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 it’s cognitive in the same sense as the internal stuff.

11. Or maybe: It seems like we’re 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 individual’s 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.