Chapter 5: Variations in Consciousness

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Chapter 5 Variations in Consciousness
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On the Nature of Consciousness

• Awareness of Internal and External Stimuli
• Variations on levels of awareness
• James stream of consciousness
• Freud unconscious
• Sleep/dreaming research

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The ElectroencephalographA Physiological Index
of Consciousness

• EEG monitoring of brain electrical activity
• Brain-waves
• Amplitude (height)
• Frequency (cycles per second)
• Beta (13-24 cps)
• Alpha (8-12 cps)
• Theta (4-7 cps)
• Delta (lt4 cps)

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Table 5.1 EEG Patterns Associated with States of
Consciousness
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Biological Rhythms and Sleep

• Circadian Rhythms 24 hr biological cycles
• Regulation of sleep/other body functions
• Physiological pathway of the biological clock
• Light levels ? retina ? suprachiasmatic nucleus
  of hypothalamus ? pineal gland ? secretion of
  melatonin
• Ignoring circadian rhythms - tired, sluggish, and
  irritable
• Realigning circadian rhythms - people realign
  their circadian rhythms, by administering small,
  carefully timed doses of melatonin and by
  carefully timed exposure to bright lights, but at
  this point there is no practical treatment that
  works for most people.

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Sleep/Waking Research

• Instruments
• Electroencephalograph brain electrical activity
• Electromyograph muscle activity
• Electrooculograph eye movements
• Other bodily functions also observed heart rate,
  breathing rate, temperature, etc., as well as
  videotape the person sleeping through a window

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Sleep Stages Cycling Through Sleep

• 5 stages of sleep based on physiological
  recordings
• Stage 1 light sleep brief, transitional (1-7
  minutes)
• alpha ? theta
• hypnic jerks
• Stage 2 brief bursts of higher-frequency brain
  waves sleep spindles (10-25 minutes)
• Stages 3 4 low frequency delta waves slow-wave
  sleep (30 minutes)
• Stage 5 REM, EEG similar to awake, vivid
  dreaming (first a few minutes, then longer).
• Developmental differences in REM sleep

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Age, Culture, and Sleep

• Age trends
• Infants lots of sleep and lots of REM. Infants
  sleep more frequently (6-8 times in a 24-hour
  period) and may sleep up to 16 of those 24 hours.
  Up to 50 of this time is spent in REM sleep.
• Aging less sleep and less slow-wave sleep
• Cultural variations Comparative studies of sleep
  in different cultures show very little variation
  in the amount of time spent sleeping, but larger
  differences in sleeping arrangements.
• Co-sleeping
• Napping

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Figure 5.4 Changes in sleep patterns over the
life span
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Figure 5.5 Cultural variations in how long
people tend to sleep
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Why Do We Sleep?

• Hypothesis 1
• Sleep evolved to conserve organisms energy
• Hypothesis 2
• Immobilization during sleep is adaptive because
  it reduces danger
• Hypothesis 3
• Sleep helps animals to restore energy and other
  bodily resources

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Sleep Deprivation

• Partial deprivation or sleep restriction
• impaired attention, reaction time, coordination,
  and decision making
• accidents Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez
• Selective deprivation
• REM and slow-wave sleep rebound effect
• waking subjects up whenever they go into REM
  sleep causes the person to go back into REM
  faster. Pretty soon have to wake them up almost
  constantly to keep them from going into REM
  suggesting that the body needs REM. The same
  rebound effect has been found for slow-wave sleep.

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Sleep Problems

• Insomnia difficulty falling or staying asleep
• -trouble falling asleep, trouble remaining
  asleep, and persistent early morning awakening.
• Difficulty falling asleep is most common
  among young people, while early morning awakening
  and trouble staying asleep are more common among
  middle-aged and elderly people.
• 34-35 of adults report problems with
  insomnia and about 15-17 have severe or frequent
  insomnia. The prevalence increases with age and
  is 50 more common in men than in women
• Narcolepsy falling asleep uncontrollably -
  person with Narcolepsy goes directly into REM
  sleep.
• Sleep Apnea reflexive gasping for air that
  awakens person - With sleep apnea, the person
  literally stops breathing for 15 to 60 seconds.
• Somnambulism sleepwalking - first two hours of
  sleep, during slow-wave sleep, and is principally
  dangerous because sleepwalkers are prone to
  accidents.

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Figure 5.6 The vicious cycle of dependence on
sleeping pills
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The Nature and Contents of Dreams

• Dreams mental experiences during sleep
• Content usually familiar
• Common themes - falling, being pursued, trying
  repeatedly to do something, school, sex, being
  late, eating, being frightened
• Waking life spillover day residue
• Western vs. Non-Western interpretations - many
  non-Western cultures are likely to view dreams as
  important information about themselves, the
  future, or the spiritual world.

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Figure 5.8 Three theories of dreaming
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Hypnosis Altered State of Consciousness or Role
Playing?

• Hypnosis a systematic procedure that increases
  suggestibility - relaxation, narrowed attention
• Hypnotic susceptibility individual differences -
  10 of people are especially easy to hypnotize,
  10 especially difficult.
• Effects produced through hypnosis
• Anesthesia
• Sensory distortions and hallucinations
• Disinhibition
• Posthypnotic suggestions and amnesia
• Researchers argue about whether hypnosis is
  really an altered state of awareness or if it is
  simply people doing what they think they are
  supposed to do when they are hypnotized. The
  dissociation hypothesis holds that hypnosis
  splits consciousness into two streams divided
  consciousness.

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Meditation Pure Consciousness or Relaxation

• Meditation practices that train attention to
  heighten awareness and bring mental processes
  under greater voluntary control
• Yoga, Zen, transcendental meditation (TM)
• Effects of meditation include decreased heart
  rate, respiration rate and a relaxed EEG, with
  predominant theta and alpha rhythm patterns.
• PET show increased activity in PFC and Parietal
  lobe. Attention and location in space
  transcendence ?
• Potential physiological benefits
• Similar to effective relaxation procedures

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Chapter 8 Cognition and Intelligence
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Types of Problems

• Problems of inducing structure
• Series completion and analogy problems - where
  people are required to discover relations among
  numbers, words, symbols, or ideas.
• e.g., 1,2,8,3,4,6,5,6 _____
• Problems of arrangement
• String problem and Anagrams - where people
  arrange the parts of a problem in a way that
  satisfies some criterion
• e.g., anagram what english word?
• rwaet ? keroj?
• Often solved through insight
• Problems of transformation
• involve carrying out a sequence of
  transformations in order to reach a specific
  goal.

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Effective Problem Solving

• Barriers to effective problem solving
• Irrelevant Information - getting bogged down in
  unimportant information
• Functional Fixedness - tendency to perceive an
  item only in terms of its most common use
• Mental Set - when people persist in using
  problem-solving strategies that have worked in
  the past
• Unnecessary Constraints - assuming unnecessary
  constraints on the problem

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Approaches to Problem Solving

• Trial-and-error - effective method of solving
  problems if there are only a few possible
  solutions, but quickly becomes unwieldy when
  there are many possible solutions.
• Heuristics - guiding principles or rules of
  thumb used in solving problems. They dont
  guarantee success.
• Forming subgoals - allows one to solve part of
  the problem, therefore moving toward success.
• Searching for analogies - Searching for analogies
  involves using a solution to a previous problem
  to solve a current one.
• Changing the representation of a problem math
  function viewed in graph form

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Culture, Cognitive Style,and Problem Solving

• Field dependence relying on external frames of
  reference
• Field independence relying on internal frames
  of reference
• Western cultures inspire field independence
• Holistic vs. analytic cognitive styles
• Nisbett and colleagues (2001) argue that people
  from East Asian cultures display a holistic
  cognitive style focusing on context and
  relationships among elements in a field (wholes).
  
• People from Western cultures, alternatively, show
  an analytic cognitive style focusing on objects
  and their properties rather than context.

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Each group saw computer animated visual scenes
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Decision MakingChoices and Chances

• Simon (1957) theory of bounded rationality -
  decision making strategies are simplistic and
  often yield irrational results.
• Making Choices
• Additive strategies - Additive decision models
  are used to make choices by rating the attributes
  of each alternative and selecting the alternative
  with most desirable attributes (Few options)
• Elimination by aspects - making choices by
  gradually eliminating unattractive alternatives.
  (Many options)
• Risky decision making
• Expected value - what you stand to gain
• Subjective utility - what an outcome is
  personally worth to an individual. For example,
  insurance may provide a sense of security.

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Heuristics in Judging Probabilities

• The availability heuristic - involves basing the
  estimated probability of an event on the ease
  with which relevant instances come to mind
• The tendency to ignore base rates Not taking
  into account how frequently something occurs when
  making a judgment. e.g., Steve is very shy and
  withdrawn, invariably helpful, but with little
  interest in people or the world of reality. He
  has a passion for order and detail. Is Steve a
  librarian or car salesman?
• The gamblers fallacy - The gamblers fallacy is
  the belief that the odds of a chance event
  increase if the event hasnt occurred recently
• e.g., flipping a coin T-H-H-H-H is it more
  likely to be heads?
• Overestimating the improbable - how people tend
  to greatly overestimate the likelihood of
  dramatic, vivid, but infrequent, events that
  receive heavy media coverage Tornados,
  hurricanes, fires ..

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Evolutionary Analyses Flaws in Decision Making
and Fast and Frugal Heuristics

• While research shows that human decision making
  is replete with bias and error, evolutionary
  psychologists argue that this is due to the
  laboratory tasks used to measure it.
• Cosmides and Tooby (1996)
• Unrealistic standard of rationality
• Problem solving research based on contrived and
  artificial problems
• We dont typically calculate probabilities in the
  real world interactions
• Gigerenzer (2000) humans do not have the time,
  resources, or capacities to gather all
  information, consider all alternatives, calculate
  all probabilities and risks, and then make the
  statistically optimal decision
• Fast and frugal heuristics - quick, one-reason
  decisions which yield inferences that are often
  just as accurate as much more elaborate and
  time-consuming strategies
• Less than perfect but adaptive

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The Evolution of Intelligence Testing

• Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon (1905)
• first intelligence test in 1905, Binet-Simon
  Intelligence Scale was a test designed to single
  out youngsters in need of special
  trainingexpressed a childs score in terms of
  mental age for example, a 4 year-old child with
  a mental age of 6 performed like the average 6
  year-old on the test
• Lewis Terman (1916)
• Terman used a new scoring scheme, the
  intelligence quotient, dividing a childs mental
  age by chronological age and multiplying by 100.
  This made it possible to compare children of
  different ages.
• Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
• Intelligence Quotient (IQ) MA/CA x 100
• David Wechsler (1955)
• Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
• - Two innovations in intelligence
  testing
• First, his scales give more emphasis to nonverbal
  reasoning, yielding a verbal IQ, a performance
  IQ, and a full-scale IQ.
• Second, Wechsler devised a new scoring system
  based on the normal distribution the deviation
  IQ.

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What Do IQ Scores Mean?

• The normal distribution - a symmetric,
  bell-shaped curve that represents the pattern in
  which many human characteristics are dispersed in
  the population
• Distribution set so mean is 100
• Standard deviation
• the standard deviation shows how far a score is
  from the mean about 68 of scores fall within 1
  SD (plus or minus) from the mean
• Deviation IQ scores - A persons raw score is
  converted to a deviation score, which is the
  persons score on the scale where the mean is set
  to 100
• Conversion to percentile scores - A percentile
  score indicates the percentage of people who
  score at or below the score you obtained.

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Mean 100
1 S.D. 34 in either direction 2 S.Ds 14
I.Q. Scores 100 mean 1 SD - 15 2 SD - 30
Percentiles Mean 100 50th percentile
Figure 8.15 The normal distribution
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Reliability and Validity of IQ tests

• Although they are intended to measure potential,
  IQ tests inevitably assess both knowledge and
  potential
• Exceptionally reliable correlations into the
  .90s test retest
• Qualified validity valid indicators of
  academic/verbal intelligence, not intelligence in
  a truly general sense
• Correlations
• .40s.50s with school success
• .60s.80s with number of years in school
• Predictive of occupational attainment, debate
  about predictiveness of performance

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Heredity and Environment as Determinants of
Intelligence

• Heredity
• Twin and adoption studies - The basic rationale
  is that identical and fraternal twins develop
  under similar environmental conditions, but
  identical twins share more genesif identical
  twins end up more similar on a given
  characteristic, it must be genetic.
• Environment
• Adoption studies provide evidence that upbringing
  plays an important role in mental ability, as
  adopted children show some resemblance to their
  foster parents. Also, siblings reared together
  are more similar in IQ than siblings reared
  apart. In fact, entirely unrelated children who
  are reared together show resemblance in IQ.
• The Flynn effect - The Flynn effect is the trend,
  all over the developed world, for IQ scores to
  increase from one generation to the next.
  Hypotheses for why this occurs focus on
  environmental variables, as evolution does not
  operate in a generation

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Figure 8.19 Studies of IQ similarity
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Interaction Heredity and Environment The
concept of the Reaction Range - The environment
determines whether a person will fall at the
upper or lower end of their genetically
determined range.
Figure 8.21 Reaction range
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Cultural Differences in IQ

• Heritability as an explanation
• Aurthur Jensen (1969)
• These arguments have been challenged on a
  number of grounds. First, even if IQ is largely
  due to heredity, group differences may not be.
  Social class and socioeconomic disadvantage are
  correlated with ethnicity, so environmental
  variables are not equal between groups.
• Socioeconomic disadvantage as an explanation
• Kamins cornfield analogy socioeconomic
  disadvantage

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New Directions in the Study of Intelligence

• Biological Indexes and Correlates of Intelligence
• Reaction time and inspection time
• Brain size

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Cognitive Conceptualizations of
Intelligence Sternbergs triarchic theory and
successful intelligence
Figure 8.23 Sternbergs triarchic theory of
intelligence
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Expanding the Concept of IntelligenceGardners
multiple intelligences
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