mnemonics}| aids learning and remembering. Mnemonics always uses mental imagery. For example, method of loci associates a sequence of familiar places with images about information, by attaching symbols to sequence of place objects.
Learning techniques {method of loci}| {loci method} can associate a sequence of familiar places with images {imagines} about information, by attaching symbols to sequences of place objects.
Learning skill has development stage, in which inadequate movements are only secondarily corrected. Learning skill then has skilled stage, in which secondary corrections become primary corrections, mind has developed movement pattern, and mistakes do not require secondary corrections.
Learning movements uses self-regulatory system. Movements start with goals, which provide models of expected future results.
All nervous-system levels integrate, from reflex or spinal level, to coordination or thalamo-striatum level, to spatial/symbolic or cortical level {afferent field, learning} [Bernstein, 1947] [Bernstein, 1967].
Learning involves dissociation and association equally {association theory}.
Learning finds optimum and maintains it {Baldwin effect}. Learning optimizes whole-system input-output function, by altering structures and relations, and requires method to inform system about optimum output.
Mind as whole has processing capacity, and brain modules have processing capacities {capacity model of learning}. For example, while learning word lists, seeing or hearing second list earlier or later uses mental capacity and interferes with learning list.
Simultaneity can be sufficient for learning {contiguity theory}, with no reinforcement. Mind automatically joins objects or events perceived or performed simultaneously.
Learning has eight types {cumulative learning theory} {cumulative learning model} [Gagné, 1977].
Several code types can operate in cognitive tasks {dual-coding hypothesis}. Learning can be passive increase in association strength during repetition, or it can be an active cognitive process using conscious strategies.
Recognizing image, situation, or problem type {learning set} can solve problem. Monkeys repeatedly trained to select one of two food objects improved learning speed. Perhaps, they learned rule: Correct means repeat, and incorrect means change to the other. All vertebrates show learning set formation, at similar rates [Harlow and Harlow, 1949].
Learning new behavior depends on learning thousands of simpler behaviors {learning unit}.
Memorizing uses attention and cognitive strategies, just like other cognitive processes {levels-of-processing model}. Memory strength depends on processing amount, which moves information to different coding levels in system: physical properties, phonemes, and semantic meanings. Recall is worse for incidental learning than for deliberate learning. However, studying difficult sentences longer does not increase memory ability. Coding phonemically does not necessarily code semantically.
Perhaps, learning requires rewards and reinforcement for motivation and attention {reinforcement theory}.
Animals form hypotheses and expectations. They can recognize problem types in environment. Signs or cues indicate problem type, especially goal type {sign-gestalt theory} [Tolman, 1932] [Tolman and Brunswik, 1935].
Learning first builds new stimulus-response associations {stimulus-response bond} and then organizes them into systems. Situations have specific responses and no general rules.
If skill is more complex to learn, it needs less motivation to learn it {Yerkes-Dodson law}. Important goals aid simple learning but hinder complex learning.
Learning releases more vesicles from presynaptic terminals release than sensitization does {activity-dependent enhancement}. Calcium ion binds to calmodulin, and complex binds to and activates adenyl cyclase. Increased transmitted glutamate binds to ionotropic alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4 isoxazole proprionic-acid receptor (AMPA receptor), which lets sodium ion in and potassium ion out. If action potentials increase, postsynaptic-membrane depolarization increases, and magnesium ions leave N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDA receptor) channels and go into intercellular space. NMDA receptors are glutamate-gated channels that can open with the artificial substance NMDA, which does not affect other glutamate-gated channels. The empty channel allows more sodium ion to enter, potassium ion to leave, and calcium ion to enter, and changes metabolism to make and send transmitter back to presynaptic terminal to make more action potentials.
conditioning
Fruitflies with mutations to proteins in this pathway cannot learn many classical conditioning tasks involving harmful stimuli, pleasant stimuli, and different responses. Mutants {dunce gene mutant} do not break down cAMP. Mutants {rutabaga mutant} can have little adenyl cyclase. Mutants {amnesiac mutant} do not make peptide transmitter that activates adenyl cyclase. Mutants {DCO mutant} can have altered cAMP-dependent protein-kinase-A catalytic subunits. Other mutants {cabbage mutant} {turnip mutant} can happen.
If stimulus precedes stimulus that causes behavior, first stimulus then causes the behavior {autoshaping}. Autoshaping is stimulus-stimulus response, as in classical conditioning.
If conditional stimulus pairs with reinforcer, and then second stimulus pairs with first stimulus and reinforcer, animals do not later respond to only second stimulus {blocking effect}. Low attention, little surprise, or looking for likely cause can cause blocking effect. However, cognition can prevent conjunctions from causing associations.
Learned associations can happen only at specific times {critical period}| {sensitive period} during development. Psychological processes can develop quickly over short times. For example, in the first year, children learn to trust other people. In preadolescence, delinquent behavior can begin.
Cerebellar cortex and interpositus nucleus store eye-blink conditioning {eye-blink conditioning}. Mossy-fiber input comes from pons and goes to granule cells, which send parallel fibers to Purkinje cells. Climbing-fiber input comes from dorsal accessory olivary nucleus and goes to Purkinje cells. Purkinje cells send to interpositus nucleus, which sends to superior cerebellar peduncle and then to red nucleus to perform conditioned response.
Learning tasks can use verbal-item lists. Recall can be in the same order {order recall} or any order {free recall}.
Reward or reinforcement can be greater or smaller to change behavior {response-stimulus conditioning} {habit formation} [Watson, 1913] [Watson, 1924].
In response to signal, people can unconsciously repeat mental tasks {habit learning}. Habit learning improves with practice. Habit learning involves activating neostriatum, caudate nucleus, putamen, and substantia nigra after learning. Neostriatum receives from sense and motor cortex and associates them. Substantia nigra and caudate nucleus have dopamine neurons. Perhaps, they are feedback channels for rewards.
If two inputs to one neuron are almost simultaneous {pairing}, either input later has larger effect on neuron than it did before {Hebbian learning}.
Stimulus association can happen even with no reward {latent learning}. If animals can explore region before learning path to goal, learning is faster.
Mind can discriminate objects and events {multiple discrimination learning}, to understand scenes or situations.
Learning {observational learning} {imitation learning} can use watching and copying. More imitation results if imitated person's prestige is high, if imitated person is similar to imitator, if rewards are more, and if responses are specific.
Omitting expected reward {omission training} changes behavior.
Reading is a perceptual skill. Repeating perceptual discriminations in context {perceptual learning} unconsciously improves discriminations up to weeks later. Coordinating perception with action and adapting to new perceptions involve different learning than for concepts or conditioning.
factors
Discrimination depends on feature such as texture, motion direction, and line orientation, with no reward or feedback. Seemingly, people learn underlying rules.
transfer
No learning transfer goes to other locations, other brain parts, or similar objects.
comparisons
Besides perceptual learning, there is also language learning and social learning, such as imitation, modeling, and teaching.
People can observe, manipulate, and analyze multiple examples, scenes, or situations to generalize and discriminate and to combine concepts to form principles or laws {principle learning}.
Subliminal learning is not effective {subliminal learning}| [Merikle, 2000].
Articulating repeated simple linguistic units while hearing target items decreases memory {articulatory suppression}. Articulatory suppression causes no difference in memory with different vowel sound lengths.
While learning two lists, people assign items to List1 or List2 and build concepts of List1 and List2 {list distinctiveness} {list differentiation} {discriminability}. More list repetitions make more discriminability.
People can see target sequence, then see distractor sequence {distractor, learning}, and then take test. People remember the first trial perfectly, by semantic coding.
Simultaneously presented unrelated linguistic items {irrelevant speech} decreases memory.
Children over five can use word that symbolizes category {mediated generalization} {learned generalization}. First, word overgeneralizes, and then word further discriminates.
Artificial syllables {nonsense syllable} have beginning and ending consonants and middle vowel. Consonant-vowel-consonant nonsense syllables can standardize material to learn. It can minimize affects of meaning, emotion, attention, imagery, and background knowledge. Nonsense syllables can prevent previous associations from affecting learning or memory [Ebbinghaus, 1913].
However, nonsense syllables are not equal in learning ease, because learners still try to match sound or symbol sequences to real words. People no longer use nonsense-syllable learning.
People can learn verbal-item-pair lists {paired-associate learning}. Later, learners hear or see the first item of pair, then recall second.
Given a sentence sequence, subjects recall sentence meaning and last sentence word {reading span task}. Number of sentences recalled correctly is reading span, which correlates strongly with prose comprehension and short-term-memory information content, better than with word span or digit span.
Adding an independent verbal item with a new vowel sound, in any language or with no meaning, to series ends can decrease memory {suffix effect}. Other items do not affect memory.
People can unconsciously learn repeated motor procedure {skill, learning}| {motor skill} in response to instruction or will. Skill improves with practice.
brain
At skill-learning beginning, prefrontal cortex stores temporary information, parietal cortex is for attention, and cerebellum coordinates movements. Skill learning enlarges sensorimotor cortex. After learning, neostriatum caudate nucleus and putamen activity increases and prefrontal-cortex, parietal-cortex, and cerebellum activity decreases.
practice
Training and experience make behaviors more coordinated, nuanced, and unconscious. Practice develops efficient strategies. Improvement with practice is rapid at first and then is gradual but always continuing.
properties
Skill holds over many years. Interference from other learning, not decay over time, causes people to forget discrete motor skills over time.
Skill involves learning efficient chained action programs, from initiation to result {performance strategy}. Performance strategy involves perceptions, analyses, and responses. Practice develops efficient strategies.
People can unconsciously learn to perform movement sequence {sequence learning}. Such motor skill learning improves with practice.
Mind can form object or event idea {conceptual learning}, by deriving abstract ideas and rules from perception.
comparison
Conceptual learning differs from action learning, conditioning, language learning, and social learning, such as imitation, modeling, and teaching.
process
To form concept, mind uses example object or event and then generalizes. Mind does not use abstract statements.
Mind compares later perceptions to generalized example, using both denotations and connotations for identification, categorization, and discrimination.
process: combination
New concepts can combine existing-concept parts. Methods of combining ideas are type, token, argument, function, predication, and quantification.
referents
Concept categories are actions, amounts, events, objects, places, paths, properties, and states. Concept categories include subjects, verbs, adjectives, and other syntactic categories.
Concrete concepts are easiest to learn. Spatial concepts are next easiest to learn. Number concepts are hardest to learn [Dehaene, 1997].
relations
Concepts depend on shared place or time {locational concept}, stimulus part {analytic concept}, idea or attribute {categorical concept} {superordinate concept}, or relation {relational concept}.
Older children use fewer relational concepts and more categorical and analytic concepts.
Inferences can be associations.
truth
Truth is judgment about concepts in conceptual structure.
status
Concepts can have good or poor articulation.
validity
Person's concepts can match other people's concepts.
biology
All mammals can form concepts.
Concepts can be communicable and so useful for others {accessibility, concept}. Models or interpretations can allow people to know possible worlds.
Object meaning depends on object actions, uses, movements, and interactions with other things {activity theory}. People develop meaning as they learn about motion types. Children learn how to move things and then build concepts of how things can move. Activities involve person's own movements and reactions and so are not merely symbolic.
Cognition involves different levels {cognitive unit}. Image is first-level unit. Object or image symbol is second-level unit. Concept or class of symbols, objects, or images is third-level unit. Rule about concept relations is fourth-level unit.
Concepts have forms, connect to other concepts using rules {conceptual well-formedness rule}, and belong to categories. These properties allow concept learning.
People have a meaningful visual-scene overview {gist}| [Biederman, 1972] [Hochstein and Ahissar, 2002] [Kreiman et al., 2000] [Mack and Rock, 1998] [Potter and Levy, 1969] [Wolfe and Bennett, 1997] [Wolfe, 1998] [Wolfe, 1999]. Perhaps, gist involves weak associations {proto-object} [Rensink, 2000]. Perhaps, gist involves weak associations {fringe consciousness} [Galin, 1997] [James, 1962].
People have thought formation process {ideation}|. New ideas combine existing-idea parts.
Animals seem to assume cognitive principle that effect requires cause {minimum sufficient causation}.
Mind can build object or event classes {categorization} {conceptualizing} {categorizing, learning} {category learning} and can apply verbal labels to objects or events. Categories have an overall concept.
categories
People typically use categories whose members have approximately same values for several independent attributes. People typically do not use categories based on relations between attributes. People typically do not use categories that have two member types, two relation types, or two attribute values.
Category members typically do not share necessary and sufficient attributes. Category members have many independent attributes, and members have different sets of values, with some values outside normal range. Different member pairs typically share different attribute values.
processes
Categorization can generalize several examples, combine existing categories, divide existing categories, or make analogies from existing categories to other objects or events. Learning generalizes unconsciously and consciously from specific objects, scenes, and situations to what they have in common, what is invariant, or what is similar. Perhaps, sensory cortex averages over examples.
processes: definition
To form category, propose category member, choose attribute, and use attribute value. For example, for bird, choose wing color, and use the color blue.
People typically do not define categories using non-member or opposite attribute value.
requirements
Categorization requires perceiving whole objects and their attributes or actions, understanding truth and falsehood, using reference and association, using words as symbols for things, knowing to which attributes people pay attention, and knowing what people already know.
development
Children first make semantic categories and then build grammatical categories.
Category items can be of same class {equivalence category} or be the same {identity category}. Items in equivalence category can have same attribute value or same attribute relations.
Find situation that makes one hypothesis true, find second situation that differs from first in only one way, and test hypothesis on second situation {conservative focusing}.
Find situation that matches one hypothesis, find any other situation, and test hypothesis on other situation {focus gambling}.
For situations, test all hypotheses {simultaneous scanning}.
For hypotheses, test all situations {successive scanning}.
Behavior that satisfies need reduces drive stimuli {drive reduction} and so causes reinforcement [Hull, 1940] [Hull, 1943].
Deviation from equilibrium {need, learning} causes drive stimuli. Needs are physiological {primary need} or psychological {secondary need} [Hull, 1940] [Hull, 1943].
People can try to memorize {deliberate learning}. Recall is worse for incidental learning than for deliberate learning.
Doing cognitive tasks strengthens cognitive processes and results in memory {incidental learning}. Recall is worse for incidental learning than for deliberate learning. People can learn just by observation, consciously but with no instructions how to learn or to what to attend and no reason to learn.
Learning {conditioning, learning}| can be association between stimulus and response or response and reward.
theories
Main theories about conditioning are stimulus-stimulus (S-S), stimulus-response (S-R), and expectancy [Watson, 1913] [Watson, 1924].
factors
Animal drives, habits, and sensitivities affect conditioning.
factors: reward
Punishment intensity or reward intensity affects conditioning speed and effectiveness.
Conditioning can depend on reinforcement unexpectedness. Surprise is a cognitive act.
factors: stimulus
The stronger the conditioned stimulus, the greater the reflex {stimulus strength, conditioning}
effects
Only conditioning can alter autonomic nervous system, which controls heart rate and blood pressure. Conditioning can alter voluntary nervous system.
timing
Maximum interval for conditioning is 30 minutes, but 0.5 sec is best.
biology
Conditioning is in brains, not peripheral organs.
biology: animals
Classical and instrumental conditioning are similar in many species [Hull, 1940] [Hull, 1943].
awareness
Instrumental conditioning can reflect learning about relationship between action and reinforcement, rather than just unconsciously increasing reflex or habit frequency.
If unconditioned stimulus elicits response and stimulus pairs in space and time repeatedly with another stimulus, second conditioned stimulus elicits conditioned response {classical conditioning}| {signal learning} {Pavlovian conditioning}.
properties: rules
Conditioned stimulus must predict conditioned response {contingency, conditioning}. Conditioned stimulus must be close in time to unconditioned stimulus {temporal contiguity, conditioning}.
passivity
Conditioning does not depend on human or animal actions. Pavlovian conditioning is unconscious for reflexes, autonomic nervous system, and emotions.
extinction
If pairing ceases, conditioning decreases by extinction.
comparison: sensitization
Classical conditioning is stronger and longer than sensitization.
Classical conditioning can teach people to avoid taste {conditioned taste aversion}.
For reflexes, classical conditioning can apply conditioned stimulus and then unconditioned stimulus, to cause conditioned response {delay conditioning} [Carrillo et al., 2000] [Carter et al., 2003] [Clark and Squire, 1998] [Clark and Squire, 1999] [Han et al., 2003] [Knuttinen et al., 2001] [Lovibond and Shanks, 2002] [Öhman and Soares, 1998] [Quinn et al., 2002].
Shock, noise, or scary image {fear conditioning, learning} {conditioned fear} changes skin conductance or makes animal stand still. Putting animal in same location used for fear conditioning causes fear {context fear conditioning} [Quinn et al., 2002].
In senses, when second stimulus follows first stimulus, second stimulus can pair with first stimulus {sensory preconditioning}. Second stimulus can cause the behavior that first stimulus causes. Sensory preconditioning is stimulus-stimulus classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning can use conscious conditioned stimuli {trace conditioning}, which involve declarative memory [Carrillo et al., 2000] [Carter et al., 2003] [Clark and Squire, 1998] [Clark and Squire, 1999] [Han et al., 2003] [Knuttinen et al., 2001] [Lovibond and Shanks, 2002] [Öhman and Soares, 1998] [Quinn et al., 2002].
After conditioning, conditioned stimuli elicit the same response {conditioned response} (CR) that unconditioned stimuli elicit.
After conditioning, stimuli {conditioned stimulus} (CS), such as musical notes, that were neutral before conditioning elicit conditioned responses.
Stimuli {unconditioned stimulus} (US) can naturally elicit behavioral responses and can pair in space and time with conditioned stimuli.
Conditioned stimuli have an optimum interval, starting 0.2 to 1 second before unconditioned stimulus and ending when both stimuli stop simultaneously {activity dependence}.
Conditioned stimuli must predict conditioned responses {contingency}.
Conditioned stimuli must be close in time to unconditioned stimuli {temporal contiguity, learning}.
If a stimulus elicits a response, and then organism gets a reward, response frequency to stimulus increases {instrumental learning}| {instrumental conditioning} {stimulus-response learning} {trial and error learning}.
process
Learning can be by trial and error, using instinctive movements. Accidental successes have satisfying effects. Failures have annoying effects. Behavior changes gradually, rather than by sudden insights. Over time, only correct movements survive.
Training on one task can transfer to training on different tasks, but does not necessarily transfer [Thorndike, 1903] [Thorndike, 1911].
emotion
People learn reactions, such as aggression, withdrawal, and persistence, to emotions through instrumental conditioning.
If organism performs behavior and receives reward, response frequency increases {operant conditioning, learning}| {response conditioning}. Higher animals can perform new behaviors, and rewarded operants reappear more frequently. Response conditioning does not associate stimulus and response. Operant conditioning does not need goals, only rewards. Operant conditioning is stronger if rewards are unpredictable [Watson, 1913] [Watson, 1924].
Instrumental learning experiments can use maze or box {puzzle-box}, from which animal escapes [Thorndike, 1903] [Thorndike, 1911].
Operant conditioning can happen in spontaneous, not learned, motor activities. Reinforced actions increase in frequency. Reward kinds and timing {token economy} affect instrumental conditioning [Bekhterev, 1913].
People repeat behaviors useful for drive and need reduction {continuity theory of learning}. As they develop, children internalize repeated actions [Hull, 1940] [Hull, 1943].
As children develop, they internalize repeated actions {behavior segment}. Practice leads to memory. Young children cannot combine behavior segments, but older children can combine two behavior segments to reach goal [Hull, 1940] [Hull, 1943].
Shock, noise, or scary image {fear conditioning, freezing} can make animal stand still {freeze, animal}|.
Fear conditioning changes skin conductance {galvanic skin conductance}.
External stimulus can cause covert internal response {mediation, stimulus}, which causes internal stimulus, which causes body response.
Over time, without stimulus repetition, conditioned responses to conditioned stimuli decrease {forgetting}|. Over time, without reinforcement, instrumental responses to conditioned stimuli decrease. All stimulus-response associative links or conditioned reflexes gradually disappear without reinforcement.
cause
Forgetting happens because events repeat without reward, not because time passed or people did not use response.
level
Forgetting can be complete, with no response or memory.
purpose
Forgetting allows retaining most-useful information.
forgetting rate
Maximum forgetting rate is immediately after learning. Forgetting rate decreases over one day and then levels off.
If stimulus pairing ceases, conditioned response fades {extinction, learning}|. Extinction has same stages and processes as conditioning. Near extinction time, activity level, response variation, and response force increase [Watson, 1913] [Watson, 1924].
Other learning causes forgetting {suppression, learning}|. Newer memories can modify older ones. More suppression results when more activities intervene between learning and recall. Blocking new learning prevents suppression.
Pleasurable or painful experience, above minimum level but not beyond maximum intensity, strengthens the bond between stimulus and response {law of effect}. People learn, remember, and repeat actions that immediately lead to pleasure, and these become habits. People do not remember actions leading to pain, to avoid painful behavior later [Thorndike, 1903] [Thorndike, 1911].
Repeating response under good conditions strengthens stimulus-response association, and reinforcement increases practice {law of exercise} {law of use} [Thorndike, 1903] [Thorndike, 1911].
Learning can happen if learner can respond, has interest, has background knowledge, is mature enough, and has motivation {law of readiness} [Thorndike, 1903] [Thorndike, 1911].
Behaviors can be similar to previous behaviors {response-response law} (R-R law).
Behaviors can always happen, given environment states or events {stimulus-response law} (S-R law).
Training can take short time {massed training}.
Training can take long time {spaced training}.
People can remember facts or events {memory}|. Memory allows information recall and use [Baddeley, 1990] [Dudai, 1989] [LeDoux, 1996] [Martinez and Kesner, 1998]. Memory stores information. Memory storage can be inaccurate.
comparison: learning
Learning places information in memory. Memory implies learning. People learn some memories better than others. Perhaps, they repeat them often.
comparison: recall
Recall retrieves information from store. Memory recall can be inaccurate.
types
People can perform habits and procedural skills {procedural memory, cognition}. People can remember facts, previous actions, predictions, goals, objects, locations, and times {declarative memory, cognition}. Long-term memory can be declarative/explicit or non-declarative/implicit. Memory can be episodic, procedural, categorical, or semantic. Episodes and procedures are personal. Words and statements are not personal.
processes
Forming memory requires timed inputs, conditional branches, and delays while some processes wait for other processes to finish.
Mind has fast and slow processes. Short-term memory and attention involve intensive, detailed, and fast processes, which have limited information capacity and can create information structures available to consciousness. Long-term memory involves slow processes, which have unlimited information capacity and cannot create information structures available to consciousness. People cannot be aware of mental processes, computations, or abstract representations, so consciousness is viewpoint-specific representations {intermediate-level theory of consciousness, memory}. Consciousness stores computation results {information structure}. Consciousness is a viewer-centered representation, in short-term memory, of a three-dimensional model, and involves position, shape, color, motion, attention, and representation [Crick and Koch, 2000] [Jackendoff, 1987] [Jackendoff, 1996] [Jackendoff, 2002] [Siewert, 1998] [Strawson, 1996]. Perceptual primary sensory cortex stores perceptions. Short-term memory can hold all object features simultaneously and so unify perception. Some perceptions do not become memories.
Complex memories have same laws as basic unit memories {memory theories} [Ebbinghaus, 1913].
processes: analog process
Forming and retrieving memories, and other mental processes, are analog processes, not digital.
processes: indexing
Memories depend on indexing by location, time, and image. Index uses a lookup table sorted by use probability. Index can have inhibition and excitation to expand or prune.
processes: information processing
Mind actively processes data consciously and non-consciously.
processes: interactive memory
Memories are made, stored, and recalled using active cognitive processes, which relate existing memories and interpret memory content {interactive memory, cognition}, so memory has no bound.
processes: knowledge structure
Memory uses space, time, subject, and so on, in an interrelated knowledge hierarchy. Meaning and understanding require knowledge schemas and hierarchies {knowledge structure}. Such structures both provide background information and integrate current stimuli and facts. For example, stories have schema, with setting, characters, goal, plot, and resolution. Meaning relates to what object can do or is for [Schank and Abelson, 1977] [Schank, 1997].
processes: perception
All memories are about past perceptions.
processes: repetition
Repetition strengthens memory.
processes: representation
Memories have multiple mental representations. Mental representations build from familiar parts. Parts have one and only one object.
processes: storage
Mind has mechanisms to store mental representations. Mental processes store memories for use within several seconds in immediate memory or sensory memory, for use up to 45 seconds in short-term memory or working memory, and for use after 45 seconds in long-term memory. These processes differ for different senses. Perhaps, long-term memories are never lost. Only ability to recall them fails. Perhaps, associations are weak, or needed stimuli do not happen. Perhaps, long-term associations are never lost. Perhaps, associations strengthen during conscious processing only. Perhaps, non-conscious processing also happens during and after learning, affecting representations or associations.
processes: units
Memory content involves storing basic units, such as shapes, sizes, motions, and qualities.
requirements
Memory does not require sensation, does not require perception, and does require awareness.
biology: ampakine
Ampakines increase glutamine binding to AMPA receptor and increase glutamate release from AMPA receptor, and so affect memory and cognition.
biology: animals
All mammals have procedural and declarative memory.
biology: brain
Memory involves caudate nucleus, cerebellum, frontal lobe, hippocampus, inferotemporal cortex, lateral prefrontal cortex, mamillary bodies, medial temporal lobe, posterior superior temporal lobe, putamen, septo-hippocampal system, and thalamus. Stimulating brain position repeatedly results in same memory. Most brain damage does not affect short-term memory.
biology: connection strength
Memory coding changes neuron connection strengths and patterns.
biology: CREB
Calcium influx activates protein kinases that phosphorylate other enzymes that activate or deactivate CREB. CREB enhances memory protein genes, such as zif268. Cell stimulus patterns activate gene set. High-frequency, middle-frequency, and low-frequency stimuli affect different enzymes. Signals strengthen synapses sensitized by stimulus that released enzymes that activate CREB. Synapses themselves do not send signal molecules to cell nucleus.
biology: drug
Drugs can make atypical memory states. If drugs reduce brain electrical activity, memories do not consolidate. After memory consolidates, drugs do not affect memory. Anti-cholinesterase, physostigmine, puromycin, and scopolamine affect memory [Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968] [Atkinson et al., 1999] [Atkinson et al., 2000] [Farthing, 1992] [Hobson, 1999] [Metzner, 1971] [Spence and Spence, 1968] [Tart, 1972] [Tart, 1975]. Drugs do not affect short-term memory.
biology: EEG
Brain wave changes do not affect memory.
Short-term memory has gamma oscillations in local field potentials, which can result from reverberating brain activity [Tallon-Baudry and Bertrand, 1999].
biology: electrical shock
If electrical shock reduces brain electrical activity, memories do not consolidate. After memory consolidates, electrical shock does not affect memory.
biology: hippocampus
After temporal-lobe and hippocampus removal, people cannot make long-term declarative memories but can learn motor tasks [Scoville and Milner, 1957].
biology: ion channel
Brain information processing code uses ion channels and molecules. Protein alters cell-membrane ion-channel-use probabilities.
biology: myelination
Myelination extent does not affect memory.
biology: neocortex
Long-term memories go to neocortex. Perhaps, it happens at night.
biology: neuron
Short-term memory and long-term memory use same neurons and networks.
biology: NGF
NGF increases choline acetyltransferase (CAT), which synthesizes acetylcholine in hippocampal neurons. NGF reverses poor spatial memory.
biology: protein synthesis
Long-term memory needs protein synthesis [Agranoff, 1967] [Flexner et al., 1963]. Non-declarative memory uses proteins [Benzer, 1967]. Protein-synthesis inhibitor prevents memory formation.
biology: synapse
Memory involves cholinergic synapses.
properties: defaults
Memories provide assumptions and defaults to compare to current perceptions.
properties: encoding
Encoding context should match cue information.
properties: expertise
Experts in subject have large working memory for that subject, gained by active learning with high motivation.
properties: familiarity
Better perception, concepts, and encoding make better storage, so people have better memory for more familiar things.
properties: feeling of knowing
If people cannot recall, they can judge whether they can retrieve the memory in the future.
properties: loss
Mind does not lose memories, only access to memories.
properties: information
People recall high-level information best.
properties: music
Tunes ending in harmonic cadence are easier to remember than those that do not end in harmonic cadence.
properties: learning
While people are learning something, they can judge whether they can retrieve it in the future.
properties: non-accidental properties
Memory stores non-accidental properties and their relative positions as object templates [Anderson, 1983] [Anderson, 1995] [Aristotle, -350] [Niesser, 1967] [Niesser, 1982] [Rose, 1993].
properties: non-consciousness
Memory survives unconscious periods.
Intense stimuli can cause memory without consciousness.
properties: number
Number of objects that people know is approximately 10,000,000. Number of patterns is 50,000, for useful objects. Similar objects can have different property values. Objects can be in hierarchies.
properties: organization
Memory is better for related events.
properties: reading problems
People with reading problems have small working memory information content.
properties: repeated sequence
People remember repeated sequences better in verbal short-term memory tests, perhaps from beginning long-term memory or maintaining short-term memory traces.
properties: rhythm
Rhythm change aids memory.
properties: search
People can search 50,000 pictures per second in long-term memory.
properties: size
Human memory can hold 10^20 bits.
properties: smell
Smell short-term memory is poor.
properties: strength
Memory strength is number of stored or recalled units. Memories are weak if event does not repeat, emotion is low, or attention is weak. Certain content types also result in weak memories. Strong memories involve close attention or repeated study.
properties: sentence subject
People remember sentence subjects best, not objects, predicates, or relations.
properties: tempo
People perceive presentation speed. Slow tempo allows active tone coding. Fast tempo allows only overall tone patterns.
properties: time
Verbal short-term memory lasts up to 45 seconds. Processing decay causes decrease. Interference among memories decreases long-term memory over time. Memory is outside time. Memory causes the ideas of time and motion. Memory maps time to make a time field. Time measurement is only in the present.
properties: tip of tongue
If people cannot remember something, they can judge whether they will soon recall it.
properties: verb tense
Verbal memory requires verb tense.
effects: automatic response
Memories allow automatic responses. Automatic responses do not necessarily fit current problems, so memories must alter.
factors: age
Newborns can learn but need longer times for memory consolidation. At 3 to 6 years, hippocampus becomes mature and so long-term memories can form. Working memory information content increases up to age 20 to 35 and then declines. Perhaps, old age does not affect short-term memory [Selkoe, 1992]. At all ages, people can access memories by cues, such as habits.
factors: anesthesia
Even light anesthesia causes memory loss and analgesia.
factors: anxiety
Anxiety can cause consciousness loss and long-term memory loss.
factors: arousal
Long-term memory improves with increased arousal but short-term memory does not.
factors: consciousness
Attended items in sensory memory can become experiences. Consciousness uses external stimuli and memories {remembered present, consciousness} to make images. Short-term memory holds image parts and features as whole image develops. Sense-quality representations can be in short-term memory. People without long-term memory can be conscious. Sense-quality representations can be in long-term memory. Long-term declarative-fact memories can become conscious. Reporting recalled items requires consciousness.
factors: dreaming
Dream pattern changes do not affect memory.
factors: emotion
Because emotions include semantic and perceptual codes, more inferences, more intense perceptions, or more integration into life causes stronger coding. Positive and negative emotions attach to memories unconsciously. Sense signals go from thalamus to amygdala basolateral nucleus, then perirhinal and entorhinal cortex, and then amygdala central nucleus, which sends signals to make fear responses, such as freezing motion, high heart rate, and slow digestion. Stress hormones, like adrenaline, cortisol, and ACTH, activate amygdala. Perhaps, amygdala stores memory emotional part or transfers it from perirhinal and entorhinal cortex.
factors: environment
Environment does not much affect memory and ability to concentrate. Environment, especially social environment, affects memory storage and retrieval.
factors: fatigue
Over time, performance slows, people make more errors, concentration is poor, perception fades, and memory decreases.
factors: hypnosis
People can remember what happened while under hypnosis.
factors: inference
Inferences derive from knowledge structures. Inferences seem to affect encoding process and recall process.
factors: intelligence
Developmentally disabled people can have special right-brain talents, such as music, painting, or procedural memory.
factors: motivation
Motivation does not affect ability to retrieve information, only persistence in trying.
factors: perception
Memory affects extracting perceptual features.
factors: reflex inhibition
Inhibiting reflexes does not affect memory.
factors: sleep
Perhaps, paradoxical sleep is for memory consolidation. Brain substance can contain memories, and memory is a material process, because memory survives unconsciousness and sleep [Hering, 1878].
problems
People can have amnesia, anterograde amnesia, dementia, Korsakoff syndrome, and senility.
problems: schizophrenia
Schizophrenia has memory disturbances.
problems: amnesia
After brain damage, people cannot recall recent long-term memories. Amnesia still allows short-term memory, procedural learning, and conditioning. People can improve performance even if they cannot remember previous practice [Farthing, 1992] [Young, 1996]. Amnesiacs can feel that they are not fully conscious [Campbell and Conway, 1995] [Sacks, 1985] [Wilson and Wearing, 1995].
People can only remember events from after they were three or four years old {infantile amnesia}. However, babies actually have good long-term memory. Perhaps, mind represses early memories. Perhaps, early memories are not strong, differ, or depend on self-concept. Perhaps, people need language, with verbal recall and storage, to access memories by intention.
Healthy people typically cannot remember where they learned declarative knowledge {source amnesia}.
Stories have schema {story schema} {story grammar}, with setting, characters, goal, plot, and resolution [Schank and Abelson, 1977] [Schank, 1997].
Minds have no single, central memory system but store memories in sense and motor regions {distributed memory}, probably in different ways.
Cerebral cortex lesions affect rat intelligence and maze learning. Learning and memory impairment seem to depend on lesion extent {mass action law} {law of mass action}, rather than lesion location [Lashley, 1956] [Solomon et al., 1958]. Whole association cortex can acquire and recall habits. However, effect happens because lesion also cuts subcortical regions. Maze running is complex activity using many functions, which can have substitutes. Many locations process and store memories.
Memory recall can have inaccurate information {memory, errors} {recall, errors} that cannot have come from guessing or wrong cueing.
Without extra context, minds can make no distinction between mistake in storing memory, recalling memory, or making original perception.
properties: verbal errors
Typical verbal errors sound similar to accurate item.
properties: meaning
Errors can arise from trying to make events meaningful, because meaning is more important than detail. General concept stored with detail can change the detail. Context or assumptions can change memory logically.
memory change
Memory change happens in weak memories. Memory change can happen at storage, when misunderstandings cause coding misrepresentations. Memory change can happen at recall, when inferences override coded representations.
memory decay
For visual situations with attention but no rehearsal, activation loss decreases memory. Forgetting increases with time elapsed. However, people can later remember memories forgotten at one time, so information is still in memory.
recall
Recalling can change unconscious memories.
perception
Perception does not confound units and produces non-contradictory results, with no chimeras. Mind eliminates contradictions preconsciously, before conscious memory.
Memory formation and retrieval can fail with low attention at storage or recall {absent-mindedness}|.
Memory can alter to make events, objects, or scenes consistent, emotionally right, or pleasant {bias, memory}.
Memory retrieval can fail if something else is on the mind {blocking, memory}.
Coding failure {consolidation failure} can decrease memory.
Inability to discriminate {discrimination failure} between two groups, locations, or times that are close together can decrease memory.
Memory failure can be at encoding {encoding deficiency}.
Memory can mix real and imagined events {false memory}| [Loftus and Ketcham, 1994].
Sensory recall can combine different stimulus features {illusory conjuncture}. Features are in different mental regions, and features recombine at recall. Recombination requires attention.
Memory can associate with wrong place, time, situation, or object {misattribution}. Recall can use guessing or associate to wrong memory {source misattribution}. Source misattribution has low probability, because cue must be precise to keep memory coherent.
Memory can be obsessive {persistence, memory}.
Memory failure can happen at retrieval {retrieval failure}.
Memory failure can happen at storage {storage loss}.
Current information {suggestibility}| can change memory.
Memory can decay or fade away {transience}.
During learning, intervening activities inhibit learning retention {interference, memory}|. Newer items occupy memory. Later learning also affects memory consolidation. Interference effects happen only for verbal items learned transiently, not for facts and procedures. Interference effects happen only for items learned successively, not for longer time intervals. Echoic memory can exhibit interference. Iconic memory does not exhibit interference.
Earlier learning can disrupt later learning {proactive interference} {proactive inhibition}. Proactive interference can be high. Release from proactive inhibition can happen when subject matter changes or time between trials is long enough. Retroactive interference is more than proactive interference. Over time, retroactive interference decreases, but proactive interference increases.
Later learning can disrupt previous learning {retroactive interference} {retroactive inhibition}. For two verbal-item lists, recall is harder if lists share items. With more interfering-list repetition, retroactive interference increases, up to a limiting value. Retroactive interference appears high. Retroactive interference is more than proactive interference. Over time, retroactive interference decreases, but proactive interference increases. There can be output interference.
Recalling some class members inhibits memory of other members {output interference}. Recalling an item inhibits memory of other items.
Semantically related items increase interference in order recall and decrease interference in free recall {similarity-based interference}. Opposites increase interference in order recall and decrease interference in free recall, because they relate semantically. Visually or aurally related items have small interference effects compared to semantic effects.
Perhaps, interference provides alternative response to stimulus {response competition}. Response competition increases with few interfering-list repetitions but then decreases. However, most list-recall errors are not other-list items, so response competition is only one interference factor.
Perhaps, interference removes needed stimulus {stimulus absence}.
Short-term memory becomes long-term memory over time {consolidation}|.
brain
In mammals, consolidation is in cerebral cortex, especially temporal lobes.
Hippocampus is for early memory consolidation. Perhaps, it uses pointers to link representation parts.
synapses
Synaptic vesicle number increases, synapse area widens, neuronal firing rate increases, and synapse number increases. Enzymes modulate synaptic transmission. Glycoprotein receptors go to synaptic membranes. Only activated synapse regions start to grow more synapses. Quiet regions do not respond to new proteins.
time
Short-term memory consolidates in one hour, but further consolidation takes years.
drugs
If drugs reduce brain electrical activity, memories do not consolidate.
electrical shock
If electrical shock reduces brain electrical activity, memories do not consolidate.
Stimulus {cue, memory} starts memory recall. Cue information determines probability of accessing memory. Cue should match cue used at storage.
Forming associations with existing memories, or forming images of existing parts {elaboration, memory}, transfers items to long-term memory and aids recall. Associations can be among items in short-term memory or to items in long-term memory. Images can combine items in short-term memory or associate features to items in long-term memory. Elaboration increases memory compared to rehearsal but takes more time.
Brain regions, mainly in cerebral cortex, that encode event also store and record event {engram}| {memory trace}. Data processing and data storage combine in mind. Coding, recursion, self-reference, and goals affect both. Forming memory changes neuron structure.
Attention and recognition give meaning to stimulus and allow it into short-term memory {identification, memory}. Item identification happens in parallel. Identification requires one quarter second.
Two words {linkword} can associate using image that combines their referents.
A new stimulus, immediately happening at same location as previous stimulus, causes immediate previous-stimulus forgetting {masking, memory}|. Brightness masking uses a higher-intensity second stimulus and affects retina. Pattern masking uses pattern, affects mental processing, and has no brightness effect. Masking does not necessarily replace the first image but only prevents consciousness [Keysers et al., 2001].
People remember verbal items by sound {phonemic code}, even for visual material. People also use weaker visual and semantic codes. People remember items better than order. Phonemic code can be how to represent physical sounds or articulate sounds.
Mind places object in scene in short-term memory {pop-out, memory}|, using motion, depth, texture, and color cues.
Information supplied after memory storage {post-event information} can cause memory change, if information is not suspect and if memory was weak. Memories change to be consistent with new information.
compromise
Conscious recall does not allow unreal or contradictory contents. However, feature mixing can happen {compromise memory, post-event information}, such as using one-object's color for another object.
recall
People take longer to recall items if they have to take into account new information.
repetition
Repeating new information increases confidence in changed memories.
Recent experience, even just one, with words, strings, lines, images, sounds, or objects unconsciously improves recognizing same experience up to one year later {priming, memory} [Bar and Biederman, 1998] [Bar and Biederman, 1999] [VanRullen and Koch, 2003]. Prime can be same as target {repetition priming}. Prime can have similar meaning {semantic priming}. Processing can aid {positive priming} or inhibit {negative priming} other processing.
perception
Perceptual processing causes priming effect, because slightly different words or objects do not prime. Priming can activate processing [Mandler, 1980].
Priming can activate transfer-appropriate processing for different memory types [Roediger and McDermott, 1993].
brain
After priming, cortex activity decreases during recognizing.
consciousness
Priming is equally in conscious and unconscious processing.
To retain retrieved or activated memory, mind must store the memory again {reconsolidation}, using proteins.
People can repeat items in verbal short-term memory in sequence {rehearsal, memory}. More rehearsal improves recall. Consciously repeating verbal items transfers them to long-term memory.
Consciousness uses external stimuli and memories {remembered present, cognition} to make images. Consciousness requires short-term memory. Short-term memory holds image parts and features as whole image develops.
Memory retrieval tries to find and use memories in memory store {accessibility, memory}, but memories can be unavailable.
People typically can apprehend up to six or seven items {span of apprehension, memory} {apprehension span, memory}|.
Memories are in memory store {availability, memory}, but memories can be inaccessible.
People typically have poor time and location {episodic tag} recall. People forget time and location before other content. Weak or missing episodic tags reduce fact or episode memory organization, causing more recall errors.
In memory tests, conscious and unconscious processing can happen. Processing task has automatic/unconscious and controlled/conscious processing components, which affect behavior differently {process dissociation procedure} [Jacoby, 1991] [Reingold and Merikle, 1990]. Perhaps, they are separable {process purity problem} {method of opposition} {opposition method}.
Amnesia is greater for more recent memories {Ribot's law} {Ribot law}.
Memories are representations that are made, stored, and retrieved {stage analysis}.
People can will not to remember {voluntary suppression, memory}. Perhaps, it involves frontal lobes and hippocampus.
Memories that are semantically contradictory can co-exist non-consciously {co-existence hypothesis, memory}. Mind inhibits recall of semantically contradictory non-conscious memories.
New memory can erase semantically contradictory non-conscious memory {erasure hypothesis, memory}, to conserve limited memory capacity.
During list recall, people recall first items better {primacy effect}. For long list, people recall most words poorly. People recall items in middle worst.
behaviorism
By behaviorism, all previous words excite all following words and so associations for middle words are least correct, because they get the most-incorrect associations.
cognition
By cognition, mind rehearses first words when short-term memory is not full and so remembers them better, but middle words have poor rehearsal because they happen when short-term memory is full and so are not in short-term memory ready for recall.
People recall items at end {recency effect} best under free recall but not under order recall. Auditory items have recency effect but not visual items. For long list, people recall most words poorly. People recall items in middle worst.
behaviorism
By behaviorism, all previous words excite all following words and so associations for middle words are least correct, because they get the most-incorrect associations.
cognition
By cognition, last words are still in short-term memory and memory can recall them right away. For middle words, short-term memory is full, rehearsal is poor, and words have left short-term memory by recall time.
memory
Recency effects happen even when mind uses no short-term memory, only long-term memory.
Perhaps, relevant local and global inferences relate to content, causes, situations, and goals {constructionist theory}.
Perhaps, mind makes only familiar inferences and inferences needed for sentence coherence {minimalist theory}.
Perhaps, mind always generates inferences {promiscuous theory}, but this can exceed processing capacity.
Retrieving information {recall}| from memory uses different mechanisms to return memory representations to consciousness or near consciousness. Recalling declarative knowledge creates experiences.
processes: cueing
Externally or internally supplied stimulus recalls memories from storage.
processes: errors
Recall can be inaccurate. People recall some memories better than others. Perhaps, they repeat them often.
processes: inhibition
Memories or cues can inhibit recalling other memories, because memories are contradictory or substitute.
processes: reconstruction
Recall builds from memories. Memories do not mix, but only select from among choices. However, features, such as color, can mix. People do not recall chimeras and contradictions.
Reporting recalled item requires consciousness.
processes: time coordinates
Memory creates time coordinates and uses them for recall and storage.
processes: voluntary retrieval
Information retrieval can be voluntary or automatic. Voluntary retrieval involves search strategy. Information non-retrieval is not voluntary.
properties: contradiction
Conscious recall does not allow unreal or contradictory contents.
properties: free recall
In free recall, people recall more items that are near each other in space or time {contiguity principle, recall}. In free recall, people recall class members better when cued with class but not classes when cued with class members. In free recall, people typically do not recall items in original order but form orders and repeat orders on subsequent recalls.
properties: time of day
Recall is better in morning than evening.
factors: context
People can recall same memory in one context but not another.
factors: hypnosis
Hypnosis does not increase memory retrieval. Memories retrieved under hypnosis are unreliable. Especially, early-infancy memories are probably not true.
factors: meaning
Meaningful events cause better and more accurate recall.
In free recall, people recall more items that have similar meaning {categorical clustering}.
Conscious recall can mix features {compromise memory, recall}, such as using one-object's color for another object.
Recall is easier and better if current conditions, internal and external, are similar to learning conditions {context dependency} {context-dependent retrieval}. The main internal context is mood. Recall is slightly, but significantly, better in same environment as learning environment. Environment can include learning act, material learned, place, time, mood, and physiological state. Context increases recall of items that match context itself.
Setting context before, but not after, performing recall task improves performance. Using context with same feature cues but not correct spatial relations does not improve performance.
meaning
Context can change memory meaning.
Perhaps, recall moves percept from coded content in unconsciousness to consciousness {direct retrieval hypothesis, recall}, based on association cues.
Searching can use a strategy {generate-recognize model} {generate/recognize model}, to test hypotheses.
Given arithmetic problems, subjects can recall problem answers or words. Number correctly recalled {operation span} depends on prose comprehension and short-term-memory information.
People can recall and re-express memory information {retrieval, memory}|. Memory reconstructs perception, starting from cue, by assembling information from mental regions.
process
Recall associates memory with current thought. The first step in recall or pattern detection is to identify expected object type. The second step is to select node or node system.
factors
Context, mood, and mental state affect retrieval.
How information makes categories affects recall. Recall is better if unusual event, image, or story connects with memory.
Practicing recall aids recall. Cramming increases success.
brain
Recall is poor if catecholamine level is low, because catecholamines arouse brain.
time
Retrieving memory using sequential search takes 0.5 seconds.
Perhaps, memory representations have concept, image, time, or context information {tag, memory} about target. Perhaps, memory representations have direct target association information.
If retrieval takes one step, mind retrieves the most-strongly activated target {single-stage model} {single-process model}.
If retrieval takes more than one step, cognitive decision or passive process determines retrieval from activated material {two-stage model} {two-process model} {decision model}.
Memory retrieval requires externally or internally supplied stimulus {cue, recall} related to information to retrieve {cueing, recall}. Cue quality determines retrieval, no matter memory or association strength. Strong and internal cue is mood. Everyday experiences provide retrieval cues for most information. Good retrieval cues come from good encoding.
working memory
One working-memory part stores cues, and other part stores retrieved representations. Conscious thoughts retrieve further conscious representations.
efficiency
Working memory depends on cue efficiency. Efficiency increases with long-term-memory organization and cueing strategies.
Retrieval places activated content into consciousness. If access does not encounter target memory, recall does not happen {cue-dependent forgetting}.
Retrieval places activated content into consciousness. If access encounters target memory, recall happens {cue-dependent recall}.
Most memories {behavioral memory} {procedural memory, behavior} are about actions and behaviors. Primary motor cortex stores behavioral memories.
Memories {categorical memory} can be about classes or words.
People can learn facts and concepts {declarative memory}|. Declarative knowledge includes episodic memory and semantic memory. Declarative knowledge is things that people can remember and know. Declarative knowledge is proposition sets [Campbell, 1994]. People can recall declarative memory without affecting external behavior. Declarative knowledge contrasts with procedural knowledge.
Mental process {echoic memory}| briefly preserves stimulus pattern. Echoic memory is better than iconic memory.
People can have perfect image recall and can re-perceive images {eidetic imagery}|. People can preserve visual scenes and then scan them. Eidetic images are richer than other images. People who can recall everything rely on imagery but cannot understand general ideas or concepts, because details are too numerous [Luria, 1968] [Luria, 1980].
Memory of personal events {episodic memory} has location and time, is in frontal lobe, and involves medial temporal lobe and cortex. It can be unconscious or conscious.
Semantic memory, spatial memory, or episodic memory {explicit memory} {conscious memory} is conscious and reflective and encodes object, event, and relation representations. Memory associates two arbitrary stimuli.
Repetition, meaning, interest, attention, importance, previous-knowledge relations, and rehearsal strengthen declarative-memory encoding, because more conscious processing makes more retrieval cues [Corkin et al., 1997] [Damasio et al., 1985] [Milner, 1972] [Milner et al., 1998] [Sacks, 1985] [Scoville and Milner, 1957] [Standing, 1973] [Sternberg, 2001] [Wilson and Wearing, 1995].
Eyewitnesses {eyewitness testimony}| to crimes see fast, confusing, and unsettling events and so have weak memories, even if their confidence is high. Eyewitness people identification is especially poor.
The feeling that one knows something {familiarity, memory} is an immediate response to an event. The first concept about perception is if it is familiar or strange. It requires no conscious processing. Frequent observations cause it. It is independent of context and associations.
Emotion in amygdala, and arousal in serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, and acetylcholine systems, can cause people to remember one event strongly and in detail {flashbulb memory}.
Short-term visual memory {iconic image} {iconic memory} {fleeting memory} has images that persist after removing objects. Iconic image looks like image but faded. People can see all items but have not yet identified them.
Image is at fixed position on retina. New information there erases it.
Iconic images can appear to move, if moving stimuli are near them.
attention
Making iconic memory requires attention [Billock, 1997] [Coltheart, 1983] [Coltheart, 1999] [Crick, 1984] [Freedman et al., 2001] [Freedman et al., 2002] [Gegenfurtner and Sperling, 1993] [Keysers and Perrett, 2002] [Levick and Zacks, 1970] [Loftus et al., 1992] [Potter, 1993] [Potter and Levy, 1969] [Rolls and Tovee, 1994] [Sperling, 1960].
time
Echoic memory lasts longer than iconic memory.
cue
After looking tasks {Sperling task}, cues can help memory.
People can remember immediately after one presentation {immediate memory}| {latent memory}. Immediate memory lasts seconds. Immediate memory is neural-pathway electrochemical activity, like reverberations in circuits. Immediate memory can change synaptic strengths temporarily by affecting presynaptic biochemical pathways. Changing presentation rate or delaying recall time does not affect recall.
Memory can be for skill or task {implicit memory} {non-representational memory} {non-declarative memory} {procedural memory, implicit}. Implicit memory includes habituation, sensitization, motor skill, priming, habit, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, emotional learning, and perceptual skill.
People can learn how to perform tasks and to think and follow rules. Procedural knowledge can be production systems. Procedural knowledge is motor skills and perceptual and cognitive skills. Procedural knowledge is habits and know-how [Campbell, 1994].
process
Procedural memory uses many circuits and neuron groups but does not use representations.
consciousness
Implicit memory is unconscious and never becomes conscious. It is reflexive.
brain
Sense and motor processes integrate over thalamocortical system, cerebellum, hippocampus, and basal ganglia {global mapping}.
animals
Implicit memory is the same in animals and humans.
comparison
Procedural knowledge contrasts with declarative knowledge.
Animals can learn to fixate on another animal {imprinting, memory}|, so they ignore or avoid other individuals. Imprinting can be on parent {filial imprinting} or mate {sexual imprinting}. Imprinting is most effective between members of same species.
process
Imprinting is gradual but not associative. Imprinting with one object prevents further imprinting with other objects, except by prolonged exposure. Prolonged exposure does not eliminate the memory but only suppresses it. After prolonged exposure, original imprint comes back readily.
Brain processing can change short-term memories into stable memories {long-term memory}| (LTM) {labile memory} {secondary memory} {structural memory}. Short-term memory is process, but long-term memory is structure. Long-term memory involves interactions between two memory types: personal-experience episodic memory and fact semantic memory.
coding
Long-term memory uses mostly semantic code but also uses visual and phonemic codes. All three codes also operate in short-term memory but with different strengths and uses.
time
Long-term memory takes more than 45 seconds to form and can last lifetime.
properties: consciousness
Long-term memory is unconscious.
properties: interference
LTM can have phonological interference.
biology
Long-term memory involves cell changes and protein synthesis. Brain damage can impair long-term declarative and procedural memory but not short-term memory.
biology: drugs
After memory consolidation, drugs do not affect the memory [McCullough et al., 1999].
biology: electrical shock
After memory consolidation, electrical shock does not affect the memory [McCullough et al., 1999].
factors
Greater word concreteness, word frequency, imagery strength, and semantic similarity increase long-term memory. Phonetic similarity decreases long-term memory.
comparison
Perhaps, short-term memory and long-term memory differ only in retrieval method.
Working memory {phonological loop} can store sounds with meaning, such as spoken words. Perhaps, phonological loop has passive phoneme coding and active rehearsal [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990] [Baddeley, 2000].
Recall can be for recognition {recognition memory}. Memory can be about whether stimulus is familiar or not, was in place or at time, or associates with name or image.
process
To recognize if symbol is in short-term memory, people compare features. Matching determines recognition. With no overlap, knowledge of no match is rapid.
properties
Recognition is better for incidental learning than for deliberate learning. Recognition is typically better than recall, unless semantic association is very strong. Memory organization and repetition affect recognition memory and recall memory in same way, but word frequency, associations, presentation rate, concreteness, meaning, and imagery do not affect recognition memory and recall memory in same way, because some items are more and some less noticeable than others, and this affects recognition {mirror effect, recognition}.
Memories {semantic memory} can be about facts, meanings, and concepts. Conscious or unconscious fact memory has no particular location or time. Semantic memory involves medial temporal lobe but does not involve frontal lobe.
In senses, memory {sensory memory} first peripherally codes stimulus physical properties {physical code} {structural code} for sounds in echoic memory, sights in iconic memory, smells, tastes, and touches, taking one-third second. Sensory memory first stage does not need attention or consciousness.
Sensory memory second stage uses semantic coding and is central and automatic, taking two to 20 seconds.
recall
Higher overall stimulus intensity during and after stimulus decreases recall.
forgetting
Forgetting happens by decay and is minimal after one second for vision and four seconds for hearing. Forgetting loses location information but not item meaning or nature.
Memory {short-term memory}| (STM) {active memory} {primary memory} {working memory} {activity-dependent memory} can rehearse immediate memories, hold memories in consciousness, assist long-term memory, and decay in minutes to hours. Short-term memory puts objects and events in sequence to coordinate acquisition and retrieval.
properties: chunks
Short-term memory holds data chunks. Short-term memory holds 30 bits. People can remember chunks of three, if they must remember sequence. People can remember chunks of six or seven if there is no order [Cowan, 2001] [Miller, 1956] [Riddoch and Humphreys, 1995] [Shallice, 1988] [Sternberg, 1966] [Vallar and Shallice, 1990].
properties: interference
STM can have semantic interference.
biology: cells
Short-term memory involves no cell changes or protein synthesis.
biology: drugs
Amphetamine and strychnine affect short-term memory.
biology: brain
Prefrontal cortex neurons hold short-term memories for objects, locations, or both [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990] [Baddeley, 2000].
factors: age
Old age or brain damage does not affect short-term memory.
factors: language
Language production and comprehension require short-term memory.
working memory
Phonological loop stores sounds with meaning, such as spoken words. Visuospatial sketchpad stores images, such as faces and scenes. Working memory encodes attended content from sensory memory for non-conscious storage into long-term memory or other processing, such as sentence comprehension, and integrates content activated from long-term memory. Working memory holds content being actively processed, including conscious and near-conscious experiences and recently attended content, and includes perceptual and semantic representations. Working memory includes a goal-driven controller to determine which process to perform. Attention is part of working memory, or working memory holds attended conscious content {focus, Baddeley} [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990] [Baddeley, 2000].
Frontal lobe stores conscious event location and time memories {source memory}. Animals have less frontal lobe and so less source memory.
Spatial information travels from thalamus to neocortex to hippocampus {spatial memory}. Hippocampus has non-topographic cognitive space map, stored in pyramidal place cells. Place fields are stable and form in minutes [Brown et al., 1998]. Hippocampus place cells increase firing when body is at that location [Ekstrom et al., 2003] [Frank et al., 2000] [Nadel and Eichenbaum, 1999] [O'Keefe and Nadel, 1978] [Rolls, 1999] [Scalaidhe et al., 1997] [Wilson and McNaughton, 1993] [Zhang et al., 1998].
Memory {verbal memory} {verbal short-term memory} can be about words, sentences, and stories. People can learn word sounds and visual appearances [Campbell, 1994].
properties
Words are easier to learn if they have high imagery, are highly concrete, have high frequency, have many associations, or have high meaningfulness.
Verbal short-term memory has small register and rapid decay.
factors
Imagery, frequency, familiarity, concreteness, semantic similarity, and meaningfulness influence verbal short-term memory only little, unlike for long-term memory.
interference
Phonemic similarity interferes.
working memory
Working memory includes module for verbal short-term memory. Working memory executive controls module but does not interfere with other cognitive work.
Perhaps, memory content is only coded percepts {bounded memory}, with no other representation types, such as memory hierarchy or higher-order structures.
Memories represent percepts {perceptual code} and meanings {semantic code}.
meaning
Meaning and understanding are more important than percepts. Mind uses schema memory structures that contain meaning hierarchies, relating lower-level parts and higher-level wholes, and have semantic relations among concepts. General information integrates memory contents.
Memories are made, stored, and recalled using active cognitive processes {constructivist model} {interactive memory, constructivism}, which relate existing memories and interpret memory content, so memory has no bound. Storage and reconstruction are non-conscious. Information acquired after storing original memory can affect memories. Memory content can weaken over time.
strength
Memory assimilation to whole meaning structure determines memory strength.
recall
Reconstruction often supplies purposes, intentions, or missing information. Recall can often be inaccurate, because interpretation always happens. Recall depends on memory strength and related evidence.
individuality
Differences in understanding cause individual memories to vary.
Perhaps, memory storage involves linear functions over metric space {contractive affine transform}. Functions can be fractals. Mapping function can alter image location, orientation, and size. To recall, abstract-space trajectories specify imaged patterns as attractors.
Perhaps, cerebral cortex added declarative memory {declarative memory theory}. Cerebral cortex added processing loop between sense and motor processing regions and loops to anticipate sense information and prepare actions. Improved readiness offsets delay in processing between sense and motor regions. Training or other repeated use bypasses loop.
Perhaps, stored object and episode memories are percept copies or representations, coded in long-term memory {empiricism, memory}. Memory content is only coded percepts.
process
Perception is first. Representation follows.
units
Basic memory units are non-conscious shapes, sizes, motions, and percept qualities. Memory units can associate by being close in space, time, shape, or quality.
strength
Memory strength depends on number of stored units.
time
Stored memory codes do not change over time. Because perception is reliable, memories are typically accurate. Differences in perception cause memories to vary.
recall
Recall moves percept from unconscious coded content to consciousness, based on association cues {direct retrieval hypothesis, empiricism}.
Perhaps, short-term memory involves storing perceptual features, and memories are linked feature sets {featural model}. Features are about stimulus intensity, location, time, frequency, and quality and about higher-level stimulus combinations. Sense-input memories have features about sense mode and stimuli. Memories of thoughts and memory rehearsal have higher-level stimulus combinations and few modal features. The featural model does not use associations among features.
probability
Features have values or probabilities. Excitations and inhibitions during memory formation depend on reinforcement pathways and change feature probabilities.
recall
Recall involves selection among alternatives by feature probability. Mind compares cues, which can generate secondary cues, to features. If match is above threshold, mind recalls object or word {reintegration}. Recall takes one step. If new memory has same feature value as existing memory, new-memory feature value replaces previous-item feature value, and previous-item memory degrades.
Perhaps, consciousness is viewpoint-specific representations in short-term memory {intermediate-level theory of consciousness, cognition} [Crick and Koch, 2000] [Jackendoff, 1987] [Jackendoff, 1996] [Jackendoff, 2002] [Siewert, 1998] [Strawson, 1996]. Consciousness is at level intermediate between sense qualities and thought. Consciousness stores computation results in information structures. Consciousness is a three-dimensional model and involves position, shape, color, motion, attention, and representation. People cannot be aware of mental processes, computations, or abstract representations.
Perhaps, memories use index {library memory}. Perceptual patterns find indices and trigger memories.
Perhaps, memory units {mnemon} are anatomical or logical structures. However, memory and recall have no basic units {memory unit}. Abstract higher-level categories are important for memory and recall. Stimulus recalls multiple memories.
Perhaps, in situations in which habits do not apply, people use knowledge structures {memory organization packet, cognition} involving causes, effects, goals, and rewards to account for actions and facts. For example, movements can have 20 causal chains. Similar knowledge structures apply to places, physical actions, social relations, and personal intentions.
Perhaps, people try to generate spatial context, time context, and other overall representations {mental model} as they read or see something.
Perhaps, memory organization and repetition affect recognition memory and recall memory in same way {mirror effect, memory}. Word frequency, associations, presentation rate, concreteness, meaning, and imagery do not affect recognition memory and recall memory in same way, because some items are more and some less noticeable than others, and this affects recognition.
Perhaps, memory parts exist independently in long-term memory, and higher-order structures {scene, memory} assemble them.
Perhaps, memory organization uses non-conscious linked-data hierarchies {schema, memory}.
recall
People better remember things related to goals, plans, actions, beliefs, attitudes, moods, emotions, and expectations. They remember new, inconsistent, surprising, or changed events better.
Schemas more integrated with other schemas have better recall. Schema integration increases during development [Schank and Abelson, 1977] [Schank, 1997]. Memory strength depends on object and event relation to constructed schema [Schank and Abelson, 1977] [Schank, 1997].
amount
Memory holds maximum content amount, depending on schemas.
individuality
Different people use different schemas.
Perhaps, many life facets involve standardized behavior sequence {script, memory}. People develop habits through repeated same-type experiences. Scripts define events relative to whole, strengthen memories, infer missing information, point to episode memories, and predict future events. People expect events that match script and retain them more. People remove events that do not match from script, note them as exceptions, or modify script. Memories from scripts are indistinguishable subjectively from actual memories.
Perhaps, evolutionary models for self-redesigning or learning systems show how neural models can evolve themselves {selectionist theory} [Young, 1976] [Young, 1978].
Perhaps, people use background information and structure or situation types {situation model}, which have goals or reasons. Comprehension involves different processing levels. First, mind codes relations among items {surface code}. Then mind generates propositions {text base}.
Perhaps, mind represents body activities {somatic marker}. Reason and emotions work together to determine choices and actions.
Perhaps, stimuli are first encoded for sensory memory {stages model} {modal model}. If people attend to stimuli, they encode into short-term memory. From short-term memory, stimuli go into long-term memory. Items in short-term memory transfer to long-term memory by rehearsal, image forming, or association forming. Short-term memory can only hold up to seven items for up to 45 seconds. Short-term memory receives input from sensory memory.
Perhaps, memories {template storage memory} can compare input data to stored patterns to find match.
Perhaps, memories are representations. The simplest representations follow same memory rules as the most-complex representations. Perhaps, long-term memory has association networks or pairs {association} {associative model of memory}.
contiguity
In networks, associations can have different distances. If two images are near in space or time {contiguity principle, association}, they associate. Closeness increases association strength. Items farther apart have weaker associative links. Recall involves one associative link.
strength
Pair associations have different strengths. More repetitions increase association strength. Association recency increases association strength.
recall
Recall involves associative links. Mind recalls by moving from starting point name, list concept, environmental stimulus, or spatial position to first item and then to succeeding items, by following associative links to goals {target, recall}.
Associative links have different known types {labeled link, memory}, such as identity, similarity, and opposition.
In network, memory representations and associations can have language-like structure {propositional model} {statement model}, with subject and predicate. Associative links can be syntactical relations, such as "agent", "action", and "direct object". Associative links can be semantic or cognitive.
Perhaps, recall involves cue sets {compound cue model} for context, time, meaning, images, and concepts. First cue activates other memories from long-term memory, which then contribute to recall process. Memory does not use spreading activation.
Perhaps, cues activate specific features {content-addressable memory} {direct access}, not cluster or class.
Perhaps, conscious concept, feeling, or memory cues can activate identical or similar long-term-memory representations and so provide non-conscious access to memories {access, memory} {cueing model}. Pattern portions can trigger retrieval of rest of pattern. First memory sets pattern. Later patterns reinforce or change memory. Cues can place secondary cues in consciousness.
Perhaps, recall activates stored perceptual and semantic codes that interact with all other memory content. Recall interprets content to make meaningful response {dynamic reconstruction hypothesis}, using background and inferred information.
Perhaps, recalling one alternative erases other alternative from memory {erasure hypothesis, recall} {replacement hypothesis}. However, after leading suggestion, people can recall original memory, supporting the idea that both memories exist at same time and all memories are permanent {co-existence hypothesis, recall} [Loftus and Ketcham, 1994].
Perhaps, misleading semantic suggestions can affect stored memories and recall, by making original memory become contradiction and so causing inhibition {inhibition hypothesis}.
Perhaps, stimulus must match receptor to open memory {lock-and-key theory}. However, this process requires trying each key in each lock.
Perhaps, data has regularities, which activate rule, which is conditional statement {message and rule system theory}. Mind checks data to see if it matches condition.
Important nodes in memory structures can activate memory {Proust's principle} {Proust principle}.
Perhaps, memory stores information samples, and recall is memory reconstruction {reconstruction, memory}. Retrieval cues are the most-strongly encoded memory parts. Retrieved memories use information from stored representation and from related memories and current perceptions.
Perhaps, in spatial network, cue activates memory, and the memory activates another memory {spreading activation model}, until reaching target or losing activation because too far away or too long in time. Recall involves associative links.
Perhaps, phonological store and subvocal-rehearsal system form a feedback loop {articulatory loop} [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990].
Brain regions {phonological store} can represent sounds being remembered [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990].
Brain regions {subvocal rehearsal system} can rehearse information without actually producing sound. Subvocal rehearsal system is possibly where prearticulation happens. Rehearsing is always by sounds, not images [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990].
Perhaps, verbal information first enters sensory memory {two-code theory}. Attended sense qualities passively enter phonological store for up to two seconds. Non-conscious articulation recodes visual information into sound. It also can recycle sounds back into phonological store depending on capacity and other factors. Phonological store and articulation coding are short-term memory.
Perhaps, thinking has capacity {thinking capacity}. Optimum group size is three items.
Perhaps, mental function has only one information channel, which has maximum serial information-flow rate {capacity model of memory}. Channel is for both data processing and storage. If one increases, the other must decrease. Channel is for both semantic and syntactic processing. Poor readers with low information rate can use only one processing type, but good readers can use both simultaneously.
Perhaps, concepts or perceptions can be sets {chunk, capacity}| of previous concepts or perceptions. Chunk can contain several smaller chunks, by grouping in space or time {chunking} [Cowan, 2001] [Miller, 1956]. Number of chunks that people can keep in immediate memory is seven, plus or minus two. Chunking can synchronize information subsets into unit in time [Miller, 1962]. Bigger chunks can cause weaker memory. For example, longer vowel sounds reduce memory, because it takes longer to articulate items.
Perhaps, mind as whole has processing capacity, and modules have processing capacities {consolidation theory}.
People can recall approximately seven independent verbal items {chunk, memory}, such as digits, letters, syllables, or words, after hearing them once. Range is five to nine items {memory span}. Chunks are single meaningful symbols, so consonant series are not chunks. Number of verbal short-term-memory items inversely relates to remembering ease. If verbal short-term memory is full, a new item causes immediate forgetting of a previous item.
Perhaps, mind transforms information flowing through communication channels, so memory has limited capacity {mental capacity}. Content in short-term memory decays but can go to long-term memory if rehearsed.
Perhaps, immediate memory has seven registers {slot theory}. People remember fewer items if items are similar or complex.
Perhaps, working memory is long-term-memory activated part {activation model of memory}.
Perhaps, attention selects one information channel at time, which has maximum serial information-flow rate {structural model of memory}. Working memory has several subsystems and controllers. One is phonological loop and has no semantic component. Another is visuo-spatial sketchpad and has no semantic component. Subsystems do not interfere with each other. Subsystems have subsystems. During learning, controllers are active, but, after learning, controller use is small.
Working memory stores images, such as faces and scenes [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990] [Baddeley, 2000]. Working-memory subsystems {visuospatial sketchpad} {visuo-spatial sketchpad} can be for visual and spatial information and have no semantic components. Perhaps, visuo-spatial sketchpad has passive color and shape processing and active location processing.
People can process information from sensation and memory to detect, acquire, select, organize, recognize, identify, categorize, discriminate, and interpret information about organisms, objects, features, times, and locations {perception}|. Perception establishes current environment and organism state and does not initiate or control action or behavior.
Perception acquires information about physical objects and events, using unconscious inductive inference. Senses measure pressure, temperature, concentration, frequency data, sound intensity, light intensity, angle, position, and time. It detects perceptual features and feature relations. It can detect angles and orientations. It can detect separateness and overlap. It can detect bilateral, radial, rotational, and translational symmetries. It can detect straight, curved, rotational, spiral, translational, and oscillatory trajectories. It can detect circular, elliptical, ovoid, heart, diamond, square, rectangle, and triangle shapes. It can detect spatial and temporal relations, such as under, over, near, far, before, and after. It can separate figure and ground, horizontal and vertical, and static and moving [Goldstein and Maiden, 2001].
requirements
Perception requires sensation and does not require awareness. Perception does not require consciousness, subject, or person.
biology
All mammals have perception. Perception can involve amygdala, septum, hypothalamus, insula, and cingulate gyrus.
properties
Perception has limited information capacity.
Initial perceptions can change with further mental processing.
Sense receptors respond to stimuli with sensitivity, accuracy, and precision.
properties: continuity
Perception is continuous, not discrete. Perceptions have no gaps and no overlaps in intensity, time, space, frequency, or quality.
properties: discrimination
Perception can detect differences between stimuli, patterns, or objects, if difference is above threshold. Visual discrimination takes 40 milliseconds to 100 milliseconds.
properties: formal system
Perception is complete and consistent and so is formal system, which can have axioms, statements, and reasoning. Formal properties describe how mind uses sensations to get perceptions.
properties: intensity
Feature values have intensity range. People typically can identify no more than five different intensity levels. The lowest intensity detectable during measured time is one energy unit, such as photon, which causes one chemical reaction. The highest intensity detectable causes physical changes rather than chemical reactions. It can saturate receptors, stretch cell membranes past elastic limit, coat receptors, or damage cells. Intensity accuracy is one to two orders of magnitude poorer than just-noticeable-difference accuracy. People judge intensity relative to other intensities. Sense qualities change with intensity. Isolated sensory signals can only signal that stimulus exists, not define intensity value.
If people judge intensity by ratio {magnitude estimation, perception}, the preferred method, power law relates perceived intensity {subjective magnitude} and stimulus intensity: S = a * I^k, where a is a constant that depends on sense, k is a constant that depends on attribute, I is stimulus intensity, and S is perceived intensity. Exponent k varies from 0.33 for luminance to 3.5 for electric shock. Using logarithms, subjective magnitude to stimulus magnitude equation is: r = a + b * log(s), where r is response magnitude, s is stimulus magnitude, and a and b are constants.
Neuron has refractory period after spike, so spikes have frequency. Frequency is higher if stimulus is greater, until frequency maximizes. Number of spikes per second is also energy flow. If frequency/flow passes threshold, synapse sends signal to next neuron. Higher frequencies send more signals until flow maximizes. Neurons have energy flow, with amplitude, frequency if flow varies, pressure, resistance, and capacitance. Circuits and processes are the same as fluid or electrical flow in pipes and circuits. Variations in flow make perception speckle or vary in density.
properties: intensity fade
If not renewed, inhibition reduces intensity, leaving only empty space.
properties: invariance
Connected lines, topological order, texture, and color do not change with distance or perspective.
properties: labeling
Mind labels intensities, locations, times, and objects and labels links among features and objects {labeled link, mind}. Mind uses labels for learning, memory, and recall.
properties: reference frame
Perceptions seem to be in a stationary world, in which body, head, and eyes move. Fixed reference frame optimizes distance and trajectory calculations and minimizes body, head, and eye deviations from straight-line motion. Fixed reference frame minimizes intensity and distance ratios, allowing perceptual constancies.
Babies develop fixed reference frame as they compensate for motions as they move.
properties: scale
Mind represents sizes and locations at multiple scales. Local signals have high precision, and global signals have low precision [Clarke, 1995].
properties: senses inside and outside
Sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell detect stimuli outside body {outside sense, perception}. Posture, movement, and pain detect stimuli inside body {inside sense, perception}.
properties: sense interaction
Perception in one sense can affect perception in another sense. Smell and taste affect each other when eating food, in retronasal area. Taste and touch affect each other when eating food. Balance and sight affect each other for head and eye position and to find vertical. Touch and sight affect each other when handling nearby objects. Touch and hearing mechanical vibrations overlap near 20 Hertz.
properties: shortest perception
The shortest perception lasts 120 milliseconds to 130 milliseconds. Visual stimuli lasting less than 120 milliseconds make perceptions that last 120 milliseconds to 130 milliseconds.
properties: simultaneity
Events whose times differ by less than 100 milliseconds seem simultaneous to perception, but not to sensation or neurons.
properties: spatial relations
Spatial relations among object features do not change with changing viewpoint.
properties: subject
Perception is subjective and requires subject. Body-movement, sense-quality, and mental-state covariance defines subject and location, distinguishing it from environment, other organisms, and other minds. Subjective states have different being/reality than objective things [Schreiber, 1973].
properties: synchronicity
Events whose times differ by less than several milliseconds seem to be same event to perception.
properties: timing
Perceptual quality appears 20 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds after stimulus signal reaches brain. During interval between signal and perception, other stimuli can affect lateral inhibition, contrast enhancement, color finding, depth estimation, line orientation, texture analysis, feature detection, iconic memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory [Clifford et al., 2003].
properties: transformations
Object subtends different visual angles at different distances. It can retain same shape as it grows or shrinks in size. It can add or subtract parts or change spatial relations among parts. It can have different textures and lighting. It can have partial occlusion. It can fall on different retina locations. Viewing objects from different positions can change line orientations and angles.
properties: transient
Mind tends to perceive movement or change. However, high attentional load can cause change blindness, repetition blindness, attentional blink, and inattentional blindness.
properties: perception principles
Principle 1: Discontinuous motion between two nearby points indicates boundary. Principle 2: Similar-size surface markings indicate object, especially if other-size markings surround surface. Principle 3: Shallow objects have smooth boundary above deeper objects. Principle 4: Objects are rigid, so curvatures stay constant. Principle 5: Projection laws are true. Principle 6: Oscillating and swinging are in planes. Principle 7: Two surfaces intersect to make concave discontinuities. Principle 8: Minimum-curvature points mark section boundaries.
purpose
Perception evolves to detect behaviorally useful information. Perception models physical reality. Perception improves survival, adaptation, and reproduction. It models reality for these purposes.
Perception does not find true nature of physical world.
factors: awareness
People can be aware that they perceive stimulus. Perhaps, people have experiences when they think about perceptions [Burle and Bonnet, 1997] [Burle and Bonnet, 1999] [Colquhoun, 1971] [Dehaene, 1993] [Efron, 1970] [Fries et al., 2001] [Geissler et al., 1999] [Gho and Varela, 1988] [Harter, 1967] [Hirsch and Sherrick, 1961] [Kristofferson, 1967] [Lichtenstein, 1961] [Makeig et al., 2002] [Pöppel, 1978] [Pöppel and Logothetis, 1986] [Purves et al., 1996] [Quastler, 1956] [Rizzuto et al., 2003] [Rock, 1983] [Sanford, 1971] [Stroud, 1956] [VanRullen and Koch, 2003] [Varela et al., 2001] [Venables, 1960] [Wertheimer, 1912] [White, 1963] [White and Harter, 1969].
factors: consciousness
Conscious processes can modify perceptions.
factors: culture
Fundamental sense qualities can be innate, with no affect from culture, environment, or experience. For example, all cultures have same basic colors, though languages can have rudimentary or sophisticated color vocabulary. Alternatively, different cultures and environments can cause different sense categories. People can learn colors and other sense qualities by perceiving environment and using language. For example, culture affects shape perception, geometric pattern orientation, and shape constancy. Differences in behavior and language indicate differences in perception.
Figures that cause illusions in USA have less effect in cultures in which rectangular objects and arrangements are rare. Horizontal-vertical illusions are stronger for observers living in savanna.
Cultures can describe salt as sour. Cultures can describe sweet, sour, and bitter as tasting like monosodium glutamate salt (MSG).
Ability to interpret relations among items in pictures differs with culture.
Child-rearing style and culture social structure vary with field dependence.
factors: individuality
Receptor and brain differences, and different viewpoints, cause the same physical event to cause different perceptions in different people.
factors: learning
Learning can change later object or event perceptions by changing how perception extracts, values, and links perceptual features.
factors: memory
Memory can change how perception extracts, values, and links perceptual features.
processes: curvature and orientation
To find curvature and orientation at a surface point, measure angles or areas of six equilateral triangles forming a regular hexagon around the point.
processes: deconvolution
If situation has many sources, use convolution and deconvolution to reduce number of source tests. To convolute sources, array cells can receive from more than one source. Some sources cause effects, but most do not. Test cells for effect. Cells with effective source will have responses in all cells in which source is present. Compare results from cells to see which sources are effective. If pattern determined the convolution, deconvolution pattern indicates effective sources. If sources must interact to be effective, pattern shows effective interactions. Brain uses interacting sources to cause effects, so deconvolution can be way that memory and action work. For example, ten feature sensors can feed into 100 cells, with each node receiving from two sensors. Sensors are in two array nodes. If two sensors need to interact to be effective, only the cell with both will have response over threshold. Array can have weights for sensors or node connections. If weights can change, it is like neural net but with starting structure.
processes: declarative knowledge
Perception involves statements about objects and events. Mind can process declarative knowledge both non-consciously and consciously.
processes: distance
To find surface distance, measure surface-orientation and sight-line angle. Angle becomes smaller as objects become more distant. Angle is near perpendicular for nearer objects. At very great distances, brain cannot measure orientation angle accurately. Brain also uses triangulation to find distance.
processes: equilibrium
Perhaps, input disturbs equilibrium, and sense qualities restore equilibrium. New stimuli cause imbalance, then flows associated with sense qualities restore balance.
processes: magnitude
Mind can compare two stimulus intensities by ratio {magnitude, perception}, rather than difference. For small intensity range, next higher magnitude n+1 can be double or triple preceding magnitude n. For large intensity range, next higher magnitude can be ten times more than preceding magnitude. Magnitude judgments require minimum-stimulus zero level but no intensity measurement unit.
processes: motion as cause
Perceptions grow out of objects in motion. At extremes of pain and low frequency, mechanical movements, involving only mass, charge, space, and time, blend with and are identical to sense qualities, in all senses.
Mind can detect mechanical vibration up to twenty cycles per second, the same as lowest detectable sound frequency. Sound detects rapid mechanical vibrations. Mind can feel sound, as well as hear it, at low frequency. Vision blurs succession of frames at twenty cycles per second into continuous motion. Touch and temperature border each other at twenty cycles per second. Below twenty cycles per second, senses perceive mechanical motion, which has and needs no sense qualities. People cannot breathe, flick tongue, or do anything at rates greater than twenty cycles per second. Twenty cycles per second is limiting rate for body mechanical motions.
All sense qualities use sense organ motions. Smell and taste use matter in motion. Food or air texture is always part of taste and smell, as is pressure. Fingers move. Eyes move. Ears cock, or heads turn.
At high intensity, pain is similar for all senses, and all senses are alike at high intensity. High firing rate overcomes all correlations that distinguish senses, and sense qualities become only pain. High intensity can feel like pressure [Smith and Smith, 1962].
processes: movement
Perception laws depend on movement patterns [Smith and Smith, 1962].
processes: prediction
Organisms detect stimulus associations, patterns, laws, and regularities and use them to predict or track events, by analogy or generalization. Mind uses most stimuli to build predictive abilities, rather than to initiate response. Animals habituate to stimuli that have no predictive value [Dodwell, 1970].
processes: object categories
Organisms need to recognize food/prey, dangerous situation/predator, and related organism: mate, child, relative, and self. They can recognize different levels, such as food that is easier to get or more nutritious.
processes: optimization
Perception is like relaxation or optimization, which finds the most-likely pattern.
processes: response to stimulus
All stimulus responses are complex. Response motor output causes internal feedback stimuli by stimulating kinesthetic receptors and external feedback stimuli by changing environment. All responses involve anticipation.
processes: space
Psychological spatial concepts derive from object location, size, and orientation perceptions. Special visual system encodes spatial properties.
Separate visual system encodes object shapes, colors, and textures.
processes: stimulus
Stimuli are structured energy patterns that reach body sensors. All stimuli affect multiple sensors and are complex.
processes: surface perception
Surfaces have extents, locations, orientations, durations, depths, and other perceptual properties. Greatest perceptual-property change rate is at surface boundaries. Surface has temporal and spatial scale, which mind can expand and contract. Mind uses surfaces and surface boundaries to perceive patterns, objects, scenes, and events. Objects or patterns are surface sets. Object sides are convex, concave, or flat surfaces, which have surface textures, such as number of points or bumps.
Perceptual experience corresponds to unique object or event {indestructible simple, perception}, which has name.
Perception can use temporal steps {microgenesis} [Bachmann, 1994] [Bachmann, 2000].
Physical stimuli evoke measurable perceptions, including subjective sense qualities, and psychological changes {psychophysics}.
Propositions about facts require words for classes {referent, perception}, which refer to multiple objects.
Specific receptors detect different skin sense qualities {specificity theory}, such as temperature, vibration, and deformation.
The same mental function can always use same physiology {state-identity theory, perception} {type-identity theory, perception} [Churchland, 1979] [Churchland, 1986] [Churchland, 1988] [Churchland, 1995] [Churchland, 2002] [Farber and Churchland, 1995] [Pylyshyn, 1984].
Mind uses sense information and learned, rapid, ad hoc rules to perform appropriate action {utilitarian theory of perception} [Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998].
Perception detects distance, angle, size, shape, speed, brightness, hue, lightness, loudness, pitch, attack, decay, pressure, temperature, texture, taste, and smell {perceptual feature}. Perhaps, sense has 100,000 independent features. Features are frequent and regular, so people soon memorize them in all possible states and combinations.
processes
Mind derives features from local spatial and temporal relations among intensities in sense information channels. Features are about stimulus intensity, location, time, frequency, and quality and about higher-level stimulus combinations.
processes: association
Mind associates two features if they are simultaneous, at rate higher than chance.
processes: feature analysis
Perception distinguishes and links features, values, and probabilities. Perception excitations and inhibitions depend on reinforcement pathways and change feature probabilities. Feature analysis {feature analysis} works for independent variables with discrete values but not for clustered variables or continuous values.
properties: continuity
Feature values are always continuous, with no discreteness, edges, jumps, or skips, though neuron signals are discrete. Feature values are continuous even for neurons far apart and for small intensities. Movement, blinking, and other transformations never cause feature value to be discrete.
Perhaps, continuity results from insensitivity to change. Perhaps, coordinate units are larger than feature sizes. Perhaps, information channel and signal number are large, so graininess is small. Perhaps, continuity results from integration, over multiple information channels, of overlapping regions of different sizes, displacements, and orientations.
properties: discontinuity
Missing features cause discontinuities in events.
properties: probability
Features have probabilities of happening if another feature happens.
effects
Recognized features and feature combinations cause actions. Unrecognized features suppress actions [Werner, 1974].
Perceptual features {accidental feature}| or regularities, such as aligned edges and reflected colors, can result from viewing position {accidental viewpoint}.
Perceptual features {non-accidental feature}| {non-accidental property}, such as mass, can not depend on observation point. Non-accidental features stay constant from multiple viewpoints and under transformation, reflection, rotation, translation, and zooming. Relative feature positions stay the same.
recognition
Memory uses non-accidental properties and relative positions to make object templates for perceptual recognition.
projection
Straight edge tends to project collinear lines. Curved edge tends to project lines that fall along smooth function. Parallel edges tend to project parallel lines. Edge intersections tend to project lines that meet at point. Parts that are close together tend to project lines that are close together. Symmetrical parts tend to project symmetrical line patterns.
Two stimuli can mutually inhibit {masking, perception}| [Bachmann, 1994] [Bachmann, 2000] [Breitmeyer, 1984] [Breitmeyer and Ögmen, 2000] [Dehaene et al., 2001] [Dennett, 1991] [Enns and DiLollo, 2000] [Flanagan, 1991] [Flanagan, 1992] [Flanagan, 2002] [Keysers and Perrett, 2002] [Keysers et al., 2001] [Macknik and Livingstone, 1998] [Macknik et al., 2000] [Rolls and Tovee, 1994] [Thompson and Schall, 1999] [Thompson and Schall, 2000] [VanRullen and Koch, 2003].
If, after a several-millisecond stimulus, a second stimulus is at the same location, people do not perceive first stimulus {backward masking}. Masking is greatest when second stimulus is 70 milliseconds to 90 milliseconds after first. Second stimulus has no affect after 100 milliseconds. For sound stimulus, second stimulus is noise. If first stimulus causes emotion, emotion results even if stimulus is not conscious.
Masks can precede targets {forward masking}.
Masks can be simultaneous with targets, or masking stimulus can follow short stimulus {metacontrast masking}, to improve detection.
People skew their reports about perceptions {perceptual bias}, for example, when experimenters ask people to report intensity using number scale.
People's responses can have symmetric distribution around central value {centering bias}. Avoid this bias by using response-scale numbers equally.
People's responses can use shortcuts based on associations {contraction bias}. Avoid this bias by reversing stimuli and responses.
People can respond to high and low stimuli differently {logarithmic response bias}. Avoid this bias by using number range with only single digits, with no ratios.
Smaller stimulus ranges have steeper slopes {range equalizing bias}. This bias is unavoidable, so people underestimate large sizes and differences and overestimate small sizes and differences.
People's responses can group stimuli by time {stimulus frequency bias}. Avoid this bias by presenting all stimuli equally often.
People's responses can group stimuli in space {stimulus spacing bias}. Avoid this bias by spacing stimuli at subjectively equal intervals.
Previous conditions can influence later performance {transfer bias}. Avoid this bias by using separate groups of uninitiated people for each investigation or judgment.
Stimulus intensity, location, size, form, number, and duration {amodal feature} do not depend on sense, can transfer among senses, and allow equivalence judgments among sense modes {amodal perception}|. Perhaps, they allow desire, expectation, or pain judgments.
At space locations, mind can average sense qualities with neighbors {blur}|. Sampling error, background noise, and sense organ imperfections, such as imperfect lenses, retina veins, and dust, cause blur.
People perceive continuously varying intensity or frequency as discrete ranges {categorical perception}. Sense processing divides continuous range into intervals and so discrete categories [Damper and Harnad, 2000] [Harnad, 1987]. For example, people perceive pitch as tones and half tones. People perceive tone durations as eighth notes, quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes.
Categorical perception detects musical intervals, animals, faces, and face expressions. People identify and label perceptual features and feature combinations with sharp boundaries, using many dimensions. Labeling/identifying and discrimination are two aspects of one mechanism.
Smell perception diminishes during continuous exposure {cognitive habituation}, though receptor and neuron sensitivity do not change.
People can correlate intensities in two different senses {cross-modality matching}. For example, mind can match taste intensity with pain intensity. The cross-modality matching technique can test sensitivity to stimuli.
Stimuli {cue, perception}| before other stimuli can indicate second-stimulus types, times, or locations. Cues have maximum effectiveness 150 ms before second stimulus. Cues can provide correct information {valid cue}, incorrect information {invalid cue}, or no useful information {neutral cue}.
People can have feeling that they have seen or heard something before {déja vu}|. For déja vu, people typically have fatigue, have experienced component features before, are young, and have heightened sensitivity.
Different contexts can make the same object or event signal differ, because context expands or contracts at varying rates {domain warping}. Transforming space and structure representations can find geometric analogies and trajectories.
People can have false recognition {fause reconnaissance}.
Mind places new features at locations that have easily described relationships to already represented features {frontier effect}.
Objects have properties, and features have properties. In most perception, object properties override feature properties {global superiority effect}.
Novel unrelated stimuli can aid pattern, poetry, idea, and hypothesis recognition {lateral thinking}. Random words are examples.
Experience thresholds {limen} are not constant.
Observer can assign or choose natural number to estimate stimulus intensity magnitude {magnitude estimation, observer}, such as 1 to 10 for minimum to maximum.
Mind can perceive two different stimuli {metamer} as the same. For example, two different wavelength and intensity combinations can result in same color. Objects with different surface reflectances can cause same color perceptions.
Perception can distinguish event order {order discrimination}, though events seem to be simultaneous in sensations.
Perhaps, perception is continual every 20 to 200 milliseconds {perceptual moment} {frame, perception} {snapshot, perception}. Perception is not continuous [Burle and Bonnet, 1997] [Burle and Bonnet, 1999] [Colquhoun, 1971] [Dehaene, 1993] [Efron, 1970] [Fries et al., 2001] [Geissler et al., 1999] [Gho and Varela, 1988] [Harter, 1967] [Hirsch and Sherrick, 1961] [Kristofferson, 1967] [Lichtenstein, 1961] [Makeig et al., 2002] [Pöppel, 1978] [Pöppel and Logothetis, 1986] [Purves et al., 1996] [Quastler, 1956] [Rizzuto et al., 2003] [Rock, 1983] [Sanford, 1971] [Stroud, 1956] [VanRullen and Koch, 2003] [Varela et al., 2001] [Venables, 1960] [Wertheimer, 1912] [White, 1963] [White and Harter, 1969].
Perception can alternate between two interpretations {rivalry, perception}|, though stimulus pattern stays the same.
Stimulus can have higher intensity than neighboring stimuli {saliency, perception}|. Saliency originates in dorsomedial pulvinar, lateral-intraparietal lobe, and frontal lobe. Saliency can affect thalamus or sensory cortex [Blaser et al., 1999] [Braun and Julesz, 1998] [Braun and Sagi, 1990] [Braun et al., 2001] [Itti et al., 1998] [Itti and Koch, 2000] [Itti and Koch, 2001] [Jovicich et al., 2001] [Koch and Ullman, 1985] [Nakayama and Mackeben, 1989] [Parasuraman, 1998] [Pashler, 1998] [Treisman, 1988] [Treisman and Gelade, 1980] [Walther et al., 2002] [Wolfe, 1994] [Wolfe, 1999].
Animals can become ready for specific stimuli or general stimulation {sensitization, perception}. In harsh environments, animals sensitize to all stimuli. In favorable environments, animals become responsive to stimuli about desirable goals. Rearing animals in restricted environments, in which they see only vertical stripes, results in cortical neurons more sensitive to vertical orientations.
External stimuli of which people are unaware, just below conscious {subliminal perception}|, can affect perception and memory. All sensory modes have subliminal range [Dixon, 1971] [Merikle and Daneman, 1998]. Subliminal stimulus in "blind" eye transfers perception to that side.
Sense-organ stimuli can cause different sense qualities {synesthesia, perception}|.
colors
White numeral symbol can have color. However, Roman numeral can have no color when the Arabic numeral of same number has color, indicating that synesthesia is for perception, not abstract concept.
Perhaps, connections between brain areas V4 and area in V8 {number-grapheme area}, which are adjacent in fusiform gyrus, cause color-numeral synesthesia.
Months and weekdays can have colors. Perhaps, connections between TPO and angular gyrus areas cause day-month and numeral synesthesia.
tastes
Shapes can have associated tastes. Insula is for tastes and is close to sensory hand area.
sounds
Shapes can have associated sounds. Low sounds can associate with dark colors, and high sounds with light colors [Cytowic, 1989] [Cytowic, 1993] [Cytowic, 2002] [Galton, 1997] [Grossenbacher and Lovelace, 2001] [Nunn et al., 2002] [Paulesu et al., 1995] [Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001] [Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2003] [Ramachandran, 2004] [Stein and Meredith, 1993] [Stein et al., 2001].
factors: age
Infants have cortex and thalamus auditory-visual brain connections.
factors: brain
Brain regions can activate each other through atypical stimulation pathways or through inhibition pathway loss.
factors: drugs
Drugs can cause stimuli in sense organs to result in another sense's sense qualities.
properties: occurrence
Less than 0.5% of people have synesthesia, usually as just black and white colors. Such synesthesia is involuntary, starts early in life, and lasts a lifetime. It is hereditary. It happens more in lefthandedness, more in females, more with better memory, more with bad math and spatial ability, and more in creative people [Baron-Cohen and Harrison, 1997].
properties: unconscious
Synesthesia is not under conscious control.
Mind stores sensory signals and features temporarily {temporal buffering} while receiving signal remainder. Natural stimuli are not stationary, do not move regularly, and require time interval.
If vision analyzes spatial relations differently than hearing or kinesthesia, vision overrides hearing or kinesthesia {visual dominance}. For example, sound direction depends on direction of visual object associated with sound [Ingle et al., 1982]. If kinesthesia or touch analyzes spatial relations differently than hearing, kinesthesia or touch overrides hearing. Taste and smell have little effect on spatial relations.
Sense qualities have physical measurements {primary property} about space and time, such as object size, shape, motion, number, solidity, hardness, mass, and extension.
Sense qualities have mental measurements {secondary property}, such as color, touch, aroma, taste, timbre, and sound. Secondary qualities do not derive from primary qualities but come from stored knowledge and assumptions. They affect even simplest perceptions.
Stimuli are energy patterns representing information about objects in environment or body {representation, perception} {internal model}. Mental representation organizes perception and guides behavior. Objects have more than one representation and template, using different viewpoints and/or viewer-centered or absolute coordinates. Mind represents objects by shape, size, orientation, and feature and part relations. Mind stores features and relations in flexible templates.
processes
Parallel and serial information flows convey data for object and event variables. Sense receptors transform energy and code useful information parts. Nervous systems process and store object-and-event information. Information directs muscle and gland actions.
processes: object properties
Mind represents object by shape, size, orientation, and feature and part relations. Visual system encodes object properties of shape, color, and texture. A separate and independent visual system encodes spatial properties of location, size, and orientation.
processes: arrays
Representation can be two-dimensional array coding variable intensities. For example, colorful scenes can be like television screens, with intensity levels for red, green, and blue phosphors at screen points. However, representations cannot be point-for-point copies of visual images, because sense receptors communicate laterally, so points include data from surrounding points.
Representation can be two-dimensional array coding interference pattern intensities. For example, black-and-white scenes can be like holograms, with intensity levels at points determined by illumination phase from all scene points. However, representations are unlikely to be holograms, because mind does not use phase information at sense receptors and mind has no reference beam with which to reconstitute holographic images.
Representations can be sets of two-dimensional arrays, each coding one variable. For example, parallel information pathways can code for red, green, and blue intensities and combine the three later to give net color. Representation uses different topographic maps to code for location, orientation, depth, color, shape, motion, and time. After initial processing for variables, outputs cross-correlate to integrate information.
Representation can be information packets routed through mental networks. Like Internet, mind can divide information into data blocks sent over alternative pathways to destinations, where mind reunites them. Representations probably use information packets, tagged with relations to other packets and timed to synchronize with other packets.
processes: hierarchy
Pre-representations code for intensities and have no meaning. Representations combine innate and remembered information with sense information. Further processing makes semantic object and event relations, and gist allows thoughts and goals. Mind has representation-type hierarchies [Booth and Rolls, 1998] [Posner and Raichle, 1997] [Posner, 1978] [Posner, 1989].
processes: proposition
Mind uses propositions to represent images and describe shapes, without using size or orientation. Mind manipulates images by logical operations on propositions. Propositions can have variables.
coding
Space-time pattern representations use neuron signal-intensity functions. Visual system samples scene at various spatial positions, in sequences based on experience, to derive curvatures, surfaces, textures, reflectances, colors, orientations, eye positions, head position, hand positions, constancies, and co-variances.
coding: analog and digital
Depolarization impulse cycles require one millisecond, so each millisecond axon has depolarization or not. Axons carry OFF/ON signals and so are digital.
At synapses, variations in neurotransmitter vesicle size and release time make analog flow through receptors.
Neural processing has advantages and avoids disadvantages of analog and digital coding. OFF-signals set a steady baseline. ON-signals have equal strengths. Neuron coding has no timing, is not stepwise, and is not linear. Axon coding depends on impulse rate or flow.
coding: codes
Simple code can use neuron average firing frequency. Another simple code can modulate firing frequency, as in FM radio, in which fundamental frequency is like carrier wave. In temporal code, steady frequency is like clock, and frequency changes carry information. Code can superimpose frequencies to make beat frequencies. Code can superimpose frequencies, so axons carry composite signals, and different receptors use different components. Code can be waveforms of frequency sets.
spatial coordinates
Minds use three-dimensional spatial coordinates to navigate, to encode spatial information into memory, to transform images, and to specify feature locations, sizes, and orientations. Mind represents image by specifying intensities at locations in space array. Space array can show object parts, relations, and spatial axes. Representation spatial and temporal relations correspond to actual relations. Mind can manipulate size and orientation.
Minds convert categorical relations to spatial coordinates, and vice versa, to link size, distance, orientation, front/back, and reference frame to classification.
spatial coordinates: types
Mind can use locations relative to retina {retinotopic coordinate} or relative to spatial reference point {spatiotopic coordinate}. Spatiotopic coordinates can be relative to body {body-centered coordinate} {egocentric coordinate} or to another object {allocentric coordinate}. Body-centered coordinates can relate to head {craniotopic}. Mind plans and performs behavior using egocentric coordinates, compensating for body movements. Body movement coordination requires only egocentric space, not images. Egocentric space can transform to conceptual space representations.
Allocentric representations can transform to egocentric representations. Allocentric coordinates can be specific to view {viewer-centered} or object itself {object-centered}.
Mind can specify location in Cartesian coordinates, along X, Y, and Z dimensions from origin, or polar coordinates, by radius and planar and depth angles from origin.
Processes that guide action need coordinates {implicit coordinates}. Processes that store representations need coordinates {explicit coordinates}.
Local coordinates specify part locations, using many separate origins to form interlocking coordinate system. Global coordinates specify part locations relative to one origin.
Topographic maps compute locations in nearby space using body-based coordinates. Topographic maps compute locations in far space using allocentric coordinates.
Not all directions relative to body are equally accessible in image.
Subjects do not image themselves in centers of three-dimensional scenes.
People use viewer-centered coordinates in imagery.
image
Image is private symbol system that specifies local object geometry using categories and coordinates. Mind makes general, specific, and autobiographical images. Unlike perceptions, image has interpreted perceptual units, orients in space, aids event recall, and solves problems. Mind can remember images. Mind cannot readily manipulate image. Image is not picture in the head.
image: scanning
Mind can scan image, and scanning time increases linearly with distance.
image: information
Image information depends on element number and arrangement. Image does not have as much detail as physical object.
image: cue
Eye position can cue access to next image in sequence.
image: spatial frequency
Images do not include perception fundamental spatial frequency.
image: brain
In brain, membrane electrochemical signals can alter molecules that eventually produce enzyme sequences, forming patterns. Enzyme patterns can affect nearby cells or affect transferred nerve signals, making effect cascades. Both hemispheres can generate images.
Brain-damaged patients that cannot recognize faces report that they also cannot image faces. Patients that cannot distinguish colors after suffering brain damage also cannot form mental images that include color. Patients with hemi-neglect cannot see mental-image or dream right or left half.
image: time
Mind requires 100 milliseconds to 200 milliseconds of light to see image. Processing image takes 60 milliseconds to 70 milliseconds [Shiekh, 1983].
image: network
Images have parts and relations. Images are networks of nodes on surfaces and connections of spatial relations. If nodes and connections are abstract-space dimensions, patterns are abstract-space points. Similar images are near each other in state space.
Mind can store center/surround information at several, separated locations {primal image representation}, rather than high-level feature sets.
Internal interaction, past reaction, experience, goal, framework, available information, and action representations {schema, perception}| can direct perceptual exploration {anticipatory schema}. Mind updates integrated prior-movement representations {postural schema} after position changes. Schemas are rule groups. Rules generalize inference patterns. Schemas are for concept formation [Schank and Abelson, 1977] [Schank, 1997].
Animals navigate environment using map with reference point {centroid} and gradient {slope, gradient} {slope-centroid model}. Mind can calculate direction and distance to target by triangulation using centroid and slope.
Observer can change stimulus intensity or frequency until it matches, or differs from, reference stimulus, or until observer does or does not perceive it {method of adjustment} {adjustment method}. It is a method of limits.
Observer experiences many stimuli covering whole stimulus range and reports perception or no perception {method of constant stimuli} {constant stimuli method}. Alternatively, observer compares many stimuli covering whole stimulus range to reference stimulus and reports if they differ from reference or not.
Observer can attend to sound in one ear while distracted by sound in other ear {dichotic listening technique}. Alternatively, observer can attend to voice while another voice speaks.
After seeing stimulus {target, perception}, observer can respond if he or she sees stimulus among distracting stimuli {n-alternative forced-choice} {forced-choice}.
Starting from no difference in frequency and/or intensity and increasing difference, observer can note when there is difference {method of limits} {limits method}. Alternatively, starting from big difference and decreasing difference, observer can note when there is no difference.
Observers can respond after detecting stimulus on right or left {position discrimination}.
Observers can attend to text lines in one color and ignore lines in another color {selective reading paradigm}.
Observer can respond after detecting stimulus {stimulus detection}.
Observer can respond if stimulus is word or not {word discrimination}.
Something {self, cognition} about people provides agency and identity. Selves persist through amnesia, sensory deprivation, minimal information, body-perception loss, distorted perceptions, and hallucinations.
agency
Selves have will and control and perform actions. Selves have a continuous history as agents in space and time {narrative self, agent}.
identity
People feel personal identity, unity, unique individuality, and continuity. Perception continuity implies permanent, unified, and immaterial self. Selves are aware of themselves.
subject
Selves are subjects of conscious experiences. Selves {embodied self} have proprioception related to physical body. Selves are in bodies. Selves are also objects.
self and other
Ideas of self and not-self can be innate and develop as verbal concepts develop. Organisms must categorize what they can encounter as prey, predator, self, same-sex species member, or opposite-sex species member. Knowledge of self or not-self controls action inhibition or permission. Subject, person, I, or self involves self-protection.
memory
"I am who I remember myself being" is an idea about subjective self.
reference
Self is always something and is never a property of something. Self always refers to same thing.
reference point
Self is body reference point in space and time. Observation point causes viewpoint [Gallagher and Shear, 1999] [Hurley, 1998].
soul
Self can be or have soul [Augustine, 427] [Brown et al., 1998] [McMullin, 2000] [Murphy, 1998] [Sloan, 2000].
alternatives: composite
Though they seem to have unity, selves have several functions.
alternatives: no continuity
Though selves seem to stay the same, split-brain patients, multiple personalities, and self disorders indicate that selves do not have personal identity and continuity.
alternatives: no integration
Though selves seem to have beliefs, thoughts, and memories, brain processes these concepts at myriad places, so integration is fleeting.
alternatives: no person
Though selves seem to have personality, motivations and behaviors have multiple sources.
alternatives: no unity
Though selves seem to be just one observer, split-brain patients, multiple personalities, and self disorders indicate that selves do not have unity.
alternatives: no non-physical self
Though selves seem to have unique type, non-physical substance cannot affect physical brain.
alternatives: no self
Perhaps, there is no self.
alternatives: only collection
Though selves seem to be at experience centers, they are only experience collections.
alternatives: only referral
Perhaps, self is center of three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time created by spatial and temporal referral.
causes: coordination
Selves result from body-movement and sensation covariance, which distinguishes self from background environment and other organisms.
causes: society
Psychological properties cause psychological reactions in other people, which people can recognize by comparison with their psychological properties, and so create ideas of self, others, and their relations.
brain damage
Temporary or permanent brain damage can cause loss of aspects of self [Ehrlich, 2000] [Ramachandran, 2004]. Past, present, or future can be unusable. Selves can become discontinuous. Self can seem to be outside body. People can lose will and agency. Self-awareness can end. Selves end at death.
teletransporter
Imagine that machines can analyze all body cells, molecules, and momenta and can use that information, and necessary raw materials, to recreate exactly that body and brain anywhere, with no errors {teletransporter} [Parfit, 1984] [Parfit, 1987]. Imagine also that the machines destroy original body. Now imagine that machines can destroy and re-create body parts in same places.
Selves cause effects in space and time through voluntary movements {agency, self}, while trying to reach goals and satisfy wants. Selves are highest agent and organize brain functional modules.
People need a mental image {body image} of their physical dimensions to perform actions.
Speaking in first person {first person} includes idea that "I" differs from "you" or "it". First person implicitly refers to self and intention [Gallagher and Shear, 1999] [Hurley, 1998]. First person reports knowledge about report producer. First person requires self-knowledge, just as speaking in second or third person requires knowledge about other objects.
Organisms must distinguish self and other {non-self} {not-self}. Organisms that can bite or claw need sense of self and other to ensure behavior is toward right object. Because it reverberates in body, sense information from self differs fundamentally from information from other.
Constant mind {personal identity} exists through all experience. Identity is intentions and their relations. Personal identity provides an unchanging basis for learning and adaptation. Personal identity depends on apparent conscious-experience unity, continuing goals, sustained wants, memory continuity, physical causes and effects, and connections between what people plan to do and what they actually do.
Perhaps, persons in bodies are individual subjects, are real, and have physical and psychological properties or predicates {descriptive metaphysics, self}. Selves are subjects of experience that are one mental thing {subject of experience as one mental thing} (SESMET). Experience is a series of mental states {pearl view}. Self is new each time. Introspection shows that consciousness alternates with unconsciousness. There is no personality or agent. Neural processes have mental as well as non-mental properties [Strawson, 1999].
Perhaps, selves are abstract mind-process collections. Perhaps, mind can hold different stories and memories, and these "discourses" create the "I" {discursive psychology}. If brain produces self as narrator {discursive turn}, body can have several selves [Harré and Gillett, 1994].
Perhaps, people build ego identity to oppose loss of self {ego diffusion, self}.
Perhaps, people build ideas of their capabilities and opportunities {ego identity, self} to oppose ego diffusion.
Perhaps, mind has high-level processes {executive level} that know goals and coordinate actions. Self-supervisory processes {self-supervisory level} set goals and their priorities. Using self-supervisory processes makes consciousness. Alternatively, selves are abstract concepts built by mental processes combining functional elements [Mackay, 1987].
Perhaps, selves are concept collections {memeplex, self}, based on first-person language usage [Dawkins, 1976] [Dawkins, 1995].
Perhaps, experiences depend on persons or selves {no-ownership theory} [Strawson, 1999].
Perhaps, all psychological states relate to body {unity relation}. Body and body experiences cause mental states and so create self. Self develops as body develops.
Perhaps, linking declarative memories can produce feelings {autobiographical self}.
Perhaps, object and event perceptions and responses define observer and agent {core-self}, which can use procedural memories but has no unity and is not continuous.
Perhaps, identity and agency are like stories or narratives {narrative self, cognition}. Stories have scenes and characters. Situations or problems arise, develop, and resolve. Stories can guide or suggest action. Goals, wants, and hopes organize narratives, which are self-representations.
People can recall narratives. Perhaps, multiple interconnected and independent narrative fragments are at various editing stages in various mind places.
Narratives assume unified action agents, but narratives are thoughts, not thinkers. Selves are narratives, not entities.
Perhaps, all animal minds have processes that define an overall state {proto-self, cognition} that has no unity, is not continuous, and does not use memory.
Brain can initiate, control, and stop behavior independently of environmental influences {will, cognition}|, using internal states and processes. Will is ability to use voluntary muscles. Will reveals tendencies to actions.
requirements
Will does not require sensation, perception, or awareness.
consciousness
People are conscious of will but have no consciousness about how they performs behavior. Consciousness can control will.
animals
All animals make choices and act to reach goals. Perhaps, all mammals have will.
The feeling of willing has the idea of agent {authorship}. The feeling of willing comes from judging that thought caused event. Minds plan action, organize motor signals, and send motor signals. Such mental events later cause thought about action [Wegner, 2002].
Subjects can plan movements {preplanning}. When subjects experience no preplanning feeling, consciousness of intention to flex muscle is 350 milliseconds after readiness-potential beginning and 200 milliseconds before muscle movement. When subjects experience a preplanning feeling, several seconds before muscle flexion, they can distinguish preplanning stage from immediately following urge to flex.
Mind forms plans {intention, will} to act or decides not to act. Intention is not desire or belief but mental state. Many human movements do not involve intention, are just effects, or are accidents.
People can do something intentionally {action, will} {omission, will}, using reasoning, values, goals, and choices. Actions and omissions have different reasoning and responsibilities. Beliefs and desires cause change will.
People can intentionally fail to act {omission, responsibility} in situations in which action is typical or expected. Omissions rarely cause responsibility, because choosing to act can result in harm.
If related thought precedes action {priority principle}, with no other causes, mind judges situation to have intention as cause of effect [Wegner, 2002].
Will can be free {free will}| in different ways.
contingency
Though they believe in physical determinism, people can feel that they have free will {contingency, will}. People do not know determining motions and matter, only thoughts and feelings, and thoughts seem to be free. Future events depend on what people do now, and people know that there is a future, so what people do has effect, meaning, and importance. If predetermination, why do anything {fatalism, will}? Doing nothing still has effects.
dependency
Healthy, typical, unforced individuals in societal settings are free to use their functional modules to do possible things without uncontrollable outside or inside constraints. Functional modules depend on environment, society, mind, development, and biology. Influences and alternatives are many, and flexibility and unpredictability are high. Free will depends completely on knowing what first-person situation is.
knowledge
Freedom depends on ability to be self-conscious, and knowledge causes more consciousness of thinking.
number of choices
With too many choices, reason cannot choose the best one. With no choices, people cannot exercise free will.
choosing
Many situations have two possible rational acts. People feel that they can choose freely between two motives or actions. People deliberate over actions. People have purposes and goals. People try to persuade others. People feel personal responsibility and duty. People feel regret and tragedy. People can be spontaneous or choose to demonstrate their freedom. People can create.
Free action has no constraints from external forces {reconciliationism}.
Universe is deterministic, and people are neither free nor responsible {incompatibilism}, because people are not free to make choices (origination) or differences (indifference), with no causes. Only processes inside brains cause action. Rigid natural laws cause mental states that decide choices. Will only appears to be free, because brains are actually deterministic, and evolution and natural selection determine nerve signals.
People are not free to make differences {indifference, will}, with no causes.
People are not free to make real choices {origination, will}, with no causes.
Though universe and human actions have causes and are deterministic, people are free and responsible {compatibilism}, because world and other people typically do not compel them to perform actions, so they actually make real choices.
Though universe and human actions have causes and are deterministic, world and other people typically do not compel people to perform actions, so they actually make real choices {voluntariness} {spontaneity, will}.
Object classes are examples that have defining characteristics {Greek ideas about cognition} {classic model}, though they have different features.
ideal
Real objects are imperfect copies of ideal abstract objects {Ideal object} or are examples of abstract concepts {form, concept}. Real objects have matter units {substratum, matter}. Element arrangements and movements allow form, but form is separate and independent thing unrelated to parts.
ideal: function
Forms have main purposes, functions, or uses.
learning
Minds hold innate class concepts. Minds can learn form names.
hierarchy
Classes form a hierarchy. Subclasses inherit higher-class form. Higher class abstracts something common from subclasses.
association
Object or feature perception allows similar or identical objects or features to enter mind.
inference
Mind also makes and stores inferences, such as cause and effect.
Mind has innate thinking and knowing methods, such as number, space, time, causation, and logic, which interpret sense qualities and make perceptions and concepts {constructivism, cognition}. Meaning combines perceptions and abstractions into schema structures [Schank and Abelson, 1977] [Schank, 1997].
Minds build concepts by abstracting common properties from perceptions, which have sensory units {empiricism, cognition}. Complex ideas are simple-idea combinations {image, cognition}. Mind can compare, identify, use logic, and actively perform other mental activities. Abstract ideas, such as mathematics or self, can come from sensory ideas. Ideas become associated if they are experienced to be near each other in time or space {contiguity principle, cognition} {associationism, cognition}.
Mental representations, ideas, beliefs, and intentions are computations and are both mental functions and physiological states {functionalism, cognition}. States are not neurons and their actions, but their information and algorithms. The same information can be in different neurons. The same mental function can use different physiology {token-identity theory, functionalism}, rather than always the same physiology {state-identity theory, functionalism} {type-identity theory, functionalism}. The same physiology can serve different functions [Churchland, 1979] [Churchland, 1986] [Churchland, 1988] [Churchland, 1995] [Churchland, 2002] [Farber and Churchland, 1995] [Pylyshyn, 1984].
Structures have components, and their relations depend on laws about structures {Gestalt, cognition}. They do not depend on ideas about components.
Concepts develop from perceptions and cognitive operations on perceptions {logical positivism, cognition} {radical positivism}. Propositions are for understanding and meaning. Perceptual experience corresponds to unique object or event {indestructible simple, logical positivism}, which can have proper noun for name. However, propositions about facts require words for classes, but such words refer to multiple objects {referent, logical positivism}. To be meaningful, language can build concepts from simple perceptual experiences, just as mind does.
People have innate ideas and abilities {nativism, cognition}, as well as learned and observed ones.
Memories about classes {neoclassic model} include actual perceptions and ideal forms, as well as secondary functions and typical features {epistemological information}. Ideal-form information is invariant, while perceptual and epistemological information can vary, like colors can vary. Ideal-form, perceptual, or epistemological information can identify class members.
Mind and mental states are all conscious experience {physiological psychology} {sensationism}. Experience has elementary sense qualities {sensation unit} and their relations [Hume, 1739].
Minds have perceptual-image copies and abstract concepts {rationalism, cognition}. Abstract concepts are Mind's innate abilities, such as reasoning. Knowledge can be true a priori, but sensory knowledge is not absolute truth. Concepts and perceptions in Mind are codes {sign}. Minds are separate reality from physical world and have their own laws [Plato, -380] [Plato, -360].
Structures have components, and analyzing components and their relations provides cognition {structuralism, cognition}.
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Date Modified: 2022.0225