Status of conjunctive neurons

1
Status of conjunctive neurons

• Read from p. 88.
• Are higher-order conjunctive neurons amodal
  symbols?
• What determines what they activate and how the
  results will be read?

2
Change Blindness (Inattentional Blindness)

• Significant changes during saccades go unnoticed.
• Colors of hats worn by men in a picture even
  the heads themselves can switch and 70 of
  these go unnoticed (Grimes)
• Is this a matter of information being lost during
  the saccade?

3
Flicker paradigm
4

• Hypothesis the blank screen masks the change by
  disrupting processing at every location on the
  retina.
• The retina does not keep track of the location
  (thus the features) of any particular object.

5
Mud splash paradigm

• Create local movements by adding spots to the
  image as it changes.
• The changes produce local transients, but
  performance is still not great.
• Maybe the mud splash is directing attention away
  from the changes.

6
Attention

• This may be necessary, but not sufficient.
• 67 of subjects failed to detect changes in an
  actor through a simple change in action.
• Experiment using a student, asking for
  directions.

7

• Results are interesting because the level of
  change detection depends partly on motivation,
  whether the subjects are likely to care about the
  person asking directions.
• Performance significantly better when confederate
  and subjects are in the same peer group.

8
Is it a matter of encoding for content over
detail?

• Memory for pictures of scenes False positives
  when form is reversed.
• Subjects study pictures Some contain
  inconsistent objects. Changes in these objects
  are more likely to be noticed. This content is
  more likely to be noticed and encoded.

9
Movie-makers lore

• Eye gaze in movie editing people are better at
  change detection when they disrupt ways of
  tracking interpersonal dynamics (by tracking eye
  gaze).
• Consistent with the attention requirement.

10
Situated cognition and Extended Cognition

• Is there a broader moral with regard to situated
  cognition?
• Earlier argument (in connection with Ballard)
• If the external information plays the same role
  as internal information (ready to be used in
  cognitive processing), then its cognitive in the
  same sense as the internal stuff.

11

• Or maybe
• It seems like were visually conscious of
  external detail.
• Consciousness is right (that is, what seems like
  part of consciousness really is).
• Thus, the detail is part of our mental state.
• We do not represent the details internally.
• So, the mental state extends into the environment
  (the details are represented by the external
  world itself).

12
Role of Internal Abstract Representations

• If Simons and Levin are correct, the internal
  system is keeping tabs of objects in terms of
  general categories or roles (and the relations
  between them).
• Does this give the internal system a privileged
  role?

13
Narrative Comprehension

• Gernsbacher and associates (and others e.g.,
  Daneman and Carpenter) have shown that an
  individuals ability to comprehend written
  material is highly correlated with her ability to
  comprehend spoken-language material, as well as
  narratives presented only with pictures.

14
In addition

• Subjects
• --Mark the same episode structure
• --make the same inferences
• --and in free recall emphasize, elaborate, and
  omit the same details
• --Moreover, similar areas of parietal cortex are
  distinctively active.