Congitive Psycology

INDEX
S. No Topic Page No.

Week 1
1 Introduction to Cognitive Psychology 1
2 A Brief History of Cognitive Psychology 31
3 A Brief History of Cognitive Psychology (contd...) 58
4 Foundational Assumptions of Cognitive Psychology 82
5 Foundations of Cognitive Psychology 123
Week 2
6 Foundations of Cognitive Psychology 158
7 Approaches towards Cognitive Psychology 185
8 Modularity and Cognitive Neuropsychology 215
9 Basic Concepts in Cognitive Neuroscience 257
10 The Cerebral Cortex 307
Week 3
11 Basics of Research Methods 347
12 Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology 394
13 Sensation & Perception 437
14 Psychophysics: Measuring Sensation 453
15 Signal Detection Theory 499
Week 4
16 Physiology of Visual Perception 529
17 Representation in Perception 550
18 Approaches to Visual Perception - 1 576
Week 5
21 Theories of Object Recognition 664
22 Perception & Action 690
23 Auditory Perception 730
24 Auditory Perception - II 760
25 Attention - I 794
Week 6
26 Attention - II 824
27 Attention - III 845
28 Attention - IV 874
29 Memory- I 921
30 Memory-II 951
Week 7
31 Memory-III 993
32 Memory-IV 1040
33 Memory-V 1072
34 Memory-VI 1112
35 Memory- VII 1154
Week 8
36 Everyday Memory & Memory Errors 1206
37 Disorders for Perception & Attention 1273
38 Disorders of Memory 1328
39 Summary and Q & A 1386
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)
Course Title
Basic Cognitive Processes
Lecture: 1
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
So hello and welcome to this introductory course in cognitive psychology which is titled
basic cognitive processes.
(Refer Slide Time: 00:22)
I am Dr. Ark Verma, from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. I am in assistant
professor of psychology.
1
Now today’s lecture is titled introduction to cognitive psychology. We will talk about what
cognitive psychology is actually about. But before we get deeply involved in the topics in
cognitive psychology and what these basic cognitive processes are let us ask more basic
questions. The basic question is what is psychology?
2
Now if take this question around and you take this question to your colleagues, your family
members and people around you, you will actually get a variety of responses. For example,
some of them could tell you that psychology is about knowing and predicting people’s
behaviours.
3
In this comic strip here you might see that both the rat and the lab experimenters are having a
sense of controlling each other’s behaviour. They seem to know that they are doing
something which will actually predict this next person’s behaviour. That is one way; another
response that a lot of students in psychology get and a lot of students get actually, you know
really engaged by this is that a lot people would come and tell you that psychology is about
reading people’s mind.
But at some point or the other people would actually you know go out and say that, ‘Yes, I
am a student of psychology, but that is not meant that I can read your mind’. Psychology is
not really about reading people’s mind though it might help you in other ways. One of the
last answers about what is psychology you could get is that psychology could shape people’s
behaviour in social situations.
You might see this example here which says there is a placard which says that you know
please throw your litter on the ground or on the grass, but it actually gets the exact opposite
effect okay. So this is also one of the examples which psychology or one of the applications
which psychology has.
4
Moving ahead, but is psychology just about behaviour modification I would say no. It
actuallly offers you much more, we will see what.
5
What is the subject matter of psychology then.
6
Let us begin with the basic definition. Psychology as a science, is a science which studies
mental processes, experiences and behavious in different contexts. We will visit each of these
one by one. What are the mental processes we are talking about whether we are talking about
just brain activity or mental activity or mental functions. That part is not really clear, but we
can take some examples such as learning, remembering, perceiving feeling those kinds of
things. Those are also examples of what psychology helps you do or what psychology is
actually study.
7
Experiences, what are experiences?. Experiences are subjective feeling, you know what you
are feeling at any point in time what is your awareness, let us say for example, I am in this
particular room, I see people around me or I see this screen or I am seeing and talking to you
guys. Okay. Also psychology could actually help you understand experiences whether
somebody is experiencing a normal state or an altered state may be in under the influence of a
particular drug or something.
Or say for example, very simply put somebody is feeling rather energetic or active or
someothers may be feeling other passive or sad. All of these comes under the view of
psychology.
8
Coming to behaviours, what are behavious? Behaviours most simply put our responses or
reactions to the events and actions in the world. You know we are surrounded by agents, we
are surrounded by people and situations and how we actually come out acting is basicaly
what is a behaviour. It is rather a simple definition which I am taking here. Also behaviour
includes sometimes spontanious activity in order to achieve various goals or motives.
You might have a goal of becoming somebody, or you might have a goal of becoming a
cricketer, you will continue and you will have some behaviours which will lead on to you
becoming a crricketer. All of that also forms part of what is called behaviour. Behaviours can
be looked in two ways. One of the way is either simple or complex behaviour, what is the
simple behaviour.
Simple behaviour is say for example the most typical stimulus and reactions. Say for
example, if I ask you to touch the tip of a needle, you will probably trying to touch it, but you
will take your hand back very quickly. It is in response to you being pricked. On the other
hand, I could actually give you more complex behaviour that being I could ask you to go in
make a cup of coffee for me.
9
That is basically a complex behaviour which will actually involve a chain of very simple
behaviours. Okay .Another way in which you can actually look at behaviour is whether
behaviour is overt or covert. Covert behaviour is simply is the behaviour that can be observed
by others the actions that you do, the things which you say or say for example, the stage that
you experience and which you show people. That is overt behaviour.
Covert behaviour on the other hand is something that is typically going on in your mind
things that you would experiencing feeling of attraction, feelings of anger, disgust, shame all
of that or say for example, simply processing the world around you. All of that processing is
happening inside your head that is an example of covert behaviour.
Now moving ahead, this is rather commonly asked question whether psychology is a science
or it is just about common sense. We get ask this questions a lot of times. Now if
psychology were to be common sense, it would be found with a few problems. Say for
example, confirmation biases.
10
Now one of the ways in which you can describe a confirmation bias is that it is your internal
yes man. If you say for example, develop a particular opinion or a theory about something in
the world some person which you know, you will actually look for and collect evidence that
agrees with your perspective or that agrees with your point of view. That basically is a
confirmation bias okay.
11
Another problem with the common sense is basically sterio types. Okay. Say for example,
people have particular opinions and actually look at the world through those opinions. Say
for example, most common sterio type that you might have heard or come across of few
times is the aspect of, is for example the fact that females are bad dirvers. Okay. This is one
of the most common sterio types that you will hear.
So for example, if somebody comes and tells you that there has been an accident near your
house and there was a woman involved automatically some of you will make the conclusion
that the woman must be at fault in this accident. However, close examination and scientific
observation might tell you that this might not be the case. So psychology in that sense is
slightly different from common sense. I would say much different from common sense
actually okay.
12
Moving ahead, let us talk about how psychology is actually structured as a discipline. As a
discipline basically psychology seeks to understand and explain how the mind works and
how the different mental processes lead to different behaviours. Okay. Psychology tries also
in that sense to minimize biases and the explanation of behaviour and expeirence in a variety
of ways. You saw that how psychology is differnet from common sense in the last slide.
However, psychology also recognises the importance of subjectivity in some cases, though
always trying to develop a scientific understanding of those phenomena.
13
So psychology basically draws from two streams of knowledge. Okay. One which makes use
of methods in physical and biological sciences and the other which uses methods of social
and cultural sciences while studying a variety of psychosocial phenomenal. In the first case,
psychology focuses largely and biological principle to explain human behaviour thinks like
how is the brain function, what is the response to various neuro transmitters in the brain, and
stuff like that.
On the other hand, psychology focuses on how behavioural phenomenal can be explained in
terms of the interaction that takes place you know between the person and the social context,
how is the person behaving when he is alone, or compared to how does the person behave
any when he is confronted with the group of people when he is part of a larger group. Those
kind of phenomena.
14
As a science psychology applies what is called the scientific method? It emphasizes

objectivity it exphasizes that your opinion should be based on facts, your opinion should be
based on measurements that basically which is called empiricism. In it is go psychology uses
of particular method or it basically functions around a particular model which has been called
the hypothetic deductive model.
15
So let us have a look at this model for a while, this is what this model looks like. It is
basically begins with some kind of you know literature review, you actually look into
literature, you actually see what are the questions people have asked, you actually look to see
what are the papers people have published, what are the topics that people have been
interested in studying and to what extent they have actually studied them.
What are the questions relevant to those topics and how people have approached those
questions? Then basically you move on to formulating your own research questions on the
basis of whatever literature you actually started. You move on to design in empirical study it
could be an observational study or it could be basic experiment we will talk about these
things later as we go on into the course.
And then when once you conduct an experiment you gets some data, you get some
measurements. You analyse those data, you analyze that data and basically that helps you
reach particular conclusions. Once you reach a particular conclusion now you also have to
says something about that particular topic. This then gets added to this body of research
literature which people coming after you might again, to review to conduct their own
research questions.
16
That is what psychology broadly uses as a method. Once we move on we actually talk about
these kind of methods in more detail. Finally let us talk about what psychology attempts to
understand.
So psychology basically attempts to understand two things, mind and behaviour and basically
the questions in psychology which are asked around this dichotomy, what is mind, what is
behaviour okay. Let us kind of take a bit of a pause and ask these questions what is mind or
what are the functions of the mind or how does one really study his concept called mind.
This probably or these three questions basically form the core of the topic or core of the
topics in cognitive psychology that we will be focusing in this course.
17
So let us move from here and let us ask a question like what is cognitive psychology? What
are you going to study in this course? What am I going to talk about in the coming lectures?
18
Now cognitive psychology basically is been simply defined as a science is basically defined
as a branch of psychology which is devoted to the scientific study of the mind okay. What is
mind? You remember we asked this question. So let us actually move on, you know to a
simple definition. Let us try in construct a simple definition of what is mind.
19
Please note the following instances, the use of this term called mind. I will take out I will
actually says some sentences, one of them say for example, he was able to call to mind, what
he was doing on the day of the accident. Okay. In this sentence you see that the person is
referring to mind as memory. You know the person is actually if trying to bring to mind or
recall what is involved in that particular accident.
Let us take the second sentence; if you put your mind to it, I am sure you can solve that maths
problem. In this case you see the person is actually taking mind as a problem solver. So the
mind must be able to help you solve particular problems, the mind must be able to help you
take particular decisions, have a particular algorithm take particular steps and then reach a
final goal.
20
Moving on, I have not made up my mind yet; say for example I am of two minds about this.
This is basically again an instance in which mind is being used to make decisions or consider
or evaluate possibilities okay. So this is again one of the functions of the mind. Another
sentence here could be he is off sound, mind and body or when he talks about his encounter
with aliens, it seems like he is out of his mind okay.
Here you can see that the sense is that healthy mind is being associated with normal
functioning and non-functioning is being associated with abnormal functioning. Now these
are two different things parts of which we will definitely touch in this course, but to tell you
that basically the mind then it means something which is capable of taking good decisions or
say something which helps to stay connected with the reality okay. So what exactly then we
know about mind.
21
Let us you know on the basis of the statement we actually heard let us try and construct a
basic definition of mind. A simple definition would be the mind creates and controls mental
functions such as perception, attention memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and
reasoning. Now all of these terms basically are different mental functions which we will talk
about in more detail in the coming lectures.
Also you can look at the mind as a system that creates representations of the world. So that
we can act within it to achieve our particular goals. So mind is also motivator of sorts okay.
You will probably touch this definition as well when we are going to the further lectures.
22
We talked about these different mental functions, so let us ask what these different mental
functions are. To understand what these different mental functions are let me take you to a
practical example okay. So take a moment read what is here and I will just read it along with
you.
23
So as Raphael is walking across the campus talking to Susan on his cell phone about meeting
at the student union later this afternoon, he remembers that he left the book that she had lent
him at home. I can’t believe it he thinks, I can see it sitting there on my desk, where I left it.
I should have put it in my backpack last night when I was thinking about it.
As he finishes his call with Susan and makes a mental note to be on time for their
appointment, his thoughts shift to how he is going to survive after Wednesday when his car is
scheduled to go into the shop. Rending a car offers the most mobility, but is expensive.
Bumming rides from his roommate is cheap, but is rather limiting. Perhaps he will pick up a
bus schedule at the student union, he thinks, as he puts his cell phone back in the pocket.
Entering his anthropology class, he remembers that an exam is coming up soon.

Unfortunately, he still has a lot of reading to do, so he decides that they would not be able to
take Susan to the movies tonight as they had already planned. Because he needs time to
study, as the lecture beings, Raphael is anticipating, with some anxiety his meeting with
Susan and how he is going to tell her about this decision.
Now you see this is a description of a lot of small little thinks which are happening at one
particular moment in somebody’s mind. You can actually put yourself in the situation at any
point in time or throughout the day you can pick up yourself and just examine one such
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instance you will realise that at one particular point in time a lot of different things are going
on through your mind. So let us try and see what all is happening here, what all the mental
functions are taking place.
This is the figure of what different things Raphael is doing as he is walking across the
campus, so we will see that is understanding conversation, because he is on the phone. He is
visualizing his book on the desk which he left, he is thinking that he has to be on time for the
appointment may be because that will lead complications. He is also remembering Susan’s
book. By the way he is walking in the campus.
So he is actually perceiving there the campus so as as to avoid bumping into people and
falling off also you saw that he was thinking about his car problem. So he is doing variety of
things, he is doing, he is basically engaged in something called complex behaviour at this
point in time. So what all is Raphael doing actually let us boil down to that.
25
He is perceiving his his environment, he is basically seeing people on campus walking. He is

also listening to Susan talking on the phone. He is paying attention to one thing after the
other person approaching his left what Susan is saying and how much time is left for the
class. So he is actually paying attention to these different facts at the same time while he is
involved in this conversation on the phone.
Also Raphael is remembering, he is remembering things from the past that he told Susan that
he was going to return her book today, he is thinking of how he will get the book back or say
for example, how he is left the book on his table. Those kinds of things he is actually going
through in his memory. He is also doing something interesting; he is distinguishing different
items in a category.
When he thinks about different possible forms of transportation, so he actually is comparing

these possibilities whether he should take a rental car, whether he should to take help get a
ride with his roommate or say for example, he should go with the bus. He is actually also
evaluating possibilities in here also he is visualizing.
26
He is basically thinking of where he had left the book on his desk, he can actually see okay I
left the book there; I am just forgot to keep it in my backpack while I slept in the last night.
He is understanding and producing language something very complex is actually thinking to
himself understanding what Susan is saying and also answering her back. So he is doing
these three things at the same point in time.
He is understanding whatever Susan saying, whatever he is thinking and also he is actually

producing language while talking back to Susan. Also you saw that Raphael is working to
solve a problem as he thinks about how to get to places while his car is in the shop. He
actually has a problem at hand and while the conversation is definitely going on, he also
needs to evaluate you know these different possibilities.
Finally he actually comes to a decision, so decision making is also involved here. He decides
to postpone, he is going to the movies with Susan tonight, because he has to prepare for the
exam that is going to come afterwards. So you will see in a particular moment in time, we
are involved in a variety of mental functions. We are involved in variety of these different
decisions we have to take; we are also doing a lot of things at the same point in time. While
you watching this lecture on your laptop or your computer, you are actually doing the same
thing as probably Raphael is doing in this particular example.
27
You are remembering something, you are perceiving the video you are listening to the audio
trying to understand what I am saying also thinking to yourself, you are also making
decisions on whether say for example, to continue where you like the course or whether you
do not like it. Those different kinds of things you are doing at this same moment. This
basically is what is the crux of cognitive psychology. This is basically what we are going to
study in the coming lectures.
So if this interest you it might actually help to hang on. Now let us come to the end, let us try
and talk about whether and what cognitive psychology actually does. Let us take into account
the earlier definition of what cognitive psychology is. The definition of what mind is and the
definition of mental functions and we can conclude that cognitive psychology is the study of
mental functions okay.
Is the study of mental functions for example, attention, learning, memory, visualization or
mental imagery, it is a study of language, it is a study of problem solving when you have a
problem at hand. And it is also the study of decision making okay. So in cognitive
psychology these are the different topics, these are basically the names of the different
chapters we will actually be studying more and more detail okay.
28
Each of these are specific cognitive functions and we will actually look into how do we study
these different cognitive functions, what are the different ways of understanding these
cognitive functions and so on. So with this in mind we will actually go on to the next lecture
in a next time which is basically going to be about history of cognitive psychology. We will
talk about what is the history of the thought which basically governs cognitive psychology.
We will actually look into a bit of history of psychology, how psychology develop from
philosophy. We will also look into how cognitive psychology or this cognitivist perspective
of psychology emerge from the earlier schools of psychology. That is all we will see you in
the next class.
Acknowledgement
Ministry of Human Resources & Development
Prof. Satyaki Roy

Co – ordinator, NPTEL IIT Kanpur
NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
29
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia
Shivendra Kumar Tiwari
an IIT Kanpur Production
@copyright reserved
30
Course Title
Lecture: 02
A Brief History of Cognitive Psychology
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Welcome to the second lecture of the series of this course called basic cognitive processes.
I am Dr. Ark Verma, assistant professor of psychology in IIT, Kanpur.
31
The title of today’s lecture is a brief history of cognitive psychology. In this lecture, we will
talk about the historical antecedents of cognitive psychology. But even before we do that let
us spend a moment to think about why history of cognitive psychology is important. In
today’s lecture, what I will do is I will you through the development of the ideas of cognitive
psychology.
I will talk about how the ideas related to mind and behaviour originated in the ancient Greek
schools of philosophy. We will also see how later philosophers contributed to the growth of
this idea and then we will going to various schools of thought that emerged in psychology
from their will go to the place where the ideas about cognition and cognitive psychology, the
ideas about mental processes take shape and that basically leads to the current and
contemporary form of enquiry that is cognitive psychology.
Now why is doing all of this necessary. Why do I want to actually do this in today’s lecture?
There are two simple reasons, one of them is that going through this historical chart of how
these ideas developed what we will be doing is, we will be seeing how a particular idea which
seems to rather commonsensical has been approached through a variety of perspectives from
ancient times to the times to the more recent times.
32
We have to talk about also that how various people contributed in the growth and the
development of this idea. There have been contributors from a variety of disciplines towards
this discipline of cognitive psychology, and in this lecture today I would ask you to make
those connections.
So it will be very important that you pay attention to how this particular idea of cognitive
psychology actually develops from philosophy onwards, and it comes and with the inputs
from even fields like artificial intelligence of computer science takes form of enquiry which
is known currently as cognitive psychology. Let us go to the roots of this word called
psychology.
The word psychology basically derives from the combination of two Latin words. The first
word basically is psyche or soul. The second word is logia which is the study of. So
psychology basically defined means the study of the soul. Now I would like you to take a
moment and wonder what soul would mean here. Basically by referring to the soul, those
Asian Green philosophers were basically talking about what we probably today refer as the
mind.
Anything that a person does we actually look for causes, we actually look for reasons, why
and how the person is being able to do that or accomplish that particular behaviour. All of
33
that in ancient times was basically attributed to this thing called the soul. So that is why it is
logical to expect people to start talking about the soul as the seat of human behaviour. We
will see how that actually pans out in ancient philosophy.
So origins of psychology then basically can be actually trace down to these two more basic
disciplines which are philosophy and physiology. Now, philosophy as you know is a
discipline that seeks to explore and explain human nature through introspection. It also uses
the tools of thought like epistemology, logic etc. Now the subject matter of philosophy if you
see is basically thought okay.
So philosophy is concerned with how a human behaviour, or how this world can be explained
by analysing and reanalysing what we think okay. And philosophy also uses tools to actually
analyse this process of thought. Say for example, tools like logic. Physiology on the other
hand focuses on the body. It is a discipline that is dedicated to understanding the functioning
of the human body, the biological aspects of it how a particular organ is constituted how it
functions and those questions.
34
So psychology you will see basically focuses on the interaction of the mind and body. That is
why psychology takes into account approaches both from philosophy and physiology. So this
is basically what the roots of psychology are.
35
Now surprisingly actually if you go back in time one of the first reported experiments in
psychology can actually be traced back down to the Egyptian times. There is no reason to
believe that similar experiments were not being done in the different other civilizations.
36
But here is this experiment. An ancient king of Egypt, as far back as the seventh century B.C
actually wanted to conduct the first experiment. He had this idea that if children will raise in
isolation from infancy and were given no instruction in language of any kind, the language
that they actually end up speaking will be the original language of man or the language of the
original human civilizations. So he wanted to test this out okay.
So he actually raises a child in isolation and does that and basically finds out that the child
ends up not speaking anything. So his hypothesis is actually not confirmed. But even
though, this experiment fails to support the king’s hypothesis observes that it does illustrate
perhaps the first evidence in written history that as long as around 27 hundred years ago there
was at least one individual with this highly original notion that mental processes could be
systematically investigated first.
And mental process could be in a studied and we have something to do with the body okay.
So this is a very interesting piece of anecdotal evidence that actually tells us that people have
been intrigued with this subject matter of human behaviour of human mind and that is
something which is basically been around with us for a long, long time.
37
Now let us visit the philosophical Antecedent of the psychology that basic thought processes
in psychology that you know that actually gave rise to the questions we ask now.
38
You might be aware that one of the basic, one of the first things in earlier days when,
somebody was trying to explain a mental illness of thought was that person acts who is
basically experiencing mental illness of kind why he is basically effected by some demon
some ghost or you know some spirits. Now those kind of explanations were very popular in
which led to things like which hunting and people being prosecuted and those kind of things.
Hypocrites, as far back as 460 or 300 BC basically was one of the first to process that mental
illness was not caused by demons, but by genuine physical conditions. So you see hypocrites
is basically was the first who was making this connection between the mind and the body.
Hypocrites actually worked by dissecting human corpses and living organisms and through
his experiments in these kinds of physiology concluded that it is the mind that control the
body.
Further he proposes that mind basically resides in the head or in the brain. Now this is one of
the first times that actually behaviour is being linked to something with body.
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Another person Plato, another philosopher who is basically also one of the most influential
philosopher of all time suggested that reality basically exists in our minds completely and that
head is the seat of the mind much like hypocrites as observed recently. Now Plato is basically
suggesting that knowledge is gained through thinking and analysis of thought and this is what
basically is our effort to understand this world or the happenings of this world.
So Plato basically suggests that minds and body are different things, but they might interact
in some way or the other. Due to his emphasis on this whole process of thinking and thought
as the source of knowledge, Plato has been termed as a rationalist. Moving ahead, Aristotle
who is basically a disciple of Plato actually felt quite the opposite. Aristotle felt that mind
and body were one and the same contrary to what his teacher Plato has talked about.
Aristotle actually says that we can understand the mind by studying the body. So he is saying
that mind and body are basically the same thing, and if you studying the body you might
eventually end up studying the mind as well. He says that relying on concrete objects and
actions rather than thoughts should be our scope of enquiry or should be our scope of study.
He says that reality lies in the concrete world. His methods were basically built up on
observations of concrete facts numbers and those kinds of things and that is why Aristotle
was regarded as an empiricist.
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Now let us move a more modern bunch of thinkers philosophers, but not from the Greek era,
but from somewhere close to us in time.
41
One of the most influential philosophers who basically really shaped the subject matter of
psychology was Rene Descartes. Rene Descartes basically was a French philosopher and
mathematician. He said that introspection and reflection are better methods than observation.
Now Descartes you might want to know basically believed that our observations are a result
of the working of our senses.
And he believe that these sense can actually make mistakes. He talked about particular kinds
of illusions where in your senses will end up making mistake say for example, if stare at point
of light for a few minutes and after that you will experience sensation of darkness even
though there is no darkness outside. So Descartes basically believed that because our senses
can be fooled or our senses can actually make mistakes we should actually rely on
observation rather than the information coming to us from our senses.
Descartes said that mind and body are two separate things, though he said that these two
thing interact through a seat in the head, pineal gland. Descartes relate so much importance
on thought and analysis and that importance can actually be seen reflected in this statement
that he makes which is cogito ergo sum which basically translates to I think therefore I am.
So for Descartes the source of reality of this world basically lies in your thought and in your
analysis of the world. Using which you understand the happenings of the world.
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John Locke came after Descartes; he basically said that the relationship between the mind and
the body is sort of an equal relationship wherein these two things are the two forms of one
and the same thing. Locke basically says that mind depends upon the body through its senses
and the body depends upon the mind to process and store this information that is gained
through the senses.
So Locke actually is giving something you know which is you might say rather evolutionary
study because he is actually going on and saying that mind and body are one and the same
thing and there is definite way through is this interaction is taking place. Locke was also an
empiricist and he believed in the thought of tabula rasa. Tabula rasa basically means that all
human beings are born as blank slates in this world.
Everything that they learn, everything that they finally achieve or accomplish any kind of
behaviour is learned by their interaction with this world.
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Another important philosopher was Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant. Basically says the
human have a set of faculties. Things like mental functions we talked about in the last class.
So he said that these faculties which are your senses the faculties of understanding, faculties
of reason. These are the tools which basically work together to control this link between the
mind and body.
So by now it is clear that mind and body are two things may be same, may be separate, but
there is an interaction certainly going on between them. And different people now are
proposing different ways in which this interaction is taking place. So Immanuel Kant
basically says that these are the faculties these are the mental functions through which there is
interaction between mind and body that is going on.
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Now let us a brief pause, let us look back and let us see where we have reached from ancient
Greece to more contemporary philosophers or not only contemporary to modern
philosophers. So early thinkers, these early thinkers which we talked about have basically
laid out the broad subject matter of what psychology is. And the subject matter is nothing
other than this relationship between the mind the body.
We will elaborate upon this issue in more detail when we are actually talking about the
foundational assumption in cognitive psychology, but by this point you should be clear that
this is something which is most important to ask questions to cognitive psychologists, even
now people are constantly investigating what is mind, how does it relate to the body. Mind in
the earlier days could be studied through various ways; observable behaviour was to be one
of the more important ways.
Also body on the other hand could be studied by the biological or the neural substrates. So if
you want to study the connection between the mind and the body and say for example you
want to investigate the body which is basically the brain, you have fields like neuroscience
which will actually tell you about how the brain is constructed or how the brain really affects
your behaviour.
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Mind on the other hand is this body of mental functions which we will see how they evolve
and how they are actually structured. Now this entire preface of philosophy actually led to
development of various kinds of thought or various kinds of thought systems in psychology.
These thought systems have been organized as many as schools of thought each school of
thought has one or more prominent thinkers and it is these thinkers whose opinion forms the
basis of this entire school of thought. So we will see we will examine how these different
schools of thought contributed to the growth and to the evolution of something that is
cognitive psychology.
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One of the first and the foremost schools of thought in psychology was structuralism.
Structuralism was founded by Wilhelm Wundt who is basically a psychologist in Germany
who also established the first psychology lab in Leipzig, in Germany. Wilhelm Wundt
basically focussed on the nature of consciousness. He actually wanted to explain what
consciousness is, he actually wanted to explain the components which form human
experience.
Wilhelm Wundt believed that it was possible to analyse the basic elements of the mind and
conscious experience. If you talk to Wundt, he might be able to tell you that the feeling of
happiness is composed of X, Y and Z smaller components, or the experience of actually
being in a particular place in a particular time can actually be boiled down to these smaller
components.
On the basis of this main stream of thought Wundt found this a school which is basically
known as structuralism.
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Now structuralism basically aimed to identify the basic elements or of the cognitive
psychological experience. They wanted to create something similar to the periodic table
which basically had all of these elements of consciousness. Structuralism used the method of
introspection to attempt this map. They basically in a typical Wundt Ian lab if you are a
participant there the psychologist might just ask you to relax to sit down, and to report as
truthfully as possible detailed manner as possible whatever your experiencing at any point in
time.
Or for example whatever you are experiencing while you are engaged in a particular task.
Say for example you have given a flower to a see, and you are actually experiencing this
flower you might want to a record that you are actually seeing a shape you are seeing a
particular colour, you are smelling a particular order and you actually feeling a particular
texture when you touching or holding that flower. This is the detail; this is the componential
structure of experience that the structuralists were actually emphasizing on.
48
Further structuralists were actually using things like reaction times as a measure to
systematically assist the workings of the mind. So what they would do is they would actually
try and log while your experiencing certain steps and with that they will deduce how much
time a particular step took and they could actually try and deduce then what are the basic
components of any experience and how much time it took everyone to go through those sets
of experiences.
Say for example if I actually play a sound in your head phones say for example if I play a
sound here and if I ask you to identify that sound one of the first that you will be able to
register is that there is a sound being played. So the first thing that you will do is actually
deduction of the fact there is a sound. This basically refers to what sensation is. The second
thing that you might go on to experience is that you might be able to actually recognize the
sound or the song let us say which I am playing.
This recognition of that song is basically identification that is what perception is when the
knowledge is in the scope of your awareness. So Wundt and his structuralism basically found
that identification took longer than detection. You might logically try and connect that first
you detect it takes a bit of less time, and then you try and identify what the song is, it takes a
bit more after you have really deducted at there is a sound at least.
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So this is how the Wundtian school of a psychologist distinguish between sensation and
perception. There are actually following or rather scientific method. Edward B. Titchener
one of the disciples of Wilhelm Wundt basically claimed to identify more than 40000
sensations such us vision, hearing, taste and so many others.
This method or this approach followed by the structuralists were rather other rigorous and
very, very scientific. They were actually trying to quantifying mental events. They were
actually trying to quantify the human experience. But they had a bit of problem because the
main method they were actually using was that of introspection. Now you may take a pause
and ask yourself what is wrong with introspection.
And I might now tell you that introspection basically one of the things that is wrong with
introspection is that knowledge gained through introspection is not verifiable. Science is
about verifying proving to the others that something exist, in that sense introspection was
probably not the best of the methods to follow that is one of the short comings that this
structuralists schools of psychologist were having.
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Let us move to the next school Functionalism. Many of few would have heard that William
James is sometimes refers to as the father of psychology. William James basically belongs to
this school of thought which is termed as functionalism. Now functionalism is characteristic
in a way that functionalist seeks to not only understand what people do which the
structuralists were also trying to do.
But the functionalist would also concern with why people do certain things. Why do certain
behaviours take place okay. So they were interested in studying how the mind works, yes but
also why the mind works as it does. So the questions the structuralist and the functionalist
were asking was slightly different and let us say a bit more advance then the questions earlier
asked.
51
The functionalist believed in using whatever methods that would have answer a particular
researcher’s questions. They are not really too much about the methods but more about the
kind of questions that are being asked. Now this movement or this stands of functionalism
gradually leads to what is known as pragmatism. Now pragmatism is also one of the popular
approaches in psychology which basically is concerned about the fact that knowledge is
valuable only for what it is usefulness.
You might know certain thing you might have certain skills, but what are you using them for.
That is basically what is the functionalist wanted to say. So pragmatist wanted to say. The
pragmatist therefore would be interested in studying phenomena in a way that how this
phenomenon will help you do attain certain things. Say for example if you ask pragmatist to
study language pragmatist would want to study language to actually understand how
language helps you communicate your thoughts.
So they would really want to study language, but only to the extent that it tells you or that it
helps you accomplish particular kinds of behaviour.
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Now from structuralism and functionalism gradually they developed another school of
psychology or another school of thought in psychology that is associationism. Another
influential way of thinking in psychology was associationism basically examines how the
elements of the mind like ideas, feelings, etc., can become associated with one another.
One of the way say for example how thing is get associated with each other is contiguity or
happening close in time, say for example some of you might while you are going somewhere
there is a cat that crosses your path. May be just after the cat cross your path you meet with
an accident. Now just because these two events happen close in time together, you might
want to or some of us might want to really link these two events.
So this is one of the ways people generally link two events that happen close in time together.
Another way could be by virtue of contrast. So there could be feelings or ideas that could be
exact opposite of each other. Say for example, feeling very elated or feeling very depressed
or feeling happy or feeling sad, or say for example things like experience of hotness or
experience of coldness. So this is also one of the ways we actually link two ideas or two
experiences together.
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Hermann Ebbinghaus was one of the earlier psychologists who basically use these
associationism more systematically. He studied his own mental processes and made up a list
of nonsense syllables that consisted of a consonant, a vowel and then a consonant. He
basically constructed list of words like these zat, cax, nad, etc., which basically he tried to
later memorize.
He was basically he was very careful, he took careful note of how long it took him to
memorize each of these list, how many errors he would make and he recorded the response
times as well.
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Through these self observations Ebbinghaus studied how people learn to remember material
through process like rehearsal which is basically the conscious repetition of material
something which we mostly and commonly do. Through his experience Ebbinghaus actually
finds out that it is the first few repetitions of the first early form of rehearsal that actually
leads to most learning by later times at rehearsal basically do not give us that kind of output.
55
Edward L. Thorndike was another psychologist who was basically working with these
principles of associationism. He basically was interested in investigating the rule of
satisfaction; he says that he basically gives out of principle called the principle of law of
effect which says that a stimulus will tend to produce a certain response over time if an
organism is rewarded for that response.
So an organism basically learns to respond to a particular stimulus in a given situation if it is

rewarded to behave like. Say for example, if there is a kid and you want to teach the kid
something or say for example if there is a animal or a pet and you want to teach that animal
something, you might want to teach that animal to stand up on his two hind legs.
Now you will have to reward the animal repeatedly over time to actually make him learn that
kind of behaviour. Now we will wrap up over here and we will in the next class talk about
other aspects in the history of psychology that finally led to the shaping of what cognitive
psychology actually is. Thank you.
Acknowledgement
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Prof. Satyaki Roy
NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia
@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Lecture: 3
A Brief History of Cognitive Psychology
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Welcome to the third lecture of the series basic cognitive processes, I am Dr. Ark Verma
assistant professor of psychology in IIT Kanpur.
So the third lecture basically is also about the brief history of cognitive psychology if you might
remember that in the last lecture we were talking about how cognitive psychology developed
from philosophy. We actually talked about some of the earlier philosophers like Hippocrates,
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Aristotle, Plato, we also talked about modern philosophers like Descartes, Locke and Kant and
we basically then moved on this various schools of thought that exists in psychology.
We talked about structuralism, William Wundt and how they wanted to chart a periodic table of
human experience. We talked about functionalist like William James who wanted to know why
people behave the way they do. And then we actually moved on to associationism,
associationism basically talks about how people connect ideas or events together in time. We
saw how Ebbinghaus basically connected, applied these principles of associationism to actually
see how a person could learn certain information using processes called rehearsals.
We also talked about the principle of law of effect given by Edward Thondaik in which he says
that the person learns a particular behaviour if he or she is rewarded for doing that. Let us today
move on to another school of psychology which had deep impact on how cognitive psychology
developed as a subject. Now this school of psychology commonly referred to as behaviorism
basically evolved out of associationism itself.
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This people at the same time as the associanist Edward Thorndike and Hermann Ebbinghaus
had started doing experiments with animals. And investigating the various stimulus and
response associations. These experiments basically led to this emergence of the field called
behaviorism, behaviorism focus primarily on the relationship between these stimulus between
the behavioral responses and the environmental stimuli.
The idea was to move towards the physical from the mental. If you remember the last lecture the
discourse was mainly about what is mental, the mental processes the relationship between the
mind and body and that primarily because the scope of thought was developing in philosophy.
Gradually it came down to psychology where again you find the structuralist were also
concerned more with the mental than with the physical realities.
It was the associanist who actually started talking about physical events in response to stimuli
that the environment presented.
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Let us talk about this Russian Physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Now Ivan Pavlov basically was a
physiologist, who actually was studying the digestive system of dogs, and he had kept a dog in
his lab and there was a technician who used to feed the dog regularly or periodically. Now what
Pavlov actually finds out that whenever the technician comes to feed the dog the dogs actually
starts salivating there is a salivary response when actually they just see the person who feeds
them when they see this technician.
The technician might not be carrying food at that point in time. It is still in anticipation that may
be we are going to get food that these dogs are salivating. Something interesting is happening
here, these organisms are learning a particular response from seeing a particular event the event
of coming of this technician. Pavlov basically then went on to study this pair more
systematically.
He found out that if you pair an almost unrelated stimulus to a stimulus that is naturally eliciting
a particular kind of a response people can be made to learn the pairing of these two stimuli. Say
for example, let us take an example here, if you actually present food the response will be the
salivating response. What you do is you start presenting the food along with the sound of a
particular bell.
Now you see that because the bell is presented with the food the salivating response is still there.
However, if you repeat this sparing few times and consistently you will find that the salivating
response can be elucidated by using the bell alone itself. Now this pairing basically or this form
of learning which is happening here was termed as classical conditioning. This is one of the
central tenets of physiology which was basically investigated and principals of conditioning were
developed by this Russian physiologist called Ivan Pavlov.
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So this is basically the setup were you can see that the dog is actually tied down there is an
observation screen, there is also a place to device place there to count the drops of saliva. So this
is a typical set up in which you can actually measure or investigate these classical condoning
phenomena.
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Let us move ahead, another person actually who took this field of behaviorilism much further or
is suppose are basically supposed to be the founder of behaviorism was John Watson. John
Watson was an interesting psychologist, because he believed that the premise physiology should
only be the observable facts the observable behavior. He said that it is not possible to objectively
study the workings of the mind.
Because if you think he might make some sense, you know the process of thinking the process of
feeling etc. cannot be really objectively measured, and that is preciously what the point Watson
was making. He said that because we cannot measure these things there is no thermometer that
can measure weather you feel sad or happy, then maybe we should not study them at all may be
psychology as a science should not concern itself with things that you cannot really measure.
So psychologist basically from this brand of school of thought called behaviorism basically
viewed the mind as a black box. What they wanted about was that you present a particular
stimulus and you get a particular response, and there is this black box in the middle. We should
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not be concern with this block box at all because we cannot actually engage with the black box.
So they basically were more interested in looking at how different kinds of inputs or how
different kinds of stimulus can be presented and what kinds of responses they would generate.
So they would basically manipulate the times and the pairings and the different kinds of parings
there could be in a particular stimulus and particular kind of a response. And that is what the
subject matter of psychology should be according to the behaviorists.
B.F Skinner was another of behaviors very influential and what he was using was the system pre
enforcements and punishments. So he basically said that if you have to really teach somebody a
particular skill if you have to make somebody learn a particular skill you might need to re inforce
them. So you might need to add positive rewards to re enforce people to learn something or say
for example, if you want people to unlearn something if you want people to stop behaving in
particular ways, then what you should do is, you could give them consistent punishments.
So this system of reinforcements and punishments was seen as the way of achieving learning and
B.F Skinner actually believed that this is one of the ways in which all human behaviour is
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learned. He said that it is only through a system of reinforcements or punishments that humans
learn whatever abilities skills and behaviors that they actually do. So he use these principles to
develop theory about how to teach children and create peaceful societies.
One of the very popular quotes from skinner is that if you give me a child, and if you give in a
perfect conditions to raise the child and you ask me to make him any body from a scientist, to an
artist, to an actor if you give me the right kind of conditions I will actually be able to do that.
This scheme of reinforcements and punishments and this form of learning actually came to be
known as operant conditioning.
Another school of psychology which was rather slightly more removed from this behaviorism
was that of Gestalt psychology. Now you have to be slightly patient and you know you might
want to recall all what we have studied still now and you will see what the behaviorists are trying
to tell you is something you know which might be a bit disturbing for people to observe. What
they are trying to tell you is humans are no better than animals or no better than machines
because if they are given consistent stimuli with particular time pattern or you say for example
with a particular contiguity they will reliably and predictably produce the same responses.
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If you give a thought about yourself and how you behave or you know the behavioral patterns of
any persons that you know you might realize that is not really the case. So there was this
response growing up towards behaviorism and people gradually were also realizing that, if you
really have to understand human behaviour you have to talk about internal events you have to
talk about things that happen in the mind.
A behaviorist generally would actually you know desist from doing so, and discourage you
actively from doing so. But there was a another school of psychology that was actually that came
very close in time after behaviorism which brought the focus back to internal events this school
of psychology was the Gestalt school of psychology, this school of psychologist like Wolfgang
Kohler and some others who are actually in Germany, and this is very popular school of
psychology in Germany.
They basically said that we will best understand psychological phenomena when we view them
as organized structured holes. So even though, they might be constructed of variety of
components we would want to really view them as holistic patterns. So your experiences even
though you might say that they are constructed of different components of experience, but if you
want to really understand you want to understand them as wholes okay.
So according to this view we cannot fully understand behaviour when we only break the
phenomena down into smaller components. Let us take an example, I was saying earlier when I
was talking about structuralism that if you have to describe your experience of looking at a
flower, you might want to talk about its color, you might want to talk about its order, you might
want to talk about its shape, or the texture.
But a gestalt psychology would ask you that is the color of the flower, the experience of the
flower in itself or let us say is the shape of the flower, the experience of the flower in itself? You
would actually be forced to conclude then that it is neither of these components but all of the
components put together that constitute your experience of the flower that is pretty much what
the Gestalt psychologists wanted us to understand.
66
So they believed in this maxim called the whole is more than the sum of its parts which makes a
lot of sense if u see how people understands behavior. We cannot so, as I talked about this
example already.
67
So let us move on to the emergence of cognitive psychology. Now you see we have actually
charted the growth of the entire background philosophy to modern philosophers to these various
schools of psychology which are structuralism, functionalism, associationism, and behaviorism.
Behaviorism by far is actually the most radical school of thought, and it was the most popular
school of thought in psychology in the early 19th century.
But things were changing around that time people were gradually realizing as I said from the
Gestalts psychologists onwards that you have to really, in order to get complete explanation of
the human experience or in order to get the complete understanding of human behaviour you
cannot do without really talking about internal mental events. The behaviorists were very against
this proposal and they were continuously engaged in actually coming up with explanations which
typically consisted of particular stimulus response associations.
And how this stimulus response associations lead on to more complex behaviors. So let us see
how cognitive psychology emerged from all of this background.
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Now by the early 1950’s there was a movement called the cognitive revolution that was slowly
taking place. Cognitivism basically is this idea that rejects the notion is basically you know this
idea that rejects the notion that psychology should not study mental processes, because they are
unobservable. Instead cognitivism actually looks to develop methods and ways to study the
internal workings of the mind okay.
So this field basically focuses on specifically studying mental processes those that cannot be
observed, but through engineers’ ways through engineers experiments designed to study exactly
those things those workings of the mind.
69
There was a few proceeding, there were a few events that actually led on to the development of
the cognitive psychology let us visit them slowly one by one. So one of them was this influence
of psychobiology, you might remember John Locke trying to say that mind and body are one in
the same thing okay. So jumping right from there there were few developments going on in
psychobiology that were actually telling people that it indeed it could be the brain which could
be the seat of human behavior.
One of these prominent theorist in this field was actually Karl Lashley, Karl Lashley was earlier
a disciple of, earlier a student of BF Skinner and he basically went on to challenge the
behaviorists view field. He basically said that it’s foolish to assume that the human brain is a
passive organism, and it is just reacting to this contingencies this stimulus response associations.
He basically said and he believed that brain is an active and is a dynamic organizer of human
behavior.
And Lashley basically sought to understand how this macro organization of the brain how this
organization of the various parts of the brain and the various activities at the brain does go on to
70
form this complex behavior. You know we engage in a lot of very complex behavior. Let us say
a musical performance or say for example writing a poem or for example playing a particular
game now Lashley was interested in actually understanding how various simple events or very
simple stance of behavior combined together to form this complex activities
That humans are engaged in so Lashley did lot of experiments with rats in his lab and he
actually found out or he actually concluded that memory is not really localized in a particular
part of the brain it is basically distributed so you see that this connection is made that brain might
be the seat of behaviour which is your memory and again which is un observable but not only
that but also that memory is distributed across the various regions of the brain by this time
Lashley actually gave a view to all the people those who are interested in who were working in
psychology that actually you could link the brain and behaviour actually you could make a link
between the mind and body and this is therefore considered to be one of the most important steps
or one of the most important preceding steps which led to the development of what is called
cognitive psychology this is Karl Lashley.
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Another influential scientist who was basically working in the psycho biologicaltradition was
Donald Hebb. Donald Hebb basically proposed the same concept of cell assemblies as the basis
of learning in the brain. Donald Hebb basically proposed that the cell is assemblies which are
these coordinated neural structures that developed through frequent stimulation. For example if
you show a person particular shape or if you show the person particular line slanted or horizontal
line.
There will be this assembly of cells that will be registering the different aspects of the line
whether it is a colored line or thick or a thin line or it is tilted or a straight line all of those cells
might eventually start lighting up together or start firing together. Donald hebb was saying that it
is this firing together of neurons that leads to learning, so they basically says that these cells
develope over time the ability develops the overtime of one neuron to start or to stimulate firing
in a connective neuron so once these connections are formed for example there is a first neuron
which registers property.
A and then it leads to firing of the second neuron and all of these connections gradually lead to
formation of a neuron assembly that which is responsible for you learning any particular kind of
behaviour. Another interesting event after this emergence of psycho biology as interesting field
of thought was the review of a book which BF Skinner wrote and this book was titled verbal
behaviour.
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Now if you remember I have saying that this behaviourist, the behaviousrist psychologists was
still around 1950 and 1960 and what they were actually doing is they were attempting
explanations of human behaviour through this set of associations’ reinforcement punishments
and all of that. BF Skinner basically wrote a book titled verbal behaviour in which he actually
explained the entire chart of language acquisition and language hues has built upon these
stimulus response associations.
Linguist Noam Chomsky 2005 was a round at the and then he wrote a very scathing review of
BF Skinners idea. He actually took the book apart while contesting the most fundamental all the
fundamental assumptions or all the fundamental proposals that BF Skinner was making.
Chomsky actually you know on the radical extreme said that language or acquisition or usage of
language has both characteristics it has the biological foundations while also it has the creative
foundation so they actually said that it is not mere learning or its nor mere reinforcement or
punishment that is not leading us to learn language that is actually both things,
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It is the biological substrates also the creative parts also the part that is unique human that is
leading to us learning any language. Imagine say for example if I come and tell you that
whatever sentences you have actually learned are those that were taught to you by your parents
or those that you learn by going through this stimulus responses associations you say something
you are rewarded make you know make a mistake you were punished. How much of language
you were actually learn like that. This is basically what Chomsky said. So he pointed out,
likewise he pointed out the infinite number of
sentences that we can produce by ease without having learned them specifically or without
having either kind of conditioning or instructions. Okay. So in this basically Chomsky while he
wrote this scathing review of verbal behaviour he made a very specific point he made the point
that there are biological you know contributions to the human behaviour also he made the point
that human brain is something that is actively processing information that is actively you know
creating something that is new which in the behaviorist paradigm was considered impossible.
One of the reasons why they did not really want to study that.
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So thereby you see that Chomsky defies this notion that we learn language through this
reinforcement or punishment schedules.
A similar idea to what Chomsky was you saying is basically also presented by Edward Tolman.
Now Edward Tolman was doing these experiments of learning with these rats and he actually
found out that rats do not learn to navigate through maze mainly by the point that where they
are reinforced or where the food is provided they are actually processing the entire you know
information of the maze and they are actively learning and storing the information so he
basically said something called latent learning that something having there is some kind of
cognitive map being, generated in that sense again the brain is put forward or mind is put
forward as an active processor of information rather than or instrument that is just recording
stimulus response associations now you see these ideas actually are real are major departure.
From what we are talking or talking about till now, these were the basic and these were the you
know contributing events that finally lead to what cognitive psychology has become now. So
there is also in the 1950s influence of technology you know, by this time the machines made
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advance machines were there, the second world war has ended, so there are many advance
machines and psychologists and computer scientists at the same time were wondering about
particular question what that question was,that question was that whether machines could also be
programmed.
could demonstrate intelligent behavior okay, Allen Turing was around at time Allen Turing
suggested that soon it will be hard to distinguish the communication of machines you know with
the communication of humans, he said that gradually the machines will be so advance that you
will not able to differentiate that whether the response is given by a machine or given by a
human, He also developed a test to effect which is now known as Turing test. So there could be,
you could be talking to machine and the machine could be responding back and by virtue of that
test you will able tell that whether the person on the other hand is a machine or is it a computer
the computer of that time actually pass the Turing test.
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For some people it was difficult for some instances it was difficult to tell that there responses to a
person question were generated by a computer or generated by a human. Now these were
advances in technology that were taking place, and it was natural that people thought that there
is an, here is an era where we can actually create machines which will, which will elicit, what is
called human behaviour or intelligent behaviour much as humans are doing. In some sense you
see that they kind of over estimated that the development of machines or let us say probably
under estimated the sophistication or the complexity of the human brain.
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Then let us move forward by this time around 1956 in the same era this is happening artificial
intelligence is also born. The concept of Artificial intelligence basically defines as an attempt by
the humans to construct systems that show intelligence or say for example intelligent processing
of information. AI was around that time and as I said it was being thought that the computers
could actually stimulate or actually mimic the behaviour or intelligence processing information
as the humans would do. By 1960’s there were development happening in other fields as well. So
for example in the field of psycho biology in the fields of linguistic in the field of anthropology,
artificial intelligence etc.
These developments all happening at the same time actually were converging to answer the same
questions that were raised many years ago as we saw in the last class in the philosophical
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discourse. The questions about mind and body, the questions about how mind can lead to
complex behavior or say for example how mind controls the body. Those were the questions
which now became very significant questions in all of the fields were converging together in
their respective ways to answer these questions.
This then became the era of the early cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology was now
coming into being plainly by the virtue of the kind of the questions that were being asked some
of these rather famous like George miller, Allen Newell, Shaw, Herbert Simon and others. Now
this early cognitive psychologist basically argued that the traditional behaviorists’ accounts of
behavior were inadequate simply because they were not talking about how people are thinking
they are not talking about this human behaviour they are not talking about what mental processes
are happening.
Their view was unless you talk about the coward process unless you talk about the mental
events you cannot completely explain human behavior and in that lies their short coming and
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interesting person are interesting examples of response of this kind was that of George Miller.
George Miller introduces the concept of channel capacity wherein proposed that the upper limit
which an observer can match a response to a presented information you know is around seven.
So he says that if you can remember seven digits presented to you sequentially your channel
capacity for remembering digits is around seven so you see the focus is shifting towards seeing
the processing of information by the human mind much like the processing of information that
goes on in computers or in other machines. Ulric Neisser wrote a book called cognitive
psychology in 1967 which also begins especially critical in bringing.
Cognitivism to the fore, the the idea was that you were explaining this book was attempting to
explain the prominence of the field or undergraduates graduate students early career academics
and inviting all of them to field enquiry that was new and budding. Niesser defined cognitive
psychology as the study of how people learn structure and store use knowledge, the whole
discourse has now been shifted towards mental functions or devising new ways more innovative
ways to understand what these mental functions are. Subsequently Allen, Herbert Simon actually
proposed rather detailed models of thinking and problem solving from the most basic levels to
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the most complex levels. Now the focus is entirely shifted on these mental functions. By 1970s
cognitive was then recognized as a major field of psychological study with the distinctive set of
research methods. We will talk about these research methods in the coming lectures. But before
we close todays lecture it might be a good idea to actually have a quick recap of whatever we
have talked about in the two lectures on the history of psychology. We began with talking about
the ideas of rationalism and empiricism, we talked about the problems in philosophy about the
connection between the mind and body where they were the same thing or they were different, or
how they interacted, we talked about the early schools of psychology, structuralism,
functionalism, associationism, and we also talked eventually how the cognitive revolution came
up as a consequence of all of these schools of thought that existed, right from the Greek
philosophers to the behaviorists psychologists like BF Skinner and John Watson. With this I
would like to close this lecture on the history of psychology and we will meet in the next lecture.
Thanks You
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Course Title
Lecture - 04
Foundational Assumptions of Cognitive Psychology
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the fourth lecturer of the series called basic cognitive processes. I am Dr.
Ark Varma from IIT Kanpur.
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The title of today’s lecturer is foundation assumptions of cognitive psychology. Today I will be
talking to you about the foundational assumptions in cognitive physiology to explain you the
principles on which scientific enquiry is based in cognitive physiology. It is pretty much like
playing a game and knowing the rules of the game before you actually engage in the game, you
know early childhood days sometime you move to a new area, find new friends, you are actually
getting into a new game.
It always better to know what the rules or the nitty gritty of the game are before you start playing
it, it is pretty much this to the same effect, that I will talk about what are the foundational
assumption of cognitive physiology and why are they so.
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Let us start with the most basic question again so what is behavior, if you remember the lecturer
on introduction to cognition you would remember that I told that behavior could be very simply
just a stimulus and a response association. So there is a stimulus and there is a response to it. For
example somebody pricks you, with a pin and you take your hand back or you for example you
move away from the needle that is pretty much what the simplest definition of the behavior could
be.
Moving ahead we can also talk about what causes behavior, now cause of behavior is something
which is slightly more complex to understand. For example, the cause of behavior could be
simply just a reaction, to the stimulus as in the prick and needle example, or it could be
motivated, by some internal desires, for example you want to have an ice cream, or for example
you need to drink water because you are thirsty.
So behavior on that sense can have causes at multiple levels we will see how does this actually
pan out while you are actually talking about cognitive physiology.
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If you remember the definition of cognitive physiology, we were talking about cognitive
physiology as the scientific study of mind. Now again this term mind comes in, and this idea in
itself is slightly counter intuitive or has been slightly counter intuitive to a lot of people, because
when we say mind, we are talking about something which is actually non physical.
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Something which is rather abstract, so the whole point of cognitive physiology is that we are
assuming or we building our discipline on the basis on this assumption that there is inner world
there is this world called mind and there is where these you know mental process take place,
where the mental activity really goes on. Also this is a space where in each and every element of
the outer world is actually represented. So you might have representation of your dog, your
sibling, your parents, or say simply for the example a representation of where do you live, what
are the objects that you use, and those kind of things.
Unless you have a mental representation of those things you will not be able to talk about those
things in any meaningful manner. So in that sense the cognitive psychology is actually resting on
this distinction between the inner and the outer world. We will try and see how we can actually
approach this dilemma and how we can actually talk about this internal world, in more scientific
ways.
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So without this actually to really you know, achieve that feet it will be important for us to
actually get some kind of a philosophical understanding of what basically this inner world, and
what this material world really means.
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The first concept that you like to understand is that concept of abstractness, what is abstractness,
abstractness basically is when you actually define something without a reference to the material
world, without a reference to the physical object that are the there in the material world, thoughts
beliefs, emotions, etc. are all abstracts, because while they sometimes describe people sometimes
describe aspects of this material world, they do not need those material aspects to exists okay.
So for example, you might have feeling of love, you might have feeling of guilt, or shame about
something or for someone, but it does not need that material entity to actually feel that or
understand that the feeling of love, or feeling of pain okay. So that is something which you will
need to keep in mind.
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However, you see that it is very easily that we can talk about and theorize about these abstract
entities. This is something we always do, we always talk about our feelings, we always talk
about how we are feeling at any point in time, how something looks, those kind of discussions
we are always having, why should it be so easy to do that? Probably because we understand that
distinction between the physical and the mental, we understand what is the physical world we
understand what is the mental world. And that is why we can actually talk very easily about these
two things.
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Consider this statement for example William decided to make a sandwich because he felt,
hungry. Now if you note, there are two important factors here the aspect that the Williams is
feeling something and which is hunger and aspect that William is decided something that he will
make a sandwich.
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So how is it happing the two mental events feeling and deciding are leading to a physical event
that is making of a sandwich, this is something we are actually going to talk about in cognitive
physiology in more detail.
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However, as you will see it is quite possible, so it is quite possible to talk about the these mental
states and processes, in the absence of any discussion of any physical states and process. We do
not really talk about that in the brain something happen and somebody decided, felt something or
say for example that area of the brain decided, something so we not really taking about this,
physical substrates which might underline behavior, or those kind of thing. We will actually talk
about how this interaction can be approached, as we move a head in this particular chapter.
So in other words for cognitive psychologist or cognitive psychology it should be possible to

proceed at mind is an abstract entity with the only implication that it can be discussed and
defined without reference to physical states and process. So we have to begin, and this is the
most foundational assumption of the cognitive psychology that you need to understand that mind
is the metaphysical, mind is a mental entity, it is not really a physical entity.
Brain is a physical entity we will come to the relationship between the mind and the brain but
cognitive physiology actually rests on this distinction between the mind and the brain okay. So
this is one which you need to keep in mind before we move further. Now if you understand this
if you except this that mind is a mental entity on we are going to talk about that we are going to
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try and investigate that, then as cognitive physiologists what we could do is cognitive you could
actually just you know develop theoretical models and develop explanation of human behavior
on the basis of that physical entity.
You do not really need to talk about what are the physical processes that are going on between
your ears, you do not really need to talk about how the neurons are firing or, how are, the neuron
transmitters acting, you can’t just talk about completely, theoretically about what a particular
mental function is. Say for example, what memory is for example what learning is okay.
It is not to say that cognitive psychologist are not concerned with the neural structure at all or the
material explanation at all, it is that they can exist without them as well. Obviously, you will see
as we go head in this course, that there is always an attempt to locate or to you know base that
physical that metaphysical or mental explanation to the physical structures that are there in the
brain.
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Now moving slightly on a different plane an important question could be that science basically is
a field, which is really concerned about the physical world, it is really concerned about the
measuring and it is really concerned about the explaining, explaining things that happens in the
physical world. So how can you use science to talk about the mental world, how can you use
science to talk about something that is entirely metaphysical.
So we will see, and if we can talk about it at all, what could be methods that we used to actually
talk about this?
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So we will go ahead with this we will see this physiologist do attempt to understand human
behavior and assume that the large component of this understanding requires the detailing of how
this mental world really pans out okay. A very inserting suggestion could be to read Stephen
Pinker’s how the mind works in which he actually really you know interesting way approach this
topic. I will take you to alternative account.
Now as I said science is basically about measurements and it is about really measuring of the
material and solid facts, there was this account of mental activities or human behavior which is
known by the name of behaviorism.
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You saw in our history, lectures history of cognitive physiology lecturer that behaviorism was
actually one of the things that really led to the formation of cognition; it was in reaction to
behaviorism that a lot of cognitive physiology really comes up okay. So let us try and understand
behaviorism is in a bit more detail today. Behaviorism is basically the view that is true science of
psychology strives to achieve description of human nature in terms of laws of behavior.
You know, simply like for example you have laws of gravity, we have laws of action and
reaction and those kind of things. So the idea in behaviorism is that we must strive to generate
laws of behavior in terms of physical events and physical processes okay.
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Now these laws basically will contains statements only about observable things okay, you can
make a law about only the things that you can see that you can measure only then you will able
to reliably predict everything, or so is the belief okay. Say for example, laws of motion or gravity
or something like that. Now the eventual theory of human behavior in behaviorism should
therefore contain these universally established principles, and should be able to correctly predict
behavior.
So if you actually taking about the physical world, say for example much like physics, if you
understand the behavior of two objects or two material you should able to really and confidently
predict that when these two objects are brought close to each other how they will interact or how
the interaction will pan out. Pretty much that was the idea about how psychology should actually
exists as the science, as the field of enquiry.
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So for instance there was this law that any given humans / animal will seek pleasurable thing or
un-pleasant things, you know very simple assumption and given two outcomes the human will
always choose the pleasurable outcome over the un-pleasurable outcome. This is basically what
the law of effect is. We discuss these this was given by Edward Thorndike in the last class.
Edward Thorndike actually said that animals or humans will learn the responses that lead to
rewarding consequences and unlearn the response that will lead to punishing consequences.
You know pretty much rather simple you know prediction of this, because this effect of making a
particular response leads to learning you know this is if you do something and leads to positive
effect, you will do it again if it something that leads you to negative effect you will not do that.
Pretty much this was thought to be the, you know microcosm of all human behavior. We do
everything that leads to good consequences, and we do not do things that lead to bad
consequences.
Now that should ring a bell, this statement should ring the bell, that is it really so? Does it always
happen like that, you know in that feeling that you will get when you say this statement again,
that is where this crux of cognitive physiology is. We will see this as we go ahead.
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So if we move further with the same theoretical model that behaviorism gives the whole idea is
that behaviors can be explained between the associations of stimuli and their contingent
responses, there is the stimulus and there is a responses, that is pretty much all what there is to
explain in behavior okay. So stimulus response bond basically implies, that the tendency to make
a particular response increases for the particular stimulus, if you trying to strengthen this bond.
If you trying to weaken this bond, that tendency to you know give a response are to particular
stimuli S will decrease, and you can actually change or manipulate this strength to actually go on
an further predict this human behavior that is what they wanted to say.
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Say for example take this example here you will see that dog is basically connected to a set of
electrods, that there is a wooden plank and there is also the metal sheet, if the dog actually keeps
it legs on that metal sheet what can happen is that you can actually you know have a sound of the
tuning fork. When the sound of the tuning fork goes a dog receives a shock, over a number of
trials when you do this, whenever the dog hears the sound of the tuning fork, it raises its leg,
because that will break the circuit, and it will not receive any shock.
And the point is of teaching the dog to learn this association between the tuning fork and the
shock okay. This is pretty much a very simple explanation of behavior, say for example, you can
actually still you this behavior to explain the you know use this model to explain the behavior of
vary small children, or animal or those kind of very simplistic scenarios. Now this was one,
moving ahead to something slightly different but within the same frame work.
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Principle of associationism, associationism basically talks about the effects of frequency and
recency. If two things are actually frequently occurring together you might link them, or if two
things are occurring close in time together you might again link them okay. So for example, how
frequently a criminal is punished after committing a crime can teach him not to do a crime okay,
if it is 100% of the time that a criminal receives a punishment after doing a crime he might not
want to do it, or also how quickly the criminal gets punish after he has done a particular crime.
You know these two kinds of associations can be made and that can lead to learning of a
particular kind of behavior.
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So useful learning then can take place from being able to either register the contiguity or register
the frequency of co-occurrence of stimuli together okay. So what humans probably are doing,
they are actually are registering this contiguity and this regency of this stimuli in this external
world, and that is how we are actually shaping our entire behavior, that is what is suppose to be
the behaviorist model of explanation of human behavior okay.
So learning then depends on the ability to do register this co-variation of stimuli and their
corresponding responses. So this is a practical way of explaining behavior, it suppose to be
scientific way of explaining behavior. But certainly there are some problems with it okay,
certainly there are some side notes one would like to make when you are actually giving this
kind of model, let us talk about those things.
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So an association formation basically provides an apparently straight forward account of learning
about causation, you know we are always concerned about knowing the cause of how things
happens in this entire world okay. So for example, if event B is always following event A in
close temporal proximity it might be reasonable to predict that A cause B okay, whenever A
occurs B will follow, closely in that A is causing B to happen.
Say for example, you are taking an aspirin and your headache is going away, if it is happening
100% of the time, you will rather quickly after taking an aspirin you might believe that the cause
of aspirin is the effect of the aspirin is going away of your headache okay, that is rather simple
model what will see is that the story is slightly more complex than this. Now this is what the
behaviorist would try to say. So let us take a moment and see how this is really panning out.
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Now applying these principle of associationism and behaviorism, the behaviorists had hoped to
show that behavior could be predicted and controlled, you can reliably predict how person will
be behave in particular circumstances or actually taking it further, you can also control how
person would behave in particular circumstance. Now that was actually the program that is called
the behaviorist program.
Animal experiments were then conducted in large numbers in controlled environments and their
behaviors predicted, because of knowing the previous history of re enforcement and applying the
laws of behavior. This is pretty much this is something that which gained a lot of popularity, in
the early 1900’s and pretty much this became became the flavor of physiology, nobody wanted
to talk about mental states and stuff like you know there is something called a mind. Because it
was giving you know rather reasonable, job of explaining simple behavior, people were not
really talking about, mental state so much that point in time.
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So ultimate goal was to extrapolate the result of this animal experiment, to the whole of human
society, and hence provide a theoretical frame work for explaining and understanding the human
behavior. If you remember in the history classes I was telling that skinners idea was if you give
me a set of individual, and if you give me a right condition to raise them, I can actually make
them to run out be whatever you ask me to, I can make them to be run lawyers, you know artists,
actors, whatever.
This is the kind of confidence they had in this theoretical framework. Note however, that an
explanatory concept for behavior mind is not being used, mind they are not really talking about,
mind at all. An implication of this whole exercise could be that you know animals and even
humans are considered only nothing more than machines. For example, if you know machine
you press a particular button a particular response is got 100% of the time, this is pretty much
what they wanted to say and they are actually moving ahead with.
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That the point that has been conveyed here if you focus and if actually think over this a bit, is
according to behaviorism human behavior is seem to described in terms of a deterministic
system, in which everything happens all the time with 100% certainty okay, you do you have a
stimulus say, you have a response be and then will happen 100% of the time. There is nothing
that can change it okay; it is almost as good as machine.
So with any other machine as long as we can identify the physical antecedents to some form of
behavior we can then claim to understand the causes of the behavior. So if you actually study
that what led to the particular behavior if you study that there was a situation was like this, you
know something was said, somebody did something, that was led to particular kind of behavior,
and this pretty much very comfortable way or simple way of understanding what human
behavior is about.
Is that over simplified model, or is that a model or is that the model you would actually you
know really explain all of human behaviorism, something that I leave on you to think of okay. So
in other words behavior could be defined fully by its physical antecedents.
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Now such an account is basically in line with all other scientific theories of the world okay,
physics, chemistry, you know even biology, and all other strong nature sciences that you would
say wherein the whole paradigm is that objects and events are linked by certain causal variations
and future action can be predicted by the occurrence of the causal antecedents. If you have a X
and Y condition of the temperature and pressure and volume you can reliably predict that how a
particular you a material behave in these situation.
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This is pretty much what human behavior was about much like wall clock you know in winding
up a wall clock the rotational energy applied to the key, is stored in the internal spring and the
release of this energy is basically what results in the hands of the clock rotating, is this a
satisfactory model of or satisfactory explanation of human behavior is something we have to
really think of. This pretty was called methodological behaviorism, and this is basically the term
which was given by Searle.
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In behaviorism if you have been noticed till now there is no room of free will as their aim is to
provide an account of human behavior that avoids any mention of decision making or choice
okay. So you can not want to do something, and you cannot have a desire to do something,
unless the physical antecedents permit you. So these physical antecedents will completely
determine how your behavior will be in a particular situation that is what the behaviorist
explanation is.
Behaviorists also limits them self to describing behavior solely in term of these determinates
principles, law of effect learning, reinforcement, punishment these kind of principles.
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Now so, behaviorist stance then is to sum up the theory of behavior define in respect to set up to
laws of behavior and aim of behaviorism is to uncover these laws in order to predict and control
behavior okay. Any theory that attempts to explain the human behavior should only contain
statements about observable objects and events okay. So this kind of behavior was reinforced for
this amount of time that is why it led to particular kind of human. That is what they were actually
taking about.
Now coming to a different flavor of behaviorism which is logical behaviorism, logical

behaviorism was actually a more radical stands that was taken by behaviorism.
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Logical behaviorism basically rules out the discussion of anything but observable events and
entities in our account of behavior. So it says unless you can observe and measure the
antecedents you cannot really use those to explain behavior. Anything that cannot be observed
should not be figure in this whole concept of human behavior. Now also logical behaviorism it
aims to read our explanations, any mentions of mental states, or processes in a bit to focus only
on the observable entities that is pretty much what logical behaviorism really pushes for.
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So consider this statement, I say William is thirsty and other statement is there were water
available then William would drink okay.
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Now according to logical behaviorism everything that you wish to predict form saying that
William is trusty, because thirsty is a unobservable mental state can be account for by stating the
statement two, if there is water William will drink it why do you need to say that William is
thirsty okay, that is what the logical behaviorist stance is okay. And this thing they basically refer
to as the behavioral deposition if there is water available I am dispose to make use of that water,
by drinking it okay.
It is not I do not need to talk about that, you know I am thirsty I feel that I want to drink water
nothing like that. If there is water I will drink it and that is the pretty much the simple
explanation.
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Now Logical behavior is basically prefer statement like two, because they do not have any
mention of anything unobservable, thirsty feeling those kind of things are not really there.
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Let us take another example, harry believes it will rain, harry will be the or say the other way to
say will be harry will be dispose to wear a raincoat and take an umbrella and he goes out okay.
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Now Churchland notes that by such a behavioral perspective which we talked about of these
logical behaviorists mentioning mental entity is nothing more than is shortened way of talking of
actual and potential patterns of behavior. So if there is going to be rain, and if you know there is
going to be rain you will be disposed of taking an umbrella with you okay. It is that you like you
take an umbrella, or you wanted to take an umbrella, do not take about those things talk about
that if there is a chance of rain you are dispose of using an umbrella with you, that is very much
what that the behaviorists is really wanted to pose.
As this has been considered to be the challenge to the cognitivists’ position, now you can see that
from this position what you can see is you can actually, you know in some sense you really
wonder whether you really need to talk about mental activities or mental functions at all.
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There were certain criticisms to the logical behaviorism; we will just visit them for a short while
now for example let us try and analyze what disposition really means okay, if you say that Harry
is disposed to drinker water or Harry, or William is disposed to take an umbrella, what does this
disposition thing really mean?
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Harman basically notes that whether you dispose to take an umbrella with you depends, on not
just you belief that it will rain, but also a desire, not to get wet, and your perception of the
umbrella, in corner and your further believe that umbrellas are good for keeping rain off, and so
on. Now you see this statement really has so many references to what basically the logical
behavior is would not like, you know the belief that you it will rain and the desire that you do not
want to get wet, and perception that there is an umbrella.
And again the belief that the umbrella is good to save you to from getting wet. So even if you try
and explain a disposition you really you know making use of things which are abstract, things
which are mental entity. So you cannot really escape from these from the mention of these
mental entities by just talking about this analyzes in terms of disposition, that is one major
criticism of logical behaviorism.
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Another objection to logical behaviorism is made by Searle, and Searle says and he basically
raises a very interesting question, he says that can you talk about that is means to be human, and
you know without really talking about the ordinary experience, of what it is like to be human
being. For instance, can you really explain about our human behavior without mentioning our
thoughts and feelings?
So we do not really go and say that I did this or I did that, we generally talk about that okay, you
know I felt something as feeling, sad so I went and did this for that feeling very happy, so I went
did. But generally in a more natural level our explanation of behavior rests on these mental
entities, rests on these abstract concepts. And pretty much this psychology has to do a good job
of explaining mental human behavior, it needs to take in these things into account, it cannot
really survive without talking about these things okay.
That is a very interesting observation to make. Say for example, Searle says how would you
describe you know the aspects of to be religious, you know how do you say that you know X is
religious, what is this aspect of religious, you know being religious only a collection of
dispossession such as for example, if there is a temple I am dispose to go and visit the temple,
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and if there is a mosque, I am dispose to pray in the mosque, or is being religious something
entirely different which is again something that exist in your mental space exits in your abstract
world.
Now if you see these two criticism of logical behaviorism by Searle and otherwise are actually
very found it, and this is what really lead gradually to the response that we see as cognitive
physiology okay, this is what really takes us to the fair that cognitive physiology should be there,
and we will talk about how that really happens.
Consider this example you logical behaviorists would have us believe that to have a pain is
nothing more than to be inclined to pain or to take an aspirant etc. Now if I tell you that you
know you come to me with pain, you know you got hurt, you probably hurt your foot or
something and you say that I am having lot of pain, and I tell you that it is not that you are
having a pain or anything you are just inclined to take an aspirin.
That does not really seem like a very good explanation, and I am sure it is not go well, if you tell
somebody this. So this is in some sense you know overall or the basic short coming, in
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behaviorism which we will see how gradually leads us to the whole explanatory frame work that
is called cognitive physiology.
Let us sum up what we did today in summary logical behaviorists substitute statement of about
mental states and processes, and statements about dispositions and to behave in certain ways, yet
in attempting to explain all of human behavior in terms of these behavioral dispositions, these
approach actually fail to acknowledge that as we human beings, we are sentient beings typically
act in ways that are determined by our thoughts and feelings which are not the physical entities,
which are mental entities.
So we are pretty much always taking into account the mental world. So thank you for today we
will go in the next lecture to the cognitivists’ position, we talked about the behaviorist position
today thank you.
Acknowledgement
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Prof. Satyaki Roy
NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Lecture - 05
Foundational of Cognitive Psychology
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello, welcome to the fifth lecture of the series of this course called basic cognitive process.
I am Dr. Ark Verma, from IIT, Kanpur.
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We are still talking about foundational assumption in cognitive psychology.
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If you remember in the last class we talked about the scientific approach you know to mind
and how that has been used to explain behaviour. Most specifically we talked about the
behaviourist explanation we talked about how this stands for behaviourism explains human
behaviour.
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In today’s class we will talk about the cognitivist view. What is the cognitivist view? The
cognitivist view basically assumes that there is an abstract entity called the mind and that this
abstract entity is composed of these mental states and mental processes. It is concerned with
exploring the nature of these mental processes. That is what cognitive psychology is meant
to do.
Cognitive psychology then may be defined as the study of the mind to the extent that we can
generate testable statements about these abstract entities. Because we want to talk about these
in a scientific manners you want to generate predictions, you want to test those predictions
and accept or reject them on the basis of those particular tests.
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How do we do that we can do that if we operate within a frame work, where we can make
certain assumptions? So we made a particular assumptions that this mental state leads to that
kind of behaviour, and then what we can do is we can test these assumption we can create
particular very specific hypothesis and go out and test them, importantly though however for
a science to work properly we must attend to generate falsifiable theories. So unless our
theories falsifiable we will not be able to test it.
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Say for example if you create a aircraft, you want to market these aircraft somebody ask you
that how strong your aircraft is, what all these aircraft is capable of doing, So you would
want to test is and you want to really test its metal before really promising to your customers,
so when do you chose would test it. So you do not really want to test it on a clear day on
sunny day when there is no wind and the chances of it failing are anyways minimal.
You would want to test it in the hardest of flying conditions and do want to see whether the
aircraft performs well or it does not perform well. That is what will give you some degree of
confidence that if I sell this aircraft the person flying this will not any end up in an accident.
Okay this pretty much what we want to do with our theory is we want to really make our
theories which are open to testing and can be falsified.
And then we see that whether they stand the rigour of a test or they do not stand rigour of the
test that is what we want to do in cognitive psychology.
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Karl Popper basically talks about attributes of how good a theory is or how do you really
evaluate a theory. So he gives us a few points, he says that a theory should be easy to verify.
So if I go and say that you know sun rises in the east. You might be just quickly turn your
head towards the east see whether at a particular time obviously you see whether the sun is
there are not or sun is raising from there or not. It should be very easy to verify.
Second is it should be refutable or else it will not be scientific. If I say something like say for
example God has done something. It is not something that I can go and refute, I will never
get the idea that God has done this or not. So then it is not really scientific theory, because it
cannot be tested. Also a genuine test of the theory is any attempt to falsify if you really want
to test a theory you want to attempt to falsify it.
You want to really test what are the conditions in which this theory will hold and what are the
conditions and which this theory will not hold. Confirming evidence about the test or about
any theoretical prediction that you make is not really counted it is not really given a lot of
weight unless it is a genuine test of the theory okay. Unless you test it and then you find
confirming evidence that is only acceptable in that case.
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Let us move ahead in line with the above cognitive psychologist also try to do the similar
thing, they are basically allowed to pose abstract entities on the assumption that they can be
tested in this scientific way. Theories therefore in cognitive psychology must be testable,
refutable and falsifiable. Further, theories in cognitive psychology should also be extremely
simple that is again one of the things that Popper said that theory should be simple.
It should not have the X leads to Y leads to Z leads to D, then only you can say that X leads
to D, they should not be so many conditions in the middle okay.
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Now let us take an example if I want you to compare this two mental operations compare 14
x 5 versus 17 x 3. How do you do this comparison? Although we all differ in our ability to
carry out this calculation from a cognitive perspective it seems fairly reasonable to assume
that this ability depends upon some mental representations. So mental representations of what
multiplication is, mental representation of what numbers are, these kind of mental process at
least should be common to everyone.
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Whether the cognitive explanation something also somebody can ask us whether cognitive
explanation is necessary for this kind of mental arithmetic. You could simply say that there
is a physical device in your head which only does this calculation.
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So let us say if there is a physical device may be it is say for example like this balance b. If
there is more weight on one side then it is then the number is more than that is alters there is
more weight on the other side result varies
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We can say that, but can we use this physical explanation for many other calculation as well,
so the dilemma is that, while cognitive psychologists would obviously wish to offer a
cognitive explanation for the brain for human behaviour, whether they would want to have
ascribed this cognitive explanation to the balance beam as well. And how do you then solve
how do you really say that okay the balance beam is a physical device and I want to give a
cognitive explanation.
You have to understand that while the balance beam can do some of your calculations, it can
do some simple multiplications some other addition, subtraction, division something like that.
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But at the level of the special purpose mechanistic approach to this mental multiplication
which is offered by this balance beam actually fail to provide a more comprehensive
explanation of how this is done, it does not really talk about how the numbers were
represented, how exactly this process of multiplication took place. It will not be able explain
that in entirety.
Humans on the other hand can handle a versatile range of calculations we do a lot of different
calculations. And those calculations cannot be handled by simple physical devices such as
the balance beam. So there is some merit to actually have this cognitive explanation of
human behaviour. We will go ahead and see how.
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So why do you really want to talk about this. Why do you really want to talk about this
mental explanation? In order to understand this we have to talk about how this mental and
physical is related how the mind which is an abstract entity is related to the brain which is the
physical entity. Let us look at possibilities.
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One of the possibilities is offered in this theory called as central state identity theory. The
central state identity theory says that our mental lives are intimately connected with the things
that go on in our brain. So anything that you do, any mental activity that takes place can be
mapped back on to any neural activity that happens in the brain.
Say for example brain damage sometimes leads to loss of memory, loss of language, loss of
understanding things like that. So that relationship can be made that part is at least clear
various attempts that is why have been made to explore the mapping between this mental
events and neurological events, say if we say people actually trying to do various
investigations into how a particular neural event in the brain can lead to a particular mental
event in your mind so to speak.
The assumption is the two are related and the only doubt or the only confusion is how are
they related and that is what basically cognitive psychology, or cognitive neuroscience is
really investigating.
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So the central state theory basically forms the foundation of all the work in your cognitive
psychology, cognitive neuroscience, etc. There are two versions of this theory.
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First is the type identity theory, so you can say that each type of mental event maps on to a
different kind of neural event. Say for example, remembering to perform a particular task x
correspondence one kind of event which is happening in the one kind of nerve cells firing and
choosing not to perform the task x actually is basically based on the another kind of nerve
cells firing.
So each type of event is related to different, different types of neurons which fire in the brain.
This is one explanation. One has to be very careful when we use words like maps onto or
corresponds to because saying these terms we will actually lead us to the materialist thing.
There is a one to one correspondent between neural events and mental events. We have to be
a bit careful with that and we will see in the next slides how.
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Now if you take an example you know, if you hurt yourself the defining element of pain will
be the sensation of hurting. This peculiar thing about pain is that pain is not merely a
sensation, but it also matter of perceptions. Some people with the same degree of hurt will
might not feel that amount of pain. So pain is also it is not only sensation it is also perception,
you will be sensing that certain degree of tissue has been damaged or something like that has
happened.
But your perception of that entire pain actually directly corresponds your pain tolerance. If a
tolerance is rather high you might feel less pain with the same amount of hurt as somebody
who is got low tolerance of pain. Now this is something which is rather interesting and kind
of creates problems for the type identity theory.
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So the problem with identity theory is that it seems to force different things to be the same.
So there is this feeling of pain which is a mental event, and there is a pattern of nerve cell
firing which is a physical event. We are trying to have a one to one or the same basically
trying to say that these two are same things. If one follows this perspective this materialist
perspective we assume that everyone’s experience is perfectly predicted by everyone’s neural
activity whatever is happening in each of our brains.
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Now Searle basically created some objections for this kind of position, he says there is
something called the different brains problem. Now take this example, Jones thinks it might
rain, and then nerve cell A, B, C & D fire, Smith thinks that Smith’s brain is different form
Jones brain, there are different kinds of connection of the structures that there is obviously a
lot of individual difference in the brain, any rudimentary book on neuroscience will tell you
that.
Now the point is say for example Smith is thinking the same thought that it might rain
different set of neurons are firing E, F, G, & H. The point is this is the problem we are
talking about, both men are actually entertaining the same thought but different neurons are
firing for the same thought, now this cannot happen within the frame work of the type
identity theory.
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This is the basic problem.
143
So from this problem actually comes another version of this identity theory which is Token
Identity Theory what does it say is asserts that mental events correspond to neurological
events, but there is acceptance that there may be a variety of neurological events, that may
lead to the same kind of a mental event. Okay say for example in this frame work then it
becomes really possible that different sets of neurons like A, B, C and D or , E, F, G & H or
actually leading to the same kind of a mental event that is thinking of brain.
As it stands, token identity theory is brand of materialism is the one which is providing the
foundations for all kinds of work in cognitive neuroscience. That is where the field of
cognitive neurosciences really based. We will talk about cognitive neuroscience in more
detail in probably our second chapter.
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Even this version actually if you really examine closely may run into difficulties concerning
the understanding of subjective experience. So what we will actually not going to much more
detail we will stop here and we will assume that this is okay and we will need to move on
with other things. On a different note if we accept the pattern of nerve cells firings may give
rise to the same thought, we also need to be sure about what is it in these nerve cells firing
that is leading to a particular kind of a thought. That is also we will need to investigate and
we will see that in the coming lectures.
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Now moving to a different question, functions, what is a function? Function is basically the
purpose of anything or what something does. Say for example the function of the umbrella is
save you from rain or the function of the chalk is to write on the black board. Now there are
two things there is a concept of structure and the concept of function, so the structure of
something then could be different from its function. What is the physical make up of
something and what it does are two slightly different things.
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So when do we talk about function, let us say when we want to have a functional description
of something so if you want to have functional description of let us say car’s engine what do
we really want, if we want to full understanding of what a car’s engine does you would want
to know the structure of its components, you would want to know how these are connected
and you want to also know what rules each of these components are playing.
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This right here is pretty much what is the functional description of the car’s engine. So there
is a petrol tank leads it is connected with the petrol pump, and the carburettor, and the piston
chamber which is connected in AC diode. But you do not find this explanation complete
unless you know what each of these things does. What is the function of the petrol tank, what
is the function of the petrol pump, what is the function of the carburettor, unless you
understand those things you will not understand what basically a car engine does.
Pretty much it is too for the human brain as well, you might know the structure but you need
to know the functions more importantly.
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So that is why it helps to have a functional description of the account. That is what we will
actually really further your understanding. Traditionally such a design eventuates in
something which is called a schematic diagram which we just saw. Such a diagram specifies
each components and shows how each component is connected with other components also
such a diagram reveals the flow of control between various components, what is linked to
what in what order what is the hierarchy.
Let us say what does the brain control your limbs or the limbs control your brain. Those kind
of questions can be asked.
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Another interesting aspect of this concept of functions is that at the level of the diagram we
are not so bothered about how close the different concepts are to another, whether the pump
is next to the tank or the carburettor we just want to see how they are connected. However, if
we embellish the structural information with the description of the functions of the individual
then the diagram becomes much more useful for us for understanding the car engine.
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In our case, such a description will allow as to discuss each of the individual components in
the abstract without committing to the physical entity. So we can say there is a petrol engine
which does this there is carburettor which does that. And all explanation could be purely a
functional explanation. There is pretty much what we attempt for the brain whiles you
talking about the cognitive psychology part. The focus basically shifts to the function and not
so much to the structure.
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This stream of thought in cognitive psychology is what is called functionalism. It is now

possible to see that how two different brain states underlay the same mental state. Because
we are concerned about functions of those brain states, which basically is to lead to particular
mental states. So as long as is two neurophysiologic states serve the same functional role
then they can obviously capture the same mental state.
So mental state x can then be defined purely in terms of its function. This basically is what
the crux of functionalism is.
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Function is then defined in terms of Causation. What leads to what, so a mental state x has a
particular function in so far it leads to the same consequences, be the new mental states or the
same form of behaviour? So mental state X could lead to new mental states or it could lead
to some particular form of this. So you feel happy leads you to eat an ice cream something
like that.
For example, Anne thought it was going to rain and remembered that she had left her kitchen
window open. She had to go and close it. So here the mental state of thinking about rain
leads to the mental state of remembering that she had left her kitchen open and it leads to the
physical behaviour of action Z.
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So as long as the functional description of the mental states and processes is the same for
different individuals then our understanding of the particularities of the underlying neural
operators will be generalizable. So as long as we know that function of this area is this and
the function of this particular brain is that to that extend we will be successfully able to
explain or give theoretical models or theoretical explanation of particular kinds of human
behaviour.
So somebody has higher memory, somebody has lower memory and that can lead to
somebody remembering more information or somebody remembering less information.
Remember in this explanation I am not really talking about somebody having more brain
cells or more neurons or less neurons, or better connected neurons or less connected, I am not
really referring to that at all.
I am just talking about memory, see the entire description then it just rested on something
which is rather abstract. This is pretty much what we doing cognitivist psychology.
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So to sum up the cognitivist view of mind and behaviour basically allows the assumption of
abstract entities as theoretical basis of human behaviour. So you assume these abstract mental
entities, mental functions and you use these abstract mental entities to actually talk about
human behaviour. Also it stresses also this cognitive view point basically stresses on the
generation of scientifically testable assumptions.
Whichever assumptions you generate should be scientifically testable that is how it will
remain the frame work of cognitive psychology. Okay. And this basically need to, these are
basically used to explain human behaviour in a simple and testable scientific manner. It is
not really as deterministic as the behaviourist paradigm, but it still does a good job of being
tested or being falsified and then being accepted or rejected.
Further it also calls for a functional description rather than a material description of human
behaviour. Now this is this last point is the most important point which you would like to
keep in mind. When we are talking about cognitive psychology when we are talking about
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different mental functions in cognitive psychology, more of them we are not actually only
talking about the functional aspects.
We are not really talking about you know the neural aspects, we do talk about the neural
aspects to some detail, you know in every cognitive psychology paper there is a reference to
this, this, this happens and this happens because of this, this is activity in the human brain. So
this is something which you would need to keep in mind. So here I will close the lecture for
today, and we will talk about another aspect of another assumption in cognitive psychology
in the next class, Thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
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K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
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Course Title
Lecture: 6
Foundations of Cognitive Psychology
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the sixth lecture of the serious basic cognitive processes. I am Dr. Ark
Verma from IIT Kanpur.
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We are still talking about the foundational assumptions in cognitive psychology today.
159
If you remember the last two lectures, we talked about the behaviourists assumptions in the
most recent lecture we talked about the cognitive as perspective on the human behaviour. We
also talked about how a functional description of mental events is actually taken as the main
point in cognitive psychology.
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In today’s lecture we would actually move towards a different kind of dichotomy something
which you might have heard obviously something you might have already heard is this
hardware and software distinction that we make between the mind and the brain. This is
probably one of the most used analogies borrowed from computer science, but something
which kind of also has its own assumptions.
So let us examine those assumptions and see how they help us in understanding this
relationship between mind and behaviour. Now hardware if you see it refers to any physical
device that is either a computer itself or it is a peripheral unit like your mouse, your keyboard
things like that. Software refers to the programs that run on the computer. So there is this
distinction between what a hardware is, and what a software is.
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Now we know that because computer is a physical device but it is programs are abstracts. So
whatever the computer does is actually abstract that is what the software part is. So we talk
about the software generally without reference to the physical hardware of the computer. So
whenever you say for sample, I saw this movie on the computer. Okay we do not really talk
about there was disk going round and round in the DVD player of the computer which led me
to watch the movie.
We generally just say we saw the movie on the computer. So we generally talking about just
the software part not really referring to the hardware part all the time. This is pretty much
what we can actually do about the human behaviour or human mind as well. We can very
well and comfortably talk about the different mental functions without always referring to
the, what is happening in the hardware or the neural part, that is your brain.
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So by if you adopt such a functional approach for the human behaviour we can actually say
something to the effect like the mind is to the brain as the program is to the hardware. This is
something which was given by Searle a statement he said that in around 1994, so cognitive
psychologist actually endeavour to understand this programs. They want to understand the
programs that collectively make up the mental activity okay.
Which is what basically you know is then can be described as the flowcharts of the mind. So
what all things happen, what all decisions take place in the mental world, in the mental states
that leads to particular kinds of behaviours? Say for example, you might be feeling sad that
sadness leads you to feeling hungry and if you hungry you over eat, things like that.
So we will be talking about and we generally the idea is that this is the general level of
explanation, or general currency of conversation that really cognitive psychologist engage in
okay. Let me take an example here, let us not talk about the brain for a while, let us talked
about thermostat or other simple device.
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Now here you can see flowchart of how the thermostat actually functions. So at the top you
can see that the thermostat needs to start and the first step that it will take is actually it will
read at the thermostat box. What is the temperature that is being registered at the thermostat
box? The second thing is it then reads the actual room temperature wherever the thermostat
is actually placed okay.
You can do that by help of a thermometer or some other kind of sensor. The second thing
that the thing after that the third step that can helping this. That it compares the two
temperature, so it compares the temperature T of the thermostat box to the temperature R
which is the room temperature. So the question could be like is T still less than or equal to R.
and they could be two possibilities okay.
If the temperature T is not less than or equal to R that is room is too cold, then what you do is
then the heater gets on then thermostat actually takes a decision that the heater needs to go
on. So that we increase the R note to the level of the T which is the thermostat box. Or in
another scenario what might happen is that the temperature T is less than or equal to R that is
room is actually too hot now.
So what it may need to do is, it will switch off the heater and this is what can keep on
happening in a cycle in terms of wherever you place that thermostat okay. Now you see here
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I just talked about the decisions and the calculations and the evaluations that the thermostat
box was doing without really referring to what is the details of the sensor that really measures
the temperature. What is the detail of the machine that really compares these two
temperatures, pretty much what we aim to do in cognitive psychology as well? We do not
really I mean to an extent we do not really want to talk about the neural structures all the
time.
Obviously, we do and obviously we need to do that for a full explanation, but talking our
discussions of mental states and human behaviour are not limited by that. Let us take that in
mind.
Now if you see the last diagram gives us an idea of the functional parameters of the
thermostat it needs to be supplemented with the knowledge of the actual physical components
as well.
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If you just give the last diagram which is the flowchart to somebody it might not suffices
really given actual explanation of what the thermostat is about. That you would know that
how the thermostat functions, but say for example, there is somebody who has never seen a
thermostat okay.
166
So you need to supply them additionally with the knowledge of the actual physical
components that are required to build up a thermostat. So that is where the whole experience
of the thermostat for some person really gets completed.
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Now the problem with the human behaviour or human mind and this is a slightly more
complex. When you consider human cognition we already have a device readies. We
already have our brain. So we do not really know what are the different components, and
how are they attached and those kind of structural connections, etc., are not really known to
the best possible level okay.
What we are trying to figure out as cognitive psychologist is just what is going on, what is
happening in the different areas of the brain and how these different areas, how activity in the
different areas of the brain is leading to particular kinds of brain. That is what we are trying
to do. So in a sense you could say that we are actually trying to do a kind of reverse
engineering okay.
We are not trying to build up something, but we are trying to in some as deconstruct
something okay. So we are trying to understand how the working of the brain underpin the
human mind. We are actually really talking about it but how the working of the mind, brain
you really underpin the mind. So for example, how this mind really you know can be how
can mind be explained by different neural activities that are going on in the brain. That is
what we are trying to do.
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So in some sense you would also say that this big jig saw puzzle kind of a thing that is your
human mind and this big jig saw solving enterprise is what cognitive psychology is actually
about. For some people it can be very interesting for some others it might be bit dry, but the
whole idea is, it is rather fascinating to understand how this human mind is made up on the
basis of these different neural activities.
We do not really know what the nature of this human mind is. We are just looking at
something which is componential in nature which is the human brain and how that is really
leading to the human mind. There are obviously debates on this issue and that basically go
on in the field of study called philosophy of mind which might also interest some of you.
So we have to begin by accepting the first place that the brain is slightly more complicated
than thermostats and beam balances. At least that is one assumption that you begin with.
Then what we need to do is to talk about concerns relating to mental states representations
and processes how is the brain representing the outside world. How is the brain leading to
these different mental states, and how is the brain actually leading to the interactions between
these mental states.
If you remember an earlier example there are william felt hungry and he decided to make a
sandwich you know how is the brain really supporting this kind of an interaction how is the
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brain going from feeling hungry to deciding to make a sandwich to actually doing all that is
required to make a sandwich. That is what we are actually interested in here. By analogy
these things seem very similar to what goes on in the computer okay.
Representations and processes, how is the computer really representing these different
numbers, how would these calculations really happening. Those kind of you know, that is
why the computer hardware, software analogy is actually taken to explain the mind, brain
relationship sometimes okay. Also something interesting that one needs to understand is how
does the brain really work in processing information.
So how is the brain really regarded as a information processing system. We talk about that as
we go ahead in this course. Then we need to talk about the information from the world, how
does the information from the world, that is your input the course that represent this input that
is the representation and how that responses are generated that is the output. So I am trying
to liken in the human brain to what a computer is.
So that is input which is information around the world there it is representation processes the
algorithms and then there is an output that response is being generated. Now somebody who
is done an excellent job of actually explaining these interactions and relationships was David
Marr.
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In 1982 David Marr actually came out with these three possible levels of explanation of the
kind of interaction we are talking about the mind and the brain interaction. He said that there
are three levels at which you can actually explain this interaction okay. So first level which
he gave was the level of computational theory, the second level that he gave was the level of
algorithm, the third level that he gave was the level of implementation. We will see each of
them as we go ahead now.
At the level of computational theory you are basically concern with what is that the device
needs to do and how is and why is it doing it okay. Here is where Marrs spells out something
which is the logic of strategy how do you go about doing something okay. You are not doing
it yet. You are not really exactly planning all the steps but how do you need to do it. How do
you need to say for example make tea okay?
You need to have milk, water, tea, and sugar okay. This is your computational; you know
that these four things are needed to make tea okay. So let us take another example for now,
so how does the calculator carry out arithmetic operations. Analysis at this level will actually
address the fact that the calculator carries out this various arithmetic calculations and the fact
that it needs a particular method to carry out this calculations.
171
The fact that it does and the fact that there has to be a method okay. When we talk about the
method we will go to the next level just talking about the computational part a bit more.
For example, if you have this early hp calculator this basically used to use a method called
reverse polish. So if you give it an expression like 1 + 2 multiplied by 3 and 1 +2 is in
parentheses then you would need to enter these like 1, 2 and 3 you enter all the numbers first
and then you actually enter the operators okay. This is basically known as the post fix
notation.
So the computation level explanation of the computational theory basically in this will be
concerned with issues like why do you need to use reverse polish here and what are the
underlying principles of reverse polish that you actually use here to solve that problem or to
explain that problem in some sense.
That is of computational level that is your computational level of explanation. What we need
ahead then we need an algorithm, how do you really implement these steps okay.
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So this is the level or the representation the algorithm level is the level, where questions are
actually asked about nature of the calculators’ operating systems. What kind of operating
system is there? What are the steps that you will take and the manner in which the numbers
are represented, embodied in the device? So we are talking about the calculators here. So
how information is stored and how arithmetic operations are instantiated.
Say for example, how does a calculator store number 2, 3, 4 and how does it invoke the
addition and those kind of things. Those things we are actually talking about algorithm and
the representation level. Or simply put how in any information, so if you just leave the
example of the calculator for while and talk about any information processing system.
The question will be that how in any information processing system the information from the
outside world is represented okay. Say for example, we see a lot of things how the picture or
how this object right in front me say represented in my eyes or in my brain. What are those
aspects in my eyes and in the brain that are actually helping the code the object outside which
I have actually seen? That is the level of representation that you need to be talking about.
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Coming back to the calculator example say for example when number two is entered into the
calculator it is represented by some form of this electronic code. Now this electronic code is
what represents number 2. That is your internal representation level, by analogy when you
talk about the mind, the mind the mental states basically need to represent the actual states in
the world.
As I said if you are actually watching flower in the, if you are walking in the garden and you
see a flower, if you see a rose for example they will be a representation of the color and the
shape of the rose in your head through your eyes which basically you will then process and
say for example have memories about in stuff. But the first step for the most basic step is
how is that colour red represented.
That is what is the level of representation, and that is what basically this level of
representation is all about.
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Now what happens to when you have represented rate, when you have set of codes or say set
of neuron that fire to code a rate, what do you do after that what ahead okay. So what ahead
basically is explained in the level of algorithm okay? The level of algorithm basically helps
you specify the set of operations that are carried out on those representation, so you combined
the red and combined the shape and you then have a complete perceptions of what a rose is.
Similarly, say for example you to make tea you know that tea and sugar and milk and water
are needed, and the next step will be how do you really combine them to come up with tea.
You will need to know the algorithm the exact sequence of steps that you will need to take in
order to able to make tea okay. So in computer science this world algorithm is mainly use
interchangeably with the word called program, it is pretty much the same thing how
something is really being done.
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So if you entered a + sign into the calculator and it is working properly then what it should do
is it should invoke the addition algorithm. So you typed 1, 2, 3 and then you typed a + sign,
the + sign should invoke the addition algorithm for these numbers that are there. So the +
sign is telling the computer that invoke the additional algorithm for these representation of
numbers that I have already had okay.
So understanding what is this additional algorithm comprise of, this additional algorithm
basically comprise of the sequence of operations that determine how these two numbers are
going to be added. So then is where we actually talk about how a particular function is taking
place, how this addition is really happening. So understanding a calculator then if you really
want to understand a get a good picture of what the calculator does really depends on trying
to specify the nature of the internal representations.
How is the calculator representing numbers and the associated process, how is the calculator
actually really adding up stuff okay. This is what you want you want to talk about when you
talking about the representation and algorithm. In terms of leave the calculator and the tea
making example aside and you come back to the cognition example comeback to how mind
and behaviour are to be explained, then what we need to do is, we really need to consider
both mental processes and mental representations and mental processes.
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How is the mind representing depth? How is the mind representing colour? How is the mind
representing shapes and then what it does to combine those color and shape and depth
information to really give you full perception of say for example, if there is a person, if there
is a place how do you navigate through a park all of those kind of things basically are coming
from this atomic level of representation okay.
That is something which is one of the most important questions that is there in cognitive
psychology that cognitive psychology attempts to explain. In this respect by the way the
functional account should not only provide the flow chart that maps out the relationship
between these different component processes, but also it gives you some description of the
sorts of internal representations that are implicated.
When you talk about a flowchart like we talked about in the example of the thermostat the
flowchart should also have that this is how particular shape, or flower, or something
particular is represented and this is how it will be combined and that is what we lead you to
the full perception or experience of the flower okay. Coming to the third level, the third level
is actually when you really get on to doing things how something is really implemented.
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For example, in the case of the thermostat what is the sensor exactly, what is the sensor that is
really measuring the temperature of the room something like that. So at the hardware
implementation level concerns are about how the designative representations and processes
are implemented physically those kind of explanation, so all those kinds of issues. So what
physical components are needed to build at the thermostat?
Now this is, if you talk about the human brain and you talk about mind and stuff, this is pretty
much slightly out of the scope of our discussion probably that is more suited to a class of
neuro science. I will not really be talking about a lot in detail about these things. But, let me
go to slightly related but a different issue. We will talk about some all explanation still is
deserved that is what we will talk about now.
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So if we accept some version of the central state identity theory the fact that mental events
and neural events are related, then we are accepting that mental states or processes are
nothing, but these neural processes. So particular neuron fires that leads to a particular kind
of memory or particular kind of feeling happiness or sadness and that is what we are talking
about.
Now this remember can be rather a strong position to take okay. And there are certain doubts
and debates about that. This kind of theory basically this kind of an explanatory stands is
called reductionism. So according to reductionists what they say is that understanding the
human mind can be reduced to understanding the basic electro chemical states and processes
that characterizes the behaviour of neurons okay.
Say for example, if you completely understand how neuron functions and if you completely
understand how are the functioning of a neuron affects another neuron and how this these all
neurons are connected together. Then you do not really need to worry about mental states at
all. It is pretty much that neuron x will fire, and neuron y will follow, and neuron z will also
follow and that will lead to the perception of that.
So then why do you need to have the perception thing there, you can just say that particular
neurons firing lead to particular kinds of behaviour okay. That if you really follow rather
other strongly can kind of creates problems are cognitive psychology okay. It kind of takes
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you to the assumption if you understand these physical states completely; you have
understood what the mind is. That is the position some of people in the discipline would like
to take as well.
This is one version; another version of reductionism by the way is called eliminative
materialism. Eliminative materialism as Patricia Churchland states is that once we have a full
understanding of the behaviour of neurons in terms of basic electrochemical principles, we
can then eliminate any mention of the description of any other level of description that you do
not really need to talk about any other levels at all okay.
So that is pretty much what is rather similar to the earlier explanation of the reductionism that
I gave. Now the point is the question that you should ask yourselves and the question you
should spend some time wondering about is that maybe, then we can get rid of the mind even.
What we can just say is that you know these are the reactions that are going on in the brain
and these reactions are directly leading to those kind of behaviour.
So you do not really need to have the mind. Last time you are saying that those could not be
help to explain the mind, but here I am saying that why consider mind at all. You can just
consider that these particular interactions of the neurons and these are happening due to
various neuro chemicals some hormones are released, some neuro transmitters are released,
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something or physical or chemical explanations there and that is pretty much what is leading
to particular kinds of behaviour.
There is no need of having the mind or mental states or all of that. There is a slightly harder
stands, this is called eliminative materialism. A more harder or stands or reduction is about.
Now if this happened say for example, at some point of time, I do not think that time is
anywhere near.
But at some point in time if the neuro scientist really go to that level and they understand
completely what the functioning of different parts of the brain are, what each of the neuron is
doing, how they are connected how the different neuro transmitters hormones, etc., are
controlling these neurons. If that level of expertise and knowledge as raised then what would
cognitive psychology do.
Then we are out of job practically we do not have stuff to talk about, but they could be some
solace. We are actually not focussing ourselves on that anyways.
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Even if one has a complete account of the nature and operation of neurons, then also this is a
completely different level of explanation that what cognitive psychologists actually engage
in. you know we never said that we want to be concerned about how the neuron functions in
the first place. You are just saying that we are actually operating at a slightly different level.
Even if you understand how a particular neuron functions and how different connections lead
to particular behaviours.
We are not really concerned with that, we are saying that we can say that okay, this kind of
activity in the nerve cells, or in the neurons, or in certain use of the brain lead to this kind of
behaviour. And they will be an intervening level of explanation that we will be talking about
that is what cognitive psychology anyways is about. As cognitive psychologist and that is
something which should be showed to all of us is as cognitive psychologist we are interested
in uncovering the functional architecture of the mental components that constitute the mind.
If you just want to know that what leads to us, say for example how memory can lead to a
particular experience those kinds of things. So the flowcharts say how a particular decision is
taken, how different mental events are connected, those kinds of things we are actually
worried about. So at some point you will see how limitations of attention can lead to
sometimes faulty perceptions, those kinds of things.
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The entire explanation is then based in mental states and that is where our model successfully
rests. Completely or if not completely, but reasonably sure of or reasonably distant from the
dependents on the neural states. That pretty much what cognitive psychology is about. So
this basically brings me to the end of the series of foundation assumptions in cognitive
psychology, and this was the third lecture in this series.
And so just to sum up we were talking about what how mental functions can be represented,
in the analogy of the hardware and software. We also talked about these different levels of
description that exists which Marr gave, and we talked about how this could lead to a
different kind of dispose about mental functions. So this is the end of the session on
foundational assumptions of cognitive psychology, we will go towards the some other kinds
of approaches to study cognitive psychology in the next class. Thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

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Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
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Course Title
Lecture - 07
Approaches towards Cognitive Psychology
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the second lecture of the serious of this course called basic cognitive
processes.
I am Dr. Ark Verma, from IIT, Kanpur.
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Today the title of the lecture is approaches towards cognitive psychology.
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In today’s lecture we will basically talk about the various approaches that have been take into
understand the architecture of the mind and the mind brain relationship. If you remember at
the last few lectures we till now talked about the definition of cognitive psychology. We have
talked about that cognitive psychology is the study of the human mind and that of mental
processes.
We also talked about the fact that cognitive psychology basically seeks to understand and
explore the functional architecture of the human mind. We have also in the last most recent
class if we talked about the fact that cognitive psychology basically also in some sense
follows the metaphor that the brain that the mind is to the brain what is software is to a
computer hardware.
So we will try and take forward this approach towards thinking about the mind, brain
relationship and we will try and see what are the various approaches that have been take into
understand this relationship, this analogy between the mind being the software and the brain
being the hardware.
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In this current lecture basically then we will look at this mind brain or the software, hardware
approach and we will try and also contrast it to some of the other approaches like the
neuroscience approach or the artificial intelligence approach as such.
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Now just to actually begin the problem or to begin talking about the problem, let me refresh
the problem for you to really understand what are we talking about. Now in the last classes
you would have seen that one of the aims of cognitive psychology is actually to understand
how the brain is structured or the how the mind is structured basically. Now the point is,
there is a bit of a problem for us as compared to somebody attempting to understand another
machine.
We are faced with something which is similar to a black box. Okay we do not know apriori
what is going on in this box. We do not really also know that what are different; let us say
sets of neurons in the brain are doing okay. So in that sense you can assume that we are
actually dealing with the black box, we might know a set of inputs and we might know a set
of out puts, but we do not have any other way to actually see what is going on inside the
black box.
One of the things that is clear for researches really approaching this problem in at least in the
human context is that we cannot really physically attempt to open this black box. Say for
example, if you dealing with any other machine and you want to understand how the machine
works a typical mechanical engineer might really want to open this machine down to its bears
nuts in tools, nuts and bolts.
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And actually see how each of the parts are connected and what each of the parts are doing,
but we do not have that luxury when you are talking about the human brain. So we will see
what could be the alternative approaches to really see what is going inside the brain. That is
exactly what another focus of cognitive psychology is. So basically in order to make this
head away, make or begin this enquiry what we do is, we simply accept a couple of things.
So we accept this foundational assumption that the black box contains and information
processing system.
You know you give it some input, it will give you some output, whatever it is doing in the
middle is information processing of some kind. Okay, and what we try and do then is to
understand the nature of the internal station processes, how information is you know
processed when we are talking in a reference of the brain or in reference of this mind which is
the abstract part.
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So here you can see it is being very well visualized in this book by Quinlan and Dyson which
the lecture is basically based on. We are actually talking about set of input, and we are talking
about set of output, but at the center the basic computational tool is your black box and we do
not know much about it. We are trying to as cognitive psychologist understand and figure out
the internal working of this black box.
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Now so where do we begin when we have to understand this black box. So how do we
understand what is this computer doing so if we may call it a computer? The aim is or one of
the thing that could done is that we get somebody and naive observer let us say to uncover
what is going on when the computer runs a program okay.
So I will just take because I am talking about the computer and hardware and software
analogy let me give you an example in terms of a program. Now here is a simple computer
program of any language.
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And the idea is that the program has these different line numbers, there is a particular input
and there is a particular output. So the new of the program is fun and you begin on the
second line then you kind of type something and we have fun yet and then some responses
given okay. The response is yes then you actually end the program if the response is no, you
again ask the same question, this is a very simple program.
Now if somebody really wants to understand how this answer is arrived at, he may take
variety of approaches to understand this okay. Let us take this example to cognitive
psychology update and try and see what cognitive psychology really does to approach such a
problem. On the first approaches let us say could be the cognitive approach which we are
talking about.
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Here in what happen is that the observer has to compulsorily adapt something of a non
invasive approach. So what the observer can do is he can basically vary the input to the
program he can type sometimes yes, he can type sometimes no, and then he actually would
note down any systematic changes that had happening in the output. Say for example, if you
type yes you see what is done by the program we should type no you again see what is done
by the program.
And in that sense you can make out that if I say yes the program exist if I say no that the
program actually stays and ask the question again. This exercise in some sense will give you
some idea about what this internal processes or what the internal decision making system of
the program is actually doing. Now what happens is in this sense when you actually
undertake this exercise as an observer what you could do is. You can actually generate that
these kind of inputs will be given and certain decision process say for example will be
undertaken and a particular kind of an output will be there.
So this is the crux of what the cognitive approach. This is something very similar to what do
when we are trying to study the mental states or mental process of the brain. You try and see
what do you really use as a stimulus and how does the brain respond to it and then we try and
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guess what kind of processing the brain you know would have done or say for example, what
kind of mental function would have operated on this input to come up with such and such
output.
Moving on to another approach let us talk about the artificial intelligence approach. Artificial
intelligence approach the focus is slightly different. You do not merely need to understand,
you do not merely want to understand what is happening in this program. You want to
actually go one step ahead. And how do you do that.
You do that by actually generating a new computer program that mimics the behaviour of the
observed program. So what you doing is you not really understanding completely or you are
actually understanding or you are not really satisfied with just understanding what a
particular program and question is doing.
You might want to actually what do you want to actually do is, want to create a parallel
program, a new program which does exactly the same as this particular program has done.
And in that sense you will did use that you have completely understood the process that this
program would have taken. Now the success or the failure of your new program basically
would mimics if the new program completely mimics the behaviour of the observed program
in all critical aspects.
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In the kind of outputs generated, the amount of time that is taken and different other
parameters that you can think of. Now not only for this case, not only you should think of a
flowchart description, you could also operationalize the ideas in the new computer programs.
So you might have some guess that okay. I think that this program in question is using a
particular kind of a decision box.
And you actually have a chance of implementing the same decision box which you think is
being used by this earlier program. And you implement that in your own program and you
see the output exactly match that of the program in question. If it matches you might assume
that okay may be I have guessed correctly that this was the decision box. This was the
decision process that the program in question was following.
Okay. Now this actually this kind of an approach gives you the satisfaction of having a
demonstration proof. Once you actually check out all of you assumptions in this new program
that you have made what you have is a demonstration proof. The demonstration proof
basically tells you that whatever particular representation and processes that you would think
of about this program in question are actually being followed.
Because you created the program of yourself that really mimics and that really does the same
thing. It is pretty much similar if you think of what we are trying to do with the robotics.
You are trying to build and create robots which would actually process the stimuli and the
information in the real world as the humans are doing. Say for example, we are trying to
build robots which actually talk to humans like humans would do which process the visual
stimulate say for example depth and color and shape just like human would do.
Here are also if you would know of that we are also thinking you are self driving cars, car
driven by these artificial intelligence methods which basically follow the same kind of
methods that the humans would do or may be even better. This is pretty much what is the
artificial intelligence approach to understanding the mind, brain relationship. What are the
benefits of such an approach?
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The claimed benefit of such an approach most importantly is that it would force a theorist to
somebody who is trying to understand to formulate very very precisely the assumptions that
underlie the theory of the other program that you would want to study. So unless you have
actually given a very very precise statements that I think this is exactly happening, this is the
next step, this is the third step and the forth step.
You will not be able to implement that in your program. So it kind of limits the scope of let
us say in some sense speculative theorization. You have to come up with very very sharp and
clear assumptions and those assumptions are those virtual anyways test it out in your own
program. So that is a very important benefit of the AI approach. Another thing is as I said
earlier that you have a demonstration proof. That tells you that operations that you specified
about the earlier programs sufficient to explain the behaviour of that program.
Because you are anyway is testing it out in your own program. The same kind of output you
generating. So in that sense you can actually see that okay this is done. Now something of
note here will be that you should keep in mind that it very possible for two rather different
programs to actually take some input and generate identical outputs. That is something
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which we would need to keep in mind while you are actually following the AI approach, and
I am sure that to some extend that is also being in the discipline.
So this is one of the things also if you remember in the last lecture we were talking about
Mars, levels of explanation the algorithmic level, the computation level and those kind of
levels the AI approach actually forces you to generate very very here explanations on those
levels as well. So that is again to the merit of the AI approach to understanding the mind,
brain relationship. Now coming to the neuro science approach.
The neuroscience approach is actually something similar to what the hardware approach
would be. You actually want to understand the machine you really want to understand how
the different parts of the machines are connected. What is the role or the functional role for
each of the parts of the machine? So neuroscience approaches pretty much the same approach
apply to the human brain.
Now the point is how do we proceed with the neuro science approach given the fact that we
have to be non-invasive and we do not have the luxury of opening of this machine. So one of
the ways could be to just try and measure the inner states or inner working of this computer
or this brain we are talking about. Because you are following non invasive approach and we
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are not allowed to break open the computers casing and different parts what we can do is we
basically try and have some indirect measures.
So we may try and measure the let us say the magnetic field around the parts of the
components. And for example, if a particular process as being done, what is the nature of the
magnetic field of the different parts things like that. Very similar to what the current
neuroscience approach is actually doing. We will elaborate on this in the coming lectures
anyways.
The ultimate hope with this neuro science approach is actually that if we observe the changes
in the states of its physical components the component of this machine as we run the program
then they should tells us something very fundamental about the nature of the program itself.
Say for example if you give a particular kind of an output, and you see how the machine is
changing, how the internal states or some indices of these internal states are changing.
You would know that this is what is happening in response to this input and that is how a
particular kind of an output is being generated. So I will take examples one of the typical one
of the very popular methods in neuro science is this approach of FMRI wherein what we
actually do is we measure the blood flow in various areas of the brain. With response to
particular kinds of stimulus say for example, if I actually shown your face there is a particular
area in the brain where the blood flow will maximize in a relation to other areas.
And that is how we deduce, that this is area which is implicated in processing of these kind of
stimulus which is the face. Again it is something similar to trying to understand what does the
brain do. When you present to it a face and what kind of an output it really produces so what
is the output to the face probably the fact that you recognize them that it is a face, second you
will recognize the person whom the face belongs to and similar other things. Now this idea is
actually as I said rather similar to what is currently being done.
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Now current state of the hard disk like we are already now beginning to map out which areas
of brain are particularly exercised when a person is engaged in certain cognitive task. Say for
example tasks like reading, task like understanding or recognizing a face and those kinds of
things. However, I might observe that so far rather little has being learnt about the cognitive
processes that are assumed to be associated with such changes in brain activation.
Let us say we have a knowledge about that these, these areas are involved in these particular
cognitive functions, but if you ask neuro scientist to really make a very strong claim I think
we are still not there. Obviously, you can say that this area is responsible for let us say face
recognition or word reading or say for example attention and stuff like that, but the point is,
we are not really 100%, I mean at the place that we can explain one by one what are steps
what are basically happening with respect to these different brain areas.
Already though to the credit of the field much is still being learnt about the structural
organization of the brain where you know each of these different kind of stimuli are being
process but still we have long way to go really to understand how each of these areas are
implicated exactly. Now these different approaches apart I will now take you toward rather
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different kind of an approach and we will slightly moving away from the example of this
program and the mind, brain relationship that we were talking about.
Let us talk about cognition slightly in a more general sense. Okay now if you actually try and
understand that cognition pretty much is basically or is very similar to somebody processing
some information and coming with the particular output. So there was the very influential
approach which came out in the 1940s, end of the 1940s that really try to specify how
information processing happens and in that sense it also kind of you know created a particular
kind of theoretical frame work for understanding how the human brain also process the
information.
Now this information this approach is basically the information theory approach which is
actually introduced by Shannon and Weaver in 1949, and it was supposed to be a
mathematical account of the operation of any type of communication system. Any
communication system can actually we approached theoretically through this particular
approach. So what is this approach do?
This approach basically it provides the basic assumptions that underpin our ideas about what
information processing systems are. How information processing is actually done. What are
the various parameters? So let us say take the example of two speakers may be connected by
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a wireless phone or wired phone or something like that. Now talking about this telephone and
some kind of message has been interchanged.
It is components of such a typical setting. So you have an information source that is a

speaker 1. He could be a Andy or anyone. And then you have a transmitter, so the
information source actually transmits some kind of message through this transmitter which is
the transmitter in this case let us stay Andy’s telephone over which Andy is speaking who is
the information source.
Then you have to have channel through which this information will be passed through so let
use the cable connecting the two handsets or let us say a satellite connecting the wireless
connecting these two phones wirelessly. And then you have a receiver which is Lou’s phone
who is the person Andy is talking to, that will be the receiver. Another aspect is the
destination which is Lou himself who is actually receiving this message which is basically
sent by the speaker who is Andy.
So typically an information processing system or rather simple idea is that you have an
information source you have a transmitter, you have a channel, you have a receiver and you
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have the destination. These are the five components of any rather simplistic information
system.
Here you can actually see the visualization of this information processing system. So you
have an information source, you have a transmitter, you have place where there is a source
has being transferred and you have a receiver and a destination. So this is typically the set up.
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Now what happens is in this communication system the auditory input is actually it first
needs to be converted by the transmitter into an electrical signal which will actually travel
through the channel okay this is one of the steps. Another is that the same signal which has
been converted the same an electric signal which was basically earlier information sources
has to reconverted into the information source the kind of information that was being sent
already at the point where the receiver is at the point where receiver basically gets this
information from the channel.
So what Shannon and Weaver did is they actually considered these important issues and they
said they could be few variables which might be necessary to take into account when we are
talking about such a system of the variables as channel capacity. How much information can
this channel actually carry okay? The second is the rate of transmission how fast; nowadays
we are talking about high speed internet.
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So what is this rate of transmission? The third is the redundancy of coding. How much
meaningful information can actually be transmitted? I will talk about these things in more
detail as we go ahead. And the fourth is the noise, how much meaningful information versus
how much noise or how much non-meaningful information you actually transferred through
the channel.
So these are the four factors. And these four factors or a ratio those those four factors should
decide how efficient your communication system is. Okay if you be with me and if you try
and think this over you will kind of get the idea of what we are trying to do here what trying
to actually create an analogy of the way the brain might be processing this wide variety of
information that it is getting from the environment. But I will come to that in a while.
Now Shannon and Weaver were basically they trying to develop a general statistical
formulation for describing the interrelationship between these four variables we talked about
importantly what they did was that their account was actually couched on a rather abstract
formulation, this was this entire variables and how information processing system is designed
having all these four, five factors we talked about earlier is other at an abstract level.
It is independent of what kind of transmitter or what kind of receiver you are actually
considering or what kind of information being transported through this particular channel.
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We are not really talking about those specific details as if now just talking about a typical
communication system and what are the components of this communication system. Now
Haber in 1974 basically writes that their idea of that Shannon and Weaver had, was basically
that they wanted to develop communication system with the general statistical concepts.
Independent of the specific types of channels, the types of senders and types of receivers and
most critically the nature of the contained of information that is pretty much what they
wanted to really do. Now let me come to rather important aspect of the information theory
which is a redundancy.
The redundancy basically is it can be used to refer to the amount of information present in a
given signal if we take an example here, say for example I say that X is my brother and X is
also the son of my father. So what I am trying to say here is that if I write these two sentences
in a message I am actually one of these two sentences will actually be redundant, because say
for example if I am already saying that x is my brother it should imply that he is son of my
father or if I actually just say that x is the son of my father it automatically implies that x is
my brother.
So the whole point is that the entire message actually contains less information as compared
to the length of this entire message. So one of the ways of computing redundancy is basically
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from mathematical formula which says that the amount of redundancy, redundancy in a
particular messages logged to, of the amount of information as compared to the total length of
the message.
That is one mathematical formulation we do not really want to talk about that in detail for our
purpose, but just to explain, just to give you the idea of what redundancy should mean. The
important point in redundancy invite as valuable to us, that it kind of helps you to define and
quantify the amount of information present in a particular message. It also in some sense,
gives you a way of measuring it. Now this was rather vital addition to the field of cognitive
psychology in a sense that it allowed cognitive psychologist to conceive waves of measuring
something couched at a psychological or abstract level.
If you remember the classes that have happened till now we have talked about the fact that
things we are actually cognitive psychology the entire conception of what the mind is, or
what the mental states are. They are couched in a abstract world, in an abstract reality. So
this is something which you would need to keep in mind. Another way of thinking about
redundancy is in terms of how much the signal can be correctly predicted by other parts of
the signal.
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So if you are giving a particular information whether that information can be already
predicted from what is already known. Say for example if let us say message let us is highly
predictive what is basically one could actually get away in that sense by deleting the
irrelevant bits and just leaving the relevant part. Say for example, if there is a variable X and
it is always followed by variable Y we do not need to specify separately for the variable Y,
we would know that okay if X is there Y will anyways be there. That is how basically you
know people could actually quantify information and find ways of measuring it.
Now Shannon and Weaver basically took it upon themselves to try to quantify information
purely in terms of statistical means by using things like frequency of co-occurrence of parts
of the message. For instance, they realized with amount of information increases with the
number of things that might have occurred at a given point in the signal. So if we are just idea
of the temporal unfolding of the signal, those kind of things.
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Say for example there is a message that we should meet tonight because that is the good time
to elope, has a very low redundancy as Lou would be unable to reconstruct the intended
message. If at all say for example what he heard was we should meet because that is good
dash to dash. Here Andy could fill in different kinds of things, so the whole point is it is not
easy to predict what the message was, so the message in that sense has low redundancy. Now
what is information processing theory give us about human information processing.
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We know now that this modern world really depends on the variety of telecommunication
systems that are fundamentally based on the properties and principles which were identified
by Shannon and Weaver. So these early ideas also influence cognitive psychologists for
example by providing them a frame work of thinking about how the human mind might be
operating, how the human mind might be taking, let us information about colour and shape
and different things and processing it.
So in that sense it actually provided rather new theoretical frame work. It also provided the
foundation for the assumption that the mind may be characterized as an information
processing system whereby stimulation at the senses enters complex communication system
and then if kind of gets to a particular point.
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Now these different models of cognitive processing then which would be found at that point
in time were based on the central tenets of this information processing frame work which
Shannon and Weaver had given. Say for example one of the earliest models of memory that
kinship model and those kinds of models. Now psychologist at that point then are very quick
to realise that for humans, the notion of information would be slightly more difficult as
compared to the notion of information for machines.
Say for example, dog bites man or man bites dog basically is the same set of information, but
dog bites man actually makes much less of a sense than man bites dog or the other way round
actually. But this entire thing actually forced the psychologists to really consider a whole new
way of thinking about human cognition. It helps the people come up with theories about how
memory would work or how sensory processing would work and those kinds of things.
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So this classical information processing view is basically that human organism really contains
these many sensory systems eyes, ears, nose, the skin which operates as receivers of external
input, these receivers operate to encode these inputs via sensory transduction. So encoded
information is then passed on, via abstract information processing systems to more central
system like in the cerebral cortex or in the brain.
These central system which are there in the core of the brain, or they basically try to operate
the on information in such a way that an appropriate sense of that information could be made.
Say for example, if you are seeing a bunch of shapes or bunch of colours what the processing
system will try to do is operate upon them in such a way that you actually see shapes in there
or you actually see that these are the objects in this gamut of colours in lines and shapes.
Ok, now while this might resemble slightly the behavioural stance the cognitive
psychologists were basically more concerned with the fact that how this internal abstract
events are happening what is happening between the stimuli and the responses.
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So to sum up today’s lecture what we talked about today was these various approaches
towards understanding the mind, brain relationship or what goes on in the mind and we also
talked about a very important approach which is the information processing approach. Thank
you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
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Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
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Aradhana Singh
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Course Title
Lecture - 08
Modularity and Cognitive Neuropsychology
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Welcome to the course, basic cognitive processes.
I am doctor Ark Verma from IIT Kanpur.
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The title of today lecture is modularity and cognitive neuropsychology. In today’s lecture we will
talk about the approaches towards modularity, the concept of what modularity is, and we will
also talk about how the field of cognitive neuropsychology helps us understand the relationship
between the mind and the brain. Again just to take a brief stock of what we have been doing till
now we know what the definition of cognitive psychology is.
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The fact that it is scientific study of the mind and mental processes. We also have looked in the
last lecture about the various approaches that have been taken to understand the relationship
between the mind and the brain. But in this lecture basically we will talk about the this issue of
concept of modularity, which was given by Jerry Fodor and we will try and see how this helps us
in understanding the architecture of the human mind.
We will also talk about how this field of cognitive neuropsychology, which is basically a field
one tries to understand the damage brain or which basically attempts to take stock of how
different cognitive disorder, gives us a peak into the workings of the human brain. Now one of
the central concepts that I will be talking about in the today’s lecture is the concept of modular
design.
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Now David Marr in 1982 actually put forward this concept as the principle of modular design
and he advanced this argument, in term of an example of the computer program, and basically he
talked about how a particular programmer who is basically given the task of designing a large
and complex computer programs will go about this task. Let us say that there is somebody whom
we have asked to write a large program.
Let us say the program has to you know do the task of let say simple task of letting us understand
what are the different objects what are the shapes in the visual environment, that particular
program, would basically have to have sub components okay. As any typical program, let us say
for example there is a program of library you have to really write a program, that basically
functions as a library, it should allow you to, you know issue books, it should allow you to
register books that are returned in and those kinds of things.
Any such programs if you want the program to do some mental activity like looking and seeing
shapes, or typical computer program whom you want to really just use as a library program, will
both need to have sub components. We have talked about this in the car engine example in one
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of the previous lecture, today we will also try and see how that example can be applied an
understanding of this human mind and brain interaction.
Now the central idea in this principle of modular design that David Marr gave, was the idea that
we need to break down this overall endeavor, over all large program that should be broken down
into smaller components each of which do a particular task and each of which are connected to
each other in possible ways that help this takes to get completed, ok these are the things you
really want to do here. Now let us try and apply this to the human mind how the human mind,
how does this model apply to the human mind?
Jerry Fodor basically takes this you know approach to this course the goal of understanding the
human mind okay. So Jerry Fodor basically takes this to how to about how to understand the
functional architecture of the human mind. He puts forward something called the modularity
hypothesis; you know the idea that the mind may be decomposed into smaller and discrete sub
processes and modules.
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Now again coming back to this example of the program, this program basically can be divided
into this separate modules or sub routines that can be developed independently of the program, to
those of whom who may be familiar from how writing a programs and texting a programs might
know it there is a big programmer or a big code of 5000 line code or 10000 line code you have to
write, there are people who actually undertake the writing of this sub modules. And then what is
done is basically all these sub modules are integrated in a single program and implemented as if.
This was just one program which you know complete this task, which is as of this program, to
complete okay. So say for example, very large software packages like Microsoft office, or say
for example windows and those kind of things each of this sub routings will have dedicated
programmer who collectively work in just develop, just work on one particular sub routine. Now
Marr basically wrote this with respect to large and complex computer programs.
He can actually be applied to how we think of the functional architecture of the mind as well say
for example, if mind is can be thought of this simple program that helps this process all this
information that we get this entire environment around here, and all of this possible output that
we generate. Then we can actually think of you know many sub modules, for example if you
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walking in a park you are actually undergoing a variety of experiences you smelling a lot of you
know odors of these different flowers, and would want to you know recognize them, you would
navigating the path, you would want to walk without bumping into anybody.
You might also want to think and decide on somethings, so the point is you will at least three
different modules to be doing these things, you would need a module that process order and
helps you to recognize you know the object to which this order belongs to. You would also say
for the example, want to have a proper navigational component which will help you walk in this
park without bumping into others, and you would to have a particular decision making kind of
the module that helps you decide and eliminate on whatever happen during the day.
And decide for example whether the day was a good or bad you know, these different kinds of
things, so you can take this example in this principle of this modularity that David Marr
forwarded and applied to how the mind really works you know to understand and functional
architecture of the human mind might be. Now according to Marr, there are actually you know
very clear advantage to having this modular design okay, in having a complex system, you know
divided into this sub process specialized sub processes. Let us take about what these advantages
could be.
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Now one of the particular advantages of having a system like this, or having this large system,
broken down into sub components or modules as David Marr would have it, has the very
important advantage that this makes the system resistant to damage. Now for example, if there is
a one large computer program, and you would want to make a change to one of the lines of this
10000 line program.
The point it is very possible that if it is just indeed in one single program, that changing one line
let say line number 2501 will actually change something for this entire program. So if you want
to really avoid that kind of a scenario, for that what programmer do will actually, use these
different modules, you have to change something in a module it has consequence for that module
itself okay.
And in that sense you have a system which will not break down, let say that one module is not
functioning, everything else kind of functions pretty much in this same way okay. So say for
example, you know this is something you know which can be explain that our program, if it is
divided into subcomponents makes this resistance to damage, any kind of damage for that matter
okay.
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On the contrary also say for example if this program is compose of this independent routine it is
also possible to see that damage to one of this component does not create a problem for all the
components or entire output of this entire program.
Now applying this view to the human mind or applying view to the this architecture of human
mind what can be said is that this sensory transduction processes you know human senses the
eyes, the nose, the ears, basically each of these sense organs what it does it whatever the
information that receives that is converted into some kind of information, that is usable by the
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senses, by the process which is called sensory transduction, it eventuates in information being
transformed into a common perceptual quotes.
Say for example, there is some information coming from the eyes, there is something you are
hearing and something you say that you are touching okay. These three sensory inputs will all be
converted into a particular perceptional code which will be the common code on which all of
these other processor will work. So all of these different sense organs will actually convert their
information into something of a common perceptional code and this basically is rendered to and
this common perceptual code actually worked on by the higher cognitive processes like decision
making, memory etc, okay.
This code then, as and how does this really you know get evaluated by these higher cognitive
process, Marr says that this code is then operated on in sequence by the faculties of perception,
imagination, reasoning, memory, etc. And each of these faculties, they basically effect their own
intrinsic operations upon these set of input representation okay. So what this, what was the
different source of information, the eyes, the ears, you know the noise, the skin, all of them give
you the different kind of information, you convert it into a common perceptional code.
And let this common perceptional code, is worked on by this higher cognitive abilities, like
memory like languages, if you want to talk about it, like say for example reasoning if you want
to decide something about it okay. And each of this processors work on this in their own special
way okay. And in some sense irrespective of each other say for example, that was the idea that
David Marr was saying that linguistic code for or linguistic operation on a particular kind of
information will happen independently of the perceptual you know processing that will happen,
or independent of the memory operation that will happen.
Now in that sense it kind of can be a good thing or a bad thing we will discuss this in more detail
as we move ahead.
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Finally in this way David Marr actually you know was also particularly taken with this principle
of modular design, because it allowed for a degree of operational independence, memory does
not need to depend on the perception, reasoning does not need depend on the memory, you know
it could just operate logically by its own, it does not need to take information from the memory.
And the point is here is where a bit of the disagreement the modular design with already starts
creeping in okay.
Now the whole idea is that this is also something say for example if you want rather efficient
system can be useful. It might be a good thing let us say, let us assume that memory does not
depends on perception, or reasoning does not depend on your memory, you know those kind of
things that David Marr was talking about. The idea is that in this very complex information
processing system that is the mind, these different modules can be getting on your own task,
quiet independently of each other and quite independently of what is happening in the other parts
of the brain okay.
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So this is what David Marr meant when he was talking about this modular design. Now it already
starts feeling a little bit counter intuitive, but be with me as we go through this whole concepts of
why modularity was proposed, and as we go ahead in later lecture of this course we will evaluate
whether we can apply this principle of modularity, to the way actually cognitive processing takes
place, because this was something which was given way back in 1982.
We know a lot more about, how cognitive processing or how the mental functions you know,
operate now. And in actually you know in that sense evaluate whether this was you know correct
way of assuming how the mental architecture would be okay. So for now we will just discuss
what basically David Marr had proposed. Now two much with Marr for now let us move to in
other way in which modularity has been thought off.
So one of the other very popular formulation of modularity was given by, Jerry Fodor, and Jerry
Fodor basically 1983 forwarded something which known as the modularity hypothesis. Jerry
Fodor basically began by discussing, what he called was the faculty of psychology okay, what is
the faculty of psychology? Faculty of psychology is basically is this loosely held set of beliefs
that maintains the mind is composed of very many, different sort of special purpose components.
You know if remember one of the earlier classes I have been talking about what are the different
mental functions that, the mind undertakes each of these different mental functions can actually
if you want theoretically be these different modules. So imagination could be a module, in that
visual imagination could be a module, auditory, or otherwise imagination could be a module, or
say for a example understanding shapes could be a module, your ability of reasoning could be a
module.
So these kind of things Jerry Fodor actually began discussing. Marshal basically 1984 says that
the basis of this idea Fodor was putting forward in 1983, basically could be traced back, to the
ancient Greek times you know of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Just a quick flash back what
Aristotle was saying. So Aristotle framework basically he talked about thinking quiet a lot and
his framework for thinking basically starts with the considerations of the five senses, we say
there are five sense that we have sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.
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And each of these five senses map on to this respective sense organs okay. So for the sight we
have eye, we have ear, we have the skin, we have the nose, and we have the tongue for each of
these different senses respectively. Eventually these are the senses which do; sensory encoding
of whatever information is coming in, and then sensory transduction which is basically
converting of the sensory information to a form that can be processed by the brain.
Jerry Fodor drawing from what Aristotle had talked about, proposed two kinds of faculties, two
kinds of abilities that the human mind or the human brain you might say will have. The first kind
of faculties is proposed by Jerry Fodor where the horizontal faculty okay.
He labeled with faculties of perception, imagination, reasoning & memory as horizontal

faculties. Now what is horizontal faculty let us elaborate. Horizontal faculties basically reflect
general competencies okay, whatever the brain generally does on all different, all kinds of
information okay. So for example, whatever processing really cuts across different domains, I
was talking about colored and those kinds of things.
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What all the brain does on every information that comes in, those kind of faculties could come
up under this horizontal faculties category. Say for instance cognitive abilities may be conceived
as containing a memory component, all cognitive abilities that is, and therefore, memory can be
constituted as a horizontal faculty. Even if I am talking about, talking to you about language, if I
am talking to you about reasoning, if I am talking to you about imagery, all of these will
necessary have a component of memory.
Say for example, if I ask you to describe the world in 20 sentences, you will definitely use your
memory to talk about it. So language has a memory connection, if I talk to you about let us say
deciding something, you will actually say for example the mental arithmetic example that we
took in one of the earlier classes, comparing 17*3 and 14*5, you will do some computation and
from your memory hold these results, and then compare.
So that also has a component of memory okay. So this is the way in which these different
faculties were supposed to imply, supposed to be involved in whatever the brain is doing, and in
that sense at a generic level. And these generic abilities were clubbed under this category called
horizontal faculties okay. So memory in that sense can be constituted as a horizontal faculty in so
far as memory constraints are like to other and quite unrelated competencies.
Such as say for example you know trying to learn a poem by heart, you will need to read the first
line, second line, third line hold it, and then read the fourth and fifth line hold it, and then try and
recite it back, so anyways does have memory component involved here.
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According to Jerry Fodor horizontal faculties then can be defined with respect to what they do
and not defined in terms of what they operate on okay, these are general processes these are not
concerned with say for example, what they are processing. Similar to if they remember you
know we are talking about information processing in the last lecture, we are talking about how
Shannon and Weaver you know visualize the information processing system, they were not
really concerned with what is this information processing system transmitting and receiving.
They are concerned with what could be the parameters, what are the components of the
information processing system. Similarly Jerry Fodor said that horizontal faculties basically are
defined with respect to they are doing, not with respect to what they are operating on okay. So
this is the one of the ways, in which we can think of horizontal faculties.
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Another kind of faculties Jerry Fodor actually defined, or put forward was that of vertical
faculties, what are vertical faculties. Vertical faculty is basically are the different kinds of
information that are coming, that will be later operated upon by the horizontal faculties. Now
inspiration for this where Jerry Fodor probably came from the work of French physician France
Joseph Gall, and Gall had a very interesting conceptualization of the human mind.
Gall’s idea was that the mind is composed of a distinct mental organ, and each mental organ was
defined with respect to a specific content domain okay. I will elaborate on this as we move ahead
for instance, they could be a mental organ that underlies musical ability okay, and a different
mental organ that underlies mathematically ability, and a different mental organ let us say that
underlies sports ability okay. So Joseph Gall was actually and France Gall was actually thinking
at that point in time, that each ability is associated with a specific organ in the brain.
And that is how we conceptualize or actually divided the whole brain into a separate portions
which, let us just talk about that in some sense. Gall actually takes these arguments slightly
further and proposes that each of these different mental faculties or mental organs could be
identified within a unique region of the brain okay. And he firmly believed in this, what he did
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was he basically divided the brain into these particular bumps, he said there are these different
bumps in the brain, structural points in the brain which could be interpreted as being associated
with particular mental abilities okay.
Each of these regions would embody a particular intellectual capability and the prominence of
the bump, how prominent it is and how does it appear, basically would indicate that the size of
the underlying brain regions. Say for example, if there is a very important mental function, let us
say the ability to do good math, you know maybe the underlying region or the bump associated
the ability of doing math should be slightly larger as compared if you think that music is a
simpler ability. So the region of the brain devoted to the musical ability will be slightly smaller
okay.
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There is in that sense, here in this you can see that your, this is what the conception of France
Gall was, that these are these different regions, and each of these different regions of the brain
are doing something or the other okay. This is what France Gall said a way back in the 1700s,
1800s okay.
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Now in positing these vertical faculties Gall basically provided a critic of the traditional view of
horizontal faculty. So he basically said kind of pose this as a conflict between what the
horizontal faculties are and what the vertical faculties are. Now what we did he do with this was
that is general notion of faculties for memory perception etc, was dismissed in favor of a
framework for thinking in which a whole battery of a distant mental organ are posited okay.
In which each one has a particular characteristics with respect to memory, perception etc. So he
is saying that let us better divide the brain not into general abilities like the horizontal faculties,
let us talk about vertical faculties which are specific processes and each of these specific
processes has a component for memory, has a component for perception. And in that sense, so
imitation if you notice the last figure should have a component of memory, because you would
remember what you want to imitate and as a component for designing stuff like that okay.
So Gall’s vertical faculties in that sense, they do not share and hence they do not compete with
the horizontal resources for memory, or attention, or intelligence etc. okay. So there is this
conflict between what these general purposes, mental faculties or horizontal; faculties or these
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special purpose mental faculties or these vertical faculties, this is something which Gall was
talking about. Coming back to what Fodor really wanted us to think okay.
So Fodor wrote this book the modularity of mind in 1983, and slightly different meaning of
modules was introduced by the Jerry Fodor okay. He basically distinguished between what the
sensory transducers are, what these input systems, and what are the central processors okay, you
can think of about this in a way, that there is certain information in the world and that
information is received by you by virtue of these sensory organ which then convert this
information into a form in which the brain can actually deal with, so that is the process of
sensory transduction.
Once that information is converted into a common form after sensory transduction that
information has to be acted upon, by the other higher areas of the brain which is your central
processors. So take this example you know hold this example with you and then use it
understand what you are going to take about what fodder was meant with modularity okay. So in
order to understand this one of the concepts introduced by Fodor was, that the concept of
proximal stimulus, and the concept of distal stimulus.
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The proximal stimulus basically is what is happening at the sense organs you know what is the
stimulations that has been received at the organs. This distal stimulus will be what is the actual
object that is creating this proximal stimulation. Say for example, a distal stimulus could be a
stereo system which is playing let us say in the next room or in same room slightly distance from
you, and the associated proximal stimulus would be the sound vibrations that you eventually
received on the ear. So this proximal stimulation could vary if the stereo is kept very close to
you, versus the stereo kept far from you.
The sensory transducers which the sense organs are responsible for taking this proximal stimulus
and converting them into a basic sensory code which will be worked upon by the sensory
transducers. Now this code then acts as a input to the corresponding input system. So let us say
there is a input system that processes auditory information. Now for Fodor these input systems
are the modules that referred to in the modularity hypothesis. If you remember what you know
Marr was also saying.
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These modules have to interact as an interface between the sensory transducers and the central
processors okay. These will be the subunits that we will be working with okay. So the final
decision about what was the distal stimulus in this, say for example somebody asks you judge a
song that is playing on this stereo. So what was the distal stimulus maybe is has to be made by
the central processors okay.
So these central processors are concerned with the fixation of belief and planning of intelligent
action. And say for example if a nice song is being played, you know something that you want to
hear, so then maybe you will shift all your attention to it or something unpleasant is being played
and you want to go and stop it, that kind of decision has to be taken by the central processors.
This fixation of the central belief or this fixation of a perceptual belief actually is this act of
making a final decision about the distal stimulus, that is what the main job of the central
processors would be.
This is visualization of this entire process, you can see that there is a distal stimulus, and the
proximal stimulus and you can see that the end of this entire thing is the central processor which
will finally decide how you react to this information.
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All this really interesting thing about thinking, whether you like something or not, whether you
heard this before or not, those kind of decisions basically are taken by the central processors.
Fodor in 2000 also claimed that the operation of central processors actually remains essentially
unknown. This black box is still not really clear, in 2000, so for example in much ahead, you
know after this modularity hypothesis is proposed still it kind of remains unknown to us. Let us
try to make sense of what these modules are.
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Fodor says that these modules which are functioning are domain specific okay; there are many
more modules than sense organs. So the visual system may contain more than one module. Say
for example, it could be one module of color, one module processing depth, one modules
processing shapes and contours. So the entire visual processing system is not a single module, it
can also be divided into many sub modules okay.
Similarly, say for example in the domain of language processing there could be couple of
modules one which deals with written language or one with the visual language, one with spoken
language or auditory language.
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The recent take on this basically has been taken by Max Coltheart, where he says that a cognitive
system is domain specific if it only responds to stimuli of a particular kind. We will discuss a lot
of experiments as we go ahead, one of these examples that we will come across is the particular
area of the brain, which responds only towards, which is called the visual word media or
particular area of the brain which responds only to faces which we use for face area.
So these could be thought of as modules that actually deal with only a particular and a specific
kind of a stimulus okay. Now let us try and apply this whole concept of modularity to how the
brain is actually suppose to function okay, let us talk about what is called modularity and
cognitive neuropsychology.
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Fodor proposed that these modules are associated with fixed neural architecture of the adult
human brain. So the human brain can be divided functionally into these different modules.
Modules exhibit characteristics as specific break done patterns. Say for example, there could be a
module about color processing that might go away, there could be module about a speech
production that might go away and that kind of sense.
Now if we accept the above two points which we are conceding that modules have a fixed neural
structure and modules can have specific characteristics of break down etc. Then what we are
trying to do is, we are actually assuming rather critical dependency between the mind and the
brain okay. This is a very interesting part to which cognitive neuropsychology really helps us.
If the brain is damaged, just taking this example further, if the brain is damaged then it is very
likely that there will be negative consequences for a particular module that was associated with
that region of the brain okay. And I think this must be you might have heard of different people,
sometimes undergoing things like a stroke or something like accident in which particular and
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specific abilities are lost, memory loss happens or loss of language happens, loss of a particular
kinds of visual capabilities happen.
All of those kind of things are happening you know consequent to a brain damage. So there is
that relationship between the mind and the brain, they are to be seen.
Now what is cognitive neuropsychology? Cognitive neuropsychology basically, or let us say

what cognitive neuropsychologists are concerned with is the operation of disordered brains. You
know brains which have particular kinds of defects, you know and the assumption here is that
much can be learned about this cognitive system, or what the mind is when you actually look at
the brains which are not functioning normally, you know you can look at a broken machine and
you can think about this part is not working and this thing is not happening.
So this part is related to that particular kind of output, so this is the kind of relation that we try to
maintain, or try to deduce when you are actually talking about the cognitive neuropsychology.
This evidence from these brain damage individuals the patient from various hospitals can
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actually provide us converging evidence for particular functional accounts and we also provide a
critical constrains for such accounts.
Say for example, you thought that part A was involved in reading, and area B was involved in
speaking, and you come across a patient in which area is damaged the person is, but the person is
able to read completely you know accurately. It will help you remove that assumption that area
A was linked to reading that can happen. Another kind of another flavor of cognitive
neuropsychology is developmental psychology,
Developmental neuropsychology is the branch of the cognitive neuropsychology which basically

deals with brain disorders that develop as a person ages, and that lead to some form of cognitive
impairment that is developmental disorders. There are also acquired disorders that occur during
the normal course of development sometimes through injury or you know different kinds of
illness, say for example N-stimulitis or stroke etc., an example could be some people acquired
aphasia that is loss of language or a particular loss of particular component of language due to
stroke or other kinds of illnesses.
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Now in adopting this cognitive neuropsychological approach the theorists basically attempts to
understand the cognitive deficits following particular or specif kinds of brain damage. One of the
things that one does is except certain key assumption, what are those assumption let us say one
of those, say for the example as Coltheart said you have to have a foundational assumption, that
some functional architure is operating across all human all normal individuals.
You know something say for example, eyes or there is a particular area of the brain, let us say
area of the event, of the occipital cortex which is the part of the brain which processes visual
inputs operates in all the individuals, there should be nobody who actually sees through the
frontal cortex okay, that basic assumption one would have to maintain to have any theory about
how this mind and brain realtionship really works.
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According to Coltheart as he says, the cognitive neuropsycholgy would actually simply fail if
different individuals had different had different functional architectures for the same cognitive
domain. For example, which I just gave. Also you have to remember that if we are trying to
pursue cognitive psycholgy then we are trying to establish a general priniciple that general
principle that will apply across all individuals. The whole idea of this field is that we are actually
reducing theories which would apply to all individuals.
If things were so, that there were so many individual differences and each brain is completely
different from another brain, then it is will be very difficult to really generate any general
purpose theory which would apply acorss individuals. Now the logic behind cognitive
neuropyschology is very simple.
Cognitive neuropsychologists are primarily concerned with the patterns of similarities and
differneces between normal cognitive abilities and the abilities of these people who have a
disordered or damaged brain. What is you know, what are the specific abiities of a person with
damage in area is X of the brain, and what is the cognitive ability of the person who does not
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have damaging in area X and how does he perform on a paticular task, so we try and compare
this okay.
So typically the interest is in the performance across the whole battery of generally whole battery
of test is given which will test different aspect of a particular cognitive function. And the
performance of the these two individuals, one with the damaging area X and one with out
damaging area X are tested, and compared on this critical parameters, that is how you come to
know, that area X was involved in this specific kind of ability under the umbrella of this
particular cognitive function.
Now cognitive neuropsychology in that sense is slightly distinctive, because it really also talks
about some in detailed analysis of single case studies okay. Say for example, it compares the
performance of particpants with brain damage, to that of say for example, if there is a patient
who has damage as seen earlier in area X, how does this performance compare to the
performance of other normal indivduals.
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So we do invest a proper importance in a single cases as well okay. Now there could be two
kinds of deficits which you find in cognitive neuropsychology, let us talk a bit about that. First
kind of deficits is your association deficits. Say for example, if there is a patient who performs
poorly on say two different tasks, say for example in understanding written words and in
understanding spoken words. These are two diferent tasks okay.
Now these kind of impairments can be said to be associated because they are arising the same
function, same person okay. That there is a same person who cannot understand written words
and who cannot understand spoken words. It might be tempting also to conclude that the
performance in both tests depend on the operation of a single underlying module. So what you
can easily say language is basically involved in both undertanding written words and
understanding spoken words, so this person should have a problem with language. That is why
this kind of thing is happening, but there is more to that. We will talk about that in a while.
Another kind of deficit, that one could talk about is that disassociation deficit. Say for example,
Funnel in 1983 reports one particular patient who was able to read aloud more than 90% of the
words, but was unable to read aloud even the simplest of non words. Now what is the non words,
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non word is something that can is that arrangement of words that can be pronounced, but does
not have any meaning okay.
So there could be a person who is being able to read aloud all the words, but not being able to
read aloud any non word, why should this happen, you know what is that critical thing missing in
this person B. In such cases what we assume is that these abilities are said to be dissociated,
reading of non words and reading of words are said to be dissociated within the same, because
within the same person one is impaired, but the other is intact.
Now this deficit on the two tasking in question could also be that of degree. So for example, he
could read 50% of non words, not all the non words okay, that could also be one of the things to
be consider. Now let us look at these two examples or these two kinds of deficits slightly more
closley.
In terms of our single dissociation example, we have a case of two tasks that may either arise
because of the operation of two diferent modules one which understands written words, one
which understand spoken words. Or we can think of a non modular system that contains a single
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resource, in which basically both of the functions are implied okay. So there is a stimuli source
whocich would helps you understand in the single resorce.
In explaining of the single dissociation then what we can say it is easily accept the modular
explanatin okay. But it can also be explained through a non modular design okay, as I said in the
example just now. So you can apply the modular explanation that a single module was
subserving these two functions that is why this single asosicated definite or you could say both
these modules have been damaged in the same peson that is here something has happened.
So a modular versus the non modular expression are both feasible here. So but say for examle,
another way of looking at this is that maybe the two tasks are not equated in their inherent
difficulty. Okay so that is the single dissociation may mainly reflect the different demands on a
single resource as I was talking about the modular resource.
We can assume that the dissociation is showing the task A performance is unimpaired or
relatively unimapaierd because whereas task B performance is showing a substntial deficit,
reading written words or understanding spoken words. Now by the resource are given this can
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happen if task A is a easier task than task B. So the same ability is damaged and the demands on
this ability or the demands on this resources is more by task A and less by task B.
So you can say that task A will be damaged, but task B will still be there, because it is putting
less demands on the single resource okay, as I just said the task A makes fewer demands on
resources and the task B, so any damage that results in the depletion of mental resources will
have a more catastrophic impact on task B than task A okay, or will have a more catastropic
impact on the more difficult task, the one which makes more demands okay.
Now try and understand, let us try and understand, the double dissociation, what is happening in
double dissociation. A Fomer evidence for mental modules arises when we consider the notion
of double dissociation okay. Say for example, if you find a patient in which there are you know
two task, task A and task B and you have two patients, patients one and patient two okay. So
what can happen is say for example a double dissociation arise if in one case patient one
performs well on task A, but performance worse on B.
And patient B performs worse on task A and well on B. So you have this kind of a dissociation,
that there is in the same person, task A is fine, task B is damaged, and on the other person task B
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is fine and task A is damaged. So by this, by comparision of these data from these participants
you can actually deduce, that there is no way that the task A and task two are linked, and in that
sense you have to expect the modular explanation, than task A and task B, are being subserved
by two different modules, make sense?
Now Coltheart basically gives an example, it takes the example of a patient in 2001 and he says
that patient A is impaired in comprehending printed words, but normal at comprehending spoken
words, and patient B is normal at comprehending printed words but impaired at comprehending
spoken words. So this kind of pattern of deficit basiclaly provides you good grounds for
concluding that the different modules are underlying text comprehension and speech
comprehension, respectivley okay.
More specifically, the double dissociation basically is more consistent with the idea that at least
one module that is unique to comprehending either printed words or spoken words is slightly
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different okay. So at least one module is unique and the unique module that compares talks about
spoken words okay.
Moreover in case of double dissociation, such a double dissociation you cannot explain a way in
terms of only resource allocation, you cannot say the task A was slightly less difficult and task B
was more different that is why this pattern of deficit have emerged. So in simple terms say for
example, if task A demanded fewer resources than B as you saw task A performance can remain
intact even if task B performance is impaired okay.
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Now if that is possible, but still reverse pattern will not occur if the problem is assumed to lie in
allocation of resources in a single non modular system, something which is happening in the
double dissociation case okay. Any problems in resource allocation will hurt the difficult tasks
first, say for example, if you say the task A was difficult, task B was easy, then the other
example in which task A is damaged and task B is not, you cannot explain that okay.
Because if it is a single resource, then more difficult task will be effected first. But we saw in the
case of patient B, that different task was damaged, but this more difficult task was expired. So
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that you cannot really explain by using a single modular design that kind of forces you do
explain or accept this based on two different modules.
Coltheart actually takes this and he says that this by no means howeve is definitive proof of
modular architecture. For examples, double dissociations can arise in cases where different
impairments or the same unified information system is there. But for now we will actually accept
the two explantion forwarded of associated deficits and dissociated deficits, and how they can
actually help you to deduce wheather a particular ability is served by a common module, or by
two different modules okay.
Now just to sum up, the lecture for today we talked about various possible archiectures of the
mind using the modularity example from David Marr and also from Jerry Fodor we talked about
also how cognitive neuropsycholgy can help us understand the nature of the relationship between
the mind and the brain okay, thank you.
Acknowledgement
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Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia
255
@copyright reserved
256
Course Title
Lecture - 09
Basic Concept in Cognitive Neuroscience
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the course series basic cognitive processes.
I am Dr. Ark Verma from IIT Kanpur.
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The topic of today is lecture is basic concepts in cognitive neuroscience. Today I will talk to you
about the relationship between brain and behavior. We will talk about how the various structures
in the brain and the various processes inside the brain, contribute to the happening of metal states
and mental functions.
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To begin with let us ask what is cognitive neuroscience actually is. Cognitive neuroscience may
be defined as the study of physiological basics of cognition you might remember in the earlier
classes we have been talking constantly about cognitive psychology being an abstract science
and the entire frame of cognitive psychology resting on the fact that we do not need physical
substrates to a rely upon while we are theorizing about how mental functions exist and what is
basically the architecture of the mind.
In today’s lecture we will try to actually connect those that abstract architecture to a physical
architecture that is your brain.
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Just to give an example about how your brain is involved in each and every activity you do. Let
us take the case of this boy John who is actually a who is sleeping everyday every morning one
of the first thing that he does is he switches off the alarm clock that goes on right next to his
head. Now what must be happening in the brain when the alarm goes off? The first step that
happens when alarm goes off is that the sound is reaches the ears of Juan and this sound waves
are then converted into an kind of an electrical signal from the ear which is then communicated
to the brain.
The auditory areas in the brain actually help Juan really hear this sound and then these signals
then a decision is taken whether to stop the alarm clock or to rise up, because it is already
morning time that signal or that decision has to be communicated through towards the motor
areas of the brain which actually take instruct Juan’s hand to actually go out there and to stop the
alarm clock from ringing. Now this is a very simple and probably one of the most simplest
examples of particular behavior that you might engage in.
But you should give an idea about that in the simplest and most complex of the task that we do or
the simplest the most complex of mental function that we can think about our brain is constantly
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working, there is a entire system of communication and structures in the brain that actually
collaborate to bring about any kind of behavior that the human beings involves in.
So let us talk about what we do in cognitive neuroscience or in today’s lecture to be precise. In

today’s lecture we will talk about the various structures of the brain and their relationship with
the human cognitive processes. We will also talk about at a variety of methods to investigate the
relationship between brain and behavior. Now we will try and try to figure out also how this
above two can actually contribute towards developing a theory of human cognition.
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Let us begin with the organization of the nervous system. The nervous system basically is a
collection of hundreds of billions of specialized and interconnected cells through which the
massages are sent from the brain to the rest of the body and vice versa. The most basic or the
most primary parts of this nervous system are the central nervous system which consists of the
brain and the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system which links the central nervous
system to our skin our muscles and other glands of the body.
A large part of our behavior is also controlled by the endocrine system which is basically the
chemical regulator of the body which consists of glands that secretes a variety of hormones and
other neuro transmitters that influence our behavior.
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So, here is a figure you actually have look at it so here you will see the central nervous system
which is consisting of the brain and the spinal cord and the peripheral nervous system which
consist mainly of this peripheral nerves.
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Now coming to neurons, the neurons basically are considered to be the basic building blocks of
the brain this theory was basically first proposed by Raymond Cajal who discovered that the
individual units called neurons were the basic building blocks of the brain, and that basically
forms the centerpiece of doctrine called the neuron doctrine. The neuron doctrine actually said
these individual cells transmit the signals in the nervous system and that these cells are not
continuous with other cells as was earlier proposed by the nerve net theory.
So we are talking about these neurons as single and independent units which connects to each
other to a relay particular kinds of signals which actually happen while the brain is processing
the variety of stimuli, a variety of information that is incoming from the environment.
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Here you can see the figure of a neuron you will see that at the left most there is this cell body
which is basically where the nucleus of the neuron or the cell lies and you will see there are these
projections from the cell body which are called dendrites the job of them is basically to receive
messages from other neurons or other cells then you will see this long fiber emanating from the
cell body which is basically the axons.
Axon basically does the task of transmitting signals from the cell body towards other cells you
will see at the end of this axon there are these structures called terminal buttons which actually
from the connections between a particular neuron and dendrites of another neuron to which has
to be connected.
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We will talk about this in more detail as you go ahead just to briefly remind you, so the cell body
basically has the mechanisms to keep the cell alive. Dendrites are the branches which emerge
out of cell body. Axon transmits signals to other neurons and very important part of how the
neurons communicate is the fact that for all neuron there is a gap between the end of a particular
neurons axon and the dendrites or the cell body of another neuron.
This gap is called synapse this is the very significant part of how the neurons communicate
between each other. We will elaborate on how this communication happens as we go ahead.
Now these neurons also are not connected indiscriminately to another is not like every neuron is
connected to every other neuron. It is basically that this neurons are connected in form of special
networks called neural circuits or neural networks which are generally allocated towards the
particular kinds of a specific functions.
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Now let us talk a bit about how the communication happens between these neurons. The
nervous system generally operates using a electro chemical process, these neurons exist in an
electrically charged environment and both inside and outside of the neurons exists these charged
particles called ions. Now some of these particles could be positively charged while others could
be negatively charged, when a neuron is inactive or resting more of the plus charges more of
these positively charged ions are outside of the neuron while a lot of these negative charge
particles are existing inside of the neuron.
As a result of this difference of charge the resting potential or the basic charge of a neuron in a
resting state is generally around -70mV this one is called resting potential of neuron.
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However, it is rarely that the neurons are in the resting state they are generally busy, because
they are so much of information that the brain continuously receive from outside the
environment. Now for this basically how the brain really starts processing or starts taking in this
information and relaying it to the other areas of the brain is done by the neurons. So messages
keep on arriving from other neurons that actually influence the behavior of the neuron impulsion.
So the behavior would be like this resting potential could get heighted up or it could get lowered
down. Now if the electrical charge of this neuron impulsion let us say rises to about -50mV the
neuron will reach something called its threshold. The threshold is basically the trigger point of
neuron for firing. Once the neuron reaches its threshold it also generates the signal from itself
which is called the nerve impulse or the action potential.
Once the threshold is reached the neuron actually fires this action potential which actually seeps
down from the cell body towards the axons and towards the terminal buttons at speeds of around
up to 200 miles per hour.
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Let us try and understand what is happening during an action potential how this signal is
generated actually. The axon membrane basically is pierced by tiny tunnels or holes called ion
channels these channels act like gates which opens to allow the sodium ions to rush inside or into
the axon. These channels open first near the soma and then throughout the length of the axon and
the action potential zips along.
So this happens in the soma or which is the cell body and then its starts opening consecutively
along the length of the neuron which is towards the axon and this is how basically this action
potential is zipping along. Each action potential is an all or an nothing event. So a nerve impulse
is first triggered near the soma that is the cell body, and then the wave of activity travels down
the length of the axon as I already said.
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This is the diagram of how the action potential might be generated in a neuron you can see that
there is gap between the terminal button of one neuron and dendrites of the other neurons. When
the action potential is fired there is this exchange of neuro transmitters also between these two
sets of neurons which we will elaborate in just a while.
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After each nerve impulse the cell briefly dips below its resting level and then becomes less
willing or less ready to fire. This negative after potential occurs basically because potassium ions
flow out of the neuron while the membrane gates are open. So this period basically is called the
refractory period when the neuron is not ready to fire.
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An interesting phenomenon during or about the communication between the neurons is the
phenomena of saltatory conduction. The saltatory conduction basically has to do with the myelin
sheets.
272
If you remember the figure of the neuron that I just showed you can see that there is this
covering over the fiber which is the axon and this covering is basically a layer of fatty substance
which is called myelin sheets. Now basically this covers some of the axon and it has some gaps
in it this basically ensures that the action potential travels rather quickly throughout the length of
this axon.
273
Now instead of passing down this entire length of the axon, the action potential basically jumps
from gaps to gap you know there is this gap between how the myelin sheet is actually throughout
the axons.
274
So if you see here, you can see the myelin sheet is actually covering this entire length of the axon
fiber but here are certain gaps these gaps are basically called the nodes of ranvier.
275
Now, so basically instead of passing down through the entire length of the axon the action
potential actually jumps from gaps to gap.
276
So for example they will be a channels opening at one gap and then not throughout the length of
the myelin sheet but then they will again open up in the other gap this is how you can say that the
action potential is jumping from one gap to the other gap throughout the length of the axon.
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When an action potential finally reaches the tip of the axon terminals neurotransmitters are
released into the synaptic gap which we just saw these neurotransmitters basically are chemicals
that alter the activity in neurons.
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Neurotransmitters basically travel across the synaptic space between the terminal button of one
neuron and dendrites of another neuron where they bind to this basically receptive sites at the
dendrites of neighboring neuron. Different terminals release different kinds of neurotransmitters
and different dendrites are particularly sensitive to different kinds of neurotransmitters. The
dendrites will admit only the neurotransmitters if they are the right shape to fit in the receptor on
the receiving neuron, the mechanism basically resembles like that of a lock and key.
So during the communication happening between these two neurons when the action potential is
fired particular neurotransmitters are released, but only those neurotransmitters will be received
by the neighboring neuron for which there is an exact match between the kind of the
neurotransmitter released and the kind of the receiver or receptor sites that are existing on the
neighboring neuron this is how lock and key really function
279
Here you can see again the same diagram where in you can see that the neurotransmitters have
been released from the terminal buttons of one of the neuron and there are these receptor sites in
the neighboring neuron which is receiving these neurotransmitters.
280
Now when these neurotransmitters basically are accepted by the receptors sites on the receiving
neurons, their effects might be either excitatory or inhibitory. Now what does excitatory or
inhibitory mean? If the neuron is able to accept more than one neurotransmitter, then it will be
influenced by excitatory or inhibitory process of each kind. Now again coming back to what an
excitatory or inhibitory mean. Excitatory action basically means that it will excite the
neighboring neuron to fire an action potential; inhibitory interaction means that the received
neurotransmitter will inhibit the neuron which has received it will inhibit it from firing and
action potential.
So these are the two kinds of relationships that are possible. When the neuron basically receives
more than one kind of neurotransmitter, it basically a functions on the summation of the number
of excitatory or inhibitory influences.
281
Let us discuss a few neurotransmitters and how they actually affect human behavior. So one of
the very common neurotransmitters you will hear about is dopamine. Dopamine basically is
involved in movement, motivation and emotion. So when dopamine is released it basically
produces feelings of pleasure and it is also involved in learning just as a side note dopamine
basically is linked to schizophrenia patients basically where in a people experience increases in
the level of dopamine release.
Also Parkinson’s disease is linked to the reduction in the levels of dopamine which kind of laced
on to a problems in particular kinds of movements. Another example could be acetylcholine,
acetylcholine basically a common neurotransmitter used in the spinal cord and motto neurons to
stimulate muscle contractions. It is also used in the brain to regulate memory, sleeping and
dreaming.
Alzheimer’s disease is linked to the under supply of acetylcholine, also nicotine is basically
supposed to be an agonist that acts like a acetylcholine. So basically agonist is something that
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can replace neurotransmitter in the kind of function. Endoclines are another class of
neurotransmitters which are released in responds to behavior such as vigorous exercise, orgasm
and eating spicy foods.
So Endorphins basically are natural pain relievers they are related to the compounds found in
drugs such as Opium, morphine, heroine etc. The release of endorphins basically creates a kind
of a high runner or somewhere say for example, that people experience sometimes after heavy
exercise. This was about how the communication happen between neurons. Let us now move
towards how the brain is structurally organized.
Now if you look at the brain there are variety of ways in which you can imagine that the brain
could be organized. One of the first ways could be based on the location of the brain.
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Now if you actually look at the brain it could be very simply that there could be one part of the
brain basically which includes all the structures in the posterior part which is your hindbrain,
there could be something in the middle which is your midbrain, and there could be something in
the front which is your forebrain. So, hindbrain basically includes all the structures which are
located in the posterior part of the brain.
The midbrain basically includes all the structure that is located in the middle part of the brain,
and the forebrain is basically all the structures that are considered in the front part of the, front of
the brain.
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Now another way of imagining the organization of the brain could be based on function. So this
central core or the brain stem could be which regulates our most primitive behaviors such as
coughing, sneezing, and other primitive behaviors which are under voluntary control such as
vomiting, sleeping, eating, drinking, etc. This basically includes all the structures in the
hindbrain and the midbrain and the two structures in the forebrain which are the hypothalamus
and the thalamus.
Another structure important on the basis of function is the limbic system. The limbic system
basically includes, is the system of structures of the brain which basically have to do with
controlling our emotions. Another important part on the basis of function is the cerebellum. The
cerebellum is basically the part which regulates our higher intellectual processes.
285
Here you can see that there is midbrain located in the middle of the brain, the forebrain is
structures in the anterior or the front part of the brain, and the hindbrain is structures that are at
the back side of the brain.
286
You can see the structures which are part of these three components so medulla. The medulla
forms the reticular formation, and the cerebellum form part of what is called hindbrain, the
superior and inferior colliculus and substantia nigra form part of what is called the midbrain and
thalamus, hypothalamus, pituitary gland and the limbic system and the cerebrum basically form
part of what is called your forebrain.
287
Here you can see all of these parts in this particular figure you can see that there is a thalamus,
hypothalamus, pituitary gland in the middle you can see what the brain is you can also see the
cerebrum you can see the cerebellum and you can see medulla and reticular formation.
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Now let us talk in the bit more detail about these parts of the brain. The hindbrain basically sits
on the top of the spinal cord at it is the crucial for most basic life functions. It has these parts the
medulla which is the first slight enlargement of the spinal cord as it is just entering the skull, it is
a narrow structure that basically controls breathing and some reflexes that help in maintaining
upright posture.
The Pons are above the medulla and they are important for the control of things like attentiveness
as well as the timing of sleep. Now at this point the major nerve tracts coming up from the spinal
cord cross over so that the right side of the brain is connected to the left side of the body and the
left side of the brain is connected to the right side of the body.
289
Here you can see the Pons and the medulla.
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Talking about reticular formation, the reticular formation basically is a network of neural circuits
that extends from the lower brainstem right up to the thalamus in the fore brain and transversing
some of the other central core structures. This type of neurons basically acts to control aerosol.
The reticular formation also play a role in our ability to focus the attention on particular kinds of
stimuli.
All of the sense receptors have nerve fibers that feed into the reticular system which appears to
act as a filter. The reticular formation also allows some sensory messages to pass through the
cerebral cortex while blocking some others.
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Here you can see that the reticular formations are can be seen on cerebellum.
292
The cerebellum basically is attached to the rear of the brain stem which is slightly above the
medulla, and it is basically a convoluted structure. It is primarily concerned with the coordination
of movement specific movements may be initiated at higher levels, but the coordination of these
movements basically depends on this structure called as cerebellum. Damage to cerebellum
sometimes results in jerky uncoordinated movements you know movements is for example
somebody is drunk and cannot stand properly and those kind of things.
293
You can see that the cerebellum is right at the back of the brain.
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The cerebellum is also important for learning new motor responses, every time you are actually
planning to learn a new motor skill say for example cycling, swimming, you know particular
kinds of physical sports, the cerebellum is an important area which helps you learn those motor
skills. There are direct neutral connections between the cerebellum and the frontal parts of the
brain which also helps to have two basically helps your ability of learning languages, ability of
planning and reasoning you know future events.
The cerebellum also has been found to play role in controlling coordination of higher mental
processes like thinking, imagining those kinds of things coming to the midbrain. The midbrain is
relatively small area in the humans and it is found just above the Pons and it is surrendered by
the forebrain. There are these parts the superior and inferior colliculi, the basically two small
structures which are important for relaying of sensory information to the brain and for movement
controls.
So these are the areas which are basically receiving all the information from the spinal cord
onwards and then we relay to the other parts of the brain to get processed further. Another part
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which forms the part of the midbrain is the substantia nigra. The substantia nigra is basically just
located above the midbrain and this is the crucial part of the dopamine containing pathway also
known as the reward pathway. So this is the pathway which makes you know people feel good if
you remember on the earlier slides I talked about dopamine as being the pleasure
neurotransmitter this structure basically deteriorates in people having Parkinson’s disease.
Here you can see the thalamus coming to the forebrain.
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In humans the forebrain is basically a relatively large and it covers the midbrain and parts of the
hindbrain. A large part of it basically the cerebrum is also called as cerebral cortex basically a
word borrowed from the Latin word for ‘bark’. The other structures of the forebrain which is
thalamus, the hypothalamus, and the areas comprising the limbic system. They are just found
beneath the cerebrum and are referred to as sub cortical structures.
297
Thalamus basically it is just located above the midbrain inside of the cerebral hemispheres and
basically these are two egg shaped groups of nerve cells. The thalami basically acts like as the
sensory relay stations which are directing incoming information from the sense receptors the five
sense vision, hearing, taste, touch, etc. and they direct these to the cerebrum where these are
processed.
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The hypothalamus basically is a much smaller structure located just below the thalamus. It is one
of the structures it is actually main structures involved in regulating, eating, drinking, sleeping
and sexual behavior. The hypothalamus is also involved in maintaining something called the
homeostasis which is basically how the system controls the autonomic nervous system.
Homeostasis is basically is a term that refers to the level of functioning that is characteristic of a
healthy and normal individual. Let us say for example there is elevated blood pressure or the
body has the less of nutrition these kind of things disturb homeostasis and the hypothalamus
basically directs the brain to take steps to restore this balance or restore the homeostasis.
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You can see the hypothalamus and thalamus in this figure.
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Now say for example when an organism is under stress, homeostasis is disturbed and then the
processes are set in motion to correct this lack of equilibrium say for example if we are too warm
you know in the summer season if we say for example if you are too cold, you know steps will
be taken to actually restore the balance. Say for example, if you are too warm the body starts
sweating so that the temperature of the body you know comes down or say for example if you
are too cold the body starts shivering and some kind of movement is created that also generates
heat and keeps the body from getting too cold.
Both these processes basically you know intentioned to restore the normal temperature and are
controlled by the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus also plays an important role in the sensation
of emotions and in our responds in stress situations. Why do I say this, in a mild electrical
stimulation of certain areas in the hypothalamus has been found to produce feelings of pleasure,
stimulation of certain adjacent region in the hypothalamus has also been found to be linked to
producing unpleasant emotion.
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So this is one of the ways evidences would actually tell you that hypothalamus is actually
involved in this sensing of emotions.
Pituitary gland is part of the limbic system it is also the most important part of the gland called
the endocrine system. The hypothalamus basically controls the endocrine system and thus it also
controls the production of various kinds of hormones.
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Coming to the limbic system, the limbic system basically is area around the central core of the
brain and these are very closely interconnected with the hypothalamus okay. These are the set of
structure that impose additional control over some of the instinctive behaviors regulated by the
central core. The hippocampus which is basically a part of limbic system that plays a special
role in memory.
The amygdala is an almond shaped structure deep within the brain it is very critical in
experiencing motion such as fear, humans with damaged you know the amygdala are unable to
recognized facial expressions of fear and also they have this inability to learn new fear responses.
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Here you can see the amygdala.
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Now to sum up today’s lecture we talked about the basic neural organization of the brain that
governs human behavior. We also talked about the structure and the functions of the neurons,
and finally we talked about the organizational principles of the brain. In the next class we will
talk about the cerebral cortex. Thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
305
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
306
Course Title
Lesson-10
The Cerebral Cortex
By
Dr. Ark Verma
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
Hello and welcome to the course Basic Cognitive Processes! I am Doctor Ark Verma from IIT Kanpur.
The topic of today’s lecture is: The Cerebral Cortex. Today we will talk in more detail about the
structural and the functional organization of the cerebral cortex.
In the last lecture if you remember we have talked about the organization of the brain and the basic
communication processes that go on in the brain to lead to particular kinds of processing of stimulus and
resulting in behavior.
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Now the cerebral cortex basically can be said to have three specific kinds of areas so each of these
sensory systems, the systems of vision, audition, etc all of them send information to the specific areas in
the cerebral cortex which are the sensory areas. Motor responses or movements of body parts basically
are controlled by other specific areas of the cortex which are called the motor areas. Rest of the cortex
basically which is neither sensory nor motor basically is a set of areas which are the association areas.
These association areas basically acquire the largest portion of the cerebral cortex and these are the areas
which is concerned with higher mental functions, like memory thought and language.
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The cortex is composed of two hemispheres one on the left and one on the right and these are basically
connected together by a bundle of axon fibers called the corpus callosum. These areas the two part of the
brain the left and the right hemispheres are basically symmetrical and have a deep division wherein they
are connected which division is called the longitudinal fissure. Each of these hemispheres is basically
divided in to four lobes, the frontal, the parietal, the occipital and the temporal lobes.
Both hemispheres contain homologues versions of these lobes. So the left and the left and the right
hemisphere will both have the frontal lobe, the left and the right hemisphere will both have a temporal
lobe and they both will have a parietal and an occipital lobe.
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Here you can see in this figure that these are two parts of the brain which are the left and the right
hemispheres. Both of these have the primary motor cortex, both of these have the primary somatic
sensory cortex, both of these have the primary visual cortex and the auditory cortex.
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Here you can see in more detail that this is the layer of muscles which is called the tissue which is called
cerebral cortex. You will also see the division between the parietal lobe, the frontal lobe, the temporal
lobe, and the occipital lobe.
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This is the real photograph of the human brain wherein you can more directly see where these each of
these lobes are situated.
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Now coming to the cerebral hemispheres, the cerebral cortex seen to have these two sides which are the
cerebral hemispheres, they are connected by this as I said thick band of fibers called the corpus callous.
The left side of the brain mainly controls the right side of the body while the right side of the brain
mainly controls the left side of the body. This is basically the basic principles of the organizations in the
human brain.
Now damaged to one side of the this brain, or damage to one of the area of the left hemisphere or one of
the areas in the right hemisphere may also cause curious problem which say for example spatial neglect.
Spatial neglect is an interesting problem in a sense that a patient which say for example, a right
hemisphere damage may end up paying no tension at all to the left visual space, because that is what it
was supposed to process.
Interesting things happen, say for example a patient who has a right spatial neglect or who has a right
hemisphere damage and has left spatial neglect might not be able to pay any attention to, for example
food on the left side of the plate or will not be able to comb the hair on the left side of the head and so
on.
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Here is the demonstration of the kind of figures that these people come up with so on the left side you
will see the model which these with the patient was asked to actually reproduce, and you can see that the
patient actually produces the numbers on only one side of the clock or similarly makes only one side of
the house or only makes only one side of the flower, this is basically I was referring to when I was
talking about spatial neglect.
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An interesting concept that is very dominant concept in understanding, the brain is the concept of
hemispheric specialization. Now the hemispheric specialization is basically a concept that the two
cerebral hemispheres may be differently adept in their capabilities and functions, for example if you talk
about mental functions like language or say for example perception or music or maths the idea that
hemispheric specialization proposes is that one of the hemispheres is slightly better at say for example,
language or music or some other abilities
An interesting scenario with respect to hemispheric specialization actually occurs with patients who
have a split brain. Split brain is basically patients who, patients are those who have undergone a
particular kind of surgery wherein the corpus callosum is severed. So now what happens is the patients
will have both sides of the brain pretty much functioning normally, but just the fact that they are not
connected to each other anymore.
Gazzaniga says that this kind of result often in a scenario where there is essentially one person with two
kinds of brains or two brains. After the right and the left brain are separated each of these hemispheres
will have its own perception, will have its own concepts and impulses to act. And those will not be
communicated to the other hemisphere in that sense not be integrated to lead to normal behavior.
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An example could be, say for example you really want to test how the behavior of the split brain patients
is , so one of the experiment one could do is you could flash dollar sign to the right brain and a question
mark sign to the left brain of a patient let us say named Tom, then what we do is we ask Tom to draw
what you saw using his left hand while the left hand is out of sight, so you can actually cover the left
hand you can ask him to draw with his left hand whatever he saw or he is seeing.
You will find that the hand of Tom will end up drawing a dollar sign which is basically flash to the right
brain. Because the right brain controls your left hand and in that sense the from the left hand this person
draws the dollar sign. Now interestingly if you ask Tom, to point out with his right hand to a picture of
what is written what the left hand might have drawn Tom would point out to the question mark. Because
now he is using his right hand he is basically going to point out at something which the left brain has
seen which is basically a question mark.
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So you see that the perception of the two visual stimuli that we presented to the left and the right brains
is so disconnected that one of the hemisphere does not really know what the other hemisphere has
actually seen or experienced. This is basically a representation of the scenario we were talking about so
you present the dollar sign in the left visual field which as to be seen by the right hemisphere and the
question mark sign to the right visual field which has to be seen by the left hemisphere. This is pretty
much we were talking about right now.
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Now in this whole point of hemispheric specialization let us talk about what could be the unique abilities
of each of these two hemispheres. Now I use the word unique which actually will not apply here because
we say that both the hemispheres of the brain are capable of doing or performing most cognitive
functions the only difference will be that one might be more adept and it is the matter of degree actually
one might be more adept one particular cognitive function while the other will be less adept. So it is not
that the right hemisphere does not process any language at all and left hemisphere processes all the
language it is that the left hemisphere language process better in some components while the right
hemisphere might process language better in some other components.
Now, so as I was taking about language, roughly 95% of us use our left brain for language say for
example speaking language, writing language or understanding language. Also the left hemisphere is
found to be superior at abilities like maths judging time and rhythm and also coordinating the order of
complex movements, for example if you have to do a highly dexterous task which involves in the use of
your fingers and fine motor movements.
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In contrast the right hemisphere can produce only simplest language and numbers. However the right
hemisphere is good at other things, say for example perceptual skills, recognizing patterns, recognizing
faces, understanding music, drawing a picture those kind of thing the right hemisphere is supposed to be
better at, I am not saying it exclusively does it again I am saying it is better at doing this. The right
hemisphere also helps one express emotion and detect emotions that the other people are feeling.
Finally the right hemisphere is more superior at some of the aspect of understanding language say for
example understanding jokes, irony, metaphors, and those kinds of aspects.
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So here in this figure you can see a slide comparative of what the left brain and the right brain might be
able to do, it is basically not supposed to be taken too seriously because both of the parts of the brain do
each of these things it is just by degree that say for example the right hemisphere is much better in non
verbal skills whereas the left hemisphere is better in language related verbal skills.
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Now let us take an example from one of the range of studies that I personally did and basically wherein
we were trying to see whether the left hemisphere involved in the deduction and use of tools but that
kind of scenario. So what are tools? Tools are those objects that we use, using our hands to achieve
certain things, for example scissor, hammer, ruler, things that we can actually pick up from our hand and
use to create particular kinds of effect.
So it is basically known, that it was there in the literature that the left hemisphere is involved in using
and manipulating tools, while the right hemisphere is not or right hemisphere is not involved directly
the using the manipulation of tools. Less was known about the other objects say for example what
happens with other objects like, things that you do not use as tools there is no clear indication of that.
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So we wanted to actually compare this and this was there, so we actually created a task which was called
a visual half field task which basically was specifically designed to investigate whether tool recognition
is lateralized that is processed laterally by the left hemisphere or not.
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So we had a scenario pretty much similar to the one which we saw so we present something in the left
visual field and we expected to be processed better by the right hemisphere we present something to the
right visual field and we expect to be processed by the left hemisphere.
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So these are the kind of stimuli which we use so on the top you can see objects which are not tools and
the bottom you can see objects which are tools which actually I referred to earlier and middle we also
had a comparison with things called non objects, you know these are just random shapes which can be
considered as objects but they are not.
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So you have two kinds of task we had an object recognition task in which the participants had to tell us
whether what he or she was seeing as pointed by the arrow was an object or not an object this was
basically done as the control to see whether objects on the whole are lateralized towards the left or the
right hemisphere or not. The second was the critical task the tool recognition task the participants had to
tell that the stimuli pointed towards by the arrow was a tool or not a tool. Very simple decision Yes No
kinds of decisions.
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And what we found here was that the tools were indeed recognized faster in a more accurate fashion by
the right visual field which if you remember is processed by the left hemisphere, so in that sense its a
kind of you know conformed our hypotheses or for the fact left hemisphere is indeed involved in the
processing of tools.
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Why should this happen, why should the you know two halves of the brain differ with respect to these
cognitive functions this is something which is you know very dominant area in the field of cognitive
psychology research something that keeps getting asked again and again there are obviously certain
theory’s about this. One of the prominent theories about this is basically.
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Is basically it talks about the style of processing so particular cognitive function or particular stimuli
involve particular kind style of processing and what we can say is that one hemisphere involves in one
kind of processing while the other hemisphere involves in another kind of processing and it is with
respect this difference in style of processing that basically makes one hemisphere adept at processing at
particular.
For example the left hemisphere is supposed to be so involved in mainly analysis and breaking down of
you know larger chunks of stimuli into much smaller part and it is also involved in processing
information rather sequentially so all those stimuli that need to be process sequentially or that need to be
broken down in more you know smaller components eventually be processed better by the left
hemisphere and all those stimuli that need to be processed holistically will then better be processed by
the right hemisphere, this is one of the common theory that exists let us see
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For example here if you see that there is L is formed being formed by a bunch of D’s. Now looking at
the same kind of stimulus the left hemispheres because its task is to break it down into components will
tell you that there is a bunch of D’s. The right hemisphere on the other hand which has to look at a
particular stimulus holistically will tell that it is just the letter L. Now you are seeing that is one stimulus
that is being looked at differently by the two hemispheres depending on the style of processing that each
of these hemispheres bring in.
This is pretty much what the one of the basic you know explanations of hemispheric specializations, is
put forward. Obviously there are other theories as well but this is something which is commonly put
forward.
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Now let us move towards the lobes of the cerebral cortex we talked about the frontal, the temporal, the
parietal and the occipital lobes, let us talk about theses lobes in a bit more detail. Now these lobes or the
cerebral cortex basically can be divided into the cerebral cortex can be divided into simpler lobes which
are the lobes we actually talked about.
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Now let us have a look at this figure you can see very clearly the parietal lobe, the frontal lobe, the
occipital and the temporal lobes here. And you can also see that there are these areas the somatic sensory
area. The primary motor area and the visual area which are actually lying in each of these lobes.
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Now let us talk about what the frontal lobes do. The frontal lobes basically are associated with higher
mental abilities and they play a role in your sense of self say. For example that the idea that I am
somebody and these are my characteristics this is my behavior this is how I decide, this is my style of
thinking all of this basically is and the sense of memory and that because memory provides you the
sense of continuity that I am this person five years ago and five years hence I will be the same person is
basically done by the frontal lobes.
The frontal lobes are also important for movements and arch of tissue basically near the rear of the
frontal lobes is called the primary motor cortex, you can see it right here is basically called the motor
cortex, it is basically for controlling and directing various kinds of movement that the body makes there
is area in this primary somatic and this area is called a primary somato centric cortex which is the
homunculus map which represents the dexterity of the body with respect to different areas of the body.
I will show you the homunculus map in a while. The motor cortex again the part of the frontal lobes is
the one area that also is supposed to contain things and special set of neurons called the mirror neurons.
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These are the neurons which are basically which become active whenever you are performing a
particular action or even when you are seeing somebody perform a particular action so mirror neurons
basically help you mimic and learn the same kind of action that you are observing at any point in time.
There are lots of theories that tell us about the mirror neurons are very important for things like language
and learning and social behavior and so on. That is also one of the reason you can say that the frontal
lobes are involved in kind of behaviors that I just mentioned
Here you can see the homunculus map, you can see the amount of neural tissue that is allocated to the
processing different parts of the brain is shown here you can see there is a large amount of neural tissue
allocated just to the face while there is relatively less amount of neural tissue you know allotted to, say
for example the trunk, the neck, the head etc.
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The rest of the frontal lobes basically are referred to as the frontal association areas that is only a very
small portion of the cerebral cortex which is directly controlling the body or receiving the information
from the senses. The surrounding areas are called the association areas which combine in process
information.
Okay say for example if you see a rose the association areas will help you connect your primary sensory
impressions with the memories you would have of the rose you will get those sensory impressions about
the touch about the smell and the color of the rose, but the association areas will actually help you
integrate your experience of the rose with an experience that you might have had earlier. You would
have come across rose the first time, the second or tenth time every time you see the rose you actually
get connect to whatever your previous experience was.
So some association areas then also contribute to the higher mental processes abilities like languages,
say for example if you want to write a poetry, if you want to describe something verbally those kind of
processes are also sometimes done by these different association areas. One of the example could be, say
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for example a damage to the association areas on the left hemisphere may lead to a particular kind of a
disorder called aphasia, which is basically an impaired ability to speak language.
One of the kinds of aphasia is called Broca’s aphasia wherein the person actually cannot produce normal
speech. The speech will be very jittery it will have ungrammatical sequences and the like.
Here you can see the sample of somebody’s brain wherein there is this damage on the frontal part of the
brain which is basically the Broca’s area. Damage to this part actually leads to what I was talking about
Broca’s aphasia
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Now the very front of the frontal association region is the most anterior region is called pre frontal area
or the prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain is related to more complex behavior like thinking,
personality, somebody being more sociable less sociable, irritable, or say for example civil behavior
those kind of things. If some of you being students of psychology you would remember a patient named
Phineas Gage.
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Phineas Gage was basically a railroad worker and in one of these accidents he had a iron rod actually
passing towards the front portion of his skull. After this accident happened the personality everything
remained most of the things remained most of the things rather same but the personality of Phineas Gage
changed considerably he began abusing people, speaking of profanities and he became less and less for
civil person. So this is how you can actually link social behavior to the frontal lobes.
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Coming to the parietal lobes, the parietal lobes basically registers all these bodily sensations that are
received from the sensory areas of the body, touch, temperature, pressure other somatic sensations
basically flow into this area called the primary somato sensory area, which is there in the parietal lobes.
We also notice the map of homunculus map that the map of bodily sensations is distorted, lips are larger
in the drawing because of their higher sensitivity, hands and fingers also occupy a large space because
they are involved in a variety of various functions.
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Here you can see that.
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Coming to the temporal lobes, the temporal lobes are basically located on each side of the brain right
above your ear. The auditory information projects directly to the primary auditory area which is there in
the temporal lobe, making it the main sight where hearing is first registered. An association area in the
temporal lobe is called the Wernicke’s area which is on the left temporal lobe and is basically acting as a
language site. This is the area which basically helps you comprehend whatever language you are
hearing. Damage to this kind of area the Wernicke’s area basically leads to something called receptive
aphasia which is just a way to say that you will not be able to understand any language.
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Here you can see the areas damaged which leads towards the Wernicke’s aphasia or the receptive
aphasia.
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Coming to the occipital lobes, they are at the back of the brain and are concerned with vision. How do
the visual areas represents vision is one the questions that is asked much in cognitive psychology. So
images basically are trapped, are mapped from the retina to the cortex, but the map is rather stretched, is
greatly distorted because you will have to convert the dimensionality as well. The visual information
areas are basically creates complex patterns of activity of neurons and it does not really send you a
television like image rather a two dimensional distorted kind of image.
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An interesting result of injury to the visual cortex or occipital lobes leads to something called visual
agnosia, which is the ability to identify seen objects. This also refer to sometimes as mind blindness, say
for example if you show Alice who is an agnosia patient an object you show her a candle she can see it
she will describe it as a long and narrow object, but she will not remember the name of the object.
Because the information link between the occipital lobe to the higher associational area is somehow
damaged.
In short Alice will be able to see the colors, size, shape etc., but will not be able to form associations of
this visual percepts to the memory and other higher centers of knowledge.
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Is agnosia limited to objects only? No agnosia can also happen for faces, for example there is also a
variety of agnosia called facial agnosia, which is people’s ability to perceive familiar faces, say for
example somebody you know who has an injury in the occipital area the area which is responsible for
perception of faces might suffer something called facial agnosia wherein the patient will not be able o
recognize the faces of people that he had otherwise known, see one of these patients could actually not
recognize the face of her husband or her mother when they visited her in hospital. She is not even
identify the pictures of her children, however as soon as the visitor started speaking she could recognize
each of them because the auditory link was still intact.
So these areas devoted to recognizing faces lie in the association areas on the underside of the occipital
lobes and the area seem to have no other function other than associating this visual input to other higher
areas.
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To sum up in this lecture we talked about the structural and functional organizations of the cerebral
cortex we talked about hemispheric specialization and we also talked about the structural and functional
details of the other areas of the cerebral cortex which are the cortical lobes. Thank you!
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
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Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Indian Institute of technology Kanpur
Course Title
Lecture – 11
Research Methods in Psychology
By
Dr. Ark Verma
Department of Humanities and Social Science
Hello and welcome to the course basic cognitive process I am doctor Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur. The topic of today’s lecture is research methods in psychology.
I am actually giving this lecture as part of this course because I am not really sure about the kind
of backgrounds all of you watching this course are coming from, so this particular lecture will be
just a primer for how research is done in psychology I will touch some of the very basic concepts
of research in psychology which generally apply to cognitive psychology as well.
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So this should be act as revision for people who are already done some courses in psychology
and also say for example this will serve as a foundational lecture into a research method
specifically known for cognitive psychology.
So let us talk about what do psychologist do, psychologist generally are concerned with a variety
of behavior both in humans and animals. They are sometimes concerned with problems relating
to cognitive ability such as learning memory intelligence, they are also some time concerned
with dealing with psychological disorders what are the causes how people suffering from those
disorders can be helped also psychologists are always called up on to a tackle issues with related
to education, teaching, instruction and so on.
Psychologist in more recent times have been finding use in developing driver safety manuals in
deciding the optimal conditions for driving say for example for roads or train driving or even
training of pilots also psychologists have been involved with judging with scenario while
criminal proceedings are going in courts of justice.
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But how do psychologist actually deal with this what are the skills they use what are the methods
they use actually which really you know are helpful for them in solving all of these kinds of
concerns. So let us talk a bit about the kind of research, you know the kind of research methods
that actually the psychologist use.
Primarily there are two kinds of research methods first is basic research basic research is one
which actually seeks answer fundamental questions about human behavior, so something very
specific something very simple say for example how do human see color, something as basic as
that or say for example how do humans distinguish between two kinds of shapes and those kinds
of this things. Another variety of research is applied research which basically investigates the
issues that have direct implications in everyday life and it actually borrows from the findings
from basic research from whatever the theory says and tries and puts it to use in solving
everyday problems like the once we were just talking about, so that is why basic research
informs applied research and progress in any science actually happens only when both kinds of
research are conducted so for our purposes we mostly be taking about concepts in basic research.
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But we will also at some point talk about how these ideas from basic research can be carried
forward to areas where they can be actually applied. Now what are the you know ground rules
when psychologists actually you know takes to research. One of the first what are the first things
is that the straightness which psychologist make should be completely empirical you know they
should be based on systematic collection of data and systematic analysis of data. Another
characteristic that the psychologist aspire to is that the procedures used are completely objective
and they are not really effected by the personal biases or the emotional of the person or the
scientist conducting their research. Finally the data in the methods of collecting the data are
described in detail and they are put out in the public domain so that others may draw up on their
own conclusion or even replicate the reported experiments.
And this kind of creation atmosphere of transparency in research and also sets out the data in the
public so that everybody can derive their own kind of conclusions from the data that might
available,
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Now how does psychologist organize the research findings? So wherever research findings are
collected they need to be organized and transformed so that they can become part of common
knowledge. So whatever research findings are there some kind of principles are generated. The
principles need to be so general so that they can apply to all situations in a given domain of
inquiry. Such generated principles are generally known as laws. Now this could be something
common to other empirical sciences as well say for example the loss of gravity or the law of
action and reaction and those kind of laws.
The theory on the other hand is an integrated set of principle that explains and predicts many
but not all observed relationships within a given domain of enquiry so for example if you are
talking about a particular kind of behavior and you have certain principles to talk about one of
the things to do is that to integrate all those principles in a kind of theoretical frame work. This
theoretical frame work should ideally describe the phenomena in question exhaustively though it
might sometimes not be able to explain all the possible relationship or all the possible
phenomena within that head but it should do a you know rather good job of describing whatever
goes on with respect to a particular phenomenon.
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Now how does one determine a good theory if you remember if talked about this in one of the
earlier classes? I will just go over this in a bit of a hurry but let me remind you of what we talked
about when you have to really evaluate a good theory. One of the first things is that the theory
should be about many different outcomes. The theory should be broad enough to you know
encompass many different outcomes related to particular phenomena at the same time the theory
should be passive that it should have the simplest possible explanations about particular
phenomena also a theory should be falsifiable.
Say for example theory which is not falsifiable is not really testable and in that sense if you
remember what Popper said they are not good theories. Finally theory should provide us good
ideas for future research. Say for example if you are conducting research on a particular topic it
is hard to imagine that you will have answered all of the question that were raised about that
particular topic. You would want to you know leave some questions open or say for example
there will certainly be some questions which you have not covered in your research which can be
taken up by you know people in the further who might be looking at your research and taking up
those questions for inquiry existing theories that is why are modified on the base of collected
data and the new modified theories then make new perditions which are again testable. So this in
some sense kind of a cyclical arrangement which basically drives the research if you remember
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this kind of set up is referred to as the hypothetical deductive model which we have talked about
in the past.
Now what are the main steps of staring to conduct a research? First of the steps is basically to
make you know rather you know let us say specific and you know restricted hypotheses what is a
hypotheses. Hypothesis is basically is a very specific falsifiable prediction about the relationship
between two or more variable whether sleeping 6 hours a day has anything to do with your
memory you will have to actually give a very you know testable prediction that okay if one
sleeps for x amount of hours the memory improvement is by a number Y and then you should go
you should be able to go out and test this relationship this is how specific a hypothesis should be.
Generally
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when you are talking about hypothesis we are actually talking about the relationship between 1
or 2 variables. What is a variable, variable is basically is any other attribute that can assume
different values amount different situations for example let us say I am talking about as example
I just gave sleeping. Now sleeping actually for a particular amount of time can take different
values, you can sleep for 2 hours 4 hours 6 hours you can have a disturbed sleep.
You can have a completely undisturbed sleep and those kind of things. So sleeping in frame
work of a particular study can be a variable one would like to study. Or the amount of sleeping
actually, this is one example of a variable. Now one of the main problems when we you know
which comes up when you are actually talking about variables is that there are two kinds of
variables probably first is conceptual variables, variables which basically stem from abstract
ideas.
Say for example I want to talk about kindness and say for example if I talk about if I want to talk
about guilt and those kind of things these basically from the basis of research methodology and
the idea is if you want to talk about kindness or guilt or those kind of things as physiological
variable you would want to able to quantify them, so that they can be actually made, just in a
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way I said sleep can be you know measured into 4, 6 hours that is the way I am quantifying sleep
so for example kindness.
There should be a way for me to able to quantify kindness, I should you know have a test or have
a measure which can actually help me test the amount of kindness, so that part basically the
conversion from a conceptual variable to something that can be quantified that quantified
variable is called the measured variable, now how do you convert? Take a conceptual variable
and convert it into a measured variable. This process of converting a conceptual variable to a
measured variable is called operational definition.
So in operational definition is precise statement of how a particular conceptual variable has been
turned into a measured variable. Let me take an example here, say for example somebody says to
you that.
That psychotherapy reduces anxiety. So how do you quantify psychotherapy, physiotherapy is a

rather broad topic, so what you can do is you can take an example saying number of hours the
patient has spent in psychotherapy actually reduces the anxiety concerns as reported by the
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patient. So in that sense what you have done is actually you know converted both of these
conceptual variables, in psychotherapy and anxiety into measured variables okay.
Now there could be other ways and there are some, some of the examples are here in which you
can actually see that you converting you know these conceptual variables into measured
variables. See for example if you want to measure aggregations. So one of the things say for
example you say number of the seconds number of seconds taken by a person to you know start
honking the car zone when he stuck in a particular traffic jam or say for example if you want to
measure depression.
You want to have a matrix say for example the number of negative words a person uses while
writing a creative story. You know these are the ways in which you can actually now start to
tangibly talk about these variables and that is one of the more basic things which drives any
research enterprise. Now there also different kinds of
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Now there also different kinds of different types of research that can be done other than basic
and applied research both of those kind of research can actually be done through a variety of
designs. Let us talk about what is the research design is? Now a research design is basically a
very specific method that a researcher uses to collect analyze and interpret datas. So you could
have a question and then you can actually you know ask yourself which kind of research design I
am going to use to answer this question.
Now there are three types of research design mainly. First is descriptive research design, which
is intended to provide you a snap shot of the current state research for example if you want just
check that how many you know let us say how many people who like color red are living your
locations so you can just go ask them that okay whether like color red or not and then you can
actually have a distribution that okay these many people like red and while others like some
other colors. A correlation research design on the other hand is intended to discover the
relationship between two or more variables. It is basically used to you know allow for a
prediction of future events, say for example if you want to know that you know the amount of
humidity in the environment, you know can be linked to the amount of rainfall that will be
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experienced later, so you can measure them also humidity and then you can you know measure
the amounts of rainfall and try and find the correlation between that.
It is again a rather mathematical method. Another kind of research design is the experimental
research design which is what we are actually concerned with, when we are talking about
cognitive psychology, now in experimental research design one first needs to create and initial
equivalent. Say for example which ever variable you really want to talk about and whichever
groups you really want to you know look in with respect to variable you would like to create an
initial equivalence.
And then from there when you think all factors that are considered equal then you try and
manipulate one of the variables which becomes your independent variable and then you actually
you know measure the effect of this manipulation of the independent variable on the another
variable which is your dependent variable. I will talk about this concepts in more detail in just
while.
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Now this is basically a snap shot of how these different kinds of research designs are there and
what are the advantages and disadvantages. Let us talk about them as we move ahead.
Descriptive research basically can be conducted in three ways. You could either have case
studies wherein you are actually taking single cases and describing them in detail. What are the
behavioral patterns say for example of a person who is suffering from you know schizophrenia
or let us say depressive disorder something like that, the another way of doing descriptive
research is conducting surveys, you could have a questionnaire which has a you know set of let
us say 20 or 40 questions and those question basically tell you something about the population.
You can actually take these questions to the entire population or to a sample from the population
and in that sense you actually get an idea about what the, you know whatever variables you are
looking up. Another kind of descriptive research is naturalistic observation, say for example if
you want to you know see the variables in plane in real settings so if you want to say you know
want to check peoples say helping behavior while they are groups, so you want to really you
know go and observe.
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multiple groups and see how a particular you know scenario of helping really you know takes
course and then decide that you know whether people help because of x or y variables.
Correlational research basically involves the measurement of two or more variables as I already
said and in assessment of the relationship among these variables. Say for example height and
weight may be systematically now people who are taller generally are considered to be heavier,
those things like this one of these variables which you looking you know which will looking for
in the correlational design becomes predictor variable the other one becomes your outcome
variable. So basically what you want to do is.
Test the effects of the predictor variable on the outcome variable. Now there could be a variety
of relationship.
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Among these variables okay and those relationships are depicted in this figure here. So you could
have a positively linear relationship, a negative linear relationship or those variables could be
independent of each other, also you can see here they could be curvy linear kind of relationship.
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Now the most common statistical measure of the strength of linear relationships is the Pearson
and Pearson’s correlation coefficient which is symbolized by the letter r. You might have seen
this in a you know somewhere in papers or in particular books which you read. Now basically
the direction of the linear relationship is indicated by the sign of the correlation coefficient that is
r, so if r is + is there is a +sign then it is a positively linear relationship if it is negative sign it is a
negative linear relationship.
The magnitude or say for example numbers such as r is 0.5 4 or r is 0.79 it tells you how strong
that relationship is, not about the direction but about the strength of the relationship. So if some,
so if you want to you know measure the correlation between two variables and r coefficient
comes up to be you know +0.80 you are actually talking about a very strong positively linear
relationship. In the other hand if the value is let us say, -r -.20 then you are actually if you going
very weak but negative relationship.
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Now the strength of this linear relationship is indexed basically by the distance of, as I already
said distance of the coefficient from 0. Now because of the Pearson you know correlation
coefficient this r only measures linear relationships whenever you have a curvilinear relationship
between two variables you will find that the value of r is 0.
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It is also possible you know to study the relationships of more than two variables, we have been
talking in our examples about generally two variables but it is also possible to test the
relationship among more than two variables during a correlation coefficient design, that kind of
design is called a multiple regression set wherein, a statistical technique based on correlation
coefficients among variables is used to you know is used to allow predicting of a single outcome
variable on the basis of variety of other predictive variables. Let us take an example of that.
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Say for example if you want to you know predict someone’s job performance you can actually
talk about more than two variables you can talk about salary, how the salary affects their
performance, how the job satisfaction affects job performance or also the number of years that a
person has been employed in. So can actually you know on the basis of regression coefficient tell
that how much a particular variable impacts the main outcome variable that is job performance.
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Now there are certain you know, there is a certain disadvantage to correlation research. One of
the disadvantage is that correlation research designs cannot be used to draw conclusions about
the causal relationship. You cannot really say confidently that there is a casual relationship
between the two variables which we were studying on the basis of a correlational design okay.
One of the reasons is that direction of correlation is not really known during this kind of a
method.
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So you might basically have let us say an example that if you want to study whether violent you
know watching violent TV leads to aggressive play you will never know actually whether
viewing violent TV is leading to aggressive play or a aggressive play is actually leading to more
violent you know watching violent TV or say for example there is a bi-directional relationship.
This kind of information is not given to us by the co relational research designs.
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See for example in some cases it could also be, that there could be a third common causal
variable which is actually effecting both viewing violent TV and you know aggression, say you
could actually have something like this.
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That parents discipline style kind of effects you know the children such a way that they, that
there they view violent television and they are also engage aggressive kinds of play. So that kind
of you know resolution is not there.
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But there are certain advantages also to correlational research design; it is generally possible
when experimental research cannot be done. Say for example, if you cannot actually go out and
manipulate the variables then it is one of the good ways to actually conduct a research. Also
correlation research allows the experimenter to study behavior in everyday life. You know you
can actually just go take some measurements you do not really need to you know get inside that
behavior and manipulate it and okay. Also correlation research design can be used to make
predictions about two variables.
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Now coming to experimental research design, let us talk about a scenario when you can actually
control variables, on the basis of that control in manipulation actually tells something about what
is causally related to what, so as I mentioned earlier we are talking about two kinds of variables
here, we are talking about an independent variable that is one which can be manipulated and we
are talking about a dependent variable.
We will get manipulated or say for example on which we are going to measure the effects of the
manipulation we did on the independent variable. Now we actually in an experimental research
design we actually have these two kinds of variables and we generally create a testable
hypothesis about how these two variables will be related. So hypothesis basically then suggest
how the IV suppose to effect the DV which is how the independent variable is going to effect the
dependent variable. And the experimental design is such that it measures the influence in terms
of quantifiable data.
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Say for example, you want to really check whether viewing violence leads to aggressive
behavior taking the same examples.
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Say for example what you will do is then you will actually have two groups, lets say group A and
group B you will create a some kind of you know initial equivalence that they could be matched
in A matched in other variables like parenting style matched in you know the exposure to kind of
TV they have matched in general education of their parents social, now they could be many
things you try and you know set out ok okay, these are the parameters on which I will create kind
of equivalence among these groups, then what you can do is then you actually give them a
particular kind of a treatment wherein you are manipulating the experimental variable or
manipulating the independent variable.
So one of these groups actually watches violent video game another of these group watch a non-
violent video game what you have manipulated here is the presence or absence of violent or non-
violent video game. Then you actually you know take them to a scenario where they are allowed
to express their aggression. So for example you administer kind of a particular kind of a white
noise and you actually see how the children are going to react with, whether they react
aggressively or whether they react non-aggressively.
That is your way of actually measuring what is the dependent variable, what is the outcome of
this experimental manipulation.
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Now two major advantages of experimental design are first that it assures you that the
independent variable actually occurs prior to the measured variable because you created a kind of
an initial equivalence. Second is this creation of initial equivalence between the conditions tells
you that this effect is not arising because of any other factors, how is this done?
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Because the IV generally occurs prior to the measurement of the DV that eliminates the
possibility of reverse causation. Secondly the influence of common casual variables is controlled
by creating initial equivalence. How do you create initial equivalence generally random sampling
or random assignment of participant to conditions are both ways in which you can actually create
initial equivalence.
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Now there are also limitations so the experimental research design as well, first is ecological
validity now if you are actually getting into the you know interplay of the variable or actually
controlling something this is not something you will actually do you know more often and not,
so in one of the you know one of the concerns that are always raised about experimental research
design is that they are, these experiments are conducted under controlled laboratories settings
and in that sense they cannot be predictive of how the relationship between the variables spans
out once the interplay is happening in you know in the outside world whether there is not so
much control.
Another important limitation is the scope of experimental research is rather limited. It is very
difficult to know, you know to be able to manipulate all kinds of variables. So you know a lot of
interesting key and social variables say for example, you know the effects of the religion or
effects of you know race etc. are things that you cannot experimentally vary. You cannot have
you know manipulate the race versus religion of the person and then measure something okay.
So those are kind of you know difficulties with experimental research design.
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Now I talk to you about the 3 kinds of research design and how research typically conducted
there in but say for example you have a set of finding and you want to be really be sure of
whether the findings are correct or not. So let us talk about ways in which you can actually test it
and be sure of it. Now there actually comes the idea of validity, so if you remember we talking
about the experimental scenario, wherein somebody said that the psychotherapy reduces anxiety.
Now you should ask questions like for example what kind of psychotherapy we are talking
about, what form of anxiety we are talking about and does this really work. Now the idea is
asking these questions will help you constrain your statements and that sense it will help you to
get a very specific answer to your questions.
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Those kind of answers are generally covered under validity, now therefore kinds of threats to
validity. One of the threats is construct validity. Construct validity is simply about whether the
measured variable is actually measuring the conceptual variable. So see for example, if you
remember one of the earlier examples that I told, whether the number of you know, sad words or
depressive words person use in a particular story do really tell us about, whether the person is
depressed or not. It might be that the person just likes that kind of thing and he is just using those
words because those are the let us say easily available words to in mind when he or she is writing
that particular story.
So does the number of these words really measure the person is really depressed or not, that kind
of question is asked when you are talking about construct validity. Statistical conclusion validity
is you know is a concern about whether the correct statistics has been used, whether the correct
methods have been used you know to actually deduce any kind of conclusion from the collected
and analyzed data. Internal validity is basically is about that is it possible that some of the
variables have not been controlled and those variables are actually you know causing these
effects other than the independent variables.
So that is internal validity. Finally, there is also concept of external validity whether the results
observed in a particular experiment are subject to only a limited set of condition or in my lab
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only or whether the same kind of results will occur if somebody tests it in their own lab let us say
in this same city, same country, in the same continent or somewhere else. So that is also, so that
is the concept of external validity.
Let us talk about this issue in bit more detail, construct validity basically refers to the extent to
which that variables used in research adequately assess the conceptual variables that they were
designed to measure. Say for example if you are using a thermometer whether the thermometer is
actually measuring temperature or not, you know it is such a basic question. Now an important
requirement you know for a variable to have construct validity, is reliability whether the variable
is consistently measured, whether the measures change in a matter of hours. Whether the
measures change as I was saying different conditions etc.
If the measures do not measure the conceptual variables, if the conceptual variables does not
really, you know measure conceptual variables they are designed to measure than you cannot
draw inferences about the relationship of variables in the question. So in that construct validity is
rather important aspects.
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Statistical conclusion validity, statistical conclusion validity refers to the extent to which we can
draw, to which we can be certain the researcher has drawn accurate conclusion about the
statistical significance of research findings, whether two things are statistically different or
statistically significantly different from each other or not. There are two possibilities of errors
happening here.
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Say for example you can actually sometimes say that there is an effect if there is not, you know
you can have something which is called a false positive, so figure on the left also you can say for
example sometimes also again you can some example find dismiss the effect when there is
actually an effect that is called the false negative or the type two error. These are two one of the
common ways.
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Now coming to internal validity, internal validity refers to the extent which we can trust our
conclusions, you know that have been drawn on the basis of our study whether the same variable,
whether independent variable is actually the variable that has caused the effect on the dependent
variable. Now the Internal validity basically has to do with experimental designs, generally we
try and keep our experimental designs such that we have control all the possible variables that
you know that could have an effects and we make sure that it is the only the independent variable
whose manipulation will lead to whatever effects happen with the dependent variable.
Internal validity therefore is maximized if the confounding variables are minimized. Now i use
this term confounding variables, what are confounding variables?
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Confounding variable is generally a variable which is not part of the research hypothesis or it is
mixed up or confounded with the independent variable, confounding variable basically makes it
possible for us to be sure that it is the independent variable that has cause the effect on the
dependent variable.
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Let us take an example. So there could be a research where in you want to test whether intake of
alcohol increases persons’ attractiveness to opposite sex. So the independent variable is alcohol
and the confounding variable is expectancy is having had the dependent variable is attraction to
members of the opposite sex. Now for example the group which has actually you know been
taken to be part of this experiment, if for example they know that they have taken alcohol and
then on the basis of that they start rating their attractiveness or the attractiveness of the members
of the opposite sex. The point is because they know some times they might actually come up
with incorrect conclusions.
You will never be sure whether the attractiveness towards the opposite sex, was only because of
taking alcohol or because of some other variables. To control these kind of setup what we could
do is, we can actually have a double mind setup where in we do not tell which members have
been given alcohol, which members have not been given alcohol and then we measure the
attractiveness towards the opposite sex in both of these groups. Then what we can do is we can
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compare the attractiveness in both of these groups, the ones who have taken alcohol and the ones
who have not taken alcohol.
In that sense that will give us the best estimate of whether taking alcohol had any effect on
attractiveness on opposite sex. This is one of the ways.
I remember one of the studies which I was involved in, where in I wanted to see whether the
reaction times for a happy faces or sad faces was equivalent or higher or lower something like
that. You can see the know faces I have used here, from the hardbound database basically you
can see the happy faces have a kind of confound. What is confounded? If you think yourself and
really look at theses faces more, you know acutely you will find, that the happy faces both have
teeth been shown, while the sad faces do not.
In that sense whatever result I would have drawn from this, might be because of the fact that
teeth are been invisible. So what I try to do was, I try to change the confound what I done it was I
tried to you know compare scenario wherein the happy faces are compared with other kind of
emotion say disgust wherein also the teeth are shown.
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Now I can compare the reaction times to happy faces and discussed the faces both of which
shows the teeth and in that sense the comparison will actually give me only the effect of people
perception of the facial expressions whether happiness or sadness not because of teeth were
visible one of the set of stimuli were, more easier to respond.
This is one of the ways you could control internal validity. Another way of controlling internal
validity is to control experimental bias. Sometimes it could be that the experimenter or the
researcher himself or herself has a particular kind of an idea about what the result should be.
Sometimes you know knowingly or unknowingly that could lead to the experimenter affecting
himself.
There is an interesting experiment we can talk about in this regard Rosenthal & Fode basically
had two groups of students’ measure maze learning in rats. So they basically you know given
this bunch of rats and they were actually asked to measure how well or how poorly these rats
would learn to navigate a certain kinds of maze.
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Now the point is one of these groups what happened in this experiment was one of this groups
were told that rats were testing were highly intelligent the other groups was told that rats were
testing a highly and unintelligent. Now what happened was irrespective of you know what the
rats would have ideally done or done in an another scenario.
Both of these groups got results which are very consistent with the information they were given
earlier. So the first group actually you know found that, the rats learned the mazes very well and
the second group found that the rats could not learn the mazes as well and they kind of agreed
with finding because they knew that these rats are un-intelligent.
Now this is one of the ways were in the expectations of the experimenter kind of can you know
get confounded with this. How do you, you know control these experimental bias again as I said
earlier the double blind drug trials. So something like in the pharma industry people who are
actually given medicinal dose they do not know you know administrators of those of the drugs
The doctors were giving this medicines also not know which patients have got the double bind
have got the placebo and which patients have got the medicine. This is one of the ways you can
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actually control experimental bias. External validity coming to external validity basically refers
to you know extend which the results of a research design can be generalized say for example
whether the results experiment conducted in my lab can be you know replicated in another lab or
you know at another culture in another place something like that. Generalization basically refers
to the degree to which the relationship among two conceptual variables can be demonstrated in a
wide variety of people, in a wide variety of situations. Now why do you need to talk about
generalization so just to take a pause and talk about this generalization basically is very
important for any kind of research enterprise.
Because you do not conduct research to actually alone only about a sample of people you
generally want to know about you know generally want to deduce inference about the large you
know larger number of population on the basics of the research you do on these small samples of
people. So the idea is that your research should actually be generalizable. It should have in the
sense can be generalized for the large group of people.
Only then your research will have any value or any academic value in that sense. So to what
extent let us say a particular result will replicate about people from different countries you can
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have an example here there was this experiment done in which people wanted to see you know
what kind of video game you know viewership can lead to what kind of behavior in people.
So the same study was repeatedly done in the USA and it was found that you know more
aggressive behavior was observed in people who watched violent video games and less
aggressive behavior people who are less aggressive behavior was also induced people who
watched less who played less violent videos.
Now the point is we really want to test this in India or in Japan or in China you would actually
want to do the same study in these places and see whether this kind of relationship will hold or
not. Now just you know, give you a small tip is that none of these research design, no research
design can possibly you know proven to generalize in all situations.
You have to make that inference on the basis of how well you have controlled all the other you
know variables and all the other important factors in this study. So one basically assume so on
the basis of these kinds of measures that while conducting experiments the results obtained will
be generalizable to other populations as well.
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So to sum up we can know that advances in science occur through the accumulation of the
knowledge that comes from many different tests of the same theory okay. So you can have a
correlation design you can have variety of research designs and you can ask the same question
now many, there are many research designs there are different kinds of participants and there are
another most important factor is the the operation how you operationalize the independent and
dependent variables scientist you know to actually you know ensure that the research been done
well or to actually take stop of what kind of research exist in a particular field take two
something called meta-analysis, meta-analysis basically is a statistical technique that uses the
results of all the existing studies or many existing studies in a particular field.
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To integrate them and to draw a conclusion on the overall discipline or overall topic. Meta-
analysis is actually or rather powerful and very useful way of summarizing the entire research
literature related to a specific topic. It will provide you relatively objective way of reviewing
research findings because you can actually compare these different research findings in a
particular scenario. It also specifies the inclusion criteria, so you know exactly what kind of
research studies over what kind of participants in what kind of conditions you are actually
comparing. That will be giving you very good hold on what can be really deduced from these.
Also meta analysis is systematically researches for all the studies that fit in a particular inclusion
criteria.
For example you want to study to tell you about intelligence and memory, amongst you know
people of age 8, 10 and 12. So you can actually look for all the studies which have used persons
in 10 and 12 and studied the same questions. It also provides you an objective measurement of
the strength of the observation.
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If we actually find that you know a particular kind of result happens in only 20% of the studies
and 40% studies says something else. Then you can actually compare the strength of the
findings. You can actually take a call that whether this was a it strong conclusion to take or not.
So you sum up today ‘s lecture we talked about variety of research methods and we talked about
what a theory is and problem is set, we talked about kinds of research designs we also talked
about what kind of variables we ask questions about and we have talked about statistics and
validity thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
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Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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National Programme on Technology Enchanced Learning (NPTEL)

Course Title
By
Prof.Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the course basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur. The topic of today's lecture is research methods in cognitive psychology in the last
lecture I talked to you about basics of research methods in psychology that was more to give you
a background into what kind of research designs what kind of research questions and what is the
general method of conducting research in psychology like. In today's lecture I will talk to you
more specifically about the kind of methods that have been used in cognitive psychology to
conduct different kinds of experiments.
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Now what do we already know? We already know what the basics of you know what the basic
research methods or the basic kind of research design in psychology is we know that there is a
you know three types of design say descriptive co relational and experimental research design.
We also know that you know the emphasis basically in research in psychology is to be able to
quantify aspects of behavior and in a way that they can be empirically measured only then we
can actually make scientific claims.
About you know particular behavioral phenomena. We also in the last section of the last lecture
talked about aspects of reliability and validity of research findings. Now that is a very important
factor which ensures that whether your research is you know dependable or not, whether you are
actually getting anywhere close to answering your questions and answering them correctly let us
now talk about methods which are used in cognitive psychology specifically methods in
cognitive psychology more or less are experimental in nature.
So generally we are actually you know into experiments at and we are asking you know we are
following the experimental research design that is to say we kind of you know are always
interested in manipulating certain variables and testing the effects of this manipulation on certain
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other variables. What are the variables in cognitive psychology? Variables in cognitive
psychology basically are those abstract mental phenomena which we try and quantify.
And then we try and investigate them by studying the effects of different things on these mental
phenomena or say for example studying the effects of various mental phenomena on some other
related or unrelated mental phenomena. Say for example how does attention influence
perception? Say for example how does stimulus size or number of stimuli or type of stimuli
affect your visual search performance or it affects your, you know recall of items? These are the
kind of questions that are generally asked in cognitive psychology.
Now what are the kinds of measures that we do generally in cognitive psychology? We are
measuring stuff in terms of the time taken to process a particular thing or how accurately you
process that thing. So these are the two dependent variables, or these are the two dependent
measures about the dependent variable which we are actually taking into account. Now one of
the most you know foremost methods.
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In cognitive psychology is mental chronometry. What is mental chronometry? Mental
chronometry basically is the use of response time in perceptual motor tasks to infer the content
the duration and the temporal sequencing of mental or cognitive operations. Now what am I
trying to say here? I am trying to say that we assume that a particular behavioral response is you
know basically it has in background different mental operations now we really want to you know
check how those mental operations are done.
So what is the time taken say for example I just ask you to compare two numbers how do you
add the two numbers or how do you do this comparison basically what are the effects, how do
you know evoke the representation or the numbers, how do you then compare it and how do you
decide to tell me whether one of the numbers is larger or smaller than the other these are
different sets of mental operation that might you know underlie your simple response of just
pressing a button to tell me whether number A or B is larger? These is basically done through
you know this is basically the idea behind what is mental chronometry mental chronometry is
one of the most you know important and core paradigms in experimental in cognitive psychology
and it is also found used in other disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience. We'll talk about that
in a while. One of the you know one of the easiest ways of doing mental chronometry or using
mental chronometry is to measure reaction time. What is the reaction time? Reaction time
simply is the elapsed time between the presentation of a particular kind of a stimuli and the you
know appearance of a subsequent behavior response so if I for example show you a particular
number and if I just ask you to tell me whether it is a number or just a shape, the time elapsed
between presentation of that stimulus on the screen and the time you take to actually press a
button and tell me whether it was a number of a shape is your reaction time.
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Reactions times are considered to be an index of processing speed. You know how fast you did
those processes okay it indicates how fast an individual can execute the various stages of mental
processing needed to complete a given task, say for example the task I give you is to compare
two numbers okay also this processing speed tells us something about an individual's processing
efficiency. Things that an individual is very good at should take lesser time, things that the
individual is not very good at should take more time you know it's a simple reduction that can be
made now there could be a variety of behavioral responses that one could take in this reaction
time studies it could either be a simple key press response space yes for yes.
And for no it could be a voice onset you know you ask people to name particular pictures and
you record their voice on set time another could be limb moments you ask them to wave their
hands or move their legs something like that or it would be simply eye movement say for
example if you want to ask the person to move their eyes from a point A to point B during a
particular experiment. Depending you know the choice of what kind of measure you are actually
going to use in a particular study depends mostly on the kind of research question that you ask.
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Now let us talk about different types of reaction papers now one of the first persons who ever
used a reaction time task was Franciscus Donders, now Donders was a Dutch physiologist who
in 1868 was interested in determining how long it took for a person to you know take decisions,
he basically conducted on the first experiments that can be considered to be an experiment in
So how did he do this? He basically determine this by measuring the reaction time that is how
long it took his participants to respond to the presentation of a kind of stimulus.
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Let us go further ahead in the first kind of his experiment Donders presented his participants just
with dot and asked them to press a button on the presentation of this story. It was a dot of light
on a particular kind of screen. Now this kind of task was termed as a very simple reaction time
task, wherein you just have to see whether the dot is there and you have to press a particular
button. In the other part of his experiment what Donders did was he made the task slightly more
difficult. He presented now one dot to the left side of the you know screen and another dot to the
right side of the screen. He now asked his participant to press button A when he you know when
the light on the left side was lit up and button B when the light on the right side was lit up. Now
this you can see is a systematically more difficult task than the earlier simple reaction time task
we were talking about.
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Here you can see the set up for these kinds of tasks in figure A you can see that the instruction is
just to press a light when you know just to place a key J when the light goes on and in the second
setup you can see that the participant has been asked to press J for left light and K for right light.
So in that sense systematically there is more effort or more mental processes are there let us say
you know how let us go into how the comparisons of these two tasks are.
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Donders reasoned that the choice reaction time task would take longer than the simple reaction
time task because the additional time it takes to make the decision you know you have to see
where the light came and then you have to decide which of the buttons you're going to press ok
that is why he is basically you know thought that the choice reaction time task will take more
time than the simple reaction time task.
And now if you subtract the simple reaction time task from the choice reaction time you will get
a number which will actually tell you how much time it took to decide which key was supposed
to be pressed. This is a simple subtraction technique which Donders use and in that sense he
actually talked about how you can really you know calculate the amount of time that is taken in
each step of a particular mental process okay.
So Donders in that sense in this example found out that the choice reaction time task took one
tenth of a second or let us say100 milliseconds longer than the simple reaction time task and very
easily through subtraction he could actually tell that the decision to about which button was to
pressed took about 100 milliseconds.
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Here is a kind of a you know graphical representation of what might have gone on in those tasks
you can see that when the light, in the simple reaction time task in panel A light flashes you
perceive the light and you simply press the key in panel B, a particular side you know left or
right light flashes you perceive the light but you then have to decide which button is going to be
pressed whether you know J or K then you press the J key because the left light has been you
know has been presented. In that sense you can already see that there was a step target and that is
what actually took the made the participants to take slightly longer time.
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Now another kind of reaction time task – that Donders introduced was the recognition reaction
time task. In this kind of task for the participants were asked to or to basically you know
recognize the kind of stimulus was presented. If you see in the simple reaction time task they
were just asked to press a key when a particular stimulus was detected. Here they were asked to
determine what depth similar S was for example to determine whether a particular symbol was
presented, let us say if I just ask you to determine K among set of different letters that is example
of a symbol recognition task this task is slightly more difficult than the simple reaction time task.
Now
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Let us talk to talk to you about a bit of you know but if other factors about reaction time studies
so there is some knowledge which is been there say for example the mean reaction times for light
stimuli is generally around 190 milliseconds, mean reaction times for sound stimuli is generally
about 160 milliseconds. Donders showed that the simple reaction time task a simple reaction
time is shorter than the cognition reaction time which in turn is shorter than the choice reaction
time.
So choice action time in that sense is the most difficult of the three kinds of reaction time task.
Laming in 1968 concluded that simple reaction times generally averaged around 220
milliseconds whereas the recognition reaction times generally measured around 384 minutes.
This was in line with studies that suggested that more complex stimuli say for example several
letters you know you actually need to see a panel of several letters among which you will
recognize one letter during a recognition reaction time elicit a slow reaction. So this was
something which is already found out.
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Miller and Low determined that the time for motor preparations, so you know you have to
prepare your hand for actually being able to press the button motor that is that will lead to a
particular kind of tensing of muscles and the motor response when you finally press the key was
generally same in all the three kinds of reaction time task in the simple reaction time task in the
recognition reaction time task and in the choice reaction time task, which led him to which led
the authors to conclude that the differences among these kind of you know on in these tasks the
simple reaction time the cognition reaction time and the choice reaction time is basically only
due to processing time because
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There is a stage added each time you actually change the task. Now an interesting finding about
choice reaction time experiments is that the response time is proportional to the log of n where n
is the number of stimuli in question. So number of stimuli that you present more specifically you
can say that reaction times generally rise with N, if you have more stimuli the reaction time will
rise to a particular point but after you know N or the number of still gets sufficiently large then
the reaction time does not increase anymore. So this kind of relationship between the number of
stimuli and the reaction time was called the Hick’s Law.
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Sternberg in1969 maintained that in recognition experiments in terms of a recognition reaction
time task the number of items in the memory set increases the reaction time, then increases
proportionately. So he said that you know reaction times are proportional to N and not the log of
N in case of a recognition reaction time or in case of a recognition experiment he actually
showed you know participants you know he measured reaction times for participant for one valid
stimulus in a panel of stimuli compared to you know six valid stimulus and they found that
reaction times was around 420 milliseconds for one valid stimulus for a RIT data and 630
milliseconds for a valid stimuli in a RIT data. So basically the reaction times were increasing by
almost 40milliseconds every time you increase the number of stimuli in the set.
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So this was a set of say for example you have to just recognize L in the panel of four letters
versus if you have to you know recognize L in a panel of six or seven letters something like that.
So what he basically thought was that these were the stages in doing this we have a stage of
encoding what is the stimuli presented, comparing whether there is L or not in there in and then
decide which button to push and those kind of thing and then finally responding. So he showed
here you can see that the number of items in the memory set and the reaction times are actually
you know it is related in a positively in that sense, they are directly proportional to each other.
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Now what kind of implication can be drawn from Sternberg task, at least one that memory
retrieval is a serial comparison process okay so for example that is why the number of items you
raise it kind of serially or lineally increases your reaction time. Second is each of these
comparison takes a fixed amount of time.
So for example one comparison generally should take around 40milliseconds. That is why the
amount of reaction time increasing with each adding stimuli was around 40 mill seconds. Now
mental operations I mean overall something which actually comes out from you know Stenberg’s
task is you know skills that mental operations and actually we successfully quantified in terms of
amounts of time they take. So the stage you know takes that a particular stage takes a particular
amount of time was validated in some sense in this kind of a study.
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Now coming to some other important reaction time studies of the past so one of the more
important studies was done by Posner Mike in 1978. He basically used a series of letter matching
task to measure the mental processing of several tasks, you know associated with recognizing a
pair of letters. So he had a physical matching task in which the subjects were just you know
shown a pair of letters and they had to identify whether they were identical or not in a second
name matching task they had to just tell whether they were the same letters or not whether they
had the same name or not and in the third or the other kind of task was that whether they were
vowel whether they belong to the same category according to a rule or not so whether they are
both vowels or both consonants.
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Here is the setup so you can see the lowest reaction time is taking a physical identity you know
say for example both are A’s the slightly more time spent while you have asked the phonetic
identity is small a or capital A, third is whether they were both vowels or not. So you see that
the reaction time increases linearly here. Okay so this is one of the ways.
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Basically we shared tells us again confirms the findings which we actually drew from the earlier
Sternberg's task. Another important task was JR Stroop Stoop task which basically wherein he
asks participants to read out names of color words. So you can talk about you know red green
blue orange etc but they were printed in an ink color which could be either congruent to the color
word say for example red is presented in red ink or it could not, or red is presented in green ink
something like that. He found out was what he found out was that participants performed worse
when there was no match between the color word and the color ink.
And it also tells us that you know multiple kinds of representations you know can get activated
when you're looking at a particular situation. So it’s just see these are the kind of stimuli that
were used so for example red is presented in red ink.
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Whereas red is presented in blue ink or say for example green is presented in green ink or green
is presented in red ink. So these are the kind of you know stimuli that were used.
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This is what the performance of participants could be like. So you were actually seeing green
written but it is presented in green ink. So you actually have to name the color of the ink so that
is what is leading to this conflict.
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So these are the three you know very basic kinds of reaction time tasks which have been very
important over the years and have guide lot you know lot many reaction time studies. What
could be the other factors you know that could influence reaction time? So at least two of them I
will mention here say for example it is known that reaction time to sound is much faster than
reaction time to light say.
For example the reaction times of sound being generally around 140 to 160milliseconds reaction
to visual stimuli being somewhere between 180 to 200milliseconds. Also Freberg found out that
visual stimuli that are presented for longer durations elicit faster reaction times because it's got
more time to process let us say and Wells found the same finding for auditory stimuli. So this is
so much about the reaction time.
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Studies reaction time you know studies have been used to you know study a variety of mental
phenomena say for example like perception and comprehension of language using naming times
when you actually see a picture and you name it you read a word and you name it, lexical
decision times whether a word you know whether a presentation let us say valid word or not a
valid word attention, say for example visual search kind of a paradigm. So you are given you
know a scenario wherein you have to look for that red X in you know number of OHS or else
something like that. Also memories say for example you are asked to recognize whether a
particular shape was presented in one of the earlier trials or not something like that.
We will talk about this in much more detail when you are actually discussing these different
cognitive functions and discussing the kind of experiments that have been used to study them.
Now the reaction time studies actually have also you know found has been formed the base of
the variety of experiments which are used in additional methodologies like you know FMRI etc
in fields like cognitive neuroscience. Now cognitive neuroscience basically let us talk about what
kind of methods are used in cognitive neuroscience.
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Now one of the most important concerns of cognitive neuroscience is basically you know
localizing the function so the whole idea is that experimental designs in cognitive neuroscience
are designed you know are basically intended to let us know what to study whether a particular
cognitive function can be reliably associated to a particular structural region of the brain okay.
So that is why most of the methodologies used in cognitive neuroscience are actually designed to
do just that. Now one of the first demonstrations of the localization of function basically you
know comes as the you know the demonstration of primary receiving areas for the senses
primary receiving areas basically are the first areas of the cerebral cortex to receive signals from
each of the senses if you remember we were talking about this in our lectures on cognitive
neuroscience. Now for example sound you know sound stimuli the receptors in the ear and these
receptors basically you know send electrical signals.
So the auditory receiving area which is there in the temporal lobe of the brain so that kind of
relationship is being made. Similarly the primary receiving area for vision information or visual
information occupies the occipital lobes; there is where the all the information from the eyes
goes to where in this basic or initial visual processing takes place. Similarly the area for skin
senses which is touch temperature pressure pain those kind of things is basically done first in
areas located in the parietal lobe.
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So here you can see that these are specific areas which are processing these are specific areas of
the brain which are processing specific kinds of input that our body receives. You know we see
something we hear something we touch something those kinds of things areas for taste and smell
are located under the temporal lobe. Now what does the frontal lobe do. The frontal lobe
basically receives signals from all of these senses and it actually plays a very important role in
perceptions that involve the coordination of information which is reaching through variety of
senses. For example one of the basis of sites inference of a place you might need to decide
whether you want to stay in that place for a longer time or you want to just move out of that
place. This kind of you know decision-making is actually done in the frontal lobe wherein they
are actually you know evaluating the different kind of sensory input that you get it.
Okay, now here you can see again the frontal lobe the temporal occipital and the parietal lobes
in this figure.
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Now let us talk about these methods of localization. So a widely-used, you know technique for
measuring brain activity in response to this environmental stimulation is the technique of brain
imaging. Brain imaging basically allows researcher to create images that show which areas of the
brain are activated when the humans are awake and they are involved in carrying out various
cognitive tasks. One of those areas I am not really going to you know do a very exhaustive or an
in detail examination of these things, I will just actually give you a flavor of what these methods
are so that when you are actually talking about experiments using these methodologies while we
are doing you know studying various cognitive functions a kind of you know gives you a way of
understanding what we're talking about.
So the first method we can talk about is Positron Emission Tomography wherein this method is
basically you know one which takes advantage of the fact that blood flow increases towards
areas of the brain that are involved or activated by a particular cognitive task. Say for example
there is an area of the brain that is sensitive to viewing faces. So every time I see you know I
show you a face in an experimental setup or otherwise the blood flow to that area of the brain
which processes faces will increase okay, a very simple reduction to make. So to measure blood
flow how do you measure that you know the blood flow is increasing in that area so what you do
is a very low dose of a radioactive tracer is injected into the blood okay and the person's brain is
then scanned by a PT apparatus wherein a person actually lies down as a big scanner as the
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person is enter in and then this scanner actually measures the signal from the tracer okay at each
location in the brain. Higher the signal, higher the brain activity so for example if you're showing
me faces and there's the area of the brain you know which is responds selectively to faces I will
see much higher activity of you know much higher brain activity in that particular area and that
can be measured and logged by the scanner now PT basically it has any weekly researchers to
track changes in blood flow and thus to determine which areas of the brain were being active,
you know this kind of measurement is called functional imaging. Now how do you really you
know say for example most tasks that we engage in are not very simple tasks.
So how do we really do it? So one of the techniques that researchers have developed to
determine this is at which areas are specially involved in which cognitive functions, is this
subtraction technique. Now this is a rather simple technique what is done is you first measure the
brain activity in a controlled state you know when the resting say for example kind of a resting
state so the person's not doing anything is just closing his eyes and relaxing and you are
measuring where the where there is the tracer is you just measure the activity of the brain in the
resting state okay I will actually take, let me take an example of a particular study to - you know
illustrate what a subtraction technique is. So for example there is a study which was designed to
determine which areas of the brain are activated for a person when he manipulates a particular
object.
So what they did was they first measured the activity generated by simply putting the object in
the person's hand okay so the person is just holding the object and you measure the brain activity
at that point in time. This will be taken as an example of a controlled state.
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Next what you could do is you measure the activity when the person is actively manipulating that
object you know it's turning it around and say for example if it is a ball or if turning the object
around in the hand and then you again measure the brain activity at that point that is your
stimulation state finally what you do is you do this manipulation, you subtract the you know
brain activity in this emulation state and you subtract the activity of the control state from this
activity for example if the activity.
Say for example if the activity, let’s say I am taking a random number is a up to 100% in areas
XYZ in the stimulation state and the activity in these areas XY and Z were just around 40 in the
control State, this subtraction will give you the number 60 which is pretty much the amount you
know the kind of you know activation that happened in response to what the person was doing
that is manipulating the object. This is a simple method of subtraction.
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Here you can see this you know happening in a sort of a demonstration you will see on the
leftmost there is an initial condition where the person is just holding the object B is your test
condition whether the person is actually already manipulating the object and C basically shows
you the subtraction so you can see that you know the area say for example in the you know
dorsal part of the parietal lobe are basically involved in some sense in manipulation of the object
because that is the part that is left there in the motor areas that is .
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Now another kind of neuro imaging technique is called functional magnetic resonance imaging.
You know this was introduced to take advantage of the fact that blood flow can also be measured
without injecting any kind of radioactive tracer. Say for example some people might be averse
and you know they might be afraid of participating an experiment which injects a radioactive
substance with a blood.
So you know for help of those kind of experience or dealing with those participants you could
have something called the functional magnetic resonance imaging. Now fMRI as it is called as
the you know abbreviation is, uses the fact that hemoglobin which is a molecule in blood carries
an oxygen carries oxygen in the blood okay and it contains a ferrous molecule but something that
is attracted to magnet.
So okay it has magnetic properties. Now if a magnetic field is applied to the brain these
hemoglobin molecules they start lining up like many tiny magnets you know they align
themselves to the magnetic field that is being applied.
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Now FMRI basically indicates the presence of brain activity because hemoglobin molecules in
areas of high brain activity lose some of the oxygen’s that are actually transporting. This
basically makes the hemoglobin more magnetic so the molecules can then respond more strongly
to the magnetic field and you can actually measure that. So FMRI apparatus basically determines
the relative activity of various areas of the brain by detecting changes in the magnetic response
of hemoglobin.
So if a particular area is involved in processing a particular kind of stimulus there will be a

higher magnetic response coming from those areas. So you are actually measuring the amount of
you know magnetic response that is coming from an area if that is more while doing a particular
task then that area is involved in doing that task. Again you can use the logic of the subtraction
technique with fMRI as well.
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So this is just you know a prototype of the scanner you can see the person is lying in the scanner
and you can see here on the right panel that activation you know is being measured so say for
example the areas in green are least activation areas in yellow are more you know having more
activation.
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What has FMRI has been used for actually localizing a variety of cognitive functions to
particular brain areas say for example there is this area called the fusiform face area which lies in
the fusi form gyrus on the underside of the temporal lobe and basically correspond to the
damaged area in people having prosopagnosia.
Not really you know see faces or recognize faces have damage in this area. It is another way of
saying that this area is involved in a perception of faces the Para hippocampal area basically is
activated by looking at pictures of indoor and outdoor scenes similarly the extra striate body area
is actually activated by pictures of body parts and parts of bodies but not faces.
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You can see the fusi form face area in this figure here you can see you know that the inner the
para hippocampal area place area is being activated by places that are in the top row but not by
you know body but not by other kinds of stimuli which are in the bottom row. In the lower part
you can see the EBA getting activated by body parts or body like parts but not in the not by other
stimuli which are there in the bottom row. So these are some of the ways in which a particular
areas of brain have been linked with particular processing of particular kinds of stimuli
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Another technique which is a very interesting technique which we can talk about is the the
technique of event related potential. So this is basically a sub part of a broader technique which
is electro encephalography which is basically measuring the electrical activity in the brain now
one of the drawbacks with the methods we have been talking about till now FMRI and PT is that
they have very good spatial resolution they can actually tell you which area processing is going
on but they have a very low temporal resolution. They do not tell you at in real time how the
processing is happening you know a general kind of reaction time in a PT or an fMRI study is
around a few minutes.
Now we know that you know brain processes stimuli very fast you if you really want to know
how what kind of mental you know stages have been gone through while processing a particular
stimuli you would want to have a much better temporal resolution. That temporal resolution is
given to us by this technique called ERP which is event-related potentials. Now what is ERP the
event-related potential basically is recorded by putting a small disc of electrodes placed on the
person scalp. Each electrode picks up signals from the groups of neurons that fire together in the
brain under the scalp; now when say for example a person hears the phrase.
Let us say we have given him you know to read something like the cat won't eat and then ERPs
are recorded then you can notice that the signals are very rapid because the question is actually
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reading these you know stimuli there is reading these words and this is this electrical activity is
happening on a scale of milliseconds. Now because of this very good temporal resolution ERP
becomes the ideal technique for investigating processes that are happening in real-time you know
say for example how well or poorly a person is understanding a conversation that is ongoing.
Now in which they for example you know in I take the example of conversation because it is
another fast process a person generally speaks about three words per second in an average way
so it's a rather fast person if you want to really want to understand that you would want to use a
method like ERP so this rapid response of ERP.
As I said contrasts with the slow response of brain imaging methods which we've talked about.
Now one disadvantage of the ERP method by the way is that it is difficult to pinpoint the source
of these selected potential okay these signals you gain while it can tell you know at what time
what is happening but it cannot really tell you where these signals are sourced from and it is
understandable because you cannot really know exactly which set of cells the signal is coming
from and this also you know the scalp and the hair and everything that the scalp that is actually
underlying the you know these electrodes.
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So that is basically something which is very difficult to determine still the ability of ERP to
provide a nearly continuous record of what is happening in the brain makes it a very you know
nice method to study say for example dynamic processes as I said language attention those kind
of things. Let us take an example so as a method of investigation as I said ERP could be very
useful say for example indistinguishing how a person is processing the form of language say for
example whether it is in tactically correct grammatically correct that is or not or you know
whether it is meaningful or not meaningful okay.
So as ERP consists of a number of ways that occur at you know different delays after stimulus is
presented these have been linked these different kind of waves have been linked to different
aspects of language just to take an example the N400 component which basically is N means
negative and 400 means 4hundred milliseconds. So this negative 400 component is actually
linked to persons processing of meaning. If you processing something which is meaningful
which is say for example not meaningful and does not really fit in whatever you've read earlier
the n400 component might come or say for example if you're reading something which is not
grammatically correct a p600 component might come up which is a positive peak of around 600
milliseconds at around 600 milliseconds.
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So let us say is this example you know here you can see on the left there is a person which
having always having this electrical you know the scalp this a set of electrodes on her head and
she is reading something called you know reading this is fragment of sentence called the cat's
won’t eat, now you see how you know the brain activity or the electrical activity is going on in
the brain at this point okay the person has just read this fragment the cats won't eat. Now you
actually change this a bit.
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And then you have two kinds of sentences one kind of sentence is, one kind of sentence is
basically have a meaning anomaly and the other kind of sentences have a grammatical anomaly.
So you see cats won’t eat and cats won’t bake, now if you read the cats wont bake they will be a
response from the ring which says that cats generally do not bake so this sentence is no
meaningful. In this kind of setup you can see there is a negative peak you can see on the Left
panel at around 400milliseconds so in ERP studies generally negative is on the top as you can
see from the figure.
So you have you see speak around 400 milliseconds a negative peak on the right panel you can
see the cats won’t eat and cats won't eating there is this is just a mistake of grammar in the
second sentence. So here you can see in the right panel that there is a positive peak which is kind
of coming up around 600 milliseconds. So in this sense these two components of ERP tell you
how fast and how quickly you are detecting these kind of anomalies while reading particular
sentences okay.
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So this tells you a very important thing that you know there are different physiological response
to understanding meaning and different physiological response to understanding the form or the
grammatical correctness of you know of any language that you reading it could actually very
well be any language sentences that you might want to use. So another other set of explanations
have also shown that the N 400 response is associated with structures in the temporal lobe and
damage to areas in the temporal lobe actually reduces the amount of n400 response that will
occur when you come across same sentences like the cats wont bake or say for example.
The cats eat stone or something like that the p600 response has been associated with structures
in the frontal lobe okay. More towards the anterior parts of the brain that is damage to these kind
of areas in frontal lobe them has been found to reduce the larger P 600 responses that occur when
the form of the sentence is incorrect.
So in that sense you can actually you know in some sense estimate that these areas are involved
in this kind of processing at that particular time scale. Nowadays I would like to observe that
people are actually you know, doing using a combination of techniques so can generally see
people using a combination of ERP and fMRI wherein they actually get a very good spatial
resolution and a very good temporal resolution to go with it. Now those kind of research designs
will also come across when you're actually talking about these different cognitive functions.
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Let us sum up what we talked about in today's lecture. We talked about a variety of ways in
which research methodologies have been used to talk about these abstract mental tasks, abstract
mental functions which we have been searching about in the cognitive psychology domain okay.
We talked about reaction time tasks and how these reaction time tasks have been used to
investigate different mental functions we talked about neuro imaging tasks like PT and fMRI and
we finally talked about electroencephalographic tasks say for example ERPs that is all for today
and this was basically about the research method specific to cognitive psychology. Thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
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Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Lecture-13
Sensation and Perception
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the course called basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur.
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The topic of todays is lecture is sensation in perception. In today lecture we will talk about how
information received by senses is transduced into meaningful information that we can act about
and that we can you know make use of I start with a series of pictures and I just want you to look
at them and tell me what you or think over it what you see in them.
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What do you see here you see that there is a fat lady standing in front of a glass and in that glass
she is actually looking at herself as she has grown much slimmer? Is this a trick or is this what
the lady is actually seeing or let us say at least this is what we are seeing from that picture let us
look at some other pictures.
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If I ask you which of the two lines is larger the line at the top or line at the bottom some of you
might give have different answers. Just to tell you that both of these lines are exactly equal in
length. Do you also see a white triangle superimposed on the black lines triangle here? I also see
that but the thing is that there is no white triangle in this figure; it is just we who are actually
seeing that. Do you see a bridge or a fleet of ships here?
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I guess I see abridge but if I focus I see a fleet of ships as well.
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What is this is it a rabbit or a bird.
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Now if you notice these pictures you probably saw something which was probably not there in
the pictures okay why did that happen, were you making a mistake or is it your senses playing
tricks on you? This is exactly what we you know want to study when we really want to you
know investigate what perceptual processes are like. Is perception and accurate process does it
really reflect what the world holds or does your senses or does your sensory modality give you
the exact and accurate picture of whatever it receives.
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Let us delve deeper into this question by talking about what perception is. Perception is the set of
processes by which we recognize organize and make sense of the sensations we receive from
environmental stimuli now if you notice this definition makes a case of difference between
perception and sensation. Perception is what we are actually doing to sensation what is actually
happening to whatever sensations or sensory input.
That we are getting from the different senses, hold on to this definition let us talk about another
definition another definition of perception says that perception is the process by which the
cognitive system constructs an internal representation of the outside world. What am I trying to
say here? I am trying to tell you that there is a lot of information that your senses receive from
the outside world to interact with or to be able to use that information you have to create a
replica or a representation of that information inside your head. Perception is the process that
helps you do so. Okay so if you notice in these two definitions we are actually talking about two
key components of perception, first is that perception is a constructive active process. We are
actually actively engaged with the information that we are receiving the second is perception is
about representation okay.
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It might be different from reality, it is the representation of the reality which your senses give
you say for example if you talk about people who have myopia or hypermetropia know people
who have powers in their eyes you know the ones wearing spectacles like me. Now is it that the
world has changed and that we cannot see it.
It is probably our eyes have changed in a manner that we do not see you know the exact thing
that is out there okay that that is one of the ways you could say that sensory information cannot
always be correct if you move around a particular room and you are looking at an object from
different angles the information that you receive from that object is very different from each of
those angles.
But what you see is the same object very stable and not changing that is also what is achieved via
the process of perception. In this series of lectures on sensation and perception we will talk about
how are these processes achieved and how does perception really shape your view of the world.
Now there could be some key issues in perception. One of them is that perception may or may
not be an accurate representation of the reality okay.
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As you saw in the pictures just presented you seem something but that was probably not really
there. Instead perception is actually an interpretation of the sensory input as I was saying you
getting some sensory input and your brain or your mind is interpreting that sensory input in a
particular fashion which is what you, you know can use or which is what is available to you to
act upon or to think about and that is what perception is actually about.
Now there are two things that you know sometimes your senses may deceive you say for
example for that lady which I showed you who was probably drunk and so was looking at herself
also have become very thin drugs and different kinds of these things have that kind of an effect
on people. Also senses may be erroneous sometimes say for example the example of our eye is
not functioning properly you know the problem could be with the instrument or with the senses
which is getting the information from the outside world to the inside world.
That is your mind space. So what is what are the you know different stages in perception what
are the different aspects of perceptual processes there are at least four of them which we will talk
about the first is sensation let us talk about how all of this story really starts what is sensation
what is sensory input how do we make sense of sensory input the second is how are these
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representations formed from sensory input you know to the point that we can actually make use
of this information to the point we can organize this information. The third aspect itself is
perception which we already talked about how do you organize and you know arrange the data or
arrange the information coming in from the world. We will also talk about as a final section you
this chapter about variety of influences on perception what are the kinds of influences you know
that impact how you see the world.
So with these four topics in mind this is how you can organize this series of lecture on sensation
and perceptions. Now let us talk about the first part sensation.
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You know a question often asked in some philosophy classes is that if a tree falls in a forest and
there is nobody to hear it is there a sound produced. Now you can think of it over and over again
and you might have difference of opinion.
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But the answer I am going to give you is that no there is no sound produced but you will say that
you know the tree has fallen there is displacement there is some potential energy and so
definitely there must be something that has happened there.
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Let us you know look at this answer in bit more detail what is sound, sound is actually caused by
a wave of molecules but the waves themselves are not sound okay. Sound is actually a
psychological event and it depends on the nervous system the brain to transduce this waves to the
transduce the physical energy of the waves to a nerve impulse that is generated in your brain that
gives you the experience of sound. So you need the brain to have a sound you somebody to for
the sound to actually have existed.
Otherwise there will be just random waves which are generated and you know then finally
dissipate over without a brain to register the transduced physical energy there can be no sound.
The situation is exactly analogous to the relationship of wavelengths to the you and of amplitude
to lightness if there is nothing if there is no object to interpret this wavelength.
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You will never have this concept of different use or there is nothing to decipher this amplitude or
you know transduce these amplitudes to lightness you will not have bright or dim lights okay so
this with this in background let us try and talk more about sensation. So physical properties lead
to psychological events but they are not the events themselves.
The discipline of psychophysics actually charge the relationship between physical events and
psychological events. That is our experience of these physical events. So psychophysics is
basically the field which will help you really deal with sensations which will help you to
navigate sensations and to understand how sensations are converted into psychological events
like experience okay thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
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Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
452
3Indian Institute of technology Kanpur
Course Title
Lecture – 14
Psycho- Physics Measuring Sensation
By
Dr. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the course called basic cognitive processes I am dr. Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur.
So what is psychophysics psycho physics is actually about measuring these different sensations
measuring the input that is coming from the various senses.
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Now what is psychophysics, psychophysics as the name says is psychology + physics so

psychophysics basically involves the determination of the psychological reaction to, you know
events that lie along a physical dimension, so changes in loudness changes in brightness,
lightness changes in you know pressure, temperature those kind of things and how do we really
experience them that is pretty much what the discipline of psychophysics about. G Boring
basically you know claims that the introduction of these techniques.
You know to measure the relationship between internal impressions that is the psychological
experience and the external role that is the physical events that is what actually mark the you
know onset of scientific psychology. If you remember in one of the earlier lectures we have
talked much in detail about this that how cognitive psychology came into being how we started
really measuring what is happening in the mind space psychophysics is certainly at the forefront
of you know the beginning of this revolution.
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Let us talk about some basic concepts in psychophysics. The problem of psychophysics actually
is a bit like a paradox. You know it requires you to objectify something which is actually a
subjective experience, so your experience of you know a loudness or color etc. are subjective
experience. But we are trying to do what we are trying to do in psychophysics is to measure
these subjective experiences. So what is the subjective experience, most basic subjective
experiences any sensation or any information that is you know impinging on you know five of
your senses?
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So measuring sensations in that sense is a rather difficult task you know because they are not
really open to public measurement. You cannot really measure you know discreetly how much
pain somebody is feeling or how much light you know you feeling when you lift up a particular
you know stone or how bright you are actually feeling the light to be sometimes you are very
tired and you actually feel that the light is too bright even though the light is the same that you
have been using every day of your year, isn’t it?
So it is this subjective experience that we want to measure and that is what we use psychophysics
for. The internal judgments the ones which I was talking about are not really identical to the
amount of physical energy influencing the sensory apparatus. So it is not like you know 10% of
you know a particular physical energy in let us say light or weight or something is directly
proportional to that you are feeling 10% weight, you know that can actually vary quite a lot I
talk about that in more detail as we go ahead.
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Let us take this example of you know a radio dial say for example if there is a stereo in your
house and you have a dial to really increase or decrease the sound or volume of this what is
volume is basically is perceived loudness how loud the sound is appearing to you. So you have a
dial there is a recorder is playing some music you have this dial you can turn this dial you know
towards the left or towards the right to increase or decrease the loudness of music from this dial
okay.
Now you will realize that this movement of the dial does not bear a one-to-one relation to how
loud you are actually you know feeling the music to be rather this dial is very cleverly calibrated
so that each movement increases you know intensity proportional to increments in loudness, so
you move the dial one steps and you feel that the loudness has increased you move the dial
another step you feel that out loudness has increased further. Thus doubling the volume level on
the dial has to increase the physical energy by about 10 times to produce a two-fold increase in
loudness.
So for you to you know think that something is now twice as loud does not need the physical
energy to multiply just by two it rather needs the physical energy to be multiplied by ten, so that
you can you know experience twice loudness. This is what I am talking about when I am saying
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that there is no one-to-one relationship between the amount of physical energy and you know
corresponding psychological experience that you are having.
Also the psychophysical relationships between the stimulus and the judgment depend on the
particular sensory modality. So you might have a particular sensitivity of judgment when it
comes to light or sound but you might have a very different in a sense of judgment when it
comes to you know pressure stimuli like pain etc…
Pain judgments in response to you know increases in electrical intensity of shocks applied you
know to the skin grow much more rapidly than say for example loudness judgments. I told you
that you have to really you know multiply the physical energy of sound by10 to perceive twice
amount of loudness but you have to really multiply the electrical energy only by 1/3 you know
only raise it by one third of the time to actually you know make you feel twice as painful you
know twice as painful a shock as the original time okay.
Now psychophysics basically tries to solve this problem by closely linking perceptual experience
to physical stimuli what you are experiencing versus what you are getting the basic principle
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here is to use the physical stimuli as a reference system okay. The stimulus characteristics are are
carefully and systematically manipulated and observers are asked to report how they are
perceiving that particular system.
I will come to you know demonstration of that in a short while, the art of psychophysics however
is to formulate such a question that can get the simplest of answers.
You know, so the questions are very simple questions like can you hear the tone the person just
has to say yes or no and the person says yes you know that the person has detected the stimulus.
On the other hand can you add you can also ask questions like can you tell which tone which
tune which songs tune I am playing then the person can say yes and then you will know that the
person has identified the tone you remember we are talking about detection and identification in
the research methodology lecture. So these are two slightly different processes.
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Now problems of detection and identification may rise in cases of when the signal is too weak
and there is too much noise in the environment you know recall any party in which you are there
may be one of the processions like Bharat or something and try talking to you know your friends
or people around you and you will discover that it is very difficult to really you know gauge what
the conversation is about in the when there is so much noise in the background.
In such cases what one needs to do is one needs to do the task of discrimination, so you have to
actually discriminate the voice message that is coming from your friend from the background of
the blaring noise of the band and stuff okay. That is what is discrimination so all you have to do
is you have to discriminate a signal or a stimulus from the noisy background and this task is
generally performed under uncertainty there is a lot of noise you have to really pick just the
signal that you intend to from this lot of background noise.
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So on what does it depend that we can you know detect a signal or discriminate a signal from
noise what are the factors that decide it.
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One of the factors that decide you know whether you will be able to detect the presence of a
sound or a signal is a threshold. If you are looking at this figure here you notice that this just
threshold you know that this pole-vault is that this you know athlete has to jump over if she
misses it she will not be able to go to that side I mean that is not counted as a valid jump. So this
you know horizontal pole is that kind of threshold which really you know takes the person across
and you know converts a particular jump to a valid you know countable jump.
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It is rather similar to what our sensory you know processes are like, so the most basic function of
any sensory system is to detect energy or changes in the environment okay. So if there is a
change in temperature you will start feeling hot or cold depending on how the change is, if there
is a electric shock if there is a change in the loudness you know all of those kind of things they
have to change beyond a certain point for you to be able to detect it that certain point is your
threshold.
So this change in energy can be of many kinds it could be chemical say for example in taste or
smell how much sugar you need to add before it starts feeling sweet, how much you know light
you want to have till you start seeing something clearly or mechanical say for example you know
how loud the sound how much strong the sound wave should be or even thermal stimulation you
know how hot is something for you to feel hot you know so this is basically this all changes
energy and you have to feel them in a way beyond the particular limits.
So that you can actually tell that ok now I am feeling colder or hotter and those kind of things
that limit basically which we are talking about is your sensory threshold.
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Now in order to be noticed the stimulus has to contain a certain level of energy this minimal
amount of energy in order to be noticed is absolute threshold, so just the point where you can
actually feel that you know I can detect this stimulus now is the absolute threshold Fechner says ,
just enough to lift the sensation over the threshold of consciousness. Once you are aware of
something that it is there some sensory information that is enough to say that the information is
cross is absolute threshold.
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Something like this if you can see this figure here you will see as soon as the percentage of
detected responses go above 50% that is pretty much the time where this absolute threshold is
there and on the x-axis you can find stimulus intensity – stimulus intensity is increasing and in
proportion to that the amount of detected responses are plotted on they-axis and at the point
when the proportion of detected responses pass 50% that is chance that is a bit more than just
50/50 that is where you have reached your absolute threshold.
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The absolute threshold thus is the intensity of the stimulus that the observer can barely detect. On
the other hand there could be something like a difference threshold what is a different threshold,
difference threshold refers to the minimum intensity by which a variable comparison stimulus
must deviate from a particular standard stimulus to produce a perceptual difference.
So suppose you are holding two stones in your hand one of them is the standard stimulus one of
them is the comparison stimulus, I ask you whether the comparison stimulus is heavier or lighter
than the standard stimulus? At the point when you can detect that this one is just heavier or just
lighter that is pretty much what is your difference threshold like.
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Here you can see there is a reference stimulus and then there is a difference similar and the
difference has to be at least about 35% by this figure here which is basically or by actually a 35%
times when the participants can say that this is greater or heavier let us say that is where your
difference threshold lies, the difference is plotted horizontally by these arrows the DL symbol.
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Now how do we determine the session how do we determine the absolute threshold for a
particular sense or a different threshold for particular sensory information there are methods to
do that. The first method or the simplest method is the method of adjustment this is the simplest
method in which you actually ask the participant or you ask the subject to adjust the stimulus
intensity himself or herself until it is just noticed or until it becomes just noticeable.
You know say for example until it becomes just noticeable may be or when you are measuring
your absolute threshold until it is just noticeably different from the comparisons, from the
standard stimulus is when you are actually talking about difference threshold okay the kind of
same examples which I was talking about.
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How do you do it let us go into the steps so the observer is typically provided the control or some
sort and that control can be used to adjust the sound say for example if you are talking about
sound until it becomes just audible, so the participant is saying you know changing the dial in
small steps and as soon as the participant reports yes I can see it, you can stop that and then you
can note down that value this intensity is you do it multiple times and this average of this overall
thing can be supposed to be the, can be supposed to be what is your absolute threshold.
If you are talking about you know you can also what you can do is you can actually start the
observer from a higher value when the sound is very detectable and it means to ask him to bring
it down in small steps then it becomes not noticeable up, just one step after it becomes not
noticeable. That is also one kind of value will get. Typically these two kinds of values are
alternated several times and an average is taken to get the point where you can actually barely
detect something. So that is how you determine over a series of trials your absolute threshold.
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Another method to determine absolute threshold is the method of limits so a major difference by
the way between a method of adjustment and method of limits is that here one does not allow the
observer to control the stimulus directly but the experimenter does it himself, so if I am the
experimenter and you are the participant I will have the control and I will change the dial
towards the left or towards the right.
And I will keep asking you the same question did you detect it or did you not you will give me
answers at particular points I will note that down and I will probably do the same as I did with
the absolute threshold procedure I will probably go a once in an ascending way increasing steps
once in a descending way decreasing steps and I will take average of those values okay.
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This average of you know average of the intensity of the last scene and the first not seen stimuli
in descending series and descending series is then recorded as the absolute threshold.
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Here is an example so say for example I am talking about stimulus intensity let us say the
stimulus be X I start from values starting at a very top 200, I start from180 you say yes 160 you
say yes you say yes on 140, 120, 100 and at 80 you say no then I start from the bottom I start
from somewhere around 20 and I go up to140 from 120 to 140 you said yes so I note that value
that values 130. I do it again from 200 again a value comes I do it from 110 again a particular
value comes all of these values are actually average and you get a mean value of 115 which is
your absolute threshold.
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How do you use the method of limits to determine difference threshold. The difference threshold
basically are based on relative judgments in which a constant unchanging comparison stimulus is
judged related to the series of changing series. I will give you one brick to hold in your hand I
will keep giving two bricks of different weights and I will ask you when does the brick feel
higher or lower, you know something like. The question that is asked is how different must the
two stimuli be before they can be reliably distinguished.
473
The traditional way is to measure to ask the observer lifts pairs of weighs as I said one is
constant or that is changing and to judge if the new weight is heavier or lighter. The method is
otherwise similar to the last instance of method of limits or method of you know method of
limits and one can start from a weight which feels clearly heavier much now you know the
weights of the two things are very different and go till it starts feeling slightly equal and then
lighter or one can start from a weight which is much lighter than then starts feeling equal or
heavier in the next step.
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The upper threshold you know is the average point at the one at which the observer says it was
equal and then heavier the lower threshold is when the observer says it is equal and then in the
next step lighter this difference of these two values is called the interval of uncertainty the mean
of these upper and lower values is called the point of subjective equality where you are thinking
that okay you have got somewhere equal to this equal to the standard stimulus.
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This is a demonstration so you know have a weight which is the probably around 300 grams or
so and you start from 350, 340, 330, you find it heavier, heavier, heavier and 320 to 310 you find
it equal. So the value of the average of 320 and 310 is 315 that is recorded. Next you start from
lighter 270 and you then go upwards then you get this value of somewhere around 315 similarly
you do this again and again 3, 4 values you take mean of all of them. So that is the mean of your
upper threshold when you are going in the higher series ascending series and then the lower
threshold is when is coming down. So you take the mean of the upper threshold and the lower
threshold and that will be your point of subjective equality now this is again one way of
determining this.
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Now let us move a bit further Ernst Heinrich Weber basically discovered some important
properties of difference threshold what did he find. He found that the magnitude of the difference
threshold increases with increase in magnitude of the standard stimulus. So you are asking you to
detect the difference of a particular stimulus from a very you know light stimulus that is say for
example 10 grams of something then say for example if you know want you to tell me whether
something is heavier or not here or lighter than a 300 gram stimulus.
And the difference threshold will be around 10 grams. If I ask you to you know give me the same
comparison for a standard stimulus of 600 grams then the difference threshold will be around
220 grams similarly if I go to 3, 900 grams the different threshold will be around 30 grams.
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Now if you also noticed what I am talking about is that for a particular sensory modality the size
of this difference threshold is related to the standard stimulus is constant. So the ratio of 10
grams to 300 grams is the same as the ratio of 600 grams to 20 grams of 40 grams to1,200 so that
ratio remains constant.
478
Gustav Fechner gave a formula for this kind of a situation and he called it Weber's law, so there
is this Delta I divided / I which is equals to a constant that is your Weber's constant. When I, so
here I actually refers to the magnitude of the standard stimulus Delta I is your difference
threshold and K is the constant. Now this is something which is not really going to change and
you saw in the earlier examples that this is actually the case.
479
Here you can see that you know there is this direct linear increase in you know the difference
threshold as compared to a standard you know stimulus which is probably let us say background
intensity or something.
480
Weber’s law or the Weber's fraction basically varies in size for different senses though, so it is
somewhat larger for brightness than it is for heaviness. Weber also discovered that the value of
the different threshold is about 2% of the magnitude of the standard stimulus intensity okay
around that value.
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Here you can see the difference thresholds for different you know sensory modality, so electric
similar for an electric shock the difference threshold is slightly higher for heaviness it is around
1.4 for loudness it is just 0.6 so this is you know something which you can see that how this
differentiates across different sensory modalities.
482
Now coming to another method the method of constant stimuli here what happens is that the
experimenter chooses a number of values arbitrarily that okay I will give these values 5, 6, 7
values 9 values and on the basis of previous explanation basically they are you know suppose
that the threshold will lie somewhere amongst these values so let us say if I guess that a threshold
for a particular stimulus will be around 10. So I will actually have all the numbers around 10 will
probably will be 11, 12, 14 and 9, 8, 7, 6, 5.
I will present these values again and again this fixed set of values I will present the multiple
times and in a quasi random order and I will see when you can detect or you cannot detect this.
483
So somewhere and after each stimulus presentation you know as an observer I ask you to report
whether or not you detected the stimulus or whether it is intensity let us say in case of difference
threshold was weaker or higher than a particular standard amount. Now once each value I have
presented more than a particular number of times let us say 20, 25 then what I do is the
proportion of detected or not detected responses is calculated for each stimulus level. So how
many responses were detected at level 10 how many were detected at 12 how many are detected
at 13 something like that. Then
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What we do is we plot this data along with stimulus intensity at the x-axis and the percentage of
perceive stimuli along the y-axis. This kind of function is basically called the psychometric
function the psychometric function tells you that around what point the subject definitely
perceives a given stimuli. I will show you how it is done.
485
So for example here you have a particular you know a stimulus let us say you know stimulus
intensity is there that these many values 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 that these values and then you have you
know you presented them so many times you presented one, one time you presented 2, 3 times
you presented 3, 12 times something like that the percentage of the perceived stimuli at level one
or how many times he perceived the stimulus at level 7.
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All of this is plotted in a particular graph which you can see right here. You can see that the in a
amount of times the person perceived the value increases above 50 % at around 4you know 4 and
a bit more than 4, by around 7 the person a person is perceiving this stimulus almost 100 % of
the time. This is again one way of determining you know the point at which the person can
always 100% perceive a particular stimulus, this is again.
487
One way of really determining the absolute threshold now.
488
If you notice I am going back to this figure if you notice that this figure is slightly you know s-
shaped. It is not really a steep you know thing. If it, if say for example there was a steep
difference between the absolute threshold and the not you know detectable value then probably it
will be an abrupt change the for example will probably be more z like thing okay but it is slightly
s-shaped and why is it like that.
489
These psychometric functions generally are a sigmoidal or s-shaped because of the fact that
lower stimulus intensities are sometimes detected occasionally highest you know values are
detected more often and the intensities in the middle are detected sometimes and sometimes also
that 0.5 the thing is always there. It is detected by chance sometimes not detected by chance at
others. So it is not clear distinction between the point where you cannot certainly detect a
stimulus and where you can certainly detect a stimulus.
490
Other results why you could get an s-shaped curve in these kind of functions is probably because
there is always continuous fluctuation in the sensitivity of various system, say for example the
amount of information or the discreteness with which your ear is registering the loudness
information also can have a bit of a fluctuation, you know due to spontaneous internal noise and
stuff like that you are thinking of something you know your attention is varied a little bit all of
these kind of factors.
These inherent fluctuations mean that an observer must detect activity elicited by an external
stimulation against a background level affected. So for example if you are trying to listen to a
bird and you are sitting in a park what you are trying to do is you are trying to you know detect
that particular signal from so much of background noise that is already going on. In that case
your psychometric function will never be a steep function will always be a sigmoid s-shaped
curve.
491
So the threshold occurs with a certain probability and it is intensity value then must need to be
defined you know in a statistical way. By convention the absolute threshold is you know
measured got with a method of constant stimuli is defined as the intensity value that elicits
perceived responses around 50% of the trials. So if just above 50% you can detect something that
is pretty much what your absolute threshold will be okay.
492
So in table 2 which you just saw you can see that this value lies somewhere between 4 & 5, make
sense? Another method you can use to determine absolute threshold is the staircase method.
What is the staircase method it is an adaptive testing procedure basically used to keep the test
stimuli threshold, for example you have a good idea of what the threshold might be so what you
do is you follow a staircase and everything so you take hold of some values and you actually
present these a very small range of 4, 5, 6 values again and again to the participant you ask him
that whether you detected this similar or you did not detect this illness.
Every time the person gives the response you change the value okay so a smaller range of values
is there so that and this is a rather efficient way of doing it because you are not doing testing
hundred times this is therefore called the staircase method so I will show you how it is done so
an observer we can start from an ascending series or a descending series each time those what is
saying is you change this intensity just by one step this continues until the stimulus becomes too
weak to be detected.
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In a descending series in an ascending when it becomes you know detected finally at this point
so you reverse the direction you continue the response in the person says yes now I detect it or if
you are coming from the other direction you do it till the person says no so you keep alternating
this direction.
494
Usually after 6 to 9 such kind of reversals in direction you are actually you know good to
estimate the threshold now the threshold here is divided as the average of all the stimulus
intensities that you presented at which the observers response change from yes to low or from
you - no – yes and these different points are called transition points I will show you how it is
done.
495
Say for example in this figure you can see that you can start from a high intensity to a point when
the observers response goes to not perceive then you again go one step further observer says
perceive you come back when the observer again say is not perceived and you do this you know
a particular number of times you must take the average of this eventually and that becomes your
threshold.
496
Now to sum up what did we talk about today we talked about the concept of sensation versus
perception what is sensation it is a part of what perception is what is perception it is a
constructive process through which we actually make use of whatever sensory input we are
getting from the world you also talked about how using psychophysics you can actually put
numbers to these subjective experiences you also talked about a variety of methods using you
know within psycho physics that are used to determine these thresholds of experience both
absolute thresholds and different thresholds thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
497
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
498
Course Title
Lecture-15
Signal Detection Theory
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello everyone welcome to the lecture series on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Varma
from IIT Kanpur.
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Today we are going to talk about signal detection theory as you know in the last lectures we have
been talking about sensation and perception. We have been talking about, how to measure
sensation in one of the earlier lectures I have told you about classical psycho physics and how it
has been used to measure elements of sensation we have talked about quite a few methods most
of which come under classical psychophysical theory in order to determine concepts like
absolute threshold different threshold etc.
We have seen that these processes basically help us identify when a person is feeling a particular
sensation and how that sensation can be quantified using some of the methods like the method of
adjustment or the method of constant stimuli etc. Today I will be talking to you about a particular
theory which kind of diverges its approach towards measuring sensation. This particular theory is
called signal detection theory.
We will see some of the merits and maybe you know how this theory is slightly different from
other class classical psychophysical methods, now we have been talking about the importance of
thresholds isn’t it? How did you know how did we if say for example we do not need to
determine threshold in the first place. Can we do with something else, can we do with the you
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know related concept which does not really merely you know depend on determining at what
point somebody perceives a particular you know physical stimulus according to the theory of
signal detection our perception in general Is controlled.
By evidence and decision processes, so any you know stimulus in the environment can be treated
off as an evidence if for example a particular ray of light falling on the retina is evidence of light
you know that is therein the external environment and you have to take a decision whether the
light is let us say bright enough for not or whether the light whether there is any light at all in the
first place, so signal detection theory basically you know assumes these processes as a sum of
both evidence which is you know the property of the stimulus and decision processes that are the
property of the perceiver. A signal or a stimulus creates
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Evidence that depends on the intensity of the signal and also the acuity of the observer say for
example I asked you to distinguish between two shapes partly this depends upon, how different
the two shapes are from each other if it is you know a small line and some very large lines next
to it also it depends on your ability to see the difference between the two stimulus, so that is
acuity of you acuity of the perceiver or the observer both of these factors interact to determine
whether you will give a yes response to the question that things are different or whether you have
detect something.
They could also be other factors which determine how you know you are going to respond to that
question say for example the willingness of an observer to say yes maybe if you are not very sure
may be if the decision is slightly you know valuable to make maybe you will not say yes, okay
maybe you will wait for completely more you know completely convincing case and more
evidence to say yes. These kinds of influences which determine whether you want to say yes or
not or your willingness to say yes are called response biases these response bias influences you
know also include the payoff for being accurate or the frequency of the signal and so many other
factors. We will talk about them as we move ahead.
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Look at this figure here you will see this is basically how you know a theoretical representation
of what signal detection really means, you can see that there are sensory systems here there is a
particular sensory module in the brain and essentially module in the brain kind of you know
evaluates the evidence values which is basically the intensity of stimulus and those kinds of
things. Then you will see that these evidence values feed on to a particular box which is the
decision module you know the brain has to decide.
Whether to say different or not different or whether to say detected or not detected and in there
you will see a modulating factor is the payoffs or the motivation or vigilance, how alert you were
if you were you know, when that signal was presented. What is the frequency of that signal does
it happen once in hundred times or does it happen let us say 60 times in 100 times okay. This
decision-making module of the brain, actually you know leaves on to the kind of responses that
you end up giving.
So this in nutshell is how signal detection theory is really you know approaches this whole aspect
of people detecting particular person particular sensations, let us take an example of the fact you
know of the willingness thing. Say for example imagine if your friend has setup a blind date for
you okay.
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Now you have to really tell him by within one hour or so whether you are interested in going on
that date or not, now you are thinking now what could be the cause of such a decision you know
the maximum cost for saying no to a blind date or saying, or saying yes to a blind date in that
sense could be let us say you will waste an evening, you do not like the person you were set up
with and you did not like their behavior and stuff, so maximum what will happen, you will waste
evening maybe you will say for example.
Not even like the food. These cause a slightly lesser. Isn’t it? and you know then the possible
benefits could be much higher say for example if you like the person if the you know if the two
of you strike a chord and you know an exciting evening happens, and many more happen in the
future so this kind of is cost versus benefit analysis of this decision okay, in such scenarios when
the costs are slightly lesser as compared to possible benefits people basically you know highly
favor a yes strategy.
So what they will do is that they will kind of you know evaluate what are the cost what are the
benefits, they will find that the benefits are slightly more than the cause they will actually go on
with the yes response more often than not. This decision basically, if you see now is based on the
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analysis of costs and benefits because you do not really have any information about the stimulus
you do not know about the girl it is a blind date you do not know what else to take into account
that is one of doing it.
However if you have a high-cost decision to make say for example if you have to say yes or no
to a marriage proposal that maybe one of your parents have brought to you, now if you still you
do not know you know any information about the girl you do not know you know what is what
does she look like what is the education other things that you want to consider, how do you it
then? People have been found to be very careful and very conservative in scenarios where the
possible benefits or you know where the incurred costs are much more than the possible benefits.
In terms of decision theory most of us there in these kind of scenarios are very conservative
decision makers when costs are higher relative to the benefits okay.
505
Now leaving aside this kind of a process let us talk about the sensory processes here. So the
sensory processes basically you know they transmit a particular, value to the decision making
modules, the decision processes if this value is considerably high, the decision is more likely to
yield a yes response because we have enough evidence to say yes okay, about any decision about
the fact that there is light in the room about the fact that there is you know a particular kind of
temperature in the room those kind of things. Obviously you evaluate the costs and benefits, if
this value given by the sensory processes to the decision making process is low the evidence is
less then basically what will happen is that you are more likely to yield a no response okay, once
again take after taking into account the costs and the benefits.
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Now what determines the quality of this signal you know what determines what kind of signal
that is coming in, signal detection theory has two assumptions, first is that it has used that there is
always noise present. You know there is always a disturbance that can be confused with signals
and is always present whenever a human being attempts to you know detect any kind of signal
and this and this the source of this noise could be anything, it could be environmental changes it
could be equipment changes maybe you are measuring you know temperature for example you
different kinds of thermometers there will be some degree of error you know. There is this
concept of 0 error in the physical measurement instruments. It could be spontaneous neural
activity, because here the measurement is not actually a external device, the measurement is you
yourself. Maybe you are not attentive enough at that point in time, maybe you are just slightly
tired and so somebody is speaking and you cannot really attend to it very you know attentively
say okay.
So in that sense it is very possible that somebody is telling you something and you kind of you
just mind your mind wandered somewhere and you missed the details of what was said. A lot of
time that might happen, when somebody is giving out the shopping list you kind of you know
slightly not concentrating and some of the important ingredients are left out and you know that
might lead to problems. There could be other sources of this kind of you know noise as well, say
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for example you know different kind of experimental manipulations can be done with a receiver.
Let us look at one of this kind of experimental manipulation.
Imagine if you are setting in a soundproof booth wearing headphones you know it is a
soundproof booth you are given headphones and you have been asked to decide whether you
heard a faint tone combined with white noise or you only heard white noise maybe it could be
just a machine generated tone like pa something like that and it is you know mixed with white
noise which is again system generated noise does not have a lot of meaning. A trial might begin
by presentation.
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of a flashlight that is to gain your attention, to get you ready then what you hear is a burst of
white noise which now may or may not contain the faint tone signal, now you have to decide
whether this white noise contain that signal or not. You would say yes, if you think a tone signal
was present you would say no if you think it was not.
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Now signal detection theory in these kind of scenarios assumes that any stimulus even noise
produces what is called a distribution of evidence. You know there will be distribution of
different points, so each the evidence on each trial will be just one point, but you will actually go
through many such trials. So there will be a distribution of all of these you know points, so
basically what will happen say for example also since evidence cannot be directly observed that
distribution for stimulus trials and noise trials are both they will be hypothetical.
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What you might have is that the evidence for trial for which only noise occurred will tend to be
small. There will be less evidence there, so that over many trials a hypothetical distribution with
a very small mean will be sufficient, so if you are trying to just draw a distribution of the noise
trials a very few trials had noise a very small mean and a very small distribution will be there. If
you think of trials where noise and signal that is the faint tone were both presented, you will
basically have a larger distribution with a greater mean. Again from the very many trials we are
still talking about that experiment.
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Now so you will have two distributions, one will be the noise distribution then the other will be
the signal plus noise distribution. Since these two distributions way anyways overlap somewhere
in the middle, some values of evidence will be slightly ambiguous. You know those are values
where you are not really sure about whether there was noise or whether there was only noise or
whether it was signal in the noise as well, here is what this distribution might look like.
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So you have a noise distribution you have signal plus noise distribution and you have a distance
between the means of these two distributions, this distance basically is called D prime which is
basically your sensitivity okay we will talk about this very shortly.
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So how do you decide you know whether there was noise present or not you need to set some
criterion that beyond this point I will say that yes the signal was present before this point I will
say no the signal is not present, so a criterion was therefore we set to determine whether you will
give a yes response or a no response. The position for this criterion is basically set up by what is
called the decision process if the constant benefits analysis kind of you know says favors a
liberal decision policy you know things like going on a blind date with somebody the criterion
will be set slightly further to the left and so that most of the responses will yield in yes response
most of the trials will lead in a yes response if it is a conservative decision for here, something
very important the criterion will move slightly towards the right and what you will do is you will
say more no responses okay it basically depends on the value of the decision.
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So here is how you really plot the criterion you can move the criterion slightly to the right to use
more no responses slightly you to the left to more yes responses. Okay this is this decision
criteria is called ß okay so it determines basically whether you will make a yes response or you
will make a no response. So if that is cleared we can slightly move further we can understand
that you know anyways any how this distribution turns up there will be some errors of judgment
you know there will be some values where you not really be clear if you detect the correct signal
for example this will be called a hit if say for example if incorrectly.
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Responded yes where there was no signal then that scenario will be called a scenario of false
alarm. So if you are following a very liberal decision-making side you are saying yes to
everything then what you what will happen is you will have a lot of hits yes, but you will have a
lot of false alarms as well because your tendency is to say yes to most responses. On the other
hand if you follow a conservative decision strategy then there will be low number of hits and it
number of false alarms.
So you will probably have very few false alarms but you will have a lot of misses as well
because you did not say yes when the signal was there because you following you want to be
really very very sure of the presence of the signal, now if you plot this you know if you plot a
function of hits as a function.
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Of false alarms and as criteria moves from conservative to liberal we will get a particular figure
this figure is basically known as the receiver operating characteristic or the ROC curve. In this
figure you can see and I will just show you in a moment that both hits and false alarms are in
frequent are actually infrequent.
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At the lower left of the curve you can see the figure here at the lower left side of the curve but
both hits and false alarms become more and more frequent, if you move towards the upper right
side of this particular curve okay. So this is basically something which tells you about the
decision-making process as well that whether you are following a conservative process or a
liberal process. The slope of this particular function will tell you two things if there is a flat slope
it will tell you that.
You have been following a liberal decision-making criterion if the slope is slightly steeper it will
be conservative criterion, that you have been you know having very few hits but very few false
alarms as well the slope of this curve basically such as the ROC function is determined by a
slope of the line that is drawn as a tangent to this curve and it will indirect either of the axis.
It might interact the x axis or the y axis. If it the curve is too steep it will probably you know
intersect with the y axis with the x axis, if it is slightly flatter it kind of you know intersect the y
axis now the distance, if you see this figure again.
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The distance from the diagonal to this curve.
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Tells us how far apart the noise and the signal plus noise distributions are. When these two
distributions are far apart they indicate either a more discerning will signal or a more acute
observer, so there could be two things is, Isn’t it? Either the signal is very clear so that you can
detect it all the time either you are very good at detecting that signal, so whether it you know
indicates a very desirable signal or whether it indicates a very acute observer the ROC curve
moves upward to the left.
Okay and away from the diagonal as shown by the heavy ROC function you can see this one
here you can see one of these figures is slightly higher dotted. It's slightly heavier line the one at
the top okay, when the signal is less detectable or say for example the observer is not very good
at detecting that and the distribution the distributions will be slightly closer together. So the ROC
curve will move slightly closer to the diagonals you can see here.
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That this will be slightly you know closer to the diagonal which is the lighter ROC function
which is C here. So the D prime basically is much smaller than the D prime in the earlier part
okay. So the ROC function basically tells us about both it tells us about the sensory processes
you know that is the distance between the signal plus noise and the noise and basically and the
noisy distribution it also tells us the criteria which you have been following. It also tells us about
the decision making process which is ß.
Okay now what does this you know signal detection method or what does this theory really have
in for us? Okay one of the major advantage of the signal detection methods over a classical
psychophysics psychophysical procedures like we had in the last lecture.
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Such as for example the method of limits is that this ability to measure and quantify both the
sensitivity of the observer and the responses, both can really be you know plotted and figured out
here I have not gone into great detail about those calculations because again you are just you
know doing this an introductory level you are not really going into much more detail but those of
you interested that I can actually look into them and maybe ask questions but this ability of really
talking about and quantifying.
Both the sensitivity and response bias is really be is really important. In many areas of Applied
Psychology say for example you know this ability to distinguish between these two processes
very important I can take an example of say for example you know if there is a you know if there
is a soldier at the border you know and he is basically reading taking readings from the radar and
you know whether a particular enemy is approaching or whether enemy is not approaching
basically is a costly decision.
If the enemy is approaching and you miss it you kind, you know outputting everybody else in
danger if it is not the enemy and you know shoot down somebody by mistake you still
committing a grave crime so that's kind of decision slightly expensive to make. Or so say for
example if you are a doctor and somebody comes and shows there you know x-ray report and
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you have to detect whether there is a cancerous tumor present or not it can again be very costly
decision.
If you go by a very conservative study and say yes there is tumor and you know there is a poor
patient who is come you are throwing him to a particular sort of buying very expensive
medicines etc. Which will not need it in the first place or if you actually follow a very
conservative strategy and you say no there is no tumor you are fine and the person kind of ends
up if you are not dying because the tumor was not diagnosed in time then also you are
committing a very grave mistake.
So in those kind of decisions you know in those kind of scenarios, signal detection kind of
methods are really very important and there have they have been extensively used as well. I will
take an example to elaborate on this here, say for example to determine how analgesics work
Clark and colleagues they conducted a number of experiments on pain analgesic, they wanted to
test whether how basically these analgesic like aspirin etc work.
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So they basically decided to use signal detection procedure instead of the classical psychophysics
methods and what they do was you know they are basically in these experiments they used
something called a colorimeter to evoke pain by means of thermal stimulation, so it was a
instrument that was applied on the skin, a kind of you know delivered heat in some sense and
that could you know either lead to pain or you know less pain or more pain something like that
initially Clark found that analgesics such as aspirin reduced the d-prime they reduce the
sensitivity of the observer which means the drug basically you know is really reducing or
lowering down the acuity of the sensory system with the outcome being that you know as the
ability of the observer to distinguish between painful and, non painful stimulus is lowered down.
It might this kind of thing might have its own benefits but then they went on to investigate
whether placebos or acupuncture etc.
Altered d-prime or whether placebos or acupuncture change the willingness of the participant to
report pain, in both these experiments Clark found that Placebos and acupuncture basically
elevated the subjects of decision criterion, so a stronger stimulation was needed for the subject to
say yes or for the subject to report pain detection response. Now this actually does not mean that
placebos and acupuncture etc. will not work but what they are doing is they are working with a
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slightly different method okay. We are basically changing the decision threshold okay. They are
not changing the sensitivity of the observer the sensitivity is still there but the decision threshold
is actually changed. Also drawing from earlier work done by Hardy and colleagues 1952.
It was found that using methods was found using methods of limits that suggestions if you tell
somebody that you know you are not feeling pain and stuff like that also alters absolute
threshold, so given the kind of work we saw just now a signal detection method used by Clark
and colleagues it is reasonable to suppose that suggestion basically what it did was it changed the
absolute threshold by altering the decision criterion of subject. So you are basically suggesting to
the participants that know you not feeling pain know you are not feeling pain until the pain
becomes unbearable for the participant to actually report pain okay. So the same could be true
for other kinds of occurrences as well say, for example if you have a naive observer somebody is
not being part of the experiment and you kind of you know start this experiment with this kind of
participant you see that the naive observers will have a very lower threshold initially saying yes I
felt pain, I felt pain something like that. Now this basically these kind of things could not have
been determined using classical psychophysical methods.
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You know you cannot know about decision criterion etc. using classical psychophysical methods
and this in itself is a major advantage a major advantage of signal detection type of methods, so
coming to the close trying to sum up we found out that signal detection.
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The measures are a departure from the classical psychophysical methods as they take into
account both the sensitivity of the observer and the evidence provided by the stimulus and also
the decision-making processes, so it kind of takes care of all of these three things and they are
better because they help us understand the decision-making process of the participant
experiencing and reporting these sensations, so this is basically you know the end of the series
about psychophysics in the next class onwards we start talking about issues related to perception
thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
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Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Lecture- 16
Physiology of Visual Perception
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the lecture series on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from
IIT Kanpur.
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Today we will be talking about the physiology of visual perception, now you might wonder in
the course on perception why am I limiting to visual perception, now visual perception but visual
perception per see is a the most important or probably you know it is better to say the most
investigated form of perception obviously you have all the senses you have you know the sight,
you have hearing, you have old fashion that is the smells you have respiratory that is taste you
have tactile that is related to touch.
All of these senses basically contribute to this perception but the most investigated area or
something that has been most studied in cognitive psychology is this area of a visual perception
okay. The eyes or so for example the most important information that probably we get out of our
surroundings is through the eyes and in that sense that kind of you know skewness in the amount
of research that is done in each of these areas.
Also traditionally in course in cognitive psychology visual perception is generally something

which is given slightly more important. I am not saying that I am following the convention here,
but we will begin with understanding more details about visual perception in the end and if time
permits we may we might talk about auditory perception and related processes as well, that said
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we will talk about the basic part or the first entrance into what visual perception as a process is
like. So how does this really begin? We will try and understand the physiology of visual
perception, function or say for example how do our eyes see what really helps our eyes see and
what are the very basic processes, I am not going to go into a lot of detail about each of these the
idea is just to be you a flavor of what are the constituent processes in visual perception okay.
So let us begin the beginning point or the initiating point of visual perception is basically the
registering of light in your eyes okay, so the precondition for the fact that you can see anything
for that matter is the presence of light. If there is light you see if there is no light you do not,
okay so it is kind of sort of a binary there. Now what is light, light is basically electromagnetic
radiation that you know can be physically described in terms of wavelengths there is this range
of wavelength which we are more sensitive to and that basically forms what is called visible light
for us, okay.
Humans can perceive only a very limited range of this wavelength of this electromagnetic
radiations and this very visible wavelength basically falls between 380 to 750 millimeters,
nanometers sorry.
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Here you can see this range of visible light, so there is this electromagnetic radiation and right
from 380 nanometers to 750 nanometers is what we can actually see, so any electromagnetic
radiation or the electromagnetic radiation in this wavelength is what constitutes our you know
visible spectrum.
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Now how does the process of vision really begin where does this you know how does light
contribute to us seeing, so vision basically or our sensation of anything in this world through the
eyes start when light passes through this protective covering of the eye the top part of the eye
which is the cornea which is a clear dome that protects the eye. We will talk about that I can
actually show you the figure and come back here this is what eye actually looks like.
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You can see there are these different parts here you can see that there is a pupil there is cornea,
there is the part called iris there is the posterior chamber wherein the lens is situated and then
there is this auxiliary body which has those muscles the eye is filled with some substance which
is called the vitreous humor at the back you can see there is things like the retina there is the
phobia and there is an exit the nerve which is called the optic nerve.
So again I am just taking names of these where different areas, we will talk about them in much
more detail as we go ahead. Now what is so you can see what is the cornea, cornea is basically a
clear dome that is protecting the eye something that is the outer layer of the eye then through this
cornea the light passes through the pupil, pupil is basically the opening in the center of the iris
you can again refer to the figure here you can see that there is this pupil which is the opening you
know in that thing called the iris you can see that already in the figure this one.
So light kind of it starts through the cornea passes through the pupil which is basically the
opening in the center of the iris and it continues through this crystalline lens which you saw and
the vitreous humor which is a gel-like substance which is filled in the eye and then it reaches at
the back.
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So you see the eye starts at the cornea goes through the pupil passes through the lens passes this
entire gel like vitreous humor and goes at the back, at the back is where the real processing of the
light starts. So the light then focuses on what is called the retina you might again refer to the
figure at the back there is this retina, retina is basically where the electromagnetic energy.
That is light is transuded that is converted into neural electrochemical impulses, if you are
interested in what transduction is, any signal from the external world you might remember in the
psycho physics class we have talked about it any signal from the external world any sensation
needs to be converted into a signal that can be understood by the brain. So the electromagnetic
radiation which is light needs to be converted into neural impulses so that the eyes or the brain
more importantly can make sense of it.
So the light passes through the cornea goes through the pupil passes the lens and the vitreous
humor goes and falls back at the retina, at the retina is where this is converted into electrical
impulses that is where the brain starts making sense of this. The vision is most acute at the fovea
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of the fovea is a very small thin region of the retina which is basically as the size of a pin okay,
just like the size of the head of the pin okay.
The retina basically contains layers of neuronal tissue this neuronal tissue basically includes
different kinds of cells, cells like the ganglion cells the amacrine cells horizontal size bipolar
cells and then also photoreceptor cells called the rods and the cones we will.
So here you can see a more clear picture of the cornea the iris you see the pupil is there, there is a
retina at the back and you see that bulge just like a pin the head of the pin that is what the fovea
is.
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And here there is this layering of these different kind of cells, so the first layer of the neuronal
tissue at the retina is closest to the front outward facing surface of the eye. So the first layer is the
layer which you know the light falls first so outward facing surface of the eye is the first layer is
basically the layer of what is called the ganglion cells okay, the axons of these ganglion cells if
you remember the chapter on perception the axons are actually the part which kind of protrude
from the cell body the axons of these cells constitute combined together to form what is called
the optic nerve.
So this is the outer facing surface of the cell the ganglion cells which form the optic nerve. I will
show the figure to you now so you can see that see there are these ganglion cells in the layer
number three.
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The absence of which are forming what is called the optic nerve okay, coming back in the second
layer consists of three kinds of inter neuron cells these cells are the amacrine and the horizontal
cells and the bipolar cells. The amacrine cells basically make single lateral connections to
adjacent areas of the retina in the middle layer of the cells. The bipolar cells make dual
connections they make connections forward and outward to the ganglion cells as well as
backward and inward to the third layer of these retinal cells.
So we see these connections now you can see the bipolar cells being connected to the inward
rods and cones and also to the ganglion cells. So they are basically connected to both inside and
the outside part.
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The third layer is basically the layer which consists of what are called photoreceptors as you can
guess from the name these are the cells which basically convert light energy into electrical
energy that is transmitted by the neurons to the brains, so this is very exactly this process of
transduction is happening. There are two kinds of photoreceptor cells rods and cones each eye
consists about 120 million rods and around 8 million cones both of these cells have their own
specialties I will talk about them in just a moment.
Now rods and cones simply do not only differ in shape but they also differ in their compositions
what they are made of, their locations and how they respond to light. Before go further it might
be helpful to see this cells again so you see that there are three layers the first layer or actually
the third the layer number three is basically your ganglion cells the layer number two is your
bipolar cells connected both inwards and outwards and the layer number one is basically your
photoreceptors you can see the rods and cones in different shapes.
Okay, so you can see how light is really moving light is energy is entering the eye and it is
figuring photochemical reactions in rods and cones at the back of the retina, chemical reaction to
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in turn activates the bipolar cells from the bipolar cells information is going to the ganglion and
from there it is going to your optic nerve and via the optic nerve it actually transmits to the brain.
Now what are these rods and cones doing, these rods and cones basically have substances which
are called photo pigments, photo pigments are chemical substances that react to light and
transform physical electromagnetic energy which is light into an electrochemical neural impulse
that can be understood by the brain. Now electrical chemical neural impulse we have talked
about this in the physiology part where we were talking about neurons action potentials and
those kinds of things.
The rods are long and thin photoreceptors more highly concentrated in the periphery of the retina
than in the foveal region, so foveal you will find they are more concentrated in the outside
regions of the retina and they are basically responsible for night vision and are sensitive to light
darkness. So rods are basically which are more useful when you know when there is less light in
night kind of scenarios because they are basically reacting in binary to whether there is light or
whether there is darkness or absence of light.
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The coals are very short they are slightly thicker photoreceptors and they allow for the
perception of colors okay, they are highly concentrated in the foveal region than in the periphery
because this is where the light is focused more this is where the acuity of understanding of a
releasing shapes and releasing colors is best, so the rods are more sensitive to the black and white
the colors are more sensitive to different and the cones are more sensitive to different kinds of
colors.
Here you can see the difference basically in rods and cones you see they are not only structurally
different and they are also functionally different as we discussed already.
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Now the rods cones and the photo pigments could actually not do their job if they were not really
connected somehow to the brain. So you have to talk about how all of this really connects to the
brain as well. So the neutral chemical messages that are generated in this section of the eye
produced by the rods and the cones travel via these bipolar cells to the ganglion cells, the axons
of the ganglion cells in the eyes collectively form what is called the optic nerve for that particular
eye, you can see that in the figure that we talked we saw earlier. So this is how this combination
is actually happening.
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The optic nerve basically of the two eyes joined at the base of the brain to form something called
the optic chiasm, the optic chiasm basically or at this point what happens is that the ganglion
cells from the inward of the nasal part of the retina cross through the optic chiasm and extend to
the opposite hemisphere of the brain. So for example I can show you show this to you through
this figure you can see this figure here.
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You will see that there is an inward or nasal part and there is an outward which is basically the
retinal part okay, so the inward part basically is where this cross over is happening and so input
from one eye is going to another hemisphere input from the say for example input from the left
eye is going to the right hemisphere, input from the right eye is going to the left hemisphere, so
this cross over point is called the optic chiasm.
Just going back so at this point at the optic eyes will the ganglion cells from the invert or the
nasal part of the retina cross over through the optic chiasm an extend to the opposite hemispheres
of the brain the ganglion cells from the outward or the temporal area so the inward area is called
the nasal area the outward area is called the temporal area which is actually near the temples the
temporal area of the retina goes to the hemisphere on the same side of the brain so this is how
this crossover happens.
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The lens of each eye basically inverts the image, so you might have done elementary physics in
your class sixth or seventh you might have known that a particular lens kind of forms an inverted
image of the world as it projects this image and the same happens with the lens of the eyes so it
projects an inverted image to the retina, after being routed through the optic chiasm about 90%
of the ganglion cells then go to what is called the LGL or the lateral geniculate nucleus this is a
set of nuclei in the thalamus okay.
So thalamus is the basic region of the brain where in this is going to. From the thalamus what
happens is that the neurons carry information to the primary visual cortex which is the first area
in the occipital cortex that kind of receives this information the primary visual cortex in the
occipital lobe of the brain.
And this occipital cortex basically is where the detail processing of this information coming from
these from the retina starts to happen okay, so this visual cortex or your occipital lobe it contains
several processing areas each of these areas really carryout you know different kinds of analysis
on the incoming visual information okay. And these areas can differ in to how they process the
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intensity of light, how they process the quality, how they process the color, the depth
information, the location of something the kind of pattern there is the form that you see.
Visual perception is a really complex activity I can take an example I can say that if I am looking
towards you I am actually looking at multiple levels of information I am looking at colors and
looking at contours that are shapes and looking at whether it is a 2dimensional or 3 dimensional
image. So I am looking at depth as well and making sense of how far you are from me that is
distance so I am doing and I am also say for example processing whether you are moving or not
is not it.
So even though visual perception you know typically might seem rather simple, but there are so
many processes happening at the same time with anything you are looking at. So if you look out
and you are kind of able to figure out that you know there is car moving on the road you are
actually doing a lot of these analysis over there you know you have the basic shape of the car
you have the colors you have the information that is just moving you have you might get to know
that you know what kind of car it is in kind of doing that kind of analysis as well, so doing these
multiple levels of analysis on whatever visual information is coming to your eyes via light.
Let us have a look at this figure this is how you know this is a really a you know arranged so you
have a binocular field where in both eyes are getting the input but you also have the right visual
field and the left visual field okay, so right visual field is predominantly basically what the right
eye is looking at left visual field is predominantly is what the left eye is are looking at you can
see here in this figure that part of the information from each of the visual field goes directly to
the contralateral hemisphere, contralateral is basically the other side of optic chiasm.
You can see in this figure the information in the right visual field goes first to the left visual
cortex the information the left visual field goes first to the right visual cortex. I am saying first
because generally these contralateral connections of these ganglion cells are supposed to be are
found to be faster than the ipsilateral basically the same site connections. So this kind of also
leads to really interesting or important effects we will talk about them in due course when you
are actually talking about more things about visual perception.
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For reference here is the figure which presents what is called the visual cortices you can see that
there is this lateral geniculate nucleus which is connected to the brain you can see light is
entering through the eyes it is kind of you know through the optic nerve reaching this area called
a lateral geniculate nucleus that is what your thalamus is about and from there the information is
being related to what is called the occipital lobe which is the lobe which has to do with vision
and you can see these so many areas here okay.
Each of these areas are referred to as V1 to V8 you can see and you can see what these what the
specializations of each of these areas are. Say for example I am just reading out for you areas
from V1 basically is called the striatecortex it catalogues whatever input is coming in area of, V2
is you know more responsible for relaying the signal to higher association areas, V3 basically
process forms V 8 processes motions so these are both areas are you know in the same place then
you have areas like V5 V6 V7 V8 those kind of things.
Basically so this is how you know the processing of information starting from light till coming to
the brain really happens. This is basically all about the physiology that we will be learning in this
particular lecture we will go on to how these different areas in the occipital lobes perform visual
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processing in the coming lectures we will talk about form perception, depth perception,
constancies those many different things and how basically you make sense of a particular visual
stimulus all of that in the coming lectures on perception thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
548
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

©copyright reserved
549
Course Title
Lecture-17
Representation in Perception
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the basic lecture series on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma
from IIT Kanpur.
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Today we will be talking on the topic which is slightly philosophical slightly actually you know
it should help you think about perception in slightly broad way okay we are going to talk about
the concept of representation in perception. Now I want you to think of perception and I want
you to think of what really perception means if you actually put some thought to this.
What does really perceptional what is perception really involve. Now perception basically is
looking you know is representing the information that is in the outside world to you know your
mind isn’t it cognitive psychology is all about mind what we trying to do is to represent
everything that his external to us to an internal world which is your mind space. How do we do it
we do it with the help of various senses.
Be it vison, be it audition be it through your nose which is olfaction, be it through your taste buds
which is gestatory or through your skin which is tactile information. What is it that you are
actually and basically doing in perception what you doing is you are representing the world
outside to the world inside oaky that is a just very quick concept about what representation is.
Now representation in itself has a few.
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You know bit, a few bit thorny issues, they have really been you know investigated or talked
about later or say more deeply in philosophy they have also concerned cognitive scientist and
psychologist and people who study visual perception or auditory perception any kind of
perception for that matter. We will try in today’s lecture to really you know going to and feel
have a feel of this problem.
And maybe this will help you understand what ever is going to come later in the topic of
perception it is kind of trying to you know create base line for you to understand what perception
is all about. Now representation is basically can also be said to the currency of cognition.
You mind cannot work about work on external information unless it is represented in a language
that the mind understands what is the representation what could be the first step of this
representation we have been talking about this sense sometime now starting from psychophysics
till the physiology class that this basic conversion process is what is called transduction isn’t it
not it. What this transduction actually do, how do you really make sense of information that is
outside? You know it is like imagining somebody who goes to a foreign country and you just
carrying the currency of his home country.
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Say for example you know travel to Europe but you only have rupees you know and you want to
spend those rupees to buy goods but will those rupees may accepted will people you know let
you accept use rupees to buy you know whatever eatables or place to stay or whatever. So this is
basically what the problem of representation is about. You need to convert the currency that is of
the external world to the currency that is of the internal mind space and this process of
conversion of this currencies is what you know an important so this is basically what we have to
talk about.
So an important concept of all cognition or more precisely this whole point of input to the
functional architecture of the mind is representation. To try and define it technically a mental
representation is anything that allows us to think to visualize and to make judgments concerning
these physical objects or scenes in their absence. See for example in this you know at this
moment while giving this lecture I want to think about my home okay, I want to think about let
us say my study desk in my drawing room, how can I do it at this moment I do not have them
right in front of me so I cannot really see them.
But I do have what is called a representation of that in my head. I have seen that once I have
stored it in my memory but how to I store something in my memory. So it needs to be converted
to a language to a file kind you know if for example you want to follow the computer metaphor
the file needs to converted to a type that my brain can store that is the problem of representation.
So it is really important to, it is also important to refer to the function of this mental
representation why do we create these mental representations? As I said if I have to talk about
my drawing room and my study table I have to have you know, I have to I am using that
representation for something that mental representation is being used for me by me to talk about
that, so the concept of this mental representation and why is this mental representation needed is
also something which we need to understand.
So one of the very basic concept is say for example to recognize you know you have to have a
mental representation of something that is in the external world to be able to recognize it what
does recognition mean, recognition basically includes all the three processors namely
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identification you to know what this is, categorization you know what category this particular
object belongs to and you also need to be able discriminate a particular stimulus from other kind
of stimulus.
Say if I show you, you know a mobile phone here you need to know that it is a mobile phone you
should identify you need to know it that it is you know a particular kind of communication
device and you need to distinguish it from let us say if there is a Tiffin box next to me. All of
these processes combined to get a recognition and they basically you know rely if to solve this
particular problem of recognition.
One needs to principally rely on the encoding of spatial information which is derived through
perceptual experiences so you need to know what color or shape those kind of things in a special
frequency in different kinds of things and how do you get those information you get those
information from perceptual experience, processing that information using your eyes and may be
you are holding it using tactile senses. Recognition can only be successful if a mental
representation.
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Can be matched with the current contents of the perception. Suppose I have novel object in mind.
You have never seen something like that you have no name for it whether you will be able to
recognize it or not, you do not have matching representation in your head so you will not be able
to you know recognize this novel object. So recognition is only possible if you already have
some perceptual experience of whatever is outside. Obviously we will talk about points when,
how people deal with novel objects and later in time but for now if you really need to recognize
something you need to have had some experience in it earlier. Now one of the requirements of
this process is that this should be flexible.
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If you found a mental representation of a visual stimulus, your mental representation should be
slightly flexible. I will tell you why flexible? A flexible mental representation of this objects and
scenes must be in sensitive to variations in illuminations, variations in viewing conditions and so
many other factors. Say for example I am understanding at particular point here there are you
know few lights falling on me if I kind of move to one step left or if I move to one step right the
amount of light and the angles of the lights falling on me really change and you start seeing me
differently I don’t think so. Isn’t it? So you have a mental representation of me right here which
is invariant to the changes in the light. If I kind of you know start facing on the right side or I
start facing on the left side then also my perception which you have will not really change. So
you have a representation that is stable enough and that is immune to these kinds of changes
which are happening. Now this is slightly sophisticated problem you know if you really give it
enough thought. So this is something which has intrigued people who will studying perception
investigating perception for a long time. People have thought of various ways of how to solve
this people have thought of various ways how the brain solves it, how the mind really solves it.
We will discuss some of this now so the thing which I was talking about
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So you know these example you have a canonical representation which is a typical
representation, the representation of things which you normally see. So for example this is the
posture the monkey that you are already seeing, you don’t really see monkeys or any other
animals directly from you know from the top. Isn’t it? You see it from the side you see it from
front generally because we are not flying beings you know for a bird may be the one which is
non canonical to us is the more representation. Isn’t it? Look at the bicycle here again.
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Again they had two different representation here one is the typical part and one is the non typical
part but we know in both cases that these are bicycles. How do we know that we have
representation or the mental representation of the bicycle you have helps us understand that the
figure on the right is also a bicycle and the figure on the left is bicycle, more examples.
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You can see that there are these three, these figures and the representation are kind of changing
the light and the kind of image they falling on our retina is changing but we still have a good
sense of what each of these objects are. So this is basically the problem of representation that I
am actually referring to. Again now you can see the cup, you know we have different shapes and
sizes we kind of you know still have the notion that this is a cup. Why are we able to do that?
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Now such kind of flexibility you know the kind of flexibility we just saw can we theoretically
achieved either by transformation of representation to match the contents of perceptual encoding.
So what do I mean by this I said that you might have a particular prototype of what an object
looks like and any variations you know encounter in the external world say for example you have
a particular shape like this one here or let us say we have a representation which matches one
aspect of the cycle may be one to left is what you already have in the your head. But what you
are seeing outside is the one to the right, how do you do it. So what you might doing is, you
might be adjusting incoming you know stimulus information to match what you already have.
So you matching this information of the cycle on the right side to the one which you have
already have in your head which is the one on the left side. They kind of rotating it some sense
you transforming it in some sense, so that it matches; if this will match the recognition will be
successful. If this does not match the recognition will be not successful.
So this is what we are taking about. The other way this could happen is that the transformation of
perceptual encoding can be you know done in some way to match this representation okay. So
the first part was basically transforming the perpetual encoding the second part actually which I
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said earlier was the transformation of the representation to match the contents of the perceptual
encoding.
So either you can change the representation that you have in your head, now we go back to same
example we have two representation possible one is the left one is in your head and the right one
is outside there are only two ways this can happen either you change the one in your head to
match one which is outside or you change what is incoming from outside to match what is
already present. Only two ways this could actually match you change the right one to match the
left one or you change the left one to match the right one. Irrespective of what is inside and what
is outside okay.
So this is what this problem.
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And this is what you know needs to be done in order to really have a stable representation.
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Now which of the two transformation is more prominent in human recognition one might ask
one might ask what are we actually doing? There are two ways understood but what are we
actually doing are we transforming the representations in the head or are we transforming the
perceptual encoding to already match a stable representation in the head. Two things are possible
let us see what can be done.
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Now empirical philosophers like John Locke you might heard of him in the history lectures John
Locke basically try to solve the problem of representation by proposing that we have perceptions
composing of simple ideas like something is Yellow it is hot it is sweet or complex ideas which
is a combination of something that is both the yellow hot and sweet, this kind of way basically
can lead us to assume that all knowledge is based on experience and complex entities or objects
are essentially combination of qualities derived through experience.
So you might have a sense of something that is yellow you might have sense of something that is
hot you might have a sense or something that is sweet and say for example something that is hot
and yellow and sweet at the same time you might just combine these different qualities in your
head.
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Another possible way is basically you know offered by David Marr is been working as basically
given particular theory of perception, we will talk about his theory of perception in more detail in
a later lecture but for now I can just tell you that in David Marr’s view the final 3D view or 3D
representation of an object now what Marr said is that because the retina you know is two
dimensional whatever information that we are actually getting from the outside world is
basically mapped on a two dimensional plane. But we know that the world is not two
dimensional it is three dimensional.
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It is some kind of transformation must be done on this two dimensional information to get this
sense of three dimensions. Isn’t it? People are not really flat as posters. Isn’t it? People have all
the three dimensions but the image that is found in the retina is only two dimensional. So some
transformation might be needed there. So David Marr actually came up with the solution he said
that what we actually get is something which is called 2.5 dimensional sketch that is specifies
over the two dimensional information that you get information about orientation and depth.
So that is why it acts 0.5D two dimensional information you already get you add depth and
orientation, you get a 2.5 dimensional information and then that 0.5 part is the varying part that is
the processing that happens on this 2.5D thing to actually overall give you a 3 dimensional
representation. So I am just repeating this so in Marr’s view the final 3D representation of a
particular object is basically a product of what is called a 2.5 dimensional sketch that only
specified depth distance and orientation changes which are directly visible to any observer. You
can take this example say for example you know you are going in a train you saw a you saw a
particular cow that is grazing in the field and the train is moving in a particular way.
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As and when you are going further from the cow you are finding that the cow is getting smaller
but you still know that it is a cow, isn’t’ it? As an when you are getting closer to the cow the cow
is getting bigger so you are using that information as well. So David Marr’s actually, we will be
discussing this in much more detail when you are actually talking about David Marr much more
detail in the coming lectures but this is one of the solutions to this metal representations problem
that David Merr had offered.
So you the 2.5D sketch from a combination of even more basic depth orientation whatever 2D
information you getting plus you add visual queue such as the one what mentioned which is
called motion by lack kinetic depth queue something is coming closer it is something that is
getting bigger it is larger those kind of things, if something is moving intermittently then it is
moving if something is blinking you might think that it is moving.
You know something like say for example blinking lights appear to be moving which is basically
the phenomenon that is used in LED lights. So eventfully it is 2.5 d sketch is used using these
different kinds of sources of information to form what it is called a complete 3 dimensional
representation of an object okay. So this is one solution which David Marr had offered. Now
there could be these two kinds of phase so how do we really adjust.
You know how do, we really come up with something more conclusive to say about
representation. If we begin with assumption.
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That the content of the representation is determined by the quality of sensory experience and
that perception is contained to lie with certain invariant bound say for example you cannot
perceive anything that is not being communicated through your senses. Isn’t it? So those sensory
experiences can give you degrees of freedom within which your entire perpetual phenomena will
take place.
Then these boundaries may be reflected by the properties of the representation and consequently
effective recognition performance. Say for example if your sensory experience gives you only
particular levels of information that particular levels of information gained by a sensory
experience is also the limits of how much you can transform your metal representation.
Okay moving slightly further there could be two things happening with this here. If no
processing of sensory experiences occurring you know, not really transforming the sensory
experience that is staying as it is then what is happening is that representation is tied down to the
sensory properties of the retinal image or optical array again a concept is given by Gibson, 1923
we will talk about that in some point and that brought about the representation so whatever
information this light forming through your retina.
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to your retina to your you know lateral genital nucleus to the bit areas is coming that is what your
transformation or that is what your mental representation can actually vary up to or there is
another possibility the other possibility is that perception may be an analytical.
Process okay varying we have basically symbolic descriptions of what we are actually seeing and
this symbolic descriptions are actually adjusting to whatever you know the information coming
from outside, this ability generalize.
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Or to overcome variations in appearance as I said if I move to the left or if I move to right or if I

move facing the right or the left and this in variation in appearance during identification and
recognition then depends to the on the extent of processing that occurs during perception and the
kind of in formations extracted, so while you just you know interacting with the stimulus for the
first time you might be getting out information in terms of whether you know the objectives
further or closer or whatever the texture of the object is.
Those kinds of things, there is also a possibility that during recognition a stored representation is
adjusted to form a match with the current stimulus, so what you do is you changing the stimulus
in some sense you are changing a mental representation in some sense to match the incoming
sensory information. I will tell you how that happens. Say for example this figure.
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Here we come back to that example you have representation which is to the left and you have
you know the incoming stimulus which is to the right this is the extend of information that your
visual system is getting you. What will you do to match this? You can basically you know take
this representation of the cycle which you have in your head that one on the left and you will
kind of try and rotate it mentally and there are lot of experiments that have shown that if you will
do actually rotate representations of objects. So you rotate it and you kind of get a view which is
matching the view that is being presented outside and this matching this transformation on this
mental representation will help you match these two representations and achieve successful
recognition. There are again these two things these two possibilities there, so what can be a
possible solution how do we adjust these two variable views a possible solution could be.
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that neither our retinal images always form the basis of the mental represent. So may be our
mental representation are not entirely bound by these retinal images. Nor perception is always
analytical so may be the perception is not always analytical may be it is also bound in some
sense by the incoming sensory information. So then there is a possibility of what is called a
middle path what is a middle path?
The middle path is that mental encoding need not to be elaborated to the extent that the true
nature of 3D objects are faithfully represented. So it does not need to give you all the details
about the objects that should not really be stored because then it will be slightly inflexible and
that the limitations of perception may be be reflected in the nature of spatial encoding. So even
your mental representation cannot be completely you know independent of whatever your
sensory experiences.
So this will be the middle path, so you do not really you know from the sensory experience part
over specify and from the mental representation part you cannot go independent of what the
sensory experiences. So you kind of make an adjustment or compromise between the two levels
that was about representation and now you will basically see the kind of discussion we have had
today is going to be the base of many theories of object recognition many theories of how visual
perception takes place and then we will actually talk about this question in much more detail. I
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talk to you about this particular question, so that this kind of primes you to what is going to come
next.
This should basically be the base line in order to understand theories of perception like the once
given by Gibson and David Marr and the Gestalt psychologist and also to understand theories of
object recognition like the template matching theory and the cognition by components model
which all we will be talking about in a later lectures.
So to summarize today’s debate we talked about what the notion of representation is in cognition
and in basically perception in more specific sense. We talked about how these representations
can be built, whether they are built using sensory processes or whether they are built through
analytical processes where our brain is working on those sensory inputs and it is trying in
transforming them.
We discussed basically that either of the approaches you know an extreme you know of either
the two processes might not be the best way out and so a compromise might be there and there
should be a middle path where in you kind of under specify the sensory experience part and you
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kind of restrict the you know sense of how analytical the perceptual process would be with
respect to whatever visual input you are getting in. We will talk about this in much more detail in
the coming lectures this was all about representation and perception. Thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
574
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia
@copyright reserved
575
Course Title
Lecture – 18
Approaches to Visual Perception - I
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the course-series on basic cognitive processes I am.
Dr. Ark Verma from IIT Kanpur, today we will be talking about we will begin to talk about
various approaches to visual perception in particular.
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I will talk about JJ Gibson’s approach to perception but before we begin with that, let us talk
about why do we need to discuss these approaches to perception in the first place? The key
question in perception basically is what is perception really meant for, why do we need to
perceive the world? And what you know benefit does it give us and what is our perspective you
know towards perception as a cognitive function.
The question one might ask is what is the goal of perception? Is is it for action or is it for
recognition? I can actually illustrate the difference between action and recognition by just
throwing a ball at you and you probably first take evasive action, you will try and you know save
yourself from being hit by the ball, then really recognizing that what was this object that I threw
towards you.
This kind of tells us that you know we looked at the world we are interacting with this world or
we are perceiving this world more importantly to interact with this, not really merely just to get a
you know visual description of the environment available, that is also useful and that is also
something which perception is there for but there is this debate between what is the actual use of
perception? Is it for interacting with this world or is it for just having a visual description of this
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world okay. We are talking about visual perception more specifically but such a question can
also be asked for other modalities of perception like auditory perception, tactile perception and
other kinds of perception.
There is always there is already evidence for the fact that perception for action and perception for
recognition are actually different processes and they basically involve different regions of the
brain, this was the research done by Milner and Goodale in around 1998 and a lot of papers and a
lot of experiments after that have actually confirmed this idea. So if you have this in background
you know.
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And if you really try and look at the last lecture in this series, we were talking about presentation
and what is a representation meant for and why do we construct representations basically, how
do we construct representations? Then you will come to a actual difference between you know
the way perception can be constructed, say for example whether perception depends on bottom-
up processing that is basically the flow of information through the perception system starts from
the bottom of sensory receptors and works upwards until an internal representation of the
objective is formed or the flow of information through the perceptual system starts from pre-
existing knowledge image. You know like your memory stored in the brain and then it moves
downwards towards evaluating whatever sensory inputs you are getting.
So these were the two rules we discussed yesterday about how mental representations are
constructed and this is in that sense actually you know one of the critical questions in how
perception can be looked at.
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We will talk about one of these very important theories of perception put forward by JJ Gibson
and the theory of perception is called the ecological approach. We will talk about why ecological
approach in a short while but let us say suppose that the visual perception is primarily based on
bottom-up processing of information okay, so whatever mental representations of this world you
are going to construct will be basically built out of whatever sensory experience you are getting.
J.J. Gibson actually believed that this is how we perceive this internal world that is external
world and he said something to the order of, when the senses are concerned are concerned as a
perceptual system all the theories of perception become at one stroke necessary, we do not really
need to specify the in analytic processes.
It is no longer a question of how the mind operates on the deliveries of the sense or how past
experience can organize this data or even how the brain can process the inputs of the nerves but
simply how is information picked up from this external world via these senses. So JJ Gibson
basically believes that the mental representations that we construct in perception are entirely
made out of the sensory experience that is delivered by each of our senses. We are talking more
specifically in the sense about visual perception. The Gibsonian approach concentrates on the
information present in the visual environment.
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Rather than how the brain or the mind operates upon it, an important component of Gibson's
approach is the link between perception and action he believed that action rather than the
formation of internal description of this environment should be seen as the end point of
perception.
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Gibson also conceptualized the link between perception and action by suggesting that perception
is direct, in that the information present in the light is enough it's sufficient to allow a person to
move through and interactive environment, so it is, it does not really need any kinds of
intermediary processes or transformations to happen, it's just that the light that actually falls your
retina is sufficient to give you enough information to do both get the description of the world and
to be able to interact with it. He thought that perception could never be fully explored through
laboratory experiments and one of the reasons was that if you see a picture like this.
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It is still at the end of the day a picture it does not carry all the information that if you have kept
the real object would carry okay. So he kind of you know emphasized on this difference and he
said further that you know.
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And because of this importance that he gave to the real world and you know because of the
emphasis he placed on conducting real experiments his approach was called the ecological
approach, he referred to theories that are based on the artificial experiments employing these
two-dimensional shapes as theories in the air while he referred to his own theory as the ground
because he was actually conducting experiments in the real scenario in interacting with real
objects and looking at real scenes etc.
As it emphasized the role played by the real and textured surface of the ground in providing the
information about the distance that is one of the reasons why his theory was called the ground
theory. The most important concept in the Gibson approach to perception is this concept of the
optic array.
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The optic array basically is the structure that is imposed on the light reflected by the textured
surfaces in the world around us that is basically what this optic array contains of. The basic
structure of the optic array basically is the light reflected from the surfaces in the environment
and that light converging at a point in space that is occupied by the observer. So imagine myself
sitting in this room and I am actually you know there is a lot of light in this room, the light is
reflecting from the screens from the cameras from these walls, so all of this light converging you
know towards my eyes is basically what the ambient optic array.
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is about. You can see this figure this kind of demonstrates an observer sitting in a particular room
and light reflecting from various surfaces in the room and then converging on the point in space
where this observer’s eyes are located.
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But the observer is really static, you know we are not really always sitting we are actually
moving we are moving our head, we moving our eyes, so this is also something that gives him an
account of and he said that because of these sources of motion the position of the head with
respect to the eyes always altered and the optic array also changes accordingly.
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So here is the demonstration of the fact that say for example, if this you know individual is now
standing or say for example if this individual is walking in the room the structure of the ambient
optic array would change accordingly.
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Now the primary structure of this optic array what is this primary structure of the optic array is
basically a series of angles that are formed by the light reflecting from various surfaces in the
environment towards your eyes. Say for example an angle may be formed between the light that
is reflected from the near edge of a table, or from the far edge or from the, you know the top of
the wall or from bottom of the wall different you know ways. In addition to this primary
structure of the optic array keeps maintain there were additional higher-order features that could
also provide information unambiguous information basically regarding the nature of the
environment.
So all of these different structures also tell you and give you rich information about the
environment in which you are moving around, he referred to these higher-order features as
invariance things that do not really change because those could be things that are static and he
believed that an observer could perceive the surrounding world by an actively sampling this optic
array in order to detect invariant information, so if you are actually you know at a place in the
you know at a place in the room you would get particular information about the surroundings
about the objects in the room from examining, these invariance features as well.
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An example of an invariant feature was explored by Sedgwick in 1973 and this invading feature
was a horizontal racial relation. What is horizontal racial relation? Horizontal racial relation
basically it specifies that the ratio of how much of an object is above the horizon to how much of
an object is below the horizon is always constant as the object either travels towards or away
from the object, suppose you know I am standing at this end of the room there is somebody
standing at the far end and the person is moving towards me or the person is moving away from
me. This ratio of how much of this person is above the horizon versus how much of this process
below the horizon is going to be constant.
This form of invariant information allows us to judge the relative heights of different objects and
people regardless of how far away from us they are. This proportion of the object above the
horizon increases with the overall height of the object, let us see a picture will explain you this.
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So here you can see people of same height and you know as they are actually from the at
different distances from us, so in the first figure, is near us then and the second figure one meters
away from us, and the third it is ten meters away from us and the fourth one is around 20 meters
away from us. You see that this relationship is changing but the ratio is constant.
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Here you can see people of different heights at the same distance and you can again see that this
is a horizontal ratio relation is constant.
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Now another important source of invariant information in Gibson's theory is the texture gradient.
What is the texture gradient? There are three forms of texture gradient relating to density
perspective and compression of these texture elements, texture is supposed to be the exact nature
of you know say for example of different surfaces, how does one surface you know differ from
another?
See for example in a carpet the elements are caused by individual piece of the material you know
the threads with which the carpet is made up of on a road these the texture is basically formed by
these small stones, that you know are combined to make up that surface. So that is basically what
you know surface is about and that is the idea of what texture means here you can.
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Say for example you can see a you know in the bottom you can see a pebbles on the beach in the
middle, you can see probably a tarred road, in the top you can see how a carpet is made or maybe
a shawl or something like that.
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In making use of these texture gradients we assume that the texture of the surface is uniform, so
you make this assumption that the entire surface will have the same kind of texture and then you
use this information to make judgments about what you know may be you know judge about
different things from the surface. Let us take an example the road surface of the road consists of
stones similar in size throughout its length, and therefore any change in the apparent nature of
the texture provides us with information about regarding the distance orientation and the
curvature of the surface that is the road.
Imagine say for example you are riding a bike and you're actually on a very you know nice road
made with you know similar sized stones and in a long distance you might notice that sometimes
the road appears to be converging or it appears to be diverging and this information about
distance if there are no other cues available can actually be really important for you to you know
guess how far you are from a particular milestone and those kind of things.
We will talk about this in more detail as we go ahead, so what we do using these texture
gradients we can actually tell if a surface is receding that is moving away from us or if it is
actually you know coming closer. Let us take this example.
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If you see the texture of these tiles here you can see that you know the tiles closer to us, say for
example appear much bigger this tiles which are further from us appear slightly smaller. We
know for a fact that all of these tiles all of these square boxes are actually of the same size, so we
are using this information about the size of the tiles to actually make a judgment about whether
you know which part of the tile is closer to us or which part of the tile is farther it was. These
kinds of things are used very cleverly by painters to create illusions of distance etc.
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In a similar way the perspective gradient and the compression gradient, so perspective gradient is
the width of the individual elements the compression gradient is the height of the individual
elements, both of these can reveal about the shape and the orientation of the surface.
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I will take another similar example you can see towards the right side everything is slightly
compressed width is you know reducing, so you get an information about you know the
perspective and say for example you can get the information of the shape and if you see you
know in the left side of the image, you can get the best perspective about the orientation of the
surface okay.
So you are using this information present in the surface to actually judge about the nature of the
surface or actually more importantly about your position in relation to this particular surface.
Now another important concept in Gibson’s ecological.
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Approach is basically this concept of flow. Gibson says that what is clear to me now that was not
clear before is that the structure, you know there as a frozen such it is just a mix you know or at
least it is a limiting case, in variants of structure do not really exist except in relation to variance
okay. Let us try and understand what he is trying to say here. He is saying frozen structure static
structures are not really the thing you know we are always moving or objects in the environment
are mostly moving and in that sense we have this concept of motion and how this motion
changes you know your relationship to you know the different surfaces etc or objects in the
environment.
So motion is an important aspect of the visual world by virtue which the environment changes
over time or the way you see the environment changes over time. There are two basic forms of
moving motion of the observer if you are moving around.
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And motion of the objects within them. Suppose you are sitting in a park and a lot of children are
playing suppose you are actually standing in the balcony and you see lot of vehicles moving by.
Motion of the observer tends to produce the greatest degree of movement as the entire optic array
needs to be transformed, so if you are moving your head if you are moving yourself, then
whatever the angles of you know that are contained in the slide with you know these light
reflecting on, so many surfaces and so many objects in the environment all of this needs to
change at once. If say for example the objects in the external world are moving minute
adjustments with relation to those particular objects might be needed.
Now Gibson suggested that this transformation if you are moving you know provides valuable
information about the position and shape of surfaces and objects in this external world, for
example an interesting cue could be information or shape a shape and position that is revealed by
something called motion parallax. Now watch what is motion parallax? Very simply motion
parallax is basically the principle that the further the an object is from an observer the less it will
appear to move as the object appear comes closer to us, it kind of the motion of the object
becomes more pronounced.
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You put in charge of a moving train and you are looking outside of your window and you are
trying to make sense of the environment around you, you are passing by afield and you look at a
herd of cows grazing in a large field next to the railway lines, the cows near the track will appear
to move fast much move fast much faster, than the cows at the back of the field okay.
This is not really necessary that those cows are running and the other ones are static is basically
because you moving faster and the cows you know which are nearer that is why they appear to
move fast faster. Thus this degree of apparent motion is directly related you know to the distance
of this object from the, of the cow from the driver.
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You can see this figure here you can see that if you are passing by and you are looking at your
left, you seeing that this is the slow is from you know the left to the right and you are looking at
the field you are probably, you will find out that the fourth cow which is furthest, will appear to
be not moving irrespective of whether it is moving or not and the cow which is closest to the
observer appears to be moving much faster.
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A second means by which observer emotion can provide information about the shape and
position of objects is through occlusion. Occlusion is basically when something is hidden or
occluded by something else okay, so imagine the same observer the train driver that is traveling
past the same field of cows and the motion will cause the cows nearest to the nearest to pass in
front or occlude the cows grazing further away.
If you go back to this figure you will see that the second and the third cows more towards the
right the third cow is actually slightly occluded by the second cow. This aspect of occlusion
gives you an estimate of that the third cow is slightly further away, from the second cow, you
know this is something which you can actually make, very easily so they this allows the observer
to reduce occluded cows are further away from those that are actually doing this occlusion okay.
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Now Gibson dealt with this motion of the observer through the reference to flow patterns in the
optic array, so he says that there are patterns of flow in the optic array, a flow is basically just
movement, now say for example again coming back to the train guy for example suppose, the
train driver is now bored at looking at by looking at the sides he is now looking he comes in the
front of the locomotive and he is just looking further in the direction to which they in the
direction in which the train is moving.
Now this entire optic array, now appear to flow pass from the left to right assuming that the
driver looks out of the right-hand window, now when the driver is in the front the flow patterns
in the optic array will change such that the texture elements that information surface will appear
to be radiating from the direction in which the train is traveling okay.
So it will appear like say for example you are moving in a particular direction and all the light is
diverging from that direction this point, for this in the direction is referred to as the pole. So if
you if you are actually moving ahead and you are looking you know right in front of you, will
see that this you know there is a point called the pole and all the light is kind of diverging from
it.
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Here is a figure which is a winner it is demonstrating it, now incase say for example maybe the
driver kind of comes.
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At the back of the Train now the texture elements that will you know that appear to make up the
surface in the environment will kind of you know appear to, so this pattern I talked about this
already so this pattern will completely get reversed if the guard at the rear of the train you know
the guard comes at the rear of the train and is trying to look backwards in the direction from
which the train had come. That will basically lead to you know convergence of this light the
convergence pattern of there.
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You will actually now in this figure you are moving away from this direction and you see
everything is converging towards the pole okay, so if you just look at these figures this one is
when you are actually moving towards the pole, this one here is when you are moving away from
the pole. Pole is any point at the furthest distance to the direction in which you are moving.
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Now Gibson, he proposes a set of rules that links flow in the optic array to the movement of the
observer through this environment. If the observer is moving through the environment, you can
deduce a few things by observing the you know flow in the optic array, these rules are basically
so if there is flow in the ambient optic array the observer is moving if there is no flow the
observer is not moving that is understood. Outflow of the optic array from the poles specifies,
that you are approaching this point in flow to the pole specifies that you are moving away from a
particular point.
The direction of the pole specifies where the direction in which the observer is moving, so if the
direction is basically right in front of you, you are moving towards it, if the direction of the pole
is at the back, then you are actually receding from it. A change in the direction of the poles
specifies that the observer is now changed direction okay.
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Now so this was about motion this was about earlier we talked about perspective horizontal ratio
relation, so we have talked about how this ambient optic array changes or how this ambient optic
array basically is restructured in light of new information, you know with respect to the
environment. Now Gibson as I began saying Gibson believe that perception is an act, you know
it is an action and it is not really a merely a passive response okay it is basically an act of
attention you choose and you select to attend aspects of the environment while you are not really
concerned about all the other parts okay.
So it is not really triggered impression it is an achievement and it is not really reflex, he is

basically telling us that you are actively involved in perception that is you looking for
information with which or on which you will interact.
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This brings us to the concept of affordance. Gibson basically took this idea of information being
picked up further by stating that the endpoint of the perceptual processes was not the visual
description of the surrounding world but rather that the objects would directly afford their use.
So when you once you look at the object there is enough information in light emanating from the
table jet that will tell you about how-to use, that particular object that is what Gibson actually
meant.
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So at its simplest the concept of affordance builds on earlier research done by Gestalt
psychologists will talk about them and your course basically says that features of objects actually
provide information, as per or regarding their use.
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If you see the door the two surfaces of the door here, you know one of these surfaces has a
handle it affords holding it at a force taking a grip of it while the other surface of the door does
not have a handle, so it kind of you know affords you know pushing through it okay. So you look
at the surface you realize what how do you interact with the surface and that is how you make
out whether you will pull it or for example whether we grip handle or just push the root through
your palm.
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Again different kinds of handles can afford different kinds of grip formation and again this is
basically also you know derived from the light emanating from these objects, so you
automatically you know modulate the aperture of your fingers and you try and hold these
different figures.
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Gibson for the claims that affordance acts as a bridge between perception and action and that
affordance does not require the intervention of any cognitive processes, he says information or
you know information or that is the light emanating from all of these surfaces is enough you
know for a person to be able to act and interact with the object, act on these objects or interact
with this environment. There is no rule of memory in perception according to Gibson and he says
that the observer does not really need to consult prior experience in order to be able to interact
with the world okay. He says there is already enough information in the world already enough
information in the light that is being reflected from the world the light that he called the built
optic array.
So he is strictly you know this approach is strictly bottom-up approach it is kind of building up
from whatever the sensory experience is gained by your eyes. He says for example that the
system resonates to the invariant information in the ambient optic array meaning probably that
global information about the optic array is dealt with by the perceptual system without the need
to analyze more local information, such as lines edges, so he said this global information about
this light reflection from these edges and the surfaces is more than enough. Now that was mostly
what Gibson was saying nowadays experiments using dynamic naturalistic stimuli can be done.
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Virtual scenes can be constructed and images of brain activity while people are viewing these
scenes or viewing these objects have also been captured in a way that would have been difficult
you know to even think of in the time that Gibson was around. However the stimulated year of
the screening should not really blind experimenters and theorists to this difference between the
real scenario and the scenic scenario, that you that we construct in our labs okay.
This is something you know you can take off from Gibson’s analysis on perception, he says that
there is much more information in the real world in when you are actually interacting with the
environment, than if you are trying to study this process of perception by conducting
experiments in our labs, where we are basically projecting these stimuli on two-dimensional
screens.
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Now to sum up whatever we have talked about Gibson we basically talked about the ecological
approach and we talked about how Gibson suggests that the light array from this external world
may be sufficient to provide us with a rich source of information to really construct a very rich
mental representations of, this external world we also saw that Gibson actually emphasize that
perception is more for action rather than just the description or recognition of this visual world.
Thank you in the next lecture we will talk about another approach on visual perception.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
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Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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National programme onTechnology enhanced Learning (NPTEL)
Course title
Basic cognitive processes
Lecture-19
Approaches to visual perception-2
By
Prof, ARK.Verna
Department of humanities and social science
Hello and welcome to the course series basic cognitive processes.
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We are still talking about various approaches to visual perception today we will talk about David
Marr’s theory of perception which is more commonly known as the 2.5D sketch approach okay,
before we move further let me quote David Marr from one of his papers in 1982 and he says he
was basically talking about how Gibson had approached perception and this quotations in that
reference. So he says the detection of physical invariants like image.
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Surfaces is exactly and precisely an information processing problem in modern terminology and
second Gibson vastly underrated the shared difficulty of such detection. Detecting physical
invariants is just as difficult as Gibson feared but nevertheless we can do it and the only way to
understand it how is to treat this as an information processing problem. Now you see David Marr
is basically you know talking more about computational approach to perception he is basically
talking about treating this problem of perception as a problem of information processing okay.
How do you really take up information from this external world how do you work upon it and
how does that or say for example how does that information lead to the end product that is
perception. That is pretty much what David Marr is talked about and we will discuss that in
enough details in today lecture.
Now while Gibson identified the need for invariance you have seen horizontal ratio relation and
using textures or surfaces you have seen the thing of flow and all while Gibson identified the
need for invariance for solving the problem of visual perception.
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He does not really specify the possible mechanisms of how this information has to be picked up
from these invariance he says if you remember the last lecture you know depending upon these
sizes etc we can get information but he does not really say how are we doing that he says info
you know you do look at the surfaces whether the width is smaller or larger and you can make
out whether the surface is receding or you know proceeding but how is this exactly done is not
what this one really talks about.
So to address this gap about you know how this process has to be done a particular theory was
needed that attempted to explain how these processes will be done how does the brain take up
information sense by the eyes and turn it into an accurate internal representation of the
surrounding world. Such a theory was put forward by David Marr, before we move into more
detail about Marr, let me point out a couple of commonalities between Gibson's and Marr’s
approaches.
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Like Gibson Marr also suggested that the information from the senses is sufficient to allow
perception to occur. Marr adopted an information processing approach in which the processes
responsible for analyzing the retinal image were central. So he is again saying light from the
external world falling on the retina is the primary source of information and thesis the starting
point of perception and this is how perception supposed to be built.
Marr’s theory therefore also strongly bottom-up if you remember the distinction between top-
down and bottom-up approaches mentioned in the last lecture in that it sees the retinal image as a
starting point of perception and also explores how this image might be analyzed in order to
produce a description of the environment. Note that Marr is not really concerned about
perception for action rather he is concerned about perception for recognition or perception that is
meant to build the description of the world.
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Marr basically saw the analysis of the retinal image in four distinct stages within each stage
taking the output of the previous one and performing a new analysis. So it’s basically an
incremental process of perception that Marr will talk about. You see here something happens in
the first date and where the output is processed further in the second stage and so on and so forth.
Let us have a brief look at these stages before we go and elaborate upon them. So the first stage
is grey level description is basically where in you are measuring the intensity of light at each
point in the retinal image, the second is the generation of the primal sketch wherein first there are
two phases here so first in the raw primal sketch areas could potentially correspond to the edges
and textures of the objects that are identified then you move on to constructing a full primal
sketch which is basically you use the areas to generate a description of the outline of any objects
we will actually elaborate on these in much more detail as we go ahead and I am just giving an
overview of what really Marr was talking about. The third stage in Marr’s approach is 2.5 D
sketch it is at this stage a description of the, is form of how the surfaces in view relate to each
other.
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And also to the observer the final stage of Mar is basically objects centered is a 3D or the
centered description in this stage descriptions are produced that allow the object to be recognized
from any angle so you have the object, you can move around you can still recognize the object
forms basically every stable object centered representation. Marr considered himself mostly at
the computational algorithmic levels of analysis and it do not really very much about the neural
hardware that might actually be implicated in doing all of these computations that he was talking
about.
Now let us sign elaborate these stages you will have to kind of follow this in more detail in order
to understand this entire sequence of events so the first step in this sequence of events is building
up of a gray level description what is the gray level description? Marr thought that color
information was processed by a distinct module; he says that the process of perception is handled
by different module components of processing say for example if you have to see the shape.
It is a different module, if you see the color is different module, if you see a depth and other
things they are carried over by different modules. You might remember in the physiology part
we were talking about different areas in the occipital lobe areas v 1, v 2, v 3, v 4 etc. which were
all doing different stuff so, Marr kind of you know is talking about something similar he says he
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was actually fascinated by you know this idea in computer science that a particular larger process
can be actually split into modules.
So a large computation he says can be split into split and implemented as a collection of parts
that are nearly as independent of one another as this entire task is and you are so moved by this
that it actually elevated this to a particular principle which was later referred to as the principle
of modular design if you remember one of our most you know earlier lectures we have been
talking about this principle of modularity in great detail.
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Now the first stage in Marr’s theory is basically to produce a description containing the intensity
of the intensity distributions of light at different points in the retina. How is this done this
basically is say for example the way it is done is that it is possible to derive the intensity of the
light striking at each part of the retina because as light strikes a cell in a retina the voltage across
the cell membrane changes and the size of this change how much this voltage is changing
corresponds to the intensity of the light.
If you remember the chapter on physiology we have been talking about neural impulses and how
depolarization happens it is a bit about that but what you need to understand for the moment is
just that the amount of change that happens in a neuron in the retina is corresponding to the
intensity of the light that is falling upon it. So using this information you can actually construct a
description of you know any surface with respect to whatever you know the intensity of light has
fallen upon it.
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So a grayscale description basically is produced by a pattern of depolarization on the retina. So

you get a description which basically contains only the intensity information of the scene or of
the surface that you are looking at. Now moving to the second part the primal sketch the
generation of the primal sketch basically occurs in two parts in the first part basically the forming
of a raw primal sketch happens from the gray level description by identifying the patterns of
changing intensity.
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So in the first case you have you had a description of what are the different levels of intensity in
the surface or in the scene in the second level you are actually taking into account how this
intensity is changing throughout the surface or throughout the scene. Changes in intensity of the
reflected light can be grouped into three categories so selectively large changes in intensity prod
can be produced by the edge of an object smaller changes in intensity can be caused by the parts
and the texture of the object.
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Even smaller changes in intensity might be just because of random fluctuations in the light etc.
Marr and Hildreth actually they work together and proposed an algorithm that could be used to
determine which intensity changes correspond to the edges of the objects meaning that changes
in intensity due to the random fluctuation could be discarded. This algorithm made use of a
technique called Gaussian blurring which involves averaging the intensity values in circular
regions of the grayscale description.
So basically it's like you know the algorithm works upon the intensity values that it gets from the
description and this is basically done over circular regions of this. I will just show you sure
figure which talks about this. The values at the center of the circle are weighed more, are
weighted more than those at the edges of the circle, edges in a way identical to a normal
distribution. So if you look at if you have the concept of how normal distribution looks its
basically like bell-shaped curve the highest intensity is at the center the lower intensity is kind of
are towards outside, by changing the size of the circle in which intensity values are average it is
possible to produce a range of images blurred to different degrees so let us have a look at this
figure here.
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You can see the main picture is the figure A, the figure B and figure C are blurred to slightly
different degrees. Marr and Hildreth’s algorithm really basically works by comparing the images
that have been blurred to different degrees. Now if an intensity change in these different you
know figures is visible at two or adjacent levels of learning so for example you blow something
up to 10% and20%, 30% very well if these images you know if an intensity change is visible at
two or more adjacent levels of blurring then it is assumed that it cannot correspond to random
fluctuations and must relate to an edge of the object.
So you just have intensity data you have a data about how this pattern of intensity is changing
and you can see how these computations are cumulatively telling us important information about
what is out there what does the object or the scene look like. Although this algorithm was
implemented on a computer there is also evidence that shows that retinal processing delivers
descriptions that have been actually blurred to different degrees. So it could be kind of an
evidence in support of you know the way Marr was stipulating this process is happening.
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Now by analyzing this change intensity values in the blurred images it is actually possible to
form a symbolic representation consisting of four primitives corresponding to four types of
intensity change. So how do you know really construct this kind of an image say for example if
you want to look at edge segments they should represent a really sudden change in intensity if
you look at a bar kind of a thing it basically should represent two parallel edge segments.
So two sudden changes in intensity, a termination of any surface say for example the edge of this
table here can represent sudden discontinuity, also if you're talking about a particular object
which can correspond to a small enclosed are abound by changes in intensity say for example
you are looking at a face or you’re looking at say for example face still has a lot of contours, if
you looking at a picture of an orange so it has contours inside it is just looking like a blob. Now
here again you can see the flower is basically more looking like a blob while the steel wires at
the back of it are actually more looking like edges. You can see this in more clearly here you can
see here picture A has a lot of blobs picture B has a lot of edge segments and picture C which is
basically those wires have lot of bars. You can see how this can be used on the straight lines or
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curved lines in that sense now the next step after you got this intensity description is to transform
a raw primal sketch into a description known as the full primal sketch.
Just to recap what we have done is we have done a grayscale description then we have come to a
raw primal sketch which is basically formed by analyzing the patterns of changes in this
intensity. Now what we need to do is we have to move towards forming a full primal sketch.
What is full primal sketch, it contains information about how the image is organized particularly
about the location the shape texture and internal parts of any objects that are on view basically
the idea is that you will have some things called you know place tokens. What are place tokens
they are assigned.
The areas of raw primal sketch based on grouping of edge segments grouping of bars
terminations and blobs, so once you have done the analysis like say for example in this figure
here now would what you would want to do is you would want to group things together, that is
what one needs to do in by forming the full primal sketch. So basically so if these place tokens
then form a group among themselves they can be aggregated together to form a new higher order
place token.
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So there would be different levels at which this place tokens would really appear we can
understand this better by looking at this example say for your for example you're looking at tiger
and how is this analysis happening. So the raw primal sketch of the tiger would contain
information both about the edges of the Tigers body that is the contours but also there will be
information about the edges of the tiger stripes so tiger is basically entirely covered in stripes but
then there is also at a higher level the contour of the tiger.
So in the full primal sketch place tokens will be produced by the grouping of individual hairs
into each of the stripes so we'll have information about the stripes then say for example the place
tokens for each stripe would also be grouped at a higher level in higher order place token
meaning that there will be at least two levels of place tokens making up the tiger. One level
which is just making up the stripe the other level based on the stripes making up the entire
contour of the tiger. Now various mechanisms have been postulated various mechanisms exist
for grouping the raw primal sketch components into place tokens.
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And then grouping the place tokens together to form the full primal sketch. Some of these could
include things like clustering wherein tokens that are close to one another are grouped in a very
similar in a very similar to the Gestalt principle of proximity. Proximity basically means that you
have you know you put things that are close together in one object okay. Another thing would-be
curvilinear aggregation which is basically that tokens which are related to each other which have
similar alignments are also grouped or clustered together okay.
Say for example if you’re seeing a particular line you're more likely to see that line continuing
than you know breaking at different places. We will talk about these Gestalt principles in more
detail as we move ahead it later lectures. Now the third stage the third stage is the generation of
the 2.5 D sketch. Now Marr’s modular approach to perception basically means that while the
full.
Primal sketch is being produced other types of visual information are also being organized or
analyzed simultaneously for example things like depth relations, distance information between a
surface and the observer information about whether the object is moving or you are moving in
those kinds of things. Now Marr basically propose that the information from all of such modules
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distance from shape color motion all of these modules will be combined together to form what is
called 2.5 dimension sketch, it is also called the two point five dimensions sketch because the
specification of the position and the depth of the surfaces and objects is done in relation to the
observer. Now this is the view of the object in relation to the observer that is why this is also
called a viewer centered representation. An object as it is looking to me okay the image of the
object that is falling on my retina; this will not contain any information about the object that is
not present in the retinal image okay.
The viewer centered image is later turned into a fully 3d object Center different representation
which we will discuss in one of the later lectures. Marr basically saw the 2.5 D sketch as
consisting of a series of primitives that contained vectors showing the orientations of each
surface. So once you have these surfaces you actually you know can combine all of them
together and the 2.5D sketch will appear is a series of primitives that contain these vectors you
can actually understand this by looking here so if you're looking at it here you're looking at the
2.5 D sketch of a particular cube.
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So you can see these vectors pointing in the 3 directions are actually telling us the direction of
the surface or the orientation of the surface. Let us try and evaluate this approach let us look back
and see what Marr was talking about. A lot of research has followed David Marr’s theory some
of it actually confirming his proposed mechanisms, while some of them have found out some
few shortcomings. Marr and Hildreth's proposal of a primal sketch being formed by looking for
changes in intensity worked very well with computer simulations computer simulations but it
could not really be guaranteed.
That this is the same process followed by the human visual system you would have seen that we
have been discussing in one of the earlier lectures about there could be two possible descriptions
of the same outcome. Ensign Learning, 1990 they showed that the participants of this study
could also use three-dimensional information instead of only the two-dimensional information
that is needed to form a full primal sketch. So probably in some sense the underestimated the
efficiency of our perceptual systems. However Marr’s proposal of the integration of depth cues
in 2.5 D sketch was actually supported by experiments.
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That were done by Young and colleagues in 1993 who basically reported that the perceptual
system does process this cues separately. So and we also make use selective use of them
depending on how noisy they are. So we are actually using these you know the perceptual system
is actually using these cues these invariant features or these depth cues in order to you know
develop a really rich representation of the external world around us and of the objects etc.
So this was all about David Marr’s theory of perception, let us try on sum this up. We have
talked about David Marr’s 2.5D approach to perception. We have seen that information from the
sensory experience can actually be systematically analyze to construct a good perceptual
representation of world, by good I mean rich perceptual representation of the world that has all
the knowledge that is needed for you to first construct a visual representation of the world and
because at least Marr was not really concerned.
With about perception actions, we not talked about that in this part. However there were indeed
shortcomings and gaps in linking this kind of a computational approach to match human
performance that is what has been found out after you know a lot of research conducted on
Marr’s principles but nonetheless this was good and went round in computational approach about
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visual perception. In one's the next pictures we will talk about some other kinds of approaches to
how visual perception is achieved thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
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Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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[Music]
(Refer Slide Time 00:01)
Course Title
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Lecture - 20
Approach to Visual Perception-3
by
Prof. Ark Verma
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Hello and welcome to the lecture series on Basic Cognitive Processes.
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Today we will continue talking about various approaches to visual perception.
In the last lecture, you might remember we have been -- in the last two lectures actually we've
been talking about bottom-up approaches to perception. We have been talking about how the
sensory experience from the environment can be used to construct good representations of the
external world. We have talked about the theory given by Gibson which was the ecological
approach to perception. We have also talked in more detail about the theory given by David
Marr which was the 2.5D Sketch approach to perception.
Now you would have noticed from the chapter on representation that these are not the only
approaches to construct mental representations. There is something else as well. This
something else basically includes those approaches to creating mental representations that
basically operate with the assumption that the incoming sensory experience or incoming
sensory input from the environment is not complete in itself and it needs to be filled up or
say, for example, we actively interact and analyze the perceptual input coming from the
external environment, you know, to create a good mental representation of the external world.
We’ll talk about such theories in today's class.
Now this whole concept of, you know, these kind of theories, which are basically termed as
top-down theories started from Helmholtz and Helmholtz basically proposed a principle
called the Theory of Unconscious Inference.
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Now this principle of unconscious inference states that some of our perceptions are a result of
our unconscious assumptions that we have made about the environment. So he says that we
are actually almost unconsciously but almost all the time acting upon the input that the
environment gives us and that is how we create, you know, mental representations or of this
external world.
This theory was basically proposed to account for our ability to create perceptions from the
stimulus information that can be seen in more than one way possible. I'll take this example
here. You can see this figure.
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If you see figure (a), you will see one the blue rectangle is basically occluding red rectangle
behind this. Now there are two possible scenarios of, you know how the figure (a) might end
up. One is that rectangle in the front that is the blue triangle is covering another green
rectangle or it could be that this blue rectangle is actually covering a surface, which is not
really rectangle. Okay. It's just filling in that gap.
Now you might remember, you know, or you might have come across such kind of instances
more often than not. A funny instance comes to my mind is when people start wearing just
collars and not shirts, you know. That's something which, you know, you definitely might
have seen somewhere in the television or somewhere, but the point is we are actually
assuming that probably, you know, case b is the more possible, you know, or is the more
probable case than case c. A very few of us would actually; you know, will see figure (a) and
say that figure (c) is actually the reason behind figure (a). This is exactly what Helmholtz was
talking about.
How does Helmholtz explain this? He basically is put forward a principle called the
likelihood principle. The likelihood principle states that we perceive the object that is most
likely to have caused the pattern of the stimuli we received. Again, we can go back to this
figure.
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Which is the most likely, you know, in the (b), in (b) and (c) to have resulted in the
perception like (a)? With -- on the basis of your previous experiences with similar scenarios,
you will probably deduce that (b) is generally the more likely option, which has caused, you
know, us to see something like (a).
This is basically what the principle of likelihood means and this is what Helmholtz said that
we are doing a lot of unconscious inferences. Okay. Had I not really told you about the two
possibilities b and c, you would automatically had assumed that b is the cause of the
perception that we got in a.
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So, Helmholtz, that is why he described this process of perception as being similar to the
process in, you know, solving a problem. He says, this problem is solved by a process in
which the observer applies his or her knowledge about their world, knowledge about the
environment in order to infer what the object might be.
Say, for example, you know, if you're walking in a jungle and you know suddenly a rope like
thing is slung on you, is thrown on you, you're more likely to believe that maybe it could be a
snake. But say, for example, if you're walking in your house and you know if you're walking
and you know that your house is in a place where snakes cannot be a probability, you will
more -- you will not really get, you know, so panicked. You might think that it is probably a
wire or a rope just lying around in the house.
You know, you have this memory. You have this knowledge of the world. You have and it's
kind of obvious to assume that this kind of knowledge will play a role in forming any kind of
mental representations. Okay. So in such -- in cases such as the one we discussed, in the one
which I was really talking about, this process is unconscious. You're not really consciously
thinking and making those connections. What you're doing is called unconscious inference.
Hence this theory is called the Helmholtz’s Theory of Unconscious Inference.
Let us take you to a different kind of an approach, which is probably the even more famous
approach on perception and you know the entire point of this approach can be summed up in
the sentence here which says the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
So, for example, there are quite a few components. If you just put the components together,
you might perceive something more than just the additive influence of those parts. I’ll explain
this in a very short while.
Before that I would just like to mention that this approach is basically put forward by a, you
know, a group of psychologists who have been known as the Gestalt Psychologists. They
were basically the first group of psychologists who systematically start studying perceptual
organizations back -- way back in 1920s in Germany.
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Some of those notable names, you might have heard earlier, you might come across are those
of Johann Wolfgang, Ernst Mach, Kurt Koffka, Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and
others.
Now the basic idea of perceptual organization, now you should attend to this word perceptual
organization, it is basically saying that you are organizing your perception in a particular
way. It's not that you are just passively attending to that to the sensory input. You're actually
acting upon it. You are organizing it. You're making some meaning out of it. Okay. I will
demonstrate that in the next few slides, but this basic idea of perceptual organization, you
know, can be summed up in this sentence here that any image that tends to be perceived
according to the organization of the elements within rather than merely according to the
nature of individual elements. Okay.
So if you're looking at the world, you are not basically looking at individual elements. You're
looking at how those individual elements combine to create let us say an image of an object
or let us say to, you know, create an image of a particular scene.
Let us look at some, you know, principles or you know more as they've been called laws of
organization put forward by these Gestalt Psychologists.
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Now what do you see here? Do you see let us say random arrangement of cones or do you see
a sphere which is basically covered on the surface by these cones? Let me tell you that there
is no sphere here. Okay. It's just that arrangement of cones, but aren't you seeing the globe
here? Aren’t you seeing the sphere here? What is it that is letting you see the sphere? It is this
ability to organize this arrangement of spheres, this arrangement of cones that is letting you
see this sphere.
This is basically called the Law of Closure saying that if there is this individual arrangement
of, you know, or random arrangement of individual elements, you would try and take that
interpretation that forms a good, you know, a closure of a, you know, a particular kind. Say
here you can arrange them into -- into a possible arrangement that is leading to formation of
this sphere.
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Moving ahead, now you can ask yourselves, whether you are seeing eight pebbles or you're
seeing groups of -- whether you’re seeing four groups of two pebbles each? Now the point is
in this what is happening is you're kind of already organizing the two pebbles, which are
close to each other. So you're basically more like to -- likely to say that you’re seeing four
groups of pebbles rather than eight individual pebbles.
This is the Law of Proximity. It says that individual components that are put close together
are organized as part of one object. Okay. So you will say I am seeing four pairs of pebbles
here rather than eight individual pebbles. This is called the Law of Proximity.
Another law that the Gestalt Psychologists would forward is the Law of Similarity.
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This basically says that you club similar looking things together. If I ask you what you’re
seeing here, you will say that you’re seeing a row of -- two rows of Xs and one row of Y.
Okay. But if you actually kind of look at it, you might -- two columns of Xs and one column
of Y, you might actually also be, you know, pressed up to say that you're actually seeing four
rows of X Y X and you know you’re seeing four rows of X Y X. Okay. But you're not
inclined to put Y in the same, you know, row as X. That is why you're actually seeing this
figure in columns rather than in rows because you're kind of attaching Xs together and Ys
together and it's giving you the impression of columns rather than four individual rows.
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Here another law that they give us is basically called the Law of Good Continuation. We are
inclined to link individual elements so that they form a continuous percept rather than a
broken percept.
Let us have a look at this figure here. You will see that, you know, you might be able to see
that there is this one line, which is going from the end till the top and there is another, you
know, slanted line that is joining it. I might argue on the other hand that the line which started
from the bottom here kind of bends down and there is another line which kind of joints
slightly later. But the more probable assumption that you will make is the one that the line is
started at the bottom here kind of goes all the way up and somewhere, you know, on the
fourth block, this, you know, lowly slanted line is adding up.
So the Law of Good Continuation is basically about that you kind of put individual elements
together to form a continuous figure.
Now the Gestalt researchers and there are many other principles, you know, which have been
given by them. But the Gestalt researchers formulated many other, you know, organisational
laws. Most of them kind of, you know, were manifestations of a particular law, which was
known as the Law of Pragnanz and the Law of Pragnanz was defined by Koffka as “Of
several geometrically possible organisations that one will actually occur which will possess
the best, and the simplest and the most stable shape.”
Okay. So you might kind of, you know, have things like, okay, there are so many other
elements, but what you will actually, you know, make meaning out of or what you will
actually make the figure out to be more often than not will be something that ends up in the
simplest interpretation or the most stablest interpretation of that visual input.
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I can show you some examples say, for example, what is this?
You -- here you basically see, you know, either blobs, black blobs, which are kind of
randomly put together or you will put all of those together and see they're the simplest
interpretation of this say of the shape is that this is a giraffe. Okay. So what you're doing is
you're kind of looking at all these individual elements separately and the most simple
organisation because we're not really used to seeing, you know, blobs just scattered around in
a random fashion, we are more used to seeing individual objects. So we’ll say that this is a
giraffe, which is again the most probable, you know, interpretation of this kind of a sensory
input.
Here what are you seeing? Are you seeing a tree or are you using individual elements, which
are, you know, which look like people?
The simplest thing that you just see in the first instance is actually that of a tree. You're not
really focusing on the individual elements. That's what the Law of Pragnanz is supposed to
tell us.
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What do you see here? Do you see the continent of Africa and the two people or say, for
example, what, you know, or you just see the two people and not the continent? You will take
the simplest and you know best assumption out of this.
Now let us move slightly further.
Can you tell me what are you seeing here?
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Some of you might have already guessed that this is actually a picture of a cow. Now how did
you really make out that this figure here resembles the cow? What did you really use? I
would guess that you used your memory to make up that, you know, this particular
organisation of black and white, you know, can be interpreted at least in the left part as the
face of the cow and then the rest part can be taken as the torso of the cow.
Now you see here that we are actually using our knowledge and our memory to make sense
out of the sensory input or whatever the eyes give us or let us say whatever the ambient optic
array might carry. This approach is again an extension of what we have been talking about
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top-down approaches. These approaches basically are termed together as Constructivist
Approaches to Perception. Okay.
So the notion that is perceiving something involves using stored knowledge as well as
information coming in from the senses is embodied in this generic, you know, class of
approach is called Constructivist Approaches to Perception. This is basically based on the
idea that sensory information that forms the basis of perception is rarely complete or it's
actually incomplete and it is necessary for us to build the perception of our world from
incomplete information. That's what you're getting.
Say, for example, I am looking at figure here. Most figures are kind of occluded by each
other. But I am kind of making it up that there is this continuation. I am using my knowledge
of the world.
Suppose say, for example, you're looking at a wall and there are a lot of photo frames on it.
You have this assumption that, you know, behind the photo frame, the wall is still there. It's
continuous. Isn’t it? You know that. So you're kind of filling in that information that is
incomplete. Your ambient optic array is not carrying the information of the wall behind the
picture. It could just say that there's a wall and then there’s a picture and there’s rest of the
wall. So you use this knowledge. Okay.
So you accomplish this kind of, you know, creating this internal representation from this
incomplete information. You use what you already know about the world to interpret this
incomplete sensory information coming in and you're trying to make sense of it and this is
basically, you know, the notion that stored knowledge can be used in order to, you know, aid
recognition of objects, create good representations of the external world. This is what the
constructivist approaches are about.
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Two of the foremost proponents of the constructivist approach were Irvin Rock and Richard
Gregory. Gregory basically suggested that individuals attempt to recognize objects by
generating a series of perceptual hypotheses, okay, about what the object might be.
Say, for example, you're looking at somebody and that somebody is basically behind, you
know, a particular bike. You still assume that say, for example, whether it is a person,
whether let us say it's a male or a female, those different kind of hypotheses you're generating
and you're using your knowledge of the world.
Say, for example, you know there's somebody standing behind a car and you can just see
parts of his body. You’ll use your knowledge of the world. Say, for example, if this person is
wearing, you know, sandals, which females are supposed to wear, you will kind of make out
that this must be a female or say, for example, that person is wearing pink, you know, trouser
or something. You might kind of make that probably, more probably there is a female than a
male.
I mean, you will be probably buying into a stereotype here, but this is what the knowledge of
the world will help you infer about that particular environment. This is what is called
generating multiple perceptual hypotheses and evaluating them and then choosing one of
them which is, you know, best fit to that particular sensory input.
So Gregory conceptualized this process as being akin to how a scientist might investigate a
particular problem, and how scientists work is that they generate few hypotheses and they
actually accept the one that is best supported by the data. Okay and the data is obviously your
sensory experience.
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Stored knowledge is assumed to be central to the generation of perceptual hypotheses
because this is the what allows us to fill in the gaps in our sensory input. They could -- there
was an experiment I can think of in terms of auditory perception. We will talk about auditory
perception probably at some point in time.
But interesting experiment I can recall at the moment is there were these people who were,
you know, put headphones and there was a sentence being said on the headphones and say,
for example, the sentence was, “The legislators were talking about this particular thing.” At
this point wherever the legislators word is there, in the place of s where the s should have
been there, there is a huge coughing sound. Okay. So the person does not really listen to the s.
The thing is the legi and coughing sound lators were talking about something.
After this experiment, after the participants, you know, came out of the lab, there was a
person who asked them, what did you exactly hear? And that everybody there said that we
heard about the legislators, you know, were discussing about something.
Now they did not really listen the s at all, but they actually knew this word, and so they filled
in up, filled in that gap, which was interrupted by coughing by the s. So this kind of effect is
actually called phonemic restoration effect. We might talk about this in more detail when
you're doing auditory perception, but this is how the knowledge of the world, you know,
might help you fill in the gaps in the sensory experience.
The influence of stored knowledge in guiding the perceptual hypotheses can be demonstrated
by impoverished figures. Now, again, the kind of figures we already saw.
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What is this? Is this, you know, can you make sense of what picture this is about? If you give
it enough thought and if you kind of have some idea or say, for example, if you’re living in a
city near a beach, you would automatically infer that this is basically a picture of a ship. You
can see the chimney on the right side. You can see water in the, you know, water at the
bottom and you can, you know, see that there is this ship at the left which kind of resembles
the front of the ship. Okay. You have to know something -- if you are a person who’ve never
really, you know, seen a ship earlier, you don't have any concept of ships. You will not really
be able to fill up this missing information and infer that this is a picture of a ship.
Again, the picture of the giraffe, which we've already seen.
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Now the use of knowledge to guide our perceptual hypotheses may not always lead to correct
perception. You know, you might kind of misfill something as well. Sometimes this might
lead you to -- towards accepting incorrect hypotheses resulting in false perception or resulting
in mistakes about things. Okay. That's equally possible.
Say, for example, this is the picture. This is basically a picture of the mask of Hor kept in an
Egyptian Museum. If you kind of turn this, you know, inwards, if you are looking at the back
of this mask, you can already see that if you see the third panel, you can already see that there
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seems to be an illusion of a shape there. Okay. You're trying to fill in the contours. You're
trying to reverse the contours and that basically is giving you the impression that this is
actually a face protruding outwards. Okay.
Because you're looking at the back of this figure and those are -- there are hollows in place of
the nose and there are hollows in place of the eyes, once you reverse it, your brain tells you
that eyes are not really hollow or the nose is not really hollow. You're kind of filling this up
and that is why in the third panel, the shape starts to look like an actual shape though it is just
the back of the mask. Okay. This is what constructivist approaches of perception are actually
arguing about.
Now although the constructivist approach in general and Gregory’s theories in particular
actually providing really attractive explanatory framework for perception. There are areas,
you know, which are left vague in this particular theory.
For example, Gregory does not really talk about how are we generating these hypotheses?
What is the data that is leading, you know, to generate these hypotheses? And how do we
know when to stop generating more hypotheses and what helps us decide that which is the
right one? These are some of the areas which have not really been taken up in detail by the
constructivist approaches in general, although there is a lot of research going on in that
sphere.
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So there is obviously some evidence that perceptions from the outside world can be
constructed using information flowing ‘upwards’ from the senses and combined with the
knowledge flowing ‘down’. Okay. So, obviously, a good compromise between bottom-up
approaches and top-down approaches are happening here.
But if you actually remember the last two lectures, this is entirely in contrast to what both
Gibson and Marr had said. For them, the bottom-up approach or the bottom-up, you know,
processing or the sensory experience should be completely sufficient and enough to give you
a nice representation of the external world. Okay.
That was about the constructivist approaches. Let us try and sum this up.
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So we have examined alternative to what we have been talking about earlier. We have talked
about alternative or top-down approaches to perception. We have seen the fact that in
addition to the information from the sensory experience, information already stored in the
brain or the mind, whatever you might call it, shall be useful in, you know, making sense of
the external environment, especially in cases where impoverished information from the
senses is delivered.
We might conclude having, you know, looked into both bottom-up and top-down approaches
that, you know, both of these or a combination of these may actually be involved in
constructing a perceptual representation of the external world.
Thank you. We’ll talk about object recognition and theories about object recognition in the
next class.
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Course Title
Lecture-21
Theories of Object Recognition
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the lecture series on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from
IIT Kanpur.
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Today we will talk about theories of object recognition you have seen till now that we have been
talking about perception we have been talking about various theories of perception today we will
take a particular case and we will see how we interact and how we understand and recognize
objects in this external world. Now there have been a variety of theories that have been proposed
in order to explain how visual recognition is achieved.
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These theories may differ depending upon the theoretical stance they take say for example
whether they are bottom-up theories or they are top-down theories you might know already using
the previous lectures that bottom-up theories basically focus upon developing or using the
information coming from the sensory experience to develop mental representations and top-
down theory is basically a favor the theoretical stance that you know it is our memory and it is
our experience in knowledge of the world that helps us build maintain representations of the
external world. Now we will just we're just adding a case there we are saying whether it is the
sensory experience that leads us to form representations of the objects whether it is that
information that helps us to recognize and interact with objects versus whether it is our memory
and our knowledge of the world that helps us interact and recognize objects that is the kind of a
difference you know we can talk about all in all in all basically the attempt of this object
recognition theories is basically to be able to account for the excellent capacity of object
recognition that we have the fact that we make errors very rarely and the fact that we do object
recognition rather quickly. There are two problems of object recognition we refer to this while
we were talking about Marr, is there are two kinds of representation possible if you are talking
about a particular object. One form of representation is if you are taking an object in variant
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view are you talking about the representation of the object which is an object centered
representation versus.
If you are talking about viewer centered representation say for example I am looking at a flower
pot you know standing on the window of my house how does that flower pot look if I move
around versus what is the general perception of that flower pot which will not change
irrespective of how I move around about in the room. So these are some of the problems which
are there in object recognition we will try and see how these various theories have attempted to
solve those problems.
Now there are varieties of theories we will talk about that but one of the most basic theories of
object recognition could be something like a template matching theory now our template
matching Theory basically says that you know we compare the stimulus then we compare the
sensory input with a set of templates that we already have okay so you might already have a
template of how you know a particular ball looks like or how a particular you know toy looks
like and you kind of have this template.
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And you kind of have these specific patterns and what you are trying to do here is match this set
template which is there in your head with the sensory input. So you compare the incoming
sensory input to a variety of templates you might have and you select a particular template that
matches the sensory input to the best okay say for example you have templates A B and C and
the input is let us say D you will kind of choose either of A B or C depending on the degree of
match between D.
And either of these say for example a match a 65% the other two matches you know let us say 20
and 15% so you choose probably the you know a template of A because that matches D more
than the other two okay. In this template matching account we were looking we are basically
looking for the exact match between the stored template and the input representation it is not
even 65 or something the kind of thinking of a 100% match between this template.
That we have stored and the representation or the sensory input that is coming in. I will show
you an example suppose you see you know here there are different ways of writing let us say
pattern perception you will see that depending on different peoples handwriting the templates of
just these set of alphabets can be really different. Now suppose you are a system which is
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supposed to recognize each of these things as soon as the template kind of varies by you know
one degree or two degrees you will already start having a trouble in recognizing these patterns.
An example of these kind of things could be you know the, the Machine recognitions systems
that examine for example your signatures in your you know check books if say for example you
have just made a very small mistake in your signature you have kind of you know say for
example you there is a superscript and there is a subscript if the subscript and superscript are
kind of shifted a little bit the machine recognition system which kind of matches this signature of
yours with the signature that you have given at the time of opening the account and that matches
less than a particular amount it will not recognize it okay. So that is the problem with this
template matching accounts the problem is that these are extremely inflexible theories. If a letter
were to differ you know from the appropriate template even slightly the pattern will never be
recognized.
So but that degree of freedom is not there and you see that say for example our systems the you
know recognition systems that we have are actually very good at it you know they do not really
say for example if I am writing about particular word or you are reading a particular word and
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obviously given that our writings will be really different you are still able to read that word
perfectly. So it kind of tells us that maybe we are not really using a template matching account
and in that sense we let us we kind of move on to other models as well.
Now the template models in that sense by the way they are useful also but they are kind of
useful only and they work only for isolated letters numbers and other simple two-dimensional
kind of shapes okay. So if you have a really very, very simple kind of a setup obviously then
may be the template matching account would work. But not really for complex configuration say
for example cursive handwriting for a large word that kind of brings us to a different kind of
theory of object recognition this theory is known by the name of feature analysis theory.
Now this and this theory basically proposes that you know it kind of proposes a more flexible
approach and this approach is about that any visual stimulus say for example you know a
particular letter for that matter is supposed to be composed of a small number of characteristics
or component so it says let us not have a fixed template let us talk about the components that
make up that particular object or that particular pattern and what we look for is not really the
exact template but we look for the presence of these different components okay.
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An example could be say for example if you talk about the letter R the letter R basically has
three components. You know it has a vertical component it has a curved component and it has a
slanted component. Now if I were a system that was supposed to recognize the letter R and
irrespective of the you know the people whose handwriting I am kind of recognizing I would
assume that the letter R will at least have these three features okay.
So in that sense I am not going to be troubled by peoples handwritings because anybody who
writes the letter R will at least write these three components okay, so this is something which
wherein you find that you know the feature analysis theory might be good. He has this example
you see so these are these different letters and this is basically how these features are organized
you have straight, horizontal, vertical, diagonal lines you have a closed curve you have
intersections you have symmetry about them.
So these are basically kind of features which were shown by Gibson that you know how letters
really differ from each other with respect to these distinctive features and Gibson believed that
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this is how we are really you know recognize these later this is how even our a higher object
recognition kind of you know mechanisms would work on.
So the feature analysis theories they propose that the distinctive features for each alphabet
remain constant irrespective of whether the letter is handwritten or typed or it is a photograph of
a letter anything okay these models can also explain how we can perceive a wide variety of two-
dimensional patterns such as figures in a painting, design, fabric those kind of things okay now a
feature analysis theories as a group and there are many theories we are kind of discussing at a
rather generic level feature analysis theories are consistent with both psychological and
neuroscience research. So Eleanor Gibson we have been talking about research and last things
basically demonstrated that people do require a relatively longer time to decide if the two letters
are same or different given that the two letters share a critical number of features say for example
if you have decide between whether a particular letter is an N or whether it is an M you will see
that these two letters share a lot of features they all share a slanted line and two vertical lines so
the idea is because these two letters share these critical features you are matching of these letters
or say for example the decision of telling that these two letters are different will take more time.
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Because what you are doing according to this particular theory is checking for each feature so
you check for air of vertical lines you find them alright you check for a slanted line you find
them and find that as well but once you start looking for the second slanted line or let us say the
second the different direction slanted line then you find that M has it but n does not and in that
sense I am talking about a caps lock scenario.
In that sense you will find that these two things are different. This is what the feature analysis
theory says about recognizing these things. So Larsen and Bundesen they designed a model
based on feature analysis that correctly recognize an impressive around 95% of the numbers
written in street addresses and zip codes even neuroscience research also has you know shown
that features you know feature analysis is something that we do Hubel and Wiesel did this
research with neurons and they found that those neurons basically can be tuned to you know
recognizing orientation say for example horizontal versus slanted versus vertical lines okay. So
you have these set of neurons which actually code for specific features in that sense you could
say that feature analysis theory of object recognition has some support from the neuroscience
data as well okay.
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Now but feature analysis also has some related problems here there are some criticism on feature
analysis theories itself. Let us talk about those problems now a theory of object recognition you
know simply should not just list the features. Now the idea is if you are just talking at the level of
features and isolated features you are not getting the entire you know how those features are
linked with each other. In what way these features are jointed those kind of things you will not
you are not really talking about okay. Also you can remember from the Gestalt view of
perception that you know an object is not really just components and components joined together
just not really just give it one object it kind of the whole is more than the sum of its part thing
okay. So a theory of object recognition then should not simply miss the features contained in a
stimulus it must also describe the physical relationship between those features how are they
linked together okay.
For example in the letter T the vertical line supports the horizontal line whereas in the letter L the
vertical line is resting under the horizontal line, resting at the side of the horizontal line okay. So
you can look for a horizontal and a vertical line but you will find that it is present both in L and
T. So you need to really specify how this linkage is there only then you will be able to you know
understand why say for example an L is different than the T. Now the feature analysis theories
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were constructed to explain the relatively simpler recognition of letter. See the object recognition
in itself is a bigger problem feature analysis theory is basically started with the explaining us the
recognition of letters. So you know kind of taking away very simple scenario. They were trying
to solve a very simple problem but if you really look at you know objects in the world you know
say for example plants and animals and automobiles and houses and those kind of things they are
much more complex than just being you know a concatenated set of features. So in that sense a
feature analysis you know kind of falls short of explaining the, you know the myriad problems in
understanding or recognizing different objects. So theory also something that you will see is that
there are generally distortions. You know things are moving and there are some kind of
distortions in features as well. Say for example if you were to recognize what a cheetah looks
like or say for example what a horse looks like and you are looking at a horse while it is really
running the features are changing you know and the percept or the sensory input that you are
getting is also changing okay. In that sense it will become that much more difficult for a feature
analysis theory to explain you know what a particular object looks like so imagine say for
example you know you have a particular presentation in which the features of the letters are
mixing with each other or they are kind of moving say for example if you are reading something
written on a flag for example. You know the flag is moving with the wind and something that is
actually horizontal does not look horizontal at the moment it you know looks slanted because the
flag is removed by the air so those kinds of things the feature analysis theory will find slightly
harder to explain okay. So let us move towards a different kind of a theory another theory that
we can talk about is Irving Bierderman’s recognition by component theory.
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Now what is this recognition by components theory Bierderman basically developed a theory
and to recognize three-dimensional shapes this idea was similar to what Gibson was saying we
are not really dealing with two-dimensional entities in the external world we are dealing with
three-dimensional entities, so let us you know develop a theory that will explain understanding
or recognition of three-dimensional objects rather than two-dimensional objects.
So with that the start the basic assumption of recognition by components theory is that a specific
view of an object can be represented as an arrangement of a simple 3d objects and so Biederman
basically came up with this simple theory objects called Geons. Okay I will show you Geons in a
short while but these geons were supposed to combine and represent particular shapes or
particular objects and the idea was that we are actually understanding each of these Geons.
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And that is what is leading you know to our understanding or recognition of the objects. You can
see here say for example you know you have geons on the left side and you have these objects on
the right side and you can see each of these objects on the right side are actually composed of
these different Geons so you can see say for example the telephone is composed of Geons
number 1 3 & 5 this thing the cup is basically made up of geons number 3 and number 5 okay.
So this is basically you know in some sense you know you kind of extract this higher-level
feature or say for example you can extract this higher-level component from the three-
dimensional objects that you see and you make a sense of that okay if we combine this object
with this object and say you know the Geon number 3 and geon number 5 this will lead us to
forming what is called a cup okay.
In some sense what you are doing is you are recognizing by these discrete components with just
you know so all objects are basically you know can be understood to be permutations and
combinations of these various geons okay. This is pretty much what you know the Irving
Bierderman model of recognition by components was talking about. In general let us elaborate
on this a little bit.
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In general the arrangement of three geons would give people enough information to classify a
particular object in that sense Biederman's recognition by component theory is essentially a
feature analysis theory as I was already saying for three-dimensional objects. So you have three
features you have a curved thing, if you look at this figure again you have a cylinder which is
number three you have a pipe like curved thing which is number five and you combine the
cylinder with this pipe line thing you get a cup which is an object. So this is what is thing with
this particular theory that you can combine these different components and these components are
pretty much as features only.
And you can combine these different components to get representations of objects in the world.
So Bierderman basically they conduct this FMRI research with humans and single-cell
recordings with monkeys and their findings have shown that you know areas of the cortex
beyond the primary visual cortex respond actually respond to geons as presented earlier. So the
thing is we do have some coding for these three-dimensional features or three-dimensional
components.
And in that sense maybe we are sensitive to how these components occur as parts of different
objects and maybe that helps us recognize these different objects okay. So there is some data
which supports the recognition by component theory. Now the recognition by component theory
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also requires an important modification because people will recognize an object more quickly
when those objects are seen from standard viewpoints.
The thing is this if you see a cup or say for example if you see a phone here this is one
representation of the phone or this is one representation of the car suppose I invert the cup
suppose I kind of tilt the cup then the componential analysis might change a little bit okay, at
least the feature extraction will change a little bit okay.
So you will need to modify this recognition by component theory by a little bit because people
will recognize objects more quickly from a standard view point what is the standard view point,
it is a canonical view point okay rather than a much different or a non canonical view point. Now
a modification of this approach basically named as the viewer centered approach this approach
by the way recognition of components in the standard form is a recognition is the object centered
approach.
But say for example if you are a person who is moving around the room and having different
views of these objects you would have to have what is called a viewer centered approach. The
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viewer centered approach basically proposes that we store a small number of 3d objects as
features or as components rather than just one view. So we will just store small number of views
we will see what are the three or four views of a cup I can have you store each of these to your
four views and you kind of develop a componential analysis of how these three or four views
will be made.
And that will lead to understanding these components okay. So yes and when they when you
come across such an object you will mentally rotate the image of the object until it matches one
of the views that is already stored and in the memory and then say for example by a combination
of a top-down and a bottom-up approach you will recognize that particular object. We cannot
talk about as you know it is a good point to talk about top-down influences now top-down
influences emphasize how a person’s concepts and higher level mental processes will influence
object recognition.
More specifically how a person is expectations and memory may help you in recognizing these
objects. So we can expect certain shapes to be found in certain locations and you can expect to
encounter those shapes because of past experiences say for example if you are looking you know
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at your study desk you will expect to find a particular say for example notebook there or maybe a
pen there. Suppose I bring a particular object and keep it may be I bring a cylinder you know and
keep it if you touch that cylinder if there is no light you are not really looking at it if you touch
this a little more often than not you will expect it to be a pen maybe it is not, maybe it is a pipe
for that matter.
So these kind of expectations kind of you know help us fill the gaps in our sensory input an
example could be something like this. You see you can probably read this the man ran but you
see both the A's have the top part cut so it is technically perceptually not an A but you will see
say for example in the first case you read it as H in the second and the third case you know that
this is a okay.
Even though it is exactly matching you know the H in the first word so you know what kind of
thing to expect where and that is how the top-down influence will modulate your sensory
experience and help you generate a perceptual representation something like this.
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You know there is something figure which I message which I found floating on the Internet a lot
of Facebook memes about this and it says that you can read this. Now you can see say for
example the first letter is basically replaced by a number but that number perceptually resembles
the letter it was supposed to if you read this is the first word this is this the seven basically
resembles the T and the five resembles the S.
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So you can still understand it is this and say for example you talk about message the second word
E resembles S and 3resembles E and five resembles s so you can still make out that it is a
message okay. Now let us move to a special case of object recognition let us talk about face
recognition. Now according to psychologists most people perceive faces in a slightly different
fashion than they perceive other stimuli and they say that face perception is somehow really
special.
There is a lot of research into face perception and it all of it suggests that faces are slightly
special stimuli as compared to other objects in the world. Young infants track the movements of
a photograph human face much more than other similar simile say for example it shows that you
know faces are socially or in some sense important to even the young infants. You know we are
evolutionally probably you know wired to treat the faces as a slightly special stimuli and it
makes sense because they say for example men being or humans being social animals this aspect
of you know recognizing a face is a socially important skill also aspects of recognizing the
emotions of a face is also socially important. Suppose you are looking at the face of an individual
and he suddenly shoots you so how will that be understood? If you're not recognizing the face of
the individual that this individual is angry and you know might act aggressively if you are not
really already on your feet you will you know you will pay a huge cost?
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So in that sense you can understand that faces area socially important stimulus they are special
classes’ stimuli. A lot of research really talks about that say for example Tanaka and Farah in
1993found that people were significantly more accurate in recognizing facial features when they
appeared within the context of a whole face rather than in isolation. So you have to really look at
the whole face you are not tuned to recognizing features of faces without the whole faces. Again
something that probably is not true.
If you are talking about objects and features okay in contrast yeah that is the contrast I was
talking about even judge houses they were just as accurate in recognizing isolated houses or an
isolated house feature say for example a door or a window or a gate something like that. This
shows that we recognize faces on a holistic basis we kind of have a holistic or overall
understanding of what a face should look like what are the features that holistically this
particular object should have.
And that is how we kind of you know this organization of the eyes and the nose and the mouth
and the ears is what we kind of look at as a face okay so it is kind of in that sense slightly
difficult if the eyes are presented separately or if the nose is presented separately it will take
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slightly more time for you to recognize that. This makes sense because face perception has a
special status given the importance of our social interactions something I was already talking
about. There's also a lot of neuroscience research on face recognition McNeill and Warrington.
They studied the professional who had lost his ability to recognize the human faces after he
experienced several strokes. This patient at a later point changed his career started to raise sheep
but surprisingly it was found that he could recognize many of the sheep faces though he could
still not recognize human faces. Now this special condition was diagnosed and later termed a
sprosopagnosia that is a condition in which people cannot recognize human faces visually though
they can perceive other objects relatively.
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Normally so it again is a clue to how important recognition of faces is for us as humans. The
location in the brain most responsible for face recognition is the temporal cortex at the side of the
brain generally the right side specifically the infero temporal cortex so the area under their
temporal cortex in the lower portion that is you know what is implicated it has also been shown
that certain cells in the infero temporal cortex respond especially vigorously.
When encountered with faces so this is the area which kind of lights up when you are you know
presented with a particular face. Also it has been reported in a lot of FMRI I said is that the brain
responds much more quickly to faces present in the upright condition than to face is presented in
the inverted position because the configuration would change actually so then you would
probably have to apply a feature analysis or a recognition by components kind of approach to see
what faces if it is automatically.
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If it is in the canonical position you will probably gain more information out of it much more
quickly. So this is the representation this is the yellow region is basically called the Fusiform
Gyrus this is the region which is actually responsible for us to recognize faces. Now this was all
about object recognition.
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Let us try and sum up we have talked about object recognition we saw that object dimension can
be achieved by a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches, we also saw that
perception of faces is a special case of object recognition because faces carry much more
information in social salience as compared to some of the other objects that we interact with
thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
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Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Lecture: 22
Perception & Action
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the course basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur.
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Today we will be talking about the link between perception and action. You have seen till now
that we have studied visual perception in a lot of detail. We have seen different aspects of
perception the theoretical issues and we have also seen in one of the most recent lectures about
how visual perception helps us recognize and interact with objects in the environment in the real
world. We are trying to now go towards the position where we try and say that perception is not
really a passive process perception is almost an active process and basically it changes the way
we interact with the environment.
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And that is basically the approach what JJ Gibson took if you remember that we talked about the
ecological approach to perception and that ecological approach to perception was basically about
the fact that perception is not a passive process perception is about interacting with the
environment and the influence of perception and action is something that is of interest to people
who study perception. Now the theoretical background as I said is of JJ Gibson's ecological
approach.
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To perception, he believed that perceptions should be studied as people move through the
environment and interact with it. So his idea was that perception is not really a static thing,
you're not sitting or standing at somewhere in a stationary manner and then looking and
interacting and then looking at the environment around you. You are more often than not moving
around in the environment, you are changing your position with respect you're changing your
head position you're changing your body position and with that change with that aspect of
dynamicity the perception that you are receiving the sensory input that you receiving is also
changing accordingly.
So that is a brief background with which JJ Gibson's approach to perception was stanced and we
have studied that in enough detail, just to add to whatever we know already or this to remind you
I just say that the ecological approach to perception is basically focus itself on moving observers.
So if it is designed in such a way that it is about not stationary observers and how they look at
the environment but moving observers and how that movement information influences their
perception of the environment.
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This was basically a very important concept in Gibson’s approach to perception was the concept
of optic flow. If you remember optic flow is basically the information about our movements in
the environment and the aspects in the environment say for example if you remember I talked
about the moving train example and how a driver looks out of the train and he sees cows grazing
in the field how the movement of the train affects the perception of those cows which are grazing
next to you know the train in the field.
So those kind of things about direction of movement, speed of movement relative distance
between the two moving objects these kinds of things figured as very prominent you know
sources of information in Gibson's approach to perception and that is what we will be building
upon in today's lecture in trying to make a link between perception and action.
Optic flow basically is supposed to be rather fast near the observer who is moving and it
becomes slower as you move further away from this observer. So this difference in the intensity
of optic flow is referred to as gradient of flow this is a very important source of information the
other important source of information is basically the focus of expansion if you remember I took
an example of a person you know standing in front of the train and it is moving with the
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direction of the Train in that sense there will be a small point in much further away from the
moving train in the direction that the Train is moving and that point will be the point which is
called the focus of expansion.
So it seems that the flow is emanating from that point but that point itself has no optic flow at all.
So that is the point where there is no optic flow but all the optic flow is emanating from that
direction that point is called the focus of expansion. I have a figure here to show you that the
figure is from Goldstein's book of sensation in perception.
You can see that if you are moving in a particular direction you can see that you know at that
point in the center there is no flow but flow is actually emanating from that direction, so this is
what the focus of expansion is.
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Here in you can see the focus of expansion or in the reference to a plane which is landing on an
airstrip and you can see again the center point where there is no flow present at all but all the
flow is emanating from the sides of those points.
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Now another important aspect of the ecological approach to perception is the aspect of invariant
information. Now what is the invariant information? Invariant information is that information
which does not change with respect to the movement of the observer, till now we have been
talking about that the observer moves around in the environment this causes changes in the
perception and that information that changes in perception in terms of optic flow or focus of
expansion gives some very useful information to the observer in order to continue his movement
or in order to continue his exploration of the environment.
There is however part of information that does not really change whether the observer is moving
or not and this information is referred to as invariant information. As soon as the observer stops
moving around the environment there is no flow information there because flow is continuing to
movement the focus of expansion also shifts as soon as the observer changes its direction or it
stops moving.
So these are the two sources of information you will see that the observers use in order to interact
successfully with the environment. So how does this work if you are moving in the environment.
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I will be creating something called self-produced information my movement in the environment

will create some perceptual information that will help me continue moving and interacting with
the environment. If a person is moving along the street you know say for example imagine
yourself driving a car in a particular busy street while you are driving the relative distance the
direction of your movement and the speed with which you are moving will change a lot of
information about say for example if there is a food stall somewhere nearby to your left or to
right if you are you know the kind of turn that you are going to approach or with respect you the
relative size of the people that are in a particular distance those kind of informations do change
when you are moving okay. So what you are doing here is you are actually producing some
information some new information that is being used by the perceptual system.
But this new information is actually being produced by your movement itself and as you change
the direction of movement speed of movement say for example whether you are stopping
altogether at all now these kinds of things will basically you know be useful for you to plan how
you are going to move further. So this information is very important here and you can see a
demonstration again from Goldstein’s sensation perception.
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The movement of the car creates flow information the flow information provides information for
guiding further movement. If say for example you are moving very fast towards a particular
obstacle or say for example there is a person crossing the road and you also immediately turned
on the road you will see that the size of the person on your retina simply kind of is changing with
the distance it is changing very fast with respect to whatever speed with you which you are
approaching that person.
So these are some of the kinds of information that people have reasoned are dynamically and
almost always used by our perceptual systems you can see that in that sense perception is not
really a static process it is something that is changing every moment and whatever new
information is produced by this change that is happening every moment also is already taken into
account before you plan your next movement, also Gibsong said in one of the things that the
senses working in communion with each other.
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The senses work together to create this new perceptual information that you would use in order
to move successfully imagine an animal who is hunting in the wild he is basically moving he is
also using the sense of smell he is also using his sense of hearing all of that to plan his movement
in order to you know chase the prey successfully. Gibson actually produced that the five senses
of vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch they work together to produce information that actually
facilitate moving around and interacting with the environment.
Another nice example that one can take say for example our ability to stand upright and maintain
balance of posture is basically dependent on you know these organs in the ear called the
vestibular canals in the inner ear we will talk about these when we are talking about auditory
perception, these vestibular canals are is a kind of a canal like structure therein some liquid is
filled the position of this liquid tells you that the head is in balance or it is not in balance.
So this whole ability off you know standing is not really only dependent on your touch or on
your vision. It is also dependent on something that is going on in your ears. So in that sense you
can already say that we are using multiple sources of information to maintain our balance. A
very interesting experiment on this account was done by Lee and Aronson in 1974 they actually
designed what was called the swinging room experiment. So they had a false room where in
toddlers and young very young children could stand and the walls of this room could sometimes
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move closer to these people or sometimes move further away or sometimes the room would
swing and this kind of created a perception of movement.
And what was observed that the sight of vision is actually found to be the more powerful source
of information in order to maintain somebody's balance and the sight of and this information
from vision that is getting that the people who are getting can also sometimes override other
traditional sources of information like the vestibular canal.
So what was happening was that when people saw the walls coming toward themselves they
tried to move backwards or they try to compensate for that movement of the wall even though
there was no signal that they are going off balance from the vestibular canal system. So in that
sense it was adequately established that you know the sense of vision has to do a lot with
function like standing upright and you know standing straight and maintaining a particular body
balance.
Now we will take up some examples which can be examples about how people you know how
people's perceptual systems help them interact with the environment around them we will take
some naturalistic settings say for example the setting of driving a car.
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So Land and Lee in 1994 they wanted to study the information that people use while they are
driving a car. So what they did is they fitted a car with devices to record the angle of the steering
wheel and also the speed and they also measured where this driver was looking while you know
he is driving, so with the help of a video eye tracker they actually fitted a particular car with all
of these gadgets and asked somebody to drive this car.
And when they did this experiment when some trials were done they actually found out that
although drivers do look straight ahead while driving they are not really looking at the exact spot
of the focus of expansion that you know Gibson kind of talks about they are looking not directly
at the efoi they are looking at the point just adjacent to the efoi still in front of the car.
So in that sense they are not really using optic flow information per say but they are using some
information from the outside environment to drive the car better.
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Let us say. Here you can see one of the demonstrations from Goldstein, so they are not really see
looking at the focus of expansion they are looking at a point adjacent to the focus of expansion.
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Now Land and Lee also wanted to study where drivers were looking while they were navigating
a curved road. So this was important because when you are actually navigating a curved road the
focus of expansion is continuously changing. So it has to be directly right in front of you but as
you are changing your direction while navigating a curve the focus of expansion is also changing
and so flow information is also changing.
So Land and Lee were interested in this and they found out that when going around the curve the
drivers are not really looking directly at the road but they are actually focusing at the tangent
point on the curve of the road. So they basically want to you know stay on the road by looking at
the tangent point and not really directly at the road okay. So as the drivers were not really
looking directly at the focus of expansion Land and Lee suggested that drivers are using
information in addition to the optic flow information that Gibson had specified in order to
determine the direction of movement.
And this information could be anything you know something very simple like for example the
position of the car with respect to the lines on the center or the side of the road. So this is again
you know something that tells us that you know people are actively engaging with the
environment in order to successfully move around and navigate with the environment. They are
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taking up new sources of information in addition to obviously the traditional source of
information in order to you know maintain this dynamicity of interaction.
So here you can see that you know people are actually looking at the tangent point of the curve
and not really the, you know the line at the center of the road okay.
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Now another aspect that we use perception in is in walking. So people walk and they navigate
the environment successfully what is the kind of information they might be using here, so it is
believed that they are probably following something called a visual Direction strategy. So what
they are doing is they are keeping their bodies pointed towards a particular target see for example
if you are walking on a straight road. You might you know kind of position your body such that
end of the road is your target and you are kind of walking in reference to that target.
So if they would go off in direction say for example sometimes while walking if you are talking
to somebody or if you are kind of thinking about something else or maybe texting nowadays you
might kind of go off direction and so the target would shift to the left or the right of where it was
originally and this information helps us to do what is called course correction.
So we think, now we have got off road we have to come back and then you know maintain that
position with respect to the target that we have set up, so Loomis and colleagues they basically
wanted to test in a you know series of experiments and they demonstrated this by making
participants blind walk towards a target that people are able to walk directly towards a target and
they kind of reach very close towards it.
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So for example if you kind of tell somebody that they are this is your target and you have to walk
towards this target and then kind of blindfold them they will still reach rather close very close to
the target without even using the visual information because they have oriented themselves
related to that, so here you can see a demonstration from Goldstein's book.
That the target is this square green square in the top and the person starts at a point slightly
diagonal to that and they start walking towards points one or two and they can turn towards the
right at either 0.1 or 0.2 and the kind of you will see in both those in places land somewhere very
close to the target. They are not really off target by a lot. So these set of experiments actually
demonstrated that people can orient themselves while walking to a particular target and then
might not be actively using a lot of visual information. They might kind of orient themselves in a
different way.
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Way finding is also a very important somebody tells you that you know you have to reach there
and meet me at this particular point and if you do not know the place you will be navigating for a
long distance towards the object that is not already in sight. The last example was when you
already have an object insight and you are kind of preparing to walk towards it the other thing
could be that you do not have an object in sight and you are kind of navigating making mental
maps and moving towards that.
Way finding in that sense is a slightly complex process that involves perception of objects in the
environment remembering those objects and their place in the overall scene and also judging
when what direction to turn. Say for example if you are remembering you know how to reach
you know a particular theatre or a particular coffee place from your home and it is a place you
are where you going for the first time you might want to remember what all shops that you found
in between if there was a park or if there is an important building what we do generally is we
kind of tell people that that was that you know there you will find this building and you can take
a left or right from that particular building and then reach this place.
If you are going alone as well you might use these strategies almost subconsciously but
automatically that you remember that these are the pointers in the way of you know my target
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and I will remember them so that next time I can orient myself according to these points. An
important aspect of such navigation is these points and these points are referred to as land marks.
So we remember these landmarks say for example from this particular building you have to turn
you know turn left or turn right.
So that particular building becomes a source of important information. It is associated with that
you have to turn left or right during while you are reaching a particular target. So these are the
objects on the route that serve as cues to indicate where you have to turn where you have to get
off the road.
So Sahar Hamid & colleagues in 2001 they studied the use of landmarks while participants as
they were negotiating a maze-like environment presented on a computer screen and while
pictures of common objects were used as landmarks. So they are actually in a simulated maze
they basically taught to reach from point A to point B in a maze and at different points in the
maze they use these pictures of common objects as landmarks so they will know that from this
object I have to take a left to reach the end of the maze.
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So there are two faces participants were first trained to go through the maze and they were told to
travel from point A to point B in the maze there in the second part they also monitored eye
movement using what is called a head-mounted eye tracker.
So I tracking measures indicated that participants spent more time looking at informative
landmarks than uninformative landmarks, so those landmarks that actually provided useful
information about turning and reaching the target successfully were looked at much more they
were given much more importance. In a similar study by Schinazi and Epstein it was shown that
when subjects had learned a particular route they were more likely to recognize pictures of
buildings at those decision points.
So you might say for example remember that is a particular processing from which I have to take
a turn. So you will remember how that crossing looks what are the important shops or posters on
that crossing similarly the participants in this study also remembered pictures of landmarks at
those particular pictures at those particular landmarks that were informative for reaching towards
a particular target.
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Also when these participants were taken in an fMRI scanner. It was found that the brain
responses in the navigational areas of the brain which are like the parahippocampal gyrus
hippocampal gyrus and the retrospelenial cortex the responses of these particular brain areas was
much larger to these informative landmarks than to non-informative landmarks or non-decision
building points. So this kind of tells us that the brain is constantly keeping track of wherein we
are interacting with the environment what are the sources of important information, so that it can
plan and it can be prepared for action for navigation for moving around the environment, you are
seeing that you know we are not just following instructions even if somebody gives you a map
and says that you reach from point A to point B and you are kind of you know follow these steps
you are obviously all the time gaining much more information by really taking the car or your
cycle or walking around that road. Here is this example of the brain.
You can see the hippocampus, the Para hippocampal gyrus and the retro spinal cortex
711
Now let us talk about interacting with objects now we have seen how movement actually within
an environment can facilitate or influence perception. One of the most salient movements we
actually perform is when we reach out and grasp objects you know say for example if there is a
cup here reach out to the cup and I pick up the cup to drink from it an important aspect about
reaching and grasping behavior is this concept of affordances, again you might want to revise the
lecture on Gibson's ecological approach of perception because that is what Gibson had already
talked about.
712
So what are affordances? Affordances are basically things that a particular object renders or
offers you. Say for example if there is a ball which does not have any edges you might want to
pick the ball itself if there is an object which has a handle you might want to pick that object by
that handle or say for example if there is an object which is which has a plain surface and fall
sitting you might sit on that as well. You will see people doing this kind of behavior all around
yourself. Why are they able to do that because they understand that this object affords this kind
of actions.
A lot of times you see that if you do not find a hammer or if you do not find screwdriver you
might use unconventional tools to hammer in a nail or to open and try and try and open a
particular screw. So why are we able to do this because we understand that objects have
particular afford that objects can be interacted with in a particular manner and in that sense we
are kind of always prepared to use this information in our interaction with these objects.
713
So this basically could imply the perception of an object then not only includes the information
about physical properties such as shape size color and orientation it also might enable the person
to recognize the object but our perception also includes information about how this object has to
be interacted with or how this object has to be used. One of the very interesting studies about
affordances was done by Glenn Humphries and Jayne Riddick and they basically was studying a
patient named MP and this patient MP had a damage to his temporal lobe and this damage to the
temporal lobe had led to his you know led to an impaired ability to remember you know to name
objects.
So this person would not be able to name an object if you show him okay, so MP was during this
course of this study it was given two kinds of cues.
714
One of the cues will be the name of the object and the other cue would be the use of the objects
say for example I could tell him that this is a cup or I could tell him that this is an object that I
can drink from okay and then what will be done is he will be shown ten or fifteen different kinds
of objects and it was told to press the key as soon as one of the already shown object is
presented. It was found that MP identified the object more accurately and more rapidly when the
cue given would refer to the function of the object.
So it seems that they basically concluded that MP was using the information about use of that
particular object or affordance of that particular object in recognizing the object and not really
just the name of the object. It tells you something important, it tells you that you know there are
these very specific ways in which we interact with these objects in these specific ways help us
store these objects in a much better way in our you know semantic memory in our knowledge of
the world you know so to speak.
715
Now how is I mean we will try and link this to how the brain helps us in inter acting with the
environment and this basically was explored in a very interesting study by Ungerleider and
Mishkin what they did was they wanted to study a monkey's ability to identify a particular object
or to determine a particular objects location. So Ungerleider and Mishkin presented a monkey
with the two tasks one of the tasks was an object discrimination problem and the other tasks was
a landmark discrimination problem.
716
In the object discrimination problem the monkey was shown one object say for example a
rectangular solid and then was presented with two choice tasks. So he was represented with the
object that the monkey has already been shown and the another stimulus that he had to
differentiate this object from. The monkey was supposed to push aside the target object and then
he would get some reward that was placed under this target object so you can see the setup is
something like this so the target object could be rectangle and stimulus object could be the
triangle and as a monkey successfully you know moves aside that the rectangle which is a target
object then the monkey will you know get the food as the reward.
The other kind of task was that the monkeys basically had to move the food well cover that is
closer to a tall cylinder. So you will see here there are two kinds of covers one of them contains
food but the monkey has to identify the cover that is closer to the cylinder because that is where
the food will be filled in. So the monkey has to what basically do is there determine the position
of the object was the identity of the two objects is pretty much the same.
717
Behavioral experiments with these monkeys basically showed that object discrimination problem
was particularly difficult for monkeys. The second so I will just kind of go back and I will tell
you that the second phase of this experiment was the ablation of the monkey's brain and the
ablation of monkey's brain was basically in one set of the monkeys the temporal lobes were
removed in other side of the monkeys the parietal lobes were removed. So this was the second
important part and then when the behavioral testing was done it was found that object
discrimination became an important became a very difficult task for monkeys who had got their
temporal removed.
Now on the basis of this result it was implied that the pathway that reaches the temporal lobes is
basically the pathway that is responsible for object identification. So the temporal lobes in that
sense can be implicated in identification of objects. Ungerleider and Mishkin basically called this
pathway starting from the striate cortex in the occipital lobes as the ‘what pathway’.
718
Monkeys who had their parietal lobes removed had difficulty solving the landmark
discrimination problem now this indicated that the pathway leading to the parietal lobe is
responsible for determining an object's location Ungerleide and Mishkin calls this pathway
leading from the striate cortex to the parietal lobe as the where pathway. So this is the pathway
which is telling them the spatial location of objects the other pathway what pathway is basically
telling them what these objects are. Remember that you will need both these kinds of information
if you really want to navigate successfully with the environment.
719
Here you can see the dorsal and the ventral pathway is the where path way is the dorsal pathway
and the ventral pathway is the what pathway okay.
720
So in a simple task of actually reaching and grasping a cup one could assume that the what
pathway would be involved in the initial perception of the cup and the where pathway will tell
you that where the cup is and how much my hand should move away from my body in order to
be able to grasp the cup and drink from it. So in that sense we were kind of using information
from both these sources and we are kind of integrating this information in order to successfully
interact with this object that is the cup on my coffee table. Now we kind of try and summarize
whatever we have learned with respect to these approaches. So we have seen that Gibson's
approach was basically pushing for perception for action.
721
While David Marr was more concerned about perception for recognition. Both of these
approaches are you know more or less correct in their own way but you have to try and integrate
both of these approaches the findings and the perspectives from both of these approaches to
understand perception as a whole cognitive function it seems that in some way the idea of both
these ventral and dorsal pathways can echo the similar idea so the dorsal pathway is the
perception for action kind of pathway and while the ventral pathway is the perception for
recognition kind of pathway that David Marr was talking about.
So while these two streams may seem slight different from each other and independent from
each other I am sure you would appreciate that if you have only one of these information’s you
will not be able to successfully interact with the environment so we necessarily and you know
definitely needs information from both of these pathways in order to understand and navigate the
environment successfully.
722
So Gibson’s approach of affordance emphasizes that we might need to detect what things are for
rather than what they actually are. So affordances are linked to actions and to the dorsal stream
basically that appears to be ideally suited for providing that kind of information. Also if you
remember we saw that Gibson said that there is no rule of memory in perception and I such the
dorsal stream anyways has very little storage and so this also confirms that the dorsal pathway
works pretty much as Gibson was assuming.
723
In contrast if you see the ventral stream appears to be ideally suited to the role of recognizing
objects so it is specialized in analyzing the kind of fine detail that David Marr was concerned
with the textures and the gradients in those kind of things and this information will be used in
discriminating between objects. Also as it seems that you know we draw on our existing
knowledge to understand and identify objects and so the dorsal the ventral seemed basically kind
of is drawing from that source as well. It is also the ventral stream is also slower than the dorsal
stream which is conducive to the fact that the immediate action is required.
So if I say for example throw a you know chalk towards somebody who is not really looking at
me the first thing that you will do is you kind of grasp the chalk irrespective of recognizing
whether it is a chalk or you know a pointed object or something very light okay because that
information will automatically require immediate action and in that sense the dorsal pathway will
be the one which will be required to act.
So to address these different kind of concerns and these two slightly you know different sources
of information Norman and Neisser in 1994 suggested what is called the dual processing
approach.
724
So they said there appears to be evidence that ventral stream is primarily concerned with
recognition while the dorsal stream is primarily concerned with visual behavior. The ventral
stream as it said and as it is being found has been found to be generally better at processing fine
detail while the dorsal system is more suited to processing motion. The ventral system is
knowledgebase and uses stored representations from memory while the dorsal system appears we
have only very short-term storage that is required to act and finish a particular task.
725
Also the dorsal system receives information much faster than the ventral system and we are
much more conscious of the ventral than the dorsal system. Again if you take the example of
somebody throwing a chalk at you or something that you have not seen, you will see that the
ventral system does not require that kind of processing. It first needs to take evasive action. So it
has been suggested on the basis of these things that the ventral stream recognizes objects and it is
object centered in its approach while the dorsal stream is action oriented and it receives a viewer
centered frame of reference okay.
726
So a moving slightly further so Norman kind of tries and you know defines the two as synergistic
systems, basically working in an interconnected rather than an independent fashion. Busted and
Carlton they provided an illustration of the interaction between ventral and dorsal streams when
people are learning you know a new tasks. So the work of Fitz shows that in the early stages of
learning a skill when you are not really aware of what has to happen say for example if you are
just learning driving of a car you will just first get you know very familiar with the consoles of
the car, the gear and you know other pedals and those kinds of things in that part you are kind of
you know using the Ventral system a bit more.
Once the skill is formalized, once you get you know acquainted with the particular skill then
what you might shift onto is a highly practiced skill wherein the dorsal stream might be more
useful. So we are kind of just doing things for action say for example after you have learned
driving a car you know for a particular amount of time then you are not really always looking at
what the gear is and where the pedals are you already know that they are there and they have to
serve this function and whenever you need to change the gears your hand automatically goes
onto the gears and you can change the gears in order to move forward okay.
727
So this is the end of this link between perception and action we tried and looked at the different
aspects of how our movement in the environment you know facilitates or helps out our action
and also how say for example information from the objects can help us a modulate or influence
our interaction with the environment, thank you.
Acknowledgement
Ministry of Human Resource & Development
Prof. Satyaki Roy

Co-ordinator, NPTEL IIT Kanpur
NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
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Shikha Gupta
K. K. Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
728
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Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia
©copyright reserved
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Course Title
Lecture- 23
Audiotory Preception
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the course basic cognitive processes I am dr. Ark Verma from IIT Kanpur.
Today I will be talking about auditory perception.
730
You have seen that we have talked about visual perception till now, we have talked about the
different aspects of visual perception you talked about how visual perception can be used to
recognize objects how it can be used to interact with the environment and we have seen the
different modalities and theories about visual perception itself. Today I will begin talking about
auditory perception.
Now auditory perception is basically hearing okay, and hearing also begins with transduction as
we saw in the case of visual perception any sensory input that is coming via the senses to the
brain that needs to be converted into a representation which the brain can handle and that process
is called transduction as far as auditory perception or hearing is concerned sound waves are
collected by our ears and they are converted into neural impulses which are then sent to the
brain.
731
Where they are integrated with the past experiences, whatever knowledge about those kind of
sounds you might already have and then that information is used to recognize or understand
whatever that sound is supposed to convey. Now the human here is the sensitive to a wide range
of sounds ranging from a faint, click of a clock to the roar of a rock band but the human ear is
most especially sensitive to the range of frequencies which coincides with the range of
frequencies of human voice and that you can understand is the evolutionary advantage.
Because the most important stimulus we will be hearing in your life time is people talking and in
that sense you will use that to understand most of what their environmental input will be about.
732
Now the ear it is basically an organ that it detects sound waves much as the eyes detect light
energy, now sound are generated by vibrating objects say for example if somebody is talking
their vocal cords are vibrating or say for example if you pluck a string of the guitar produces the
sound that you hear coming out of the guitar. Now this vibration basically causes these air
molecules to bump into each other and produce what are called sound waves and these sound
waves travel from the source of the vibration in peaks and valleys like ripples and they expand
outward.
You can actually make this look like, say for example if you are putting a stone in a pond of
water the stone where the stone has felt will create those kind of ripples and it will be expanding
outwards that is much similar to how sound waves really propagate. Now these sound waves
need to be carried within a medium such as an air or water or a metal and it is the changes in the
pressure associated with these mediums that your ear is able to detect.
733
Now let us talk a little bit about the physical characteristics of sound. We detect both the
wavelengths and the amplitude of these sound waves, now the wavelength of a sound wave also
known as frequency is basically measured in the number of ways that are generated per second.
This wavelength also determines what is called the pitch of the sound or the shrillness of the
sound that is the perceived frequency of the sound.
The longest sound waves will have lower frequency and will produce a lower pitch whereas
shorter sound waves will produce higher frequency and have a higher pitch. Now the amplitude
or the height of this sound wave will determine how much energy it contains and in that sense it
is perceived by you as the loudness of that particular sound.
734
In that sense larger waves are perceived as louder waves, now loudness is your experience of
whatever sound you are hearing and this experience is quantified in a unit known as decibel, 0
decibel basically is about the absolute threshold of human hearing so anything below 0 decibel
you cannot hear anything above 0 is when you start hearing. Say for example, a typical
conversation might be around 60 decibels the sound of your breeding is around 10 decibels and
so on and so forth.
It basically increases in10 folds; you have to multiply the quantity with 10 every time you are
kind of moving up by 10 decibels.
735
Now let us concentrate a little bit about the structure of the ear. So audition or hearing begins in
the external ear or the pinner which is the visible part of the ear. Now you can see that this
external ear is shaped like a funnel and this funnel is used to draw the sound waves from the
outside into what is called the auditory canal. Now this auditory canal at the end of this is a
sensitive membrane called the tympanic membrane or the eardrum which receives these
vibrations from the external environment.
Now these vibrations when received at the tympanic membrane are conveyed through the middle
ear through three tiny bones which are called ossicles and these bones are namely the hammer
the anvil and the stirrup. These convey these vibrations to the snail type structure you can see
which is the cochlea which is the innermost ear.
736
The vibrations cause this oval window of the membrane of the cochlea to vibrate and which
deserves the fluid collection inside the cochlea. The movements of the fluid inside the cochlea
bends what are called hair cells or the inner ear, the movement of these hair cells trigger neural
impulses so here you can see how the vibration is being converted into neural impulses and then
they will be connected conveyed to the auditory nerve which is connected to the brain which will
do the further processing of whatever sound that is received.
This cochlea contains around 16,000 hair cells each of which holds a bundle of fibers called cilia
on its tip and the cilia are so sensitive that they can detect a movement that even pushes them as
slightly as by the width of an atoms. Even if you push these cilia a little bit as much as the width
of an atom they will be able to detect it and respond to that. Now the loudness of the sound
basically is directly determined.
737
By the number of hair cells or number of cilia that will be vibrating and these there are two
different mechanisms that have been proposed to detect pitch. One theory or the frequency
theory proposes that whatever the pitch of the sound wave a proportional number of you know a
proportional corresponding frequency will be sent to the auditory nerve, say for example if a tone
measuring 600 Hz will be transduced it will be transduced into 600 nerve impulses per second.
But this is slightly impractical because say for example if you have a sound which is of much
higher pitch then the celia will not be able to convert those kind of neural impulses. So
alternative solution is proposed that maybe to reach the necessary speed neurons will work
together in some sort of volley system in which different neurons fire in sequence allowing us
then to detect sounds up to 4,000 Hz. So there might be you know sections of neurons vibrating
at one point and in the other section and so on and so forth.
738
The place theory of hearing the one which I was referring to proposes that different areas of the
cochlea respond to different kinds of frequency. This might be informative as higher tones will
excite areas closest to the opening of the cochlea which is near the oval window whereas lower
tones will excite the areas near the narrow tip of the cochlea which is at the opposite end. Pitch
can therefore be determined in part by the area of the cochlea which is firing most frequently.
Another important fact about the placement of the ear around our head is also important to look
at.
739
So you know that the ears are placed on either side of the head and they kind of give us the
benefit of stereophonic hearing which is that you can locate the sound in three dimensional
space, if a sound occurs on your left side the left ear receives the stimulation earlier and you will
respond by the left ear if the sound happens on the right side you will be able to detect this from
the right ear and you respond accordingly.
Now although the distance between the two ears is around six inches and sound travels you know
around at 750 miles per hour these time and intensity differences of various kinds of sounds are
easily detected. When a sound is equidistant from both here say for example if it is in the front or
in the back and the distance is equal from both ears then we have slightly more difficulty in
pinpointing the exact location of the sound and then we might maneuver our ear position in order
to get the best hint of whatever the sound is. You might have seen there are certain animals that
do that.
740
Now the most important part of auditory perception as I said earlier also is listening to speech, so
we will spend some time here talking about speech perception as a special case of auditory
perception. Now what happens during speech perception is that the auditory system needs to
analyze the sound vibrations which are generated by somebody's conversation okay.
741
So there are few characteristics of speech perception that have been proposed by Macklin say for
example when you start talking about speech sounds the fundamental unit of speech sounds
proposed by linguists and psycholinguists is the term called phoneme and the phoneme refers to
any basic sound. So say for example if you are listening to a language you can reduce the entire
language into a set of very basic sounds called phonemes.
Say for example if I am talking about Hindi any sounds like pa, bha ba ma those kind of things if
I am talking about English then the same kind of sounds like ABC those things can be referred to
as phonemes. Now another important characteristic is when you listening to a speech when you
are listening somebody conversing listeners will need to impose word boundaries. Because
otherwise everything will be jumbled up and you are not really able to make sense of what
message is being conveyed.
It becomes much easier when you are reading something on a text and then there are spaces
which tell you that the word boundary ends here and the other word begins somewhere there but
with the spoken signal but with the speech you have to do it slightly you know by yourself and
that is something which is an important feet that is achieved by you. If you kind of want to
742
appreciate how difficult or easy it is you might want to listen to a movie or a song in a language
that you do not know at all and then you see how difficult it is to really generate word
boundaries.
Another thing is that the pronunciation of these phonemes or these basic sounds in speech is a
varies extremity from speaker to speaker and also within speaker from situation to situation.
Now an important task of the auditory perception system is actually to you know understand this
variation and still not produce too many different results for the same set of sounds. We will talk
about this in more detail further; context also allows listeners to fill in missing sound.
Say for example if you are talking to somebody on a disturbed phone line a lot of times you will
see that part of the signal will be missing but you will still be able to understand what is being
said by the other speaker. This helps you this means you are being able to do this because you
have the context information of what the topic is who is talking and all those kinds of
information which basically form the context and you use that context to fill up the missing bits
of information and still understand the conversation very well.
743
The final thing that might be very important from a listener’s point of view when talking about
speech perception is also the use is the use of visual cues. You are not only listening to
somebody you know from the audition perspective you are also looking at somebody most of the
time when they are talking you are also you are you know and you have the input from the lip
movement from the gestures and those kinds of things and these kind of information these multi-
sensory multimodal information also helps you solve this puzzle of speech perception.
We will talk about speech perception in more detail now.
Because we are going to talk about what is called theories of speech perception. Now there are
two classes of theories in a speech perception of three classes of theories in speech perception the
more prominent of them is called the special mechanism approach or also the motor theory of a
speech perception as it is referred to and it says that speech perception is accomplished by what
is called a naturally selected module. They say that speech perception that this special speech
perception module monitors whatever incoming acoustic stimulation that you are receiving and
then it reacts strongly whenever the incoming signal contains characteristic patterns related to
speech.
744
And when the speech module recognizes that an incoming stimulus contains speech contains a
speech signal then what it does is it preempts or disallows the other auditory processing systems
to act on this particular speech signal, because the processing that is required to understand
speech is slightly different from the processing that is required to understand other kind of non
speech sounds.
Now and this is what it is so the non-speech sounds basically are analyzed according to basic
properties of frequency, amplitude, timbre and while we are able to perceive the characteristics
of non speech sounds accurately when the speech module latches onto an acrostic stimulus it will
prevent this kind of spectral analysis and it will basically try and understand speech in terms of
whatever prior knowledge in terms of linguistic variables that you have and that is more useful in
understanding speech information.
745
This preemption or this stopping of a general auditory processing on speech signal sometimes
can lead to what is called a duplex perception and the particular experimental scenarios. I want to
describe a very simple very interesting experiment to you guys which was done by Lieberman
and Mattingly in 1989. So what they did was they created artificial speech signals and the speech
signals represented phonemes or sounds like da and gah and basically they differ from each other
in one sense that there is one part of these SP signals which is flat which is not changing.
And the other part of the speech signal referred to as the second formant might either be
increasing or decreasing. So these speech sounds have two parts and I can just show you right
here, so these speech sounds could be something like.
746
A dark would be represented by a flat line and an increasing curve and ga could be represented
by a flat line and a decreasing curve. The flat line was referred to as base and the increasing or
decreasing curves could generally be called transitions. Now what these people did was they
bifurcated the base and the transition and in by use of head phones they presented the base and
transitions separately to two different ears, so what is happening is that in your ear you are still
getting the whole signal but you are getting this in the left ear and this one in the right ear. Now
this creates an interesting scenario and the question that one can ask is.
747
How would people perceive this kind of stimulus, they are still getting the whole stimulus but
they are getting it bifurcated into two ears, now they found that people were perceiving two
different things at the same time at the year that the transition was played into let us say the right
ear here they perceived a high-pitched whistle or a chirp sound but at the same time they also
perceived the original syllable. So they are perceiving this chirp sound as well and this whole
syllable as well.
Now this was interesting and people wanted to understand why this is happening, so Lieberman
and colleagues they argued that the simultaneously perceiving of transition in two ways as a
chirp and as a phoneme it reflects the simultaneous operation of both the speech module and the
general purpose auditory processing mechanism which will analyze speech as a non you know it
will analyze the incoming about sixty minutes as a non-speech stimuli.
748
So what is happening here is this duplex perception is happening because the auditory system
could not treat the transition as base as coming from the same source, so what happens is it starts
to analyze the transition separately using the non you know non speech analysis and it later at the
same time recognizes that no this is part of a larger signal which is the base as well, so what it
happens is it generates two kinds of results one is that this is listened to as a whistle and the other
is that it is listened to as the symphony, now this was interesting.
749
Now another important aspect about this special mechanism theory of perception is also as I said
that it is also the motor theory of perception. Now it says basically that gestures we were talking
about that phoneme is the basic unit of speech perception but they proposed differently they say
that the gestures that are involved in producing the speech sound should be treated as
fundamental units of representation.
So they are saying that if you want to understand a speech sound you want to understand which
vocal gestures produce that sound, now what are these vocal gestures so you can see that when
you are trying to speak you are you know moving your lips, you are moving your tongue, you are
moving your mouth and vocal cords in special ways. All these organs are called articulators and
specific movement patterns in them lead to generation of sounds this is what is called a gestural
score.
750
So this theory is saying is that you know the motor system when you know when it has to
produce any kind of sound it basically creates a particular plan of movement of these things that
this particular part A will vibrate now and part B will move further, so this kind of plan is called
a gestural score and the motor theory speech perception says if you can figure out this gestural
score you can understand what speech is you know whatever speech has been said, you do not
really need to go to the sounds to understand this you just make out what movements are made
and you know that which movement produces what sound and that will help you understand the
sound much better than say for example if you go by the phoneme level of analysis.
751
Now this is what they are saying, say for example I can give you an example the core part of the
gesture to produce either you know di or du if there are two sounds is the same the core sound is
the da sound which is produced when you put your tongue at the back of your teeth. The other
part however your lips move when you are saying di or du is different, so they are saying if you
can get this score part alright you will be able to understand which sound has been produced and
will not be confused by coarticulation effects of the you know the lip movements and those kind
of things.
752
Rather than trying to map acoustic signals directly to phonemes Alvin Lieberman and his
colleagues proposed that we must map acoustic signals to directly to gestures that produce them
as there is a closer relationship between gestures and phonemes. They say the relation between
perception and articulation will be considerably simpler than the relationship between perception
and sound, they further say perceived similarities and differences will correspond more closely to
the articulatory rather than the acoustic similarities.
Say for example the difference is between two acoustic signals will not cause you to perceive
two different phonemes as long as the core you know articulatory gesture is the same.
753
Another aspect of this theory of perception is the concept of categorical perception, now what is
categorical perception categorical perception, categorical perception is that when you are hearing
a wide variety of physically distinct acoustic stimuli you will not treat all of them differently
what you will do is you will say these set of stimuli belong to one category and these other set of
stimuli belong to other category.
For example, you might notice that every vocal tract mine and yours are different from each
other and they produce different kinds of sound waves. So the way I have to say a particular
word let us say pink or blue or black and the way you will say pink or blue or black or the way
somebody else will say pink or blue or black might be very different, but you must notice you
must have noticed that we treat all of these sounds as very similar and we kind of derive the
same meaning sort of these sounds even though the physical or the acoustic signatures might be
drastically different from each other.
Even say for example within the individual if I am say for example sleepy or if I am very tired or
am panting and exhausted the kind of speech signal physically that I will produce will be very
different. But what I do is out of what are phonologism system does is it is kind of blind to these
754
kind of physical differences and it will perceive all of these different kinds of signals as an
instance of one category let us say if I am talking about a sound pink it considers everything else
as you know an instance of the sound P. Now this is interesting and important in the sense that it
helps us understand a wide variety of sounds as one even though the physical signatures might be
slightly different.
Further it may be noticed as I already said that all of our voices are of different qualities than
each other but we again you know categorize speech sound coming from each of us as in one
category, one of the reasons why we are able to do this so easily is that anything that you are
saying say for example in a language called English can be you know broken down into around
40 to 45 phonemes that this language has.
So anything that is said in any way by anyone can again be mapped down to these 40 or 45
phonemes. In addition although the acoustic properties of speech stimuli can vary across a wide
range our perception does not change in these little, little steps okay, so we are so insensitive to
these kinds of variation in the speech signal but if the speech signal now starts changing too
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much then we will kind of you know create different phonemes for them and then we will start
hearing them slightly differently. Let me take an example of something like this.
Now the only difference between the sounds B and the sound P in English is that B is voiced
sound whereas P is not a voice sound, now the details are not really important here you just have
to get the point voice or not voice basically means that even though both of these sounds are
technically called labia close up, labia close up basically means that you use your both the lips to
you know converge and then you block the flow air and then suddenly there is a burst of air.
After this burst of air there is either a gap and then your vocal cord vibrates or not a gap and then
your vocal cord vibrates. When the vocal cord vibrates after a gap this time delay between the
vocal cord vibrating and the air burst happening is called voice onset time. Now as far as B and P
are concerned for the B sound the vocal cords start vibrating while your lips are still closed for
immediately after.
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But for the P sound the vocal cord starts vibrating after a slight delay after a particular voice
onset time, now this is the only difference this voice onset time is the only difference between
the sounds B and P.
This voice onset time is a variable that can take any value whatsoever so it can be called a
continuous variable. Now imagine there is a set of sounds on this variable where in there a
different voice onset times are possible so how we will perceive these different you know sounds
BP and others. If the variables if the sounds B and P differ from each other by at least 20
milliseconds we will listen to them as B and P separately but if the difference is less than 20
milliseconds that is somewhere around 7 milliseconds, 15 milliseconds or something like that
then we perceive them as the same sound.
When we perceive them as the same sound these different, having different acoustic signals they
are called as allophones very similar what happens will experience the unilateral sounds with a
range of short VOTs as B anything smaller you know than let us say 15 milliseconds or anything
longer we can start perceiving this as P. Now here you could see that you know the sound system
or the sound perception system or the auditory perception system is sensitive to differences that
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are less than meaningful that are not really you know that are just variations of different speakers
speaking that and those kind of things.
It is an important thing because it helps us understand speech which is produced by a variety of

speakers under a variety of circumstances. I would like to close here now and we will start
talking about speech perception or other aspects of the motor carrier speech perception in the
next lecture thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
758
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
759
Course Title
Lecture – 24
Auditory Perception - II
By
Dr. Ark Verma
Hello everyone, welcome to the course basic cognitive processes. I am Dr. Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur. If you remember in the last lecture we were talking about auditory perception.
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We were talking we talked a little bit about the physiology of the ear and some physical
characteristics of the sound. We also talked about we started talking about the theories on motor
theories of speech perception. The theory we were talking about while I ended the last lecture
was the motor theory of speech perception and we will try and continue from there onwards in
this lecture as well.
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Now an interesting effect of the motor theory of speech perception is basically that it says that
understanding speech gestures requires one to you know figure out whatever gestures have
created any given acoustic signal. The system therefore uses or will require to use any sort of
information that could help identify these gestures. Now while the acoustics only offered cues as
to what those gestures possibly are, the help can be taken from other perceptual systems as well.
If the perceptual systems can provide this kind of help they can provide any kind of clue as to
what the gestures are.
The motor theory says that the speech perception system will take up this information use this
information and use it in understanding speech. In fact two non auditory perceptual systems like
vision and touch have already been shown to affect speech perception and the most famous
demonstration of this multimodal effect on speech perception is the McGurk effect which first
was reported by McGurk and McDonald in 1976. Now this McGurk effect you can find a lot of
videos about on YouTube etc…
But the crux of this McGurk effect is that this happens when people are watching a video of a
person talking but the audio portion of the tape has been altered for example the video might be
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showing a person speaking ga but the audio signal is of a person speaking ba generally what
happens is that people perceive neither ga or ba perceive a combination which you know comes
out as the sound of da. So what is happening is the person is saying ga, you are hearing da, but
the video is of saying ba and what the system is doing it is combining these two information in
some sense and coming up with the entirely new sound that is da. Why is this happening this is
happening?
Because if the visual system information is removed the auditory information is accurately
perceived and the person hears ba. So if you kind of close your eyes and listen to this
information the visual thing is gone and then you will correctly perceive whatever the person
was saying as ba. Now this McGurk effect has been shown to be incredibly robust it happens
even when people are fully warned, even if they are told they see the audio is different video is
different you have to still try and understand it, it still you know happens. People still cannot
really control integrating of these two information and coming over this third category.
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Now the McGurk effect happens because our speech perception system combines both visual
and auditory information for perceiving speech rather than relying on the visual or auditory
perception alone.
Of course the auditory information by itself is sometimes sufficient for perception maker but the
McGurk effect shows that the visual information also influences a speech perception whenever it
is available say for example if you are talking on phone these kind of effects are certainly not
there. The McGurk effect is an example of what is called the multimodal perception because two
sensory modalities visual and auditory are actually being used in order to create this subjective
experience of the sound.
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Another way to create a variant of the McGurk effect is by combining haptic information with
auditory information to change the way that people perceive a spoken syllable. This kind of
perception that occurs outside the laboratory from time to time in a specialized you know module
is called tadoma. Now Helen Keller people who are you know who are not who are visually
impaired sometimes they learn to speak by using their sense of touch to feel whatever
articulatory information is presented. Remember we are still talking about the motor theory of
speech perception. And the goal is still to identify whatever gestures were used and that is
supposed to help us understand the sound.
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Now Carol Fowler did this experiment and they actually she had her participant of the
experiment feel her lips while they listened to a recording of a female speaker speaking a variety
of syllables. Now Blindfolded and Gloved these experimental participants heard the syllable ga
over the speaker while Carol Fowler simultaneously mouth the syllable ba. Again as in the
McGurk effect traditionally they reported hearing the syllable of da the motor theory explains
both these versions of the McGurk effect the visual and the haptic one a stemming from the same
basic processes.
As the goal of the speech production system is not spectral analysis of the auditory input rather it
is to figure out the set of gestures that have been you know producing these sounds. The motor
theory tries to tell us that both of these information the visual and haptic are basically being used
in order to make these judgments and that is what is leading to this combined perception that is
happening under natural circumstances the visual auditory and touch informations will anyways
all line up and they will not be conflicting like in the case of the McGurk effect video.
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So in that sense it will all work fine but if you are creating an experimental situation like this it
might lead to confusion like we saw in the perception of the syllable da.
The motor theory of speech perception repeatedly talks about the importance of understanding
the motor aspects of speech and it has been basically a very popular theory but say for example
another way was found which could help and support the motor theory speech perception. This
other way was a chance discovery of by researchers who were working on macaque monkeys
and they discovered that particular neurons in the monkeys frontal cortex responded when the
monkey performed an action but they also responded when the monkey observed a particular
action these neurons were referred to as the mirror neurons.
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Now the existence of mirror neurons in monkeys was established by invasive single cell
recordings and in that sense they have known these kind of recordings because they are not
possible to do with humans there is a hypothesis that the human brain which is very similar to the
monkey brain also contains this similar kind of neurons however the part of the brain of the
macaques that have the mirror neurons is similar to the Broca's area of the brain which also is
involved incidentally in production of speech.
So it also does something motor which is related to speech you can remember the Broca's area
from the lecture I gave on the brain and behavior thing, neuro imaging in research involving
direct recording from neurons in the Broca's areas show that Broca's area participates in speech
perception.
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Now researchers who discovered mirror neurons proposed that the mirror neurons could be the
neurological mechanisms that the motor theory of speech perception requires that is these mirror
neurons in the Broca's area could fire when an individual produces a particular set of phonemes
or hear a particular set of phonemes and providing the bridge between speaking and listening.
So if you are speaking a set of phonemes the mirror neurons in the Broca's area are firing and if
you are listening to the particular sound the same neurons are firing again so that there is the
same neuro logical structure that is involved both in speaking and listening there have been
experiments conducted to non-invasively find evidence for the participation of mirror neurons or
the participation of the motor cortex in speech perception obviously the motor cortex has been
known to you know participate while speech production is there but remember we are talking
about speech perception.
The motor theory says that accessing the representations of specific speech gestures must
underlies speech perception.
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The representations of speech gestures must be stored in the parts of the brain that control
articulatory movement wherever those parts of brain which are involved in making these
movements must also be the parts of the brain that store this information about what gestures
have been used the parts of the brain that control articulation are the motor cortex and the frontal
lobes of the brain and the adjacent premotor cortex that are used when we perceive speech. Now
the proponent of the mirror neurons are known that mirror neurons are able are basically the
neural mechanism that will establish the link between heard speech and the motor
representations that underlies speech production.
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Mirror neurons have recently been found in the monkey equivalent of the motor cortex as well
and so proponents of mirror neurons view this as evidence of the fact that all motored neurons
respond to you know speech perception as well. Some mirror neuron theorists argue further that
mirror neurons also play a role in modern humans because our speech perception in production
processes are evolving from a manual gestures, a theory about language evolution is that because
we are using manual gestures initially. That is why our mirror neuron or motor cortex is involved
in perception on production speech as well.
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There is a story for another day but let us examine some evidence about this involvement of
mirror neurons or the motor cortex in human speech perception. So Pulvermuller and colleagues
they conducted a study where in participants were to listen syllabus that resulted from either by
bilabial stops like pa or ba or alveolar stops like ta or da on listening trials. On silent production
trials these participants imagine themselves making these sounds, so there is production and
rejection both happening measurements of the brain activity were gathered using fMRI if you
remember fMRI basically measures the amount of flow of oxygenated blood to the areas that are
involved in particular cognitive tasks.
Now listening to the speech cause substantial activity in the superior parts of the temporal lobes
on both sides of the participants’ brain but it also cause a lot of activity in the motor cortex in the
experimental participants frontal lobe. Further brain activity in the motor cortex depended on
what kind of speech sounds the participants were listening to, so there were different activations
depending on whether the sound was a bilabial stop or an alveolar stop this result is explained by
the motor theory.
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And they say that you know the same areas that produce the speech are involved in perceiving it.
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So it is one kind of confirmatory evidence. In another study when TMS was applied to a
participant motor cortex participants were less able to tell the difference between two similar
phonemes. If those areas are not working your perception and understanding of these two
phonemes might also be attenuated further when people listen to speech sounds that involve
tongue movements and have TMS applied to parts of the motor cortex that control the tongue
increased motor evoked potentials are observed in the participants tongue muscles.
So there is some processing happening there as well. All of these experiments put together show
that the motor cortex indeed generates neural activity in response to listening speech consistent
with what the motor theory has been seen saying.
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But there have been some challenges to the motor theory of speech perception as well. Some of
the challenges are rooted in the link that they make between perception and production. You can
say for example infants are fully capable of perceiving and understanding speech despite the fact
that they are thoroughly incapable of producing these speech sounds to account for these results
we will either have to conclude that the infants are born with this innate set of speech motor
representations or that having a speech motor representations is not necessary for perceiving
phonemes. If we accept the latter we are kind of violating what the motor theory was saying.
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Additional experiments have also cast doubt on whether speech motor representations are
necessary for speech perception. Now no one would suggest that non-human animals have a
supply of speech motor representations you know which pertain to human speech sounds but it
has been found that animals like the Japanese quail and chinchillas they also respond to you
know particular class of speech sounds and the frame from responding to other class of speech
sounds telling us that they have this aspect of speech perception and they can differentiate
between these different sounds.
Now the motor theory would say that they also know which gestures are involved in producing
these which kind of is a non-starter.
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Because these animals lack the human articulatory apparatus they cannot have the speech motor
representations as I was saying but as they respond to these different aspects of speech very
much like humans who do the motor theories claim that speech motor representations are a
necessary part of speech perception is kind of weakened.
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Further research with aphasic patients also casts doubt on the motor theory say for example both
Broca and Wenicke they showed that some brain-damaged patients could not produce speech but
understand it while others could understand speech but not produce speech. If you were to listen
to the motor theory’s claims then you will say that you know this is not really possible the
existence of these cleared associations between speech perception and production systems
provides strong evidence against the account of the motor theory.
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Also if speech perception requires access to intact modern representations then brain damage
that impairs spoken language output should also impair spoken language comprehension as I was
saying.
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Now the final problem or another problem about this account is basically that one has to say the
same speech sounds can be produced by different articulatory gestures. It has been shown in a
study by MacNeilage in 1970, more specifically different people can produce the same phoneme
by altering configurations of the vocal tract because the vocal tract offers you know a number of
locations where the air flow can be restricted and because different combinations of airflow
restrictions have the same physical effect they wind up producing similar acoustic signals and
which are indistinguishable to the perceiver.
So perceiver might be listening to two different know the same sound being produced by
different articulators and different kinds of gestural scores then it becomes very difficult you
know to say that a single gesture is responsible for a sound like ga, you can say then there are
multiple gestures now studies involving and there is these interesting experiments done by you
know called bite block vowels when people are keeping something in their mouth and then
producing the sound and the participants can still understand it. It says that you know the motor
theory is kind of weakening here.
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The motor theory if given a chance will try to account for this set of findings in one of two ways
they will say either one more than one speech motor representation goes with a given phoneme
or that there is a single set prototype of speech motor representations and that an acoustic
analysis of speech signals determine which of these ideal gestures most closely match the
acoustic output. Now if you see this closely that both of these things will violate the spirit of
what the motor theory is saying I just repeat this once more.
So two reasons for they can give is they can say that the more than one speech motor
representation can go with a given phoneme or they can say that there is a single prototype which
can be matched to any given gesture both of these things are contradictory to what the motor
theory of speech perception has originally claimed. In that sense it is kind of weakened for now
it’s not able to explain all the findings.
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So when there are you know flaws with a particular big theory there are other theories that jump
in the other important theory of speech perception is the general auditory approach to speech
perception. Now the general auditory approach basically says it starts with the assumption that
speech sounds must be perceived or are perceived using the same mechanisms of audition and
perceptual learning that have evolved in humans to handle all other classes of sounds as well. So
it says that speech perception is not really special you understand speech as you understand all
the other sounds. Researchers in the general auditory tradition look for consistent patterns in
acoustic signals for speech.
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That appear whenever particular speech properties are present. Further they seek to explain
commonalities in the way different people and even different species react to aspects of speech.
For example some studies have looked you know at the way in which people and animal respond
to what are called voicing contrast say for example the example I was talking about pa and ba.
These studies have suggested that our ability to perceive voicing is related to the fundamental
properties of the auditory system and not really a special module that was proposed by this motor
theory.
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We can tell whether two sounds occurred simultaneously if they begin more than 20 milliseconds
apart so it is just a matter of time and not really that it is a special speech signal. So if two sounds
are presented within 20 milliseconds of each other we will perceive them as being simultaneous
in time if one starts 20 millisecond before or after another we start perceiving them in one before
the other in different sequence. The voicing boundary for people and quails by the way sits right
at the same difference of 20 milliseconds.
Now you can see that this is this generality between human auditory perception system and the
quails auditory perception system by the way quail is a particular bird if the vocal fold vibration
starts within 20 milliseconds of the birds we will perceive the phoneme as voice if it starts after
20 milliseconds we will perceive it unvoice and pa and ba the same example you have been
talking about.
So this aspect of this general aspect to phonological perception then could be said to be based on
a fundamental property of auditory perception rather than the peculiarities of gesture that go into
voice and invoice, so if I if I were a auditory perception system I do not really need to keep tab
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of whether it is voice or not voice I will just keep track of time and if the time is sufficiently
apart I will treat them as different. I can be a quail or any other animal and still do this task
perfectly.
The general auditory approach also does not offer an explanation of the full range of human
perception capabilities but its chief advantage lies in it is ability to explain common
characteristics of human and non-human speech perception and production. Since the theory is
not really committed to gestures per say it as a fundamental unit of phonological representations
it is also not vulnerable to the kind of flaws that were associated to the motor theory which had
said that speech you know perception and production link is necessary.
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Another kind of model a different kind of model of speech perception that is a more popular and
more recent is the fuzzy logic model of speech perception, that is different from both the general
auditory and motor theory of speech perception in that it says that you know a better approach or
a general auditory tradition is that there is a single set of ideal or prototype representations of
speech sounds as determined by their acoustic characteristics.
Now according to this FLMP model speech perception reflects the outcomes of two kinds of
processes. There are bottom-up processes which are the mental operations that analyze the
acoustic properties of the incoming speech stimulus and there are top-down processes which
activate a set of potentially matching phonological representations. So imagine if you are
listening to a sound if somebody is speaking something to you one set is already analyzing this
incoming signal in terms of very basic physical characteristics and the other set of operation is
trying to look into your memory as to whatever information about this particular sound you have
and they meet somewhere in the middle.
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And then you can understand whatever sound is produced. Now it needs to specify that there are
a lot of stored representations of phonemes and they are activated to different degrees and they
are similar to acoustic properties in the speech stimulus more similar phonemes attain higher
degrees of activation less similar phonemes achieve lower degrees of activation.
So if you listen to a particular sound all those sounds similar to this incoming sound that you
have heard of we will all get activated and you know they will potentially be matched against
this incoming sound the top-down processes are these mental operations that use the information
in long-term memory to try and select the best possible candidate from among the set of
candidates activated by the bottom-up processes.
So the bottom-up analysis has activated so many candidates which you can potentially match to
any of this incoming information and the top-down mental operations are actually doing this
matching and they are trying to select the best possible candidate which will match this incoming
stimulus once that match is made you understand that particular stimulus if you have heard of it
earlier.
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This may be specially important if the incoming information is ambiguous or degraded. Let me
take an example say for example when the N phoneme precedes the B sound say for example in
the case of lean bacon and if I am saying it very fastly in bacon oftentimes the co articulation
because N and B are coming so close together. A lot of people might perceive this as lean bacon.
If I am saying N and B so close together the word lean will be perceived as lean and a lot of
people will report saying hearing a lean bacon. If I if you know just want to do it you can say this
very fast again and again to yourselves and then you can see that what is happening.
Now see when somebody listens to lean bacon bottom-up processes will activate both the
prototypes it will activate N and it will activate m so they could be lean bacon and lean bacon
both will be activated. According to the fuzzy logic model of speech perception our knowledge
that lean bacon is actually a meaningful word and is a likely representation in English will cause
us to favor lean bacon over lean bacon and that is how we understand whatever has been said.
However if the n verse say for example in a non words such as pleat bacon and if I were to say as
a clean bacon or something like that a listener will be more likely to favor the M interpretation
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because the opening sound would not receive any support from top-down processes because
there is nothing I know that is called clean bacon so I will go by the bottom-up analysis and I
will pick up something that is coming from there.
Now this tendency to perceive ambiguous speech stimuli as real words is possible you know a
real words is actually called the Ganong effect of named after William Ganong in 1980.
FLMP also offers a mechanism that can produce what is called phonemic restoration effects. So
phonemic restoration basically is when speech stimuli are are edited to create gaps say for
example, if you remember I was talking in an earlier class about legislators and there was this
experiment and people who are hearing the word legislators on the head phones and there was a
coughing sound where the S is there, so Liji Calf and Letcher’s experiments what people do is
people do report hearing s even if there is no S presented in the signal itself. What is happening
here is that you are using your previous knowledge of the word legislators to fill in that s and you
do it so well that you are convinced that there was an S in that signal. Now these phonemic
restoration effects are stronger for longer than for longer words than shorter words because these
make much more sense and are more grammatical than the shorter words which are
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ungrammatical and they might not make sense. Further the specific phoneme that is restored can
also depend on the meaning of the sentence that is edited okay.
Say for example if there is a different thing if you are hearing the coughing sound let us say the
wagon lost and there is a coughing sound eel you will most likely hear the word w so because
you will hear the wagon lost it lost its wheel which is the more probable thing. But if you hear
the circus train has lost and the circus has lost a trained eel and there is a coughing sound before
eel you will probably think that you know you are talking about s your hearing and s there
because the circus generally has animals like seals and you say that maybe you know the sound
that was there was s.
So how you will do the phonemic restoration actually depends on the context that is built in the
sentence previously. Research involving ERPs have shown that nervous system does register the
presence of the coughing noise very soon after it appears in the stimulus so what is happening is
you are registering the coughing sounds very early but you are doing all the mental processes
possible to fill up that space that is created by the coughing sound. All of these suggests that
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there are a variety of possible you know sources of top-down information and various source of
information affect the way an acoustic signal is perceived.
Further they suggest that the perception of speech involves anything that involves analyzing the
signal as well as biasing the you know results of this analysis based on how will different
candidate representations fit in with other aspects of the message. So you might have you know
be biased to hear wheel or seal or anything else but because I was talking about the wagon you
would fill it with wheel because that fits in better and you will not fill s there because you know
and you will fill ‘s’ in the circus example because wheel does not fit there better.
So you are doing this different kind of calculations and you’re online correcting your perception
of speech there. These other aspects could include whether the phonological representations
result in a real word or not whether the semantic interpretation of the sentence makes sense or
not and how intact the top-down information is. If you do not remember the word exactly if you
do not remember what animal the circus have if you do not have any language any knowledge
about the animals of the circus.
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Then you might not be able to fill the example there with s as you see. If you are living in a
particular place wherein circuses do typically have seals then you will create the sentence that
the circus has lost a trained seal. This is all about speech perception that we will be talking about.
In the next class we will begin talking about attention as a cognitive effect thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
792
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
793
Course Title
Lecture-25
Attention - I
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello everyone welcome to the course basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Varma from IIT
Kanpur.
794
Today I will begin to talk to you about a mental process called attention we have been talking till
now about sensation, we have been talking about perception the variety of uses of perception,
perception being used for object recognition perception being used for visual interaction with the
environment we also talked in the more recent lectures about auditory perception we talked about
theories of speech perception we talked about the physiology of the ear and such and in a broad
sense.
What I have done till now in this course is given you an idea about what are the sensory
processes and how do we get information from these sensory processes. I have also talked to you
about how do you convert information from these sensory sources and work upon them in order
to let us say interact effectively with the environment let us say, for example you know reach
towards the cup and grab it for drinking out of it or say for example recognize the shape of
something recognize the color of something and say for example if you are driving in the street
how do you do that what is the kind of information you are using there, we have talked about all
of these things and obviously there was scope for talking about other sensory modalities as well
but given that vision and audition have received the most amount of attention from cognitive
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scientists and given the scope of the current course that I am taking I limited this to visual and
auditory perception only.
But one of the questions and I hope you must be wondering about this as well is what really
helps us gain information from these sensory modalities if you see yourself you know in this
world full imagine yourself walking in a particular park going around in a busy market place
then you will imagine that the kind of sensory input, that we are getting all the time is too
overwhelming okay.
So at any point in time you are actually your senses are actually working overtime to get in all
different kinds of information that are possible all kinds of information that you are collecting
from the environment even, if you are just awake and you know just looking at things in your
room you are looking at a lot of things your visual perception is giving you a lot of information
imagine also you know if you are living if say for example you are standing on a balcony
somewhere you are also experiencing too many different kinds of noises, too many voices maybe
some conversation voices maybe some songs are being played in the neighborhood maybe there
is just traffic and that noise you are hearing you might be say, for example even you know party
to some kind of odors or smells that around maybe there is you know nice breakfast being
prepared somewhere something like that you are touching things you are feeling all those kind of
things.
So what I am trying to impress upon you at this point in time is that there is certainly a lot of
sensory information that is constantly being bombarded on us as different kinds of simply as
very rich stimuli, now the problem with the system or say for example in such a scenario the
problem that appears in front of us and that needs to be resolved because, we can actively and
meaningfully engage with the environment is which of these information do we select which of
these information do we you know really attend to and process.
Further and which of the informations that we kind of let go. The main purpose of this mental
and cognitive function called attention is basically to resolve this dilemma you are constantly
being bombarded with visual sensory information auditory, sensory information olfactory and
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gustatory olfactory sensory information you are doing a lot of you know sensory processing all
the time but you if but if you imagine it is not that all of this information at the same time is
being processed in your head. Most of the time you are only selecting or working on or thinking
about a subset of that information.
In this coming chapter we will be talking about our ability to actually select some of that
information and let some of the other information slightly live on the background. This
phenomenon which allows us to do this is called attention. There are some key questions one can
ask if we are you know to talk about attention, if we are to discuss in more detail about attention
and that we will certainly do in the course of the next few lectures before I talk to you in more
detail about this let us try and look at these questions first.
The first question that I would like to put forth is it actually possible to selectively focus on, one
object or one event or two objects or two events while so many others are simultaneously going
on? Are we actually doing that say for example there was this famous phenomena called the
cocktail party effect wherein you are in a busy conversation in a very you know dense party and
a lot of people are there and they are talking and those kinds of things but suddenly somebody in
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some conversation may be 50 meters away from you mentions your name and you quickly orient
towards that place maybe you are you are quiet interested in, you go and see.
What is it they are talking about me you get curious how did you notice that this person was
taking your name in the first place you were engrossed in a particular conversation this person
who mentioned your name is standing 50 meters away from you how did you still get it, one of
the possibilities is that you might, still be attending this information while this information is still
not in your primary focus you know you can imagine attention or you can imagine this sensory
input as part of your work desk.
So what is happening is you have lot of items you have probably a lot of files maybe some things
need to be signed some things you need to write all of that information is in your work desk,
when you are say for example you know sitting and you want to work for a given period of time
how do you start with it? How do you start working and you know moving ahead with the job.
So you select one aspect of the job you select one part of the job you work on it push it aside
bring another one then you work on it push it push it aside and bring another one. Probably
attention is also helping us do the same it is helping us prioritize the amount of sensory
information that we are getting and also helping us say, for example and we will talk about those
modalities how does how can we prioritize this information but helping us select some
information over others, so that we can in a sense meaningfully interact with that information
with that, so kind of stimulus and then once that is done we kind of push it at the background and
pick up another information. Now the cocktail party effect is a good example of the fact.
That whatever we are not working on at the moment is also not completely unattended. It is not
that you are not aware of those you know the presence of those kind of stimuli at all. You are
certainly aware of those you know the presence of those kind of stimuli maybe up to a particular
level once they would cross a particular threshold they will grab your attention and you will
again maybe prioritize them work upon and work upon them and engage with them so attention
is that phenomena, that will help you do this it will help you prioritize the kind of sensory
interaction you will have with the environment taking a few things to work on and then you
know finishing that and then moving on the other things.
798
Now another question that can we ask this what are the conditions under which you can do this
selection I was referring to the cocktail party phenomena what are the conditions about this
particular, information or stimuli that will help you select them over the others. Say for example
you have you know five major files on your desktop and you want to work on each of them what
will help you decide that which is the file you open first and which is the file you work on first
and then how is this ranking going to be organized.
What are these factors do you decide or does the environment help you decide what is this
selection process and how is this prioritizing, prioritization going to happen? This is something
which is also a very important question, in attention if you want to do it a research with attention
if you want to understand attention as a cognitive phenomenon you would have to ask these kind
of questions and you will see that there have been lots of researchers that have actually asked
these questions.
Another kind of question that will come up is say for example what is research on attention tell
us about multi tasking. So you might be aware and obviously it happens with all of us that we are
not only selecting some information and working on it once and finishing it and then moving on
to other informations, we are all also sometimes working on two things maybe sometimes three
things simultaneously. If you are talking to somebody on phone does not mean that you are not
really doing something with your laptop as well. If you say for example you know to the
unfortunately people try and do this while driving etc. as well when they are talking on phone
they are texting they are also I mean they are also sometimes I mean driving okay. Those can be
really hazardous and we will probably in this chapter talk about those kind of questions as well
and how you can really avoid and why it is so dangerous I mean it is you might have heard, a lot
of you know advice from the police from elders and so many other people but in this particular
course we will talk about the fact that why it is actually, so dangerous to other chores to do other
tasks while you are doing something as important and as resource consuming as driving? What
are the kinds of studies that have been done? What does this research tell us about multitasking?
799
How can we do multitasking how can we say for example on our plate at the same time have two
kinds of jobs and do justice to both kinds of we will probably talk something to the amount of
that question as well. Now finally something that I have already said though is that is it that we
are not really attending everything that we have deprioritized? Is it that we are not really
conscious of the presence of everything that we have deprioritized, we have probably just rank
ordered information and stimuli as to what will be attended to first and what will be attended to
later but does it mean that items two three and four which are not in our top priority are not being
handled at all, or we are not doing some processing on them before they actually finally come us
come upon our table to work for, so these are three four different kinds of questions, there are
other questions that can be asked a for example another good question could be do we sometimes
work across modalities when we are selecting information say for example you are selecting
some information visually and at the same time you are kind of selecting some information
orally as well and you are selecting some conversation that this is the one I want to focus upon
while you are doing something with your you know eyes as well. So multimodal selection and
multimodal prioritization might also be an important question that we will ask and that has been
asked in research on attention as well so we would want to do all of these kinds of things.
Now if I want to give you a very preliminary definition of attention a very simple definition of
attention that probably been in put forward by Goldstein is that attention.
800
is the ability to focus on specific stimuli or on specific locations, now this is a very simple
definition of you know attention at a later point in time we will talk about theories about
attention and what do these theories say in terms of how do we use attention we will be talking
about that but at this point let, us just try and wonder you know how do we deal with you know
for how do we define attention. So is attention just the ability to focus on very specific stimuli or
is it also the ability to defocus on irrelevant stimuli. So this is something which you will see in
the course of the next few lectures that we will be talking about. Have we just selected something
on the basis of a it is important some salient features or maybe it is important to us and there is a
deadline or what we have done is we have just selected all that was irrelevant, so selection or
attention can happen through either of these two processes and why do we need attention at all.
Can we not process all the information that is coming to us at the same time why do we need to
select in the first place, is it a matter of resource limitation, is it the matter of capacity limitation
is it say for example now I mean you can now there nowadays it is the era of smart phones if you
start opening too many applications on your smart phone it kind of gets hanged, so it will not
function none of these apps will function, so is it a problem of memory like say for example in
the smart phone do we also have these kind of memory limitations? We will talk about all of
these kind of things in the course of the next few lectures now when you talk about attention you
can talk about there are two kinds of attentions primarily the first kind of attention is selective
attention.
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When you are selecting something focusing attention of very specific object a very specific event
or a very specific location, so that is something that you would want to do and the selective
attention in there since there have been a few metaphors used for selective attention one of them
being the famous spotlight metaphor it is like you are you know going somewhere and say for
example you are in a dark and there are too many objects you switch on your spotlight and your
push your spotlight one particular objects.
So what are you doing is by virtue of the spotlight you selected one particular area to illuminate
and one particular area to process visually, is attention also like that we will talk about that in a
more detail. The other kind of attention I can talk about is divided attention when you are doing
the multitasking thing when you are attending at two objects at the same time you know when
you are driving at the road and you are talking to your friend sitting next to you, is it is it
compatible, is it possible do we do it, yes we do it all the time but what are the processes that
help us to you know handle two objects or two kind of stimuli at the same time, we will talk
about divided attention in adequate detail as well. As far as the operation of attention is
concerned you can be say, for example using overt attention which.
802
Is apparent and you can be using say for example covert attention wherein you mentally selected
something okay, now the distinction between attention overt and covert is basically that you use
your eyes to select something specifically maybe, your eye works as your spotlight. So if you
move your eyes and then you shift your attention from one place to another from one object to
another that is what is called overt attention.
So overt attention is basically one that involves movement of eyes and by virtue of movement of
eyes you are selecting some information. Covert attention on the other hand is that you have not
really moved your eyes but your attention somehow is shifted from that specific place to another
specific place or from that specific object to another specific object.
But that is also possible sometimes we think that you know you attend only by virtue of your
moving eyes, but there have been loads and loads of studies some done in my own lab, where we
see that to shift your attention and to start processing objects that are not really in front of your
eyes, you might not need to move eyes so much. You can attend to things that are not in your
direct line of vision as well.
803
So there are these four kinds of attention I talked to you about the two kinds and the dichotomy
between selective attention and the divided attention and, the second kind of thing I talked about
was overt attention versus covert attention.
804
Here is an examples say somebody again something borrowed from Goldstein is somebody is
walking on the beach and they are actually doing some kind of is something like, if you go on a
walk somewhere you can say for example you know some object lying somewhere grabs your
attention and you look at it that is your overt attention, you were actually looking at that object,
but you are also conscious of that there is somebody passing by maybe there is a bird flying in
the sky that is your overt attention. You have attended that as well also say for example you are
say for example focus on walking on a particular path you are kind of navigating that path and
not falling into and bumping into objects, so you are doing selective attention you are using
selective attention to navigate your path as well.
The second thing what you are doing is you are basically also attending to maybe a song that is
playing in your earphones, so you are having divided attention between that object between the
song that is playing in your earphones and the path, so all of these four kinds of attention are
constantly operating when you are interacting with the environment when you are doing any
particular tasks and that is how the nature of attention is. So in today is lecture I will focus on
very specific example very specific application of attention which will help you realize all of
these four kinds of things. Now one of the most important thing that we do use attention for is
search behavior.
805
Search or visual search refers to our behavior of scanning the environment and looking for
particular feature say for example I ask you to look for a red jacket amongst all of you know the
jackets I have put in my wardrobe, so you are looking for a specific feature you are looking for a
specific object in the environment so you are actively looking for something when one is not
aware of which location you will find say for example you are looking and looking into a
wardrobe that is completely filled with clothes. So you have to kind of scan everything pick up
something and then you give it to me that is what you have achieved at the end of your search.
Now search becomes difficult and it may it is made more difficult by the presence of distracters.
Now this factors are not the target stimuli but they divert our attention away from the target. Say
for example I have asked you to bring a red jacket but there is a pink and a maroon jacket also
lying somewhere in the middle and a lot of times it might happen due to lighting conditions that
you might think of pickup, a pink jacket or maybe pick up a maroon jacket and then say that may
be that is something which is you know the red jacket. It will kind of reduce your accuracy
towards selecting the red jacket. So when say for example if you have picked up a maroon jacket
instead of a red jacket that is called the case of false alarm you know you are usually connecting
something that is not really you know the target.
806
The number of targets and distractors affect the difficulty of the task if I ask you to find T you
know the letter T amongst the two panels I am going to present you right now you will find that
the interesting thing is that a display size that is a number of items given in a visual array will
affect the search process.
807
So I will quickly go to that so now if I ask you to find T in the you know panel A it will be
slightly difficult to find T there versus if I ask you to find T in the panel number B, it will be
much easier so the display size the number of distracters and the number of targets that are there
in a particular visual arrangement will hinder, the search process. Too many people to search
from too much difficulty you will experience. Now the distracters basically cause much more
trouble under some conditions than others.
808
We basically conduct a feature search when we simply scanning the environment looking for a
specific feature, say the Red Jacket distracters plays little role in slowing our search, in this case
if you are doing feature search the distracters might play a small role in doing, this say for
example if I ask you to find the letter O in a panel C and but you know that o has a distinctive
form as compared to the rest of the items it will pop out.
809
So if you see the panel C all are L’s but one is O and O is very different feature from all the else
it pops out and your search performance is much better and quicker.
810
Feature Singleton is basically which have one simple feature with have distinctive features and
they generally stand out in the display and your search performance is better, so when feature
Singletons are targeted they will certainly grab our attention and even those with the presence of
too many distracters. On the other hand when the target stimulus has no unique or even
distinctive features then it becomes slightly difficult, in these situations the only way we can find
such an item which we are looking for is by using what is called conjunction search.
What is conjunction search? Conjunction search is when you are looking for a particular
combination of feature; say for example if I ask you to look for a red square okay. So you are
looking for red and you are looking for square among ray of visual elements say for example the
only difference between your T and L is the particular integration of line segments, so the
horizontal line segment.
811
Is on top in T and in bottom in the L, both letters are comprised for a horizontal and a vertical
line, now the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain as well as the frontal eye fields and the
posterior parietal cortex are the areas of the brain that play a role in only conjunction searches
but not so much in feature searches.
812
There are some theories of visual search that we can talk about, the first theory is the feature
integration theory now the feature integration theory basically explains the relative ease of
conducting feature searches and it talks about the relative difficulty of conducting conjunction
searches and Treisman gave this model of visual search and it says that each possible feature of a
particular stimulus each of us has a mental map for representing these features across a visual
field.
So for each possible feature we will have some mental map and then we will select each of these
features according to these mental map. Say for example there will be a map for every color for
every size, shape or orientation. So there is no added time required for additional cognitive
processing, thus during future searches we monitor only the relevant features we are not really
looking for everything else we are just looking for the red, as soon as the spot red we collect it,
this is easy and this is useful for feature search.
So during feature searches we monitor the relevant feature map for the presence of any activation
anywhere in the visual field we quickly find it and we select it and our search is complete. This
monitoring process can be done in parallel and this will therefore show no display size effects
813
because whatever the display size if you’re the target has a distinctive feature and you can look
for the distinctive feature your case is easily solved.
However during conjunction search it becomes slightly difficult because an additional stage of
processing is needed. During this stage, we must use our attention sources as a sort of a mental
glue so what you have to do is you have to look for one feature and the other feature and then
combine them to look for both features together in a particular object. So what you are doing is
you are actually looking for two or more features conjoined into audient tuned object
representation and you have to look for a particular location. In this stage what we, what happens
is that we can conjoin the features of features representation of only one object at a time. Now
this stage must be carried out sequentially conjoining each object one by one.
So we look for first feature for second feature and then you try and conjoin and then check
effects of display size therefore will definitely appear in this kind of thing because this is a
slightly cumbersome process, such a model of a visual search.
814
The one we were talking about has been supported by the work of Hubel and Wiesel in 1979
they identified specific neural feature detector, so they found that there are specific neurons in
our brain that only code for specific feature say for example they could be cortical neurons that
will respond differently to visual stimuli of particular orientation, so there will be a set of
neurons that will only react to straight lines there will be set of neurons that only react to the
horizontal or diagonal lines.
Now more recent research has indicated that the best search strategy is not for the brain to
increase the activity of these neurons that respond to particular target stimuli, in fact what the
brain does it seems to use a more optimal strategy of activating neurons that best distinguish the
targets from, the distracters. While at the same time ignoring the neurons that are tuned best to
the target, say for example the brain is kind of optimizing its a search algorithm and it's saying
that you have to find the neurons that will distinguish this particular target from all the other
targets and not really the neuron, that is only looking for that specific feature and it's tuned to
look for that specific feature.
815
You see this which have a particular advantages, the other theory you can talk about is the
similarity theory.
According to similarity theory Treisman’s data can be reinterpreted how it can be reinterpreted
as being a result of the fact that similarity between target and distracter stimuli increases, the so
does the difficulty in detecting time would increase. If the target and the distracters are very
similar to each other, say for example if you are looking for you know a red triangle in a visual
array which has all the other red objects then it will be more difficult to look for the red triangle,
you know it is a very simple thing in that sense, so targets that are highly similar to the
distracters are relatively harder to detect targets that are highly disparate from the receptors are
then relatively easy to detect, say for example if I ask you to find the black panel in the black
circle.
816
In this particular panel you might be able to find this out slightly easily because all the other
circles are white. Target is highly similar to the distractors here because you have black circles
and black squares and white circles so it might be relatively difficult to find this black circle in
this kind of a panel. If it were only consisting of these circles then might be it would be easier.
817
Now the difficulty of the search task also depends upon the degree of disparity of the distract or
for how despair they are, are they despair by one unit to in there is a way of quantifying that but
it does not depend on the number of features to be integrated, so it's not really about one feature
two feature those kind of things, it is how different how desperate the distracter is from the
target. For instance one reason it is easier to read long strings of text written in lowercase letters
than texts written in that capital letters tend to be more similar to each other in appearance.
So if you are kind of reading a particular message everything is in caps lock they will find it
slightly difficult. Your reading times will get predictably slower, if you're reading smaller case
lowercase letters like we read texts and books it becomes that much more easier.
818
Say for example try to find R in parallels F and G here. Trying to find capital R that is in panel F
is slightly more difficult than trying to find capital R in panel G here again something borrowed
from Sternberg and Sternberg.
819
Now another theory the final theory that you could probably talk about is the guided search
theory, now guided search theory basically came as an alternative to Treisman’s feature
integration model and it was given by Kevin wolfe, in wolfe in 2007 the guided search model
said is that all searches whether you know a feature searches or conjunction searches involve at
least two consecutive stages, what are these stages? The first stage is a parallel stage wherein the
individual is simultaneously activating a mental representation for all the potential targets, the
representation is based upon the simultaneous activation of each of the features, if I'm asking you
to find me red filled triangle red and filled and triangular three features and you will kind of you
know you will have a mental map of each of these features.
And you will see what are the levels of activation of each of these features when you are looking
in you know a visual array or searching a particular visual array. In a subsequent serial stage that
is second stage the individual sequentially evaluates each of the activated elements according to
the degree of activation that is what you know needs to be done that, what I was saying after that
the person chooses the true targets from the activated elements. So you will say for example have
a feature representation for all the individual elements in the array then you have, you will have
820
specific activations for each of these features and from there you will be able to select the actual
target.
According to this model the activation process of the parallel initial stage that was the first stage
helps to guide the evaluation and the selection process of this serial and second stage okay, for
example if I ask you to try to find the black circle in panel H here.
821
If I am trying to find ask you to you know just find a black circle in this particular panel this
parallel stage the first stage will help you activate a mental map that contains the features of all
the features of the target, so that it is black, that it is circles so this black circles white circles and
black squares will all be activated because they share some feature with the two features you are
looking for.
During the serial stage that is the second stage one will first evaluate the black circle which was
highly activated and you will also evaluate the black squares and white circles as they are less
activated and then dismiss them as distracters. So this is again one particular model of searching
for particular items from the visual array. That is all for today in the next lecture we will talk
about some other important aspect of attention thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy
822
NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
823
Course Title
Lecture: 26
Attention - II
By
Prof. Ark Verma
National program of technology
Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)
Hello everyone welcome to the course basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Varma from IIT
Kanpur. Now we have been talking about attention since the last lecture and if you remember.
824
What I was telling in the last lecture was this very interesting experiment or a very interesting
finding that Colin Cherry found out and this finding was referred to as the cocktail party effect so
it often happens just to give you a brief recap, it would often happen in public gatherings like in
parties or restaurants or in a busy classroom that you are talking to somebody or engaged in this
particular conversation but there's still some other conversations going around and suddenly you
know someone in those other conversations wherein you are not really involved and they are
probably you know, you are 10 50 meters away from you somebody mentions your name you
quickly get oriented towards that particular conversation. You do notice something that
somebody took your name maybe even though that person is not really talking-to you is talking
to somebody else and it is sitting say for example 20 meters away from you it does happen now
why is this happening you were engrossed in particular conversation.
You were attending to you know the persons not oriented to your name in the other conversation
there are two important things here first is that that particular conversation is also in some sense
probably being processed in your head so that you could notice that the second is not any other
information you might you know so distinctly remember but you remembered that your name
was taken, so information that is relevant to you was in some way prioritized and had more
attention so that you quickly lubed to it.
So you have to look at the attention system in such a way that it is doing at least two things it is
prioritizing and information relevant to you is probably at a much higher priority than any other
kind of information and also the second thing is that other kinds of information are also being
processed even though they are not actively you know engaged in while you are listening to that
or processing that so this is this is something which is important and in today's lecture.
We will be talking about selective attention different theories of selective attention and we'll be
talking about you know on all those theories with reference to calling Cherry’s work okay so
Colin Cherry observed that cocktail parties.
825
Are often settings wherein selective attention is very salient. See there is a lot of hustle bustle.
There is a lot of things going on too many people are talking so you have to really you know
keep up your selective attention game at the best so that you can atleast listen to somebody if you
okay say for example you know in fairs or in you know very busy crowded malls obviously
sometimes even attend to the person walking next to you becomes difficult.
So your selective attention is working overtime to help you at least understand one conversation
that you are part of okay so yeah this is just a meme I picked up from the internet.
826
Let us now talk about so Cherry was interested in studying selective attention cherry was in he
actually studied selective attention a very carefully controlled experimental setting and he used a
task which is referred to as shadowing. So what happens is that one is listening to different kinds
of messages so Cherry presented a separate message to both the ears so a one-ear receives
another message the other ear receives different kind of message.
This important task of giving two different kinds of messages two different kinds of signals or
you know sometimes to the same kind of signal to both the ears depending on what your
experimental design is it’s called the dichotic listening task. So this presentation was called
dichotic presentation where you are presenting separate message to each ear and you ask this
participant he asks these subjects of his experiment to repeat back only one of the messages and
as soon as possible after hearing it Cherry’s participants.
827
So this is the setup basically again something borrowed from the demonstration is from
Sternberg and Sternberg so you can see that this lady is getting two different kinds of messages
in the two ears. In one ear is she is hearing in the picnic basket she had peanut butter sandwiches
and in the ear she is hearing cat suddenly started to, you see these two messages qualitatively
different as well and she is shadowing say from the shadowed ear she's repeating that message
out.
These participants generally were quite successful in shadowing distinct messages in these
dichotic listening tasks. Although such shadowing required significant amount of concentration
if it was kind of you know pickup two phones and start talking with two people at the same time
you will find that it is so confusing it is so difficult to even listen to what these two people are
saying, leave alone the repeating part.
828
These participants however were also able to notice physical or sensory changes in the
unattended message as well. So you might think that you know all the concentration is spend in
just shadowing one of the years and repeating that but Cherry noticed that these participants were
actually noticing if there were any physical or sensory changes made in the unattended message.
Remember this is not the shadowed here when the message the unattended message that is was
changed to a tone if they were just a beep and hear the message in the picnic basket is playing or
say for example.
Here the cat was suddenly was being player said by a male and suddenly now it is being said by
a female they also would notice it. Now however they did not really notice the semantic changes
in the unattended message. The meaning would change they will not notice that they also failed
to notice even when the unattended message was shifted from German to English or was started
to play backwards those kind of things they did not really notice.
So they were doing some analysis with the message in the unattended ear but they are not really
doing this analysis to a semantic level where in you're kind of really understanding that as well
it’s that's where probably the resource limitation would come in. Now conversely about one third
of these people when their name was presented in during this kind of situation shifted their
829
attention to the name so even if in the unattended ear their name was presented they would
quickly grab it and quickly attend it. Now some researchers that have noticed that you know
these people who do hear heir name even the unattended message where in a concentrated task is
going on in the shadowed ear may have what is called you know limited working memory
capacity and thus are easily distracted have lower amounts of concentration there. So your
working memory capacity just kind of gets filled up and then you kind of are very distracted
towards all the other things that you are hearing.
Now if you kind of try and analyze this how this is happening what are the findings of this
experiment and how you can make sense of them three factors will help you to understand it.
There will be three factors that will help a person to selectively attend the target speaker if say
for example you are caught in a busy restaurant or those kind of things. Now distinctive sensory
characteristics of the targets we say for example somebody has a very peculiar voice you know
you must have heard everybody make fun of Sachin Tendulkar voice.
So there is a distinctive characteristic of that particular voice you will probably attend it better.
The second is the sound intensity if the person speaks very loudly verses of the speaks very
slowly it becomes that difficult if the person speaks rather loudly you will certainly that will grab
your attention and you listen to that. The third is the location of the sound if she's coming very
close to you it is coming from slightly further away from you know sometimes you would have
seen that people.
You find it difficult to hear each other and then they will call the person they are talking to and
come and sit next to me and then they have the conversation. So these are the three sources three
features of the persons of the target persons you know a voice that might may help you to
concentrate on them better. Now let us talk about theories of selective attention now there will be
few theories we'll be talking about. These theories can be grouped into filter theories and
bottleneck theories. Very broadly speaking a filter theory basically says that there is a filter
which blocks some of the information going through and thereby selects only a part of the total
information to pass-through the next stage. A bottleneck basically says that you know a
bottleneck is going to slow down the information passing through though all the information will
830
pass. So this is the distinction between filter theories of attention and bottleneck theories of
attention, just to repeat a filter theory is we are saying that some of the information you know
will be blocked from going through and only a part of this total information will pass. So
something that you not selected kind of stays outside the perceptual area, the second area is that
everything will pass, but there will be a bottleneck so we will be some kind of a capacity
limitation of handling information. So this is these are the two things you have to remember.
Now two questions one can ask say for example if there is filter if there is a filter being applied
whether there is a distinct filter for all kinds of incoming information. So auditory information is
other filter which is other filter, is that does that happen this way the second is where in this
entire processing the filter will be put. Will it be put at the initial at the most early stage?
That all the information coming this passing through filter only some information really get
through you know get past you and get past your brain where you understand it or you put the
information, put the filter much later so that all the information coming in get processed to some
particular stage but wherever the most relevant and important stage is there the filter is and so
that you are kind of just processing the most processing happens only for a limited set of
information while basic process probably apply to all the other information are coming.
831
So these are the two kind of questions you can ask if you are talking about these filter theories.
One of the very important filter theories is the Donald Broadbent theory. Donald Broadman
basically said that we are filtering information right after we notice it at the sensory level. So it's
an early filter kind of theory. So we are kind of filtering out information the sensory level itself
multiple channels of sensory input reach an attention filter those channels can be distinguished
by their characteristics like loudness pitch or accent say for example.
There are multiple people speaking in a busy room and you are kind of you know just
prioritizing or each of them is salient in one way or the other by the incoming information. Now
the filter permits only one channel of sensory information to proceed and reach the process of
perception. We thereby after this we will assign meaning to our sensations okay.
832
So the filter has to basically select from these different kinds of information but it will basically
really permit only one of the pieces of information to pass-through this filter and that is the one
which you will be able to analyze completely and assign meaning to it. Other stimuli that you
have left out will be filtered out at the sensory level itself and you will never reach to the level of
perception okay.
If you remember from the sensation and perception class sensations just the analysis of incoming
information perception is about assigning meaning to that you know evaluating whether you
know this information or not those kind of things. Now Broadman’s theory was supported by
Colin Cherry's findings that sensory information may sometimes be noticed by an unattended ear
if it does not have to an even if it does not have to be processed elaborately. Say for example if
that you know a voice was shifting from towards a tone or the male voice was being converted to
female voice.
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It was still being attended but information requiring higher perceptual processing say for
example knowing the language of the message that will happen even if this is not attended to. So
there is this distinction that is happening. Another model that we can talk about is the selective
filter model. Moray basically found out that even when participants are ignoring most of the
other higher-level aspects of unattended message they do frequently recognize their names in an
unattended ear.
So the filter is not really that hard and it is not really that strict in that sense and information that
is you know like things like your name do pass on he suggested that the reason for this effect is
that the messages are that are of high importance to a person may anyways breakthrough the
filter of selective attention. Say if say for example somebody says your name somebody is
talking about people from your family somebody‘s talking about something.
That you are very interested in say for example a conversation about cricket that might still be
relevant to you in a special way and you might still be attend it might say grab your attention
now to modify Broadbent's metaphor you know in light of these findings what one could say that
according to Murray the selective filter blocks out most of the information at the sensory level
but some personally relevant information still passes off.
834
So the filter is not really a very strict filter and keeps everything out and not getting them
processed but everything that is relevant to you something that you really like you know some
conversation about cricket or football or whatever you are interested in will still be heard. You
know imagine yourself in a metro and you know some people are talking about your favorite
player you might still attend that even though you are not really part of that conversation you are
busy doing something else.
Now the third model that we can talk about another different type of model is called the
attenuation model. Now Treisman tried to explore why are these unattended messages passing
through the filter and she kind of tried to explore this by doing certain kinds of experiments.
Now she had participants chorus shadowing these coherent messages and at some point what
happened was that she switched the remainder of the message to unattended ear, so what is
happening is again the dichotic presentation is happening. Some information is coming in the left
Ear, some information present in the right ear. Now what she is doing is that whatever
information is playing in the attended year the shadowed ear that is at some point in time that
information from the shadowed ear switches to the un shadowed or the unattended ear. Now
what happened in this scenario some participants picked up the first few words of the message
835
that they had been shadowing in the unattended ear as well so they were some processing up
happening in the unattended ear as well.
So they somehow must have been able to process whatever is going on in the unattended ear
even though they are shadowing this particular ear. Moreover it was found that if the unattended
message was identical to the attended one all the participants will notice it. So they noticed even
if one of the message is slightly out of the temporal synchronization say for example you are
talking to two people on phone or say for example sometimes you know your headphones they
get out of sync those kind of things can happen and that that kind of differences people do notice.
Now Treisman also observed that if there were some very fluently bilingual participants in the
same kind of setup that I was talking about they will notice if the messages in the unattended ear
was translated version of the attended one. Say for example if I am talking about a particular
phenomena herein English and a translation of this reception in Hindi here I might still be able to
follow what is going on in attended ear, so unattended ear. This is also happening.
836
So some kind of semantic processing must be happening here as well. Now these findings that
Treisman found out suggested that at least some information from the unattended ear is also
being analyzed. It's not only being sent and being evaluated at the sensory level but it is analyzed
at a higher-level as well. Now Treisman’s account for all of these findings proposed a theory of
selective attention that involves a slightly later filtering mechanism. Instead of blocking the
stimuli out the filter is mainly weakening the strength of the stimuli other than the target zone.
So everything else is just getting slightly weakened and the filter is applied much later. So when
the stimuli reaches we are analyzing them at a low level for target properties like loudness, pace
etc but if the stimuli possess those target properties we pass the signal on to the next stage. If we
do not possess these kindness and properties then we get a very weakened version of these still
gets passed on whatever selection criteria you have given to this filter it will search for that
selection criteria matching if something matches it is directly sent to the next stage if it does not
match it is weakened and still send to the next stage. Now the next step
837
We perceptually analyzing the meaning you know we are perceptually analyzing the meaning of
the stimuli and their relevance to us so that even a message from the unattended ear which is
supposedly weaker now and is irrelevant to us can come into awareness and influence actions if
say for example it has some meaning for us. Even if I hear a faint version of my name in the
unattended ear I am still going to attend it even if this one is a translation of whatever is going on
in the attended here I will listen to it.
Here you can see you know the comparison of Broadbent’s and Treisman’s model you will
notice that say for example while Broadbent is displacing the filter selective filter just out of just
after the sensory register Treisman is basically doing some kind of attenuation controls there are
two tabs. Okay one there is a direct capacity tab and the other is kind of limited capacity. So
again this is metaphorical comparison of what the models of attention proposed by Broadbent
and Treisman are saying and very important theories have been very important in cognitive
psychology. Now even later filter model you know has-been proposed and Deutsch and Deutsche
developed the model in which the location of filter is even later. They suggested that the stimuli
are filtered out after they have been analyzed for both their physical properties and meaning. So
they are saying Deutsch and Deutsch are saying that no it not like that, we will not analyze the
meaning of the unattended information we will do that as well and only after that we will throw
838
it away. So this late filtering would allow people to recognize information attending the
unattended ear information presented in an unattended ear
As well for example they might recognize the sound of their own names or translation of the
unattended version. This is what Deutsch and Deutsch was saying they were saying that the
selective filter is applied even after the perceptual processing has happened. Now you see how
these three models differ from each other as to where this filter has been applied will Ulric
Neisser, he was going through all of these kind of models and he wanted to synthesize the early
filter and the late filter models.
So he proposed that there are two processes that governs selective attention. First is the pre-
attentive process these automatic processes are rapid and they are occurring in parallel and they
can be used to notice only physical and sensory characteristics of the unattended message but
they do not discern meaning so a very low level analysis of the unintended message is happening
The second process happens is the attentive or the controlled process these occur slightly later
and they are executed serially.
So they happen one after the other. They consume time and attention resources such as working
memory. Now these kind of processes the second kind of process can be used as cues to observe
the relationship among these features and synthesize fragments into mental representations of a
particular object. So once you're doing this second kind of processing on the unattended message
you might be able to discern whether it has some relevance or meaning for you or not and if it
does not have you throw it out.
If it does have it grabs your attention. This two-step model basically could seriously account for
the Cherry’s and mores increase amongst data also this model has been found to nicely
incorporate aspects of treatments signal attenuation theory and feature integration. Also
according to Treisman discrete processes for feature detection and feature integration occur
during searches which also are accounted for by this particular model. Let us come to the
neuroscience of selective attention let us talk a little bit about that. Now Hillyard and colleague
basically conducted a ground breaking study
839
And they expose participants to streams of tones, one in each ear. Participants were asked to
detect occasionally occurring target stimuli when the target stimuli occurred in the attended ear
the first negative component of ERP was larger when then when the target occurred in the
second year the unattended ear. The first negative ERP component is the n1wave. Okay which
happens around after 90 milliseconds. The research hypothesize.
840
That the n1 wave was a result of the enhancement of the target. This is because this is prioritized
enhanced at the same time there was a suppression of the other stimuli with it were the
distractors. This result is consistent with filter theories of attention and later theories like once by
Woldorff in1993 found an even earlier reaction to targets stimulus, in the form of positive way
that occurs about 20 to 50milliseconds after the onset of the target. Now this wave originates in
what is called the Herschel’s gyros the auditory cortex and similar findings have also been
reported for visual attention.
So if a target stimulus disappearing even in an unattended region of the visual fields the occipital
p1 the p1 that is happening in the occipital cortex is larger than when the target appears in the
unattended. So you are seeing that there are different brain responses to stimuli coming in the
attended and unattended fields and also depending on how much you want to you know enhance
or attenuate that kind of information. Now this is all for today.
We have talked about selective attention we’ve talked about the different kinds of theories that
have talked about selective attention. We saw that a very prominent theory of selective attentions
the filter model. We've talked about for the fact that they were let us say you know the sight of
the filter is very important we saw that Broadbent as saying that the filter model should be
reapplied much much earlier just you know after the sensory analysis of everything that is
841
coming in. We saw the Treisman was saying that maybe the filter is not really weak you know
putting everything out.
It is just weakening this information. So it's limited capacity kind of a thing. It’s a bottleneck
kind of a thing and it is still letting everything pass but the one with higher priority passes faster
and more directly than one with a slightly lower priority passes in a more slower fashion. It just
gets we can even though it gets analyzed as well. We saw that there was this later model by
Deutsch and Deutsch says sensory processing has happened perceptual processing has happened
and only then the filter is applied.
So you have seen that there are consequences in terms of many mental processes as to which
kind of you know filtering or a selection mechanism that are you using in attention and they are
also consequences for wherein the entire processing you are putting this filter you are applying
this particular filter. And the more interesting part we solve towards the end of this lecture was
by Ulrich Neisser.
When he said that let us kind of you know compile all of these three kinds of models and then
see you know what kind of a model what kind of an integrated model one can come up with and
842
his data the experiments that he did could account for a lot of findings which each of these
separate models on their own could not. So this was all about selective attention in the next class
we will talk about divided attention. Thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
843
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
844
Course Title
Lecture: 27
Attention- III
By
Prof.Ark Verma
National program of technology
Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)
Hello everyone welcome to the course basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur. We have been talking about attention in the last couple of lectures. We in the first
lecture talked about visual search we talked about how you use attention to search for particular
objects in your environment say for example whether you follow a process of features looking
for specific features whether you follow process of looking for combination of features and then
we talked about how do you do this selection we talked about selective attention. Today we will
talk about what is called divided attention now it is no surprise you know and it might not come
as a novelty to any of you for that matter.
845
That we do for the most part do two things at once. Say for example this gentleman right here in
this figure is actually driving in trying to text at the same time and this is actually where you start
misusing your capacities of driving. Okay, in this particular course we will try and see how good
or a bad decision something like this will be. We will talk about the fact that we can handle more
than one information more than one kind of stimulus more than one kind of location at the same
time yes.
We can do that we will also though talk about the limitations of being able to do that how do we
do that, what are the you know processes involved in doing that and how does our attention
facilitate or sometimes acts as a limitation in doing two things at the same time. This one
however is a bad example to follow so we let us move towards investigating what divided
attention does in a safer scenario of a particular lab.
846
Now one of the early works done in the area of divided attention had participants view a
videotape in which they saw the display of a basketball game superimposed on the display of a
hand slapping. So they were these individuals they were actually you know they have brought
into in front of the screen maybe it was presented to them and they were actually looking at two
activities at the same time they are looking at a basketball game and also at the same time
looking at the display of a hand slapping game. Now these participants could successfully
monitor one activity.
847
And ignore the others if they were told that you just focus on you know viewing the basketball
game or say for example if they were advised to just focus on the hand slapping game they could
do that very successfully but in a third condition if they were asked to follow both the games
simultaneously and you know do some kind of reporting about what happened and something
like that they had great difficulty in pondering both these activities at the same time. Even if the
basketball game was watched by one eye.
And the hand slapping game by the other. You can do everything I'll just divide one of my eyes
to doing this on the eyes to doing, I Am not really sure how possible that is but even if people
would use a strategy as interesting as that they were not really successful in doing that now.
848
Neisser and Becklen, who did this study they hypothesize that the improvement in performance
could have happened you know if the participants would have practiced enough. Now as a result
of practice they would have acquired the skill of monitoring each of these games first and then
each of these games simultaneously. Now this is where your ability of divided attention comes
in. Attention we have seen that is the ability to select information and work at one information
and one time and the other information and later but this is a different kind of thing that you may
be saying that you can attend to more than one thing more than one event or object or location at
the same time. So this is what is called divided attention.
849
Now in the following year the same investigators they used dual task paradigm to study divided
attention during this simultaneous performance so earlier was observation this is a performance
task and the two activities these participants were performing were reading to short stories and
writing down dictated words. So in one activity they are actually reading a short story and there
with the second thing they are being dictated some words and they are to write that down, so two
activities are happening here.
Now the researchers actually would compare and contrast the response times and accuracy in
each of the three conditions what will be the three conditions. The first condition will be doing
the reading task the second condition will be doing the dictation task and the third in the most
important condition for our purposes is a condition wherein they are doing both of these tasks
simultaneously. Now as expected the initial performance was quite poor across the two tasks you
know when they had to be performed at the same time.
850
But Spelke & colleagues they had their participants practiced to perform these two tasks five
days a week for around 17 weeks total of 85 sessions in all. So they kind of spend a lot of time
practicing these two skills reading a story taking dictation at the same time, now to the surprise
of many the performance actually improved on both the tasks after practice so the participants
were showing improvement in their speed of reading and their accuracy of reading
comprehension as measured by the comprehension tests on whatever passages they were
presented with also they showed increases in their recognition memory for words they had
written during the dictation part.
So they are kind of not only getting better at each of these tasks independently they are getting
better at performing these tasks together. So eventually these participants’ performance on both
the tasks also reached the same levels as when they would perform each of these tasks alone. So
that is quite an improvement in itself. Now they could perform both of these tasks at the same
time without any loss in performance on both say for example if you would say that I have this
hundred percent capacity of doing a particular task if I am doing two tasks then I probably divide
it 50/50.This case the participants are doing both the tasks at 100% at the same time.
851
Now Speke and colleagues who are doing this research of you know examining these two dual
tasks they suggested that these findings are showing that control tasks can also be automatized so
that they consume fewer attentional resources. Also to discrete control tasks may be optimized as
a function together as a unit if you doing two tasks together say and you practice them enough,
you are good enough you can synthesize them you know some people study by repeating you
know whatever they are reading.
So they are speaking and reading at the same time and to them both of them are working as one a
unit task and is working pretty well. So however they still continue to be intentional and
conscious and involve high levels of cognitive processing it is not really taking away all their
resources because they are doing two tasks they have evolved or practice the skills as much that
they both of these tasks are functioning together and they're functioning as one unit of a task.
852
Now a slightly different approach to studying divided attention could be involving focusing on
very simple tasks very you know a very simple tasks that require speedy responses. An example
could be say for example if people try to you know perform an overlapping speeded recognition
tasks like the one we do in our labs the response for one or the both tasks are always slower. So
for example if you know if the second task begins soon after the first task started the speed of the
performance usually starts to suffer. The slowing is actually resulting from simultaneous
engagement in these two speeded tasks. This slowing is called the psychological refractory
period also has been referred to as the attentional blink phenomena in attention research.
853
Now hearing is a good example in a single task scenario I can just ask you to spot a black X
among these you know rapid serial visual presentation of grey alphabets. So these grey alphabets
will be presented one after another in quick succession generally with the presentation type of
rounds seventy five or fifty milliseconds and then their tasks of the participant is to just
recognize whether in that particular RV sequence black X were presented or not. So this is one
kind of performance participants generally do very well at it.
Now I can make this slightly twisted and I can tell you that ok you have to perform your know
spot a black X but you also have to spot a black O after that X that might appear not appear
might be closer to the X further from the X all of those things I would be able to manipulate but I
am giving you two tasks here. I am giving you to identify two targets T 1 and T 2 again in the
same RSV stream, it has been found and research has shown that the performance in identifying
the second target generally suffers.
854
Now findings from these PRP studies these kind of studies indicate that people can
accommodate fairly easy perceptual processing of physical properties or sensory surely when
engaged in a second speeded task. So they can with practice do that as well. However they
cannot readily accomplish more than one cognitive task requiring them to choose a response to a
you know or retrieve information from memory or engage in various other cognitive operations
at the same time. So one or both the tasks will generally show the PRP effect it will show the
characteristics slowing down it will it might show the characteristics you know a characteristic
fall in accuracy as well.
855
Now let us talk about theories of divided attention. Let us talk about what kind of theories do you
know talk about divided attention. Now a number of researchers have developed capacity models
of attention to understand our ability to divide out attention. So the whole point of being able to
divide attention is that you have a limited attentional capacity and you kind of divide this into
two tasks which you are doing or which you intend to do at the same time. Now these kind of
capacity models explain how we can perform more than one attention demanding tasks at the
same time. These pose it people have a fixed amount of attention that they can choose to allocate
according to whatever task requirement.
So if you are doing an easier task and a difficult task it might be slightly easier to do it if you are
doing two equally highly demanding tasks then it might be slightly difficult to allocate attention
and manage that. Now there two different kinds of models that have been proposed one kind of
model suggests that there is only one single pool of attentional resources, so all that sensory
information that you need to negotiate with there is only one pool of attentional resources that
you would have.
And resources can be divided according to the needs of the two tasks at hand. The other model
suggests that there are multiple sources of attention and there might not be a problem in
negotiating you know the two tasks or three tasks at the same time because you can say for
856
example and ask different pools of attention to be allocated to different tasks at the same time so
these are the two kind of models here.
You see a graphic of that borrowed from Sternberg and Sternberg books the text book on
cognitive psychology. Now in the panel A you can see that there is one single attentional pool
whatever stimuli input are coming in part of that attentional pool is allocated to task one part of
that is allocated to task two and then you select whatever activities you have to do, may be press
a key given verbal response whatever you want. This is called a single resource model of
attention or something like that. The second model if you see which is your panel B you can find
that whatever stimulus inputs are coming in they are actually entering in via two different
modalities.
So there is modality one and there is modality two and what you are basically doing is there are
separate mental resources allocated to modality one and modality two and so your selection of
possible activities that you have to do directly follows from these two different modalities and in
that sense there will be less conflict and actual responses could be had later. Now these are the
two metaphors these are the two hypothetical you know assumption see these are not really hard
857
facts that attention really operates in this manner. These are two hypothetical approaches to study
attention and both of these kind of theories have been tested there have been a lot of experiments
and those experiments have said a few things we will you know now talk about.
Now even if you look back at these models and say for example if you are wondering that
obviously these models do represent the oversimplification these models are much better and it
has been found that people are much better at dividing attention when completing tasks are in
different modalities, say for example if one task is in the visual modality the other task in the
auditory modality people have been able to do that. People have been found to do that almost
effortlessly without really you know slowing down or without really being too inaccurate okay.
So it can be said that at least some attention resources might be specific to a particular modality
verbal or visual in which a task is presented. Say for example you might also have done it a lot of
times that you will see most people can you know listen to music and concentrate on writing
simultaneously a lot of people do listen to music and drive they cannot even in some sense you
know drive if there is no music around in the car. So people are doing two things at the same
time in a lot of instances.
858
And so that this whole concept of different modalities having different kinds of attentional
resources still you know does start making some sense. Now it is though harder to listen to the
new station and concentrate writing about this air you know at the same time because the
information coming from a particular new station.
Is also new might be relevant to you might get interested in that. So you are kind of allocating
and you know a sizable amount of resources to that, also writing needs sizeable amount of
resources and then it gets difficult another thing is that they are both verbal tasks they are both
tasks about language so in the language modality it might be difficult then to divide the same
kind of resources that the language modality has to two language tasks at the same time, verbal
tasks at the same time. Similarly if you give somebody two visual tasks they are also more likely
to interfere with each other.
than are visual tasks compared with the ordinary task or an auditory task compared with the
haptic task something like that, so within modalities certainly there is this notion of capacity
limitation, within modality you try and put in too many tasks always see the finding of the PRP
859
thing that there will be that characteristic slowing down and there will be those you know extra
errors that will start coming in.
Attentional resource theory the ones which we have been talking about they have been criticized
you know heavily as being slightly broad and vague. Resource theory then in that sense seems to
be a slightly better metaphor for explaining the phenomena of divided attention on complex
tasks. In these tasks practice effects may also be observed when the person gets you know used
to it when the person gets highly skilled in that particular tasks they do this become better. Now
according to this metaphor of the resource theory each of these complex tasks become
increasingly automatized when you are getting good at driving and listening to music I can share
one of these instances which happened with me when I started to learn driving I used to get
really you know disturbed when somebody is playing radio or if somebody's playing a radio on a
higher volume as and when I practiced over the course of few months I got better at driving and
in that sense now I do obviously listen to music while I'm driving. So as the task becomes
increasingly automatized as you skill on the tasks get better the performance of each task is now
going to make fewer demands on your attention resources.
860
And in that sense both of these tasks at the same time will become more and more manageable
that is pretty much what this concept of divided attention and this whole concept of resource
Theory tells you. Now let us talk a little bit about the factors that might influence our ability to
pay attention to two or more things at the same time. Say for example if you are anxious anxiety
is a very important factor if you are anxious either by nature some people are nervous by nature
some people are slightly cautious by nature or say for example by situation if there is say for
example as something really important going to happen, an interview is there or some very
difficult task is there or say for example you just had a very you know a bad fight with somebody
but you still have to sit in a particular exam both kinds of anxiety do place constraints on
attention. You will find that you know your ability to concentrate on even one thing for that
matter but on two things certainly becomes very very difficult. The second factor could be
arousal so arousal is basically the concept of general activity and general feeling of energy or
lethargy in your body. So once overall state of arousal obviously affects and it kind of impacts
attention. So if you are drowsy or drugged - you are very sleepy say for example it's always said
with drivers that they should be well-rested if you are going for a long trip especially at the time
of the night. So if you are very you know very drowsy or very you know lethargic then your
attention capacities will slightly be limited. Or say for example if you are too excited even if you
kind of you know very very excited if you are very happy.
And you know sometimes it happens with friends your attention capacities will slightly be you
know better and your overall attention will be slightly better if it is drowsy to be lower if it's your
kind of optimally excited it will be you know better. If you are too excited however then also it
might be a problem. Another important factor about how you can really govern your attention is
that the task difficulty.
861
Now task difficulty particularly influences people's performance during divided attention. If I
am giving you two easy task to perform you will do it very well if I am giving you one easy and
one difficult task to perform you might still do okay but if I am giving you two difficult tasks to
be done at the same time under time pressure you will certainly find it very difficult to do it.
Another aspect as we saw with the you know experiment of Spelke and colleagues is that your
skills play a very important role. The more practiced and the more skilled you become in
performing each of the task at hand the more you know better you will be in performing two
tasks two of these tasks at the same time. So your attention is enhanced your processing is
enhanced and better if you are performing two tasks at the same time. Now let us talk a little bit
again about the brain and what it has to do with attention so there is this gentleman a very
important gentleman in theory of attention and attentional research or in most of cognitive
psychology Michael Posner he basically said that the attentional system is in the brain is neither
a property of a single brain area and it's not the property of the entire brain as well.
862
Posner and Mary Rothbart wrote but in 2007 they conducted a series of neuro imaging studies in
the area of attention to investigate whether the many diverse results of studies conducted points
to a common direction. So they actually conducted a series of neuro imaging studies FMRI
studies that are in the area of attention and they wanted to investigate whether the many diverse
it’s because there were a lot of research going on, in attention in the past two or three decades
and it actually wanted to you know try and integrate and combine all of the findings from all of
these studies and to say whether there is a you know a unique direction whether there is some
commonalities in all of these literature that can be coming out. So Posner and Rothbart they
found at first that what at first seemed like an unclear pattern of you know results and findings
could be effectively organized into areas you know associated with three sub functions of
attention.
So they were actually looking at the brain they were actually looking at how the brain is
negotiating attention and what are the areas of the brain they are responding to various aspects
and various facets of attention. So they found that what actually looked like an unclear activation
over you know a distributed area of the brain can actually be effectively organized into three sub
functions of attention, these sub functions they said are alerting orienting and executive attention
let us talk about all of these three things in more detail.
863
Now alerting is basically that aspect of attention that there is about you know being prepared to
attend to some incoming event and maintaining this attention so alerting also includes the
process of getting into the state of preparedness. If you know you are supple you know on
television there is a number going to be announced and that number is of a particular lottery and
you are also having a lottery ticket in your hand you are prepared that now this announcement
will be coming up say for example if you know sitting at airport lounges.
And waiting for the flight announcement or in a railway station waiting for your train
announcements you are actually prepared and alert to the possibility of that announcement being
made so that you do not miss out on any important information so that is basically what alerting
is about, now the brain areas that might be involved in alerting are the right frontal and parietal
cortices as well as what is called a locus Coeruleus, is now the neurotransmitter no epinephrine is
also found to be involved with the maintenance of alertness. Also if the alerting system does not
work properly people may develop symptoms of what is called the attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder. We can talk about this in a later section but this in the this is the process of regular
raging dysfunctions of learning systems and it kind of you know can make it very difficult for
people to concentrate on specific things.
864
Orienting is defined as the selection of stimuli to attend to, if there are too many things going on
if there are too many announcements being made too many people talking around you, you might
want to orient your attention to select something very specific and then listen and analyze and
process that. This kind of attention is needed when you are performing say for example visual
search kind of tasks you are orienting network develops during the first year of you'll see the
children even very young children are also able to orient towards particular stimuli if you clap if
you kind of you know give some kind of folly they can select that stimuli and look at that and
then maybe you are their attention fades off. Now the brain areas involved in the orienting
Network are the superior parietal lobe the temporal parietal Junction the frontal eye fields and
the superior colliculus. The modulating transfer neurotransmitter the kind of modulates the
activity of the network is the acetylcholine. Now dysfunction with this system has been
associated with what is called autism. Autism is a cognitive disorder which has to do a lot with
you know that people afflicted with autism are not able to orient and attar into something or
concentrate on things over periods of time, again we can talk about autism in more detail
865
at a later point. The other thing is executive attention. Executive attention includes the processes
for monitoring and resolving conflicts that arise among internal say for example you are
processing too many things at the same time too much information is coming you have to select
to that I will select this and select that I will you know if there is a conflict or response all of
those kinds of things feeling say for example if there's somebody saying something you are
feeling very angry but you suppress your anger you see, you know continue talking peacefully
those kind of you know social dilemmas are actually handled by this executive network the brain
areas involved in this highest order of attention processing are the anterior cingulated cortex
lateral ventral and prefrontal cortex as well as the basal ganglia. The neurotransmitter that is
involved in executive functioning is dopamine. Now dysfunction with this kind of executive
attentional system is associated with diseases like the Alzheimer's disease borderline personality
disorder and schizophrenia.
866
Now here is the figure of the brain again borrowed from Goldstein and his textbook of cognitive
psychology you can see that what are these different networks of attention and how are they
organized or scattered across the brain?
867
We have begun this you know this chapter on divided attention by giving this example of
distractions while driving now driving is one of the you know I am just going to present a very
important study to you so that it kind of impresses enough that you know doing something else
while you are driving is a rather dangerous. So driving is one of the tasks that actually require
constant attention and not being able to do due to the same due to fatigue or involvement in other
tasks can have and does have disastrous consequences in a naturalistic observation study of
driving you know in the video recorders were placed in hundred vehicles.
And they documented records of both you know what the drivers were doing and also the
outside view and this was done by Dingus and colleagues in 2006. They actually found out that
in more than 80 percent of the crashes and a 67 percent of the near crashes the driver was
actually inattentive in some way three seconds prior to the crash. So I mean it is living proof it is
experimental proof or the fact that it is very dangerous to do anything else while driving.
868
Now in a laboratory experiment on the effects of cell phones Strayer and colleague, Strayer's
Williams and Johnston place participants in a simulated driving task and they required them to
apply brakes as quickly as possible as soon as a red light flashed now doing this task while
talking on a cell phone cause participants to miss twice as many of the red lights as when they
weren't talking on the phone or they were not doing something.
869
Here there the results so if you can basically see the amount of red light. Smith is much higher
than when they were doing with cell phones and see for example the reaction time is also much
higher when they were driving along with cell phones so this is you know again experimental
proof of why it is very dangerous to do anything while you are driving.
870
Strayer and Johnston concluded from this result that talking on phone uses cognitive resources
obviously you are listening to somebody you are attending to the voice on the phone over all the
other voices of traffic haunts maybe somebody from the back is a honking and wants to pass, all
of those you know you are not selecting or selecting this voice on the phone and that would
otherwise basically you know that will be the problem. So you know it takes a cognitive
resources that would have been actually been used while you are driving the car.
871
This is all I hope I have impressed you know enough about the good parts of divided attention
and also while the end about what the you know unfortunate or misuse of divided attention
would be. Thank you so much.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
872
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
873
Course Title
By: Dr. Ark Verma,

Assistant Professor of Psychology,
Department of Humanities & Social Science,
IIT Kanpur
Lecture 28: Attention - IV
Hello everyone welcome to the course basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Now we have been talking in the last three lectures about
attention, we have seen that there have been theories of attention which talked about attention as
a selective strategy we also talked about filter theories and bottleneck theories of attention. We
were also talking in one of the lectures about how you use attention say for example the first
lecture on attention that I took and I talked about theories of visual search that was one example
wherein you use attention to navigate your environment.
Where in you are basically using aspects of attention to look for or to search for particular
objects from the environment. We saw that feature search it does basically involve looking for
specific feature or let us say conjunction search involves looking for a specific set of features
may be a combination of one or two features and how do you actually focus on one feature or
two features and look for a particular object in your environment. We have talked about that in
the first lecture in the second lecture I talked to you about theories of selective attention how is it
important to select a particular piece of information or object or a location from your
environment and work on that.
And what are the different theories of selective attention, in the third lecture we talked about
divided attention and that given that it is a basic and it is a good a profitable ability that we have
that we can sometimes if need arises focus on more than one stimulus or word more than one
location at a time and we looked into some theories of that and also in the end of that lecture we
874
talked about how say for example this divided attention thing can be misused say for example for
people you know trying to do two tasks at the same time when the task is something as
demanding as driving.
In this lecture today I will basically take you to forming a link between attention and perception.
Now if you think of what an individual does while interacting and navigating with the
environment and if you remember some of the earlier discussions we have had we have
constantly been talking about the need for selecting some information from the environment and
working on it and in that sense you would see that attention does not only help us do that but
attention because it is helping us select and you know single out some particular you know
region or location or event in time and to attend on that.
It is doing something with our perception as well. What happens when you select something
when you attain something and what happens when you do not attend the you know a object in
question. Today we will try and make this link between attention and visual perception by the
help of some experimental study some very famous studies that have been done in attention over
the past decades we will try and make this connection and we will try and see how this
connection can help us better understand the process of attention. Just to, you know again
reminding you for the overall scope of the course we have been doing specific cognitive
functions but we have also looked into how these cognitive functions interact with themselves
because that is what the story of cognition has to be about. This is a course on basic cognitive
processes and I am trying to tell you that how these basic cognitive functions interact with each
other sometimes start working together to give you a more holistic experience to give you more
control and to give you a better handle over interacting with the environment. We have talked
about sensation we talked about perception if you remember the last section on perception was
about perception and action, so how do you perceive environment around and how do you act.
The second this chapter was basically about attention and today I am going to try and help you to
connect attention and perception together.
So if you kind of following all of these lectures in a particular sequence if you try and integrate
them into a particular conceptual structure you would want to make attention perception and
action all linked up with each other and then try and understand how each of these you know
875
cognitive functions in their own right and in you know conjunction give an individual a better
chance to interact and navigate with the environment. So with that background let us try and
study one of the very famous phenomena in attentional research which has been around for quite
some time called ‘In attentional blindness’.
So Mack and Rock in 1998 they created a situation in which a person's attention is focused on
one particular task and then they tried to determine whether the person can perceive another
stimulus you know which is another visual stimulus easily or he has difficulty in doing that. The
observers task in this kind of set up was basically to indicate the setup I will just describe the set
up how it looked like. So there was a blank screen there was a fixation cross the fixation cross is
essentially a plus sign which is presented in the middle of the screen.
So the observers were given the task of determining which of the arms of this particular cross is
longer so there is a plus sign one of the arms maybe the vertical or the horizontal will be longer
than the other and this is what the participants were told that you have to figure out and tell and
they were told that you have to do it as quickly and as accurately as possible. One of these trials
while the participants were doing this a small test object it could be of any particular geometric
876
shape which was also within the you know clear line of vision of these participants was
presented.
Observers were basically then given a recognition test after this in which they were asked to pick
up the object that was presented along with the fixation cross. So if you see the set up the set up
is there are two tasks here the first task is to determine the length of the arm which of the arm is
longer of this fixation cross and the hidden task or the other task is to actually determine which
of the shapes will be presented randomly at some point in time along with this fixation cross.
So this was the set up let me give you a demonstration of this right here right now say for
example this is a fixation cross.
877
This is the object and now can you tell me which was the object present it I think it kind of went
much slower than it would have gone in the typical experiment but I hope you got the idea.
878
So if you are actually focusing on you know determining the length of one of these arms of the
fixation cross you will have to look at it in a very focused manner. It will probably not appear as
big in the center of the screen the situation might be slightly different but the task is just
determine which of these arms is longer and it is slightly a demanding task.
879
And then while you just focus on the arms length you will see some of these kinds of figures
from these geometry shapes appearing right in front of your eyes right where this you know a
target in question that is the plus sign is there.
880
And then later after asking you which of the arms was longer or which of the ones was shorter I
will present you they presented an array of geometric stimuli wherein one of these objects which
were presented earlier was also this. So you have to recognize which one the objects really
appeared with the fixation cross and suppose if you were completely engrossed in the task of
judging the arms length you will more you know probably not be very good at recognizing this
particular visual object.
881
Now this basically this phenomena has been termed as in attentional blindness if you are not
paying attention to something you are blind to that. So if you are not really being able to attend
to a particular stimulus now this is the entire setup which was again presented in Goldstein’s
book of cognitive psychology figure 4.17 this is the whole set up.
882
So the description of the phenomena is such that if you are not really paying attention to a visual
stimulus or an auditory stimulus as it may in your environment you are almost blind to it, blind
basically means you are not really attending to it. Now remember we have talked about selective
attention and we talked about divided attention and one of the theories we have said that maybe
we are still attending that but for most practical purposes we might still be we might be blind to
everything that we have not done it and we not attended.
So to just define this in a more concise way paying attention to all of these at the vertical and
horizontal arms of this fixation cross apparently is making the observers blind to the unattended
test object this phenomena has been termed as inattentional blindness. Now Mack and Rock
demonstrated in attentional blindness using rapidly flashed geometric stimuli but there have also
been other kinds of researches that have shown that similar effects can be achieved in more
natural scenarios as well okay.
So let me describe one of the other kinds of experiment here again to do within attentional
blindness.
883
So Simons and Chabris basically in 1999 they created a situation in which one part of the scene
is attended and the other part is not. So it is a more natural scenario they created a 75 second film
and they basically showed two teams of three players each playing basketball you know in a
more natural kind of a setting and in the one in white passing the basketball around, so there is
the two teams playing this one team which is white wearing white the other team might be
wearing a colored jersey.
And this team is basically following a you know passing the basketball around. Now observers
who are made to watch these movies were asked to count the number of passes. So a task let us
focus you know their attention to this ball passing activity very well okay so they are basically
attending to this team in white which is actually passing the ball around.
884
Now what happens was that after about 45 milliseconds an event that took around 5 seconds
occurs, so one of these events was say for example a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks right
through the middle of this you know movie and right through the middle of these players. So
after seeing the video observers after they actually you know attended the video they saw the
video and they were not really told that there will be a gorilla or something like that happening
they were just told to count the passes that have happened.
Now after this you know thing was going on the observers were asked whether they have seen
anything unusual happen or whether they have seen any more than 6 players or something like
that. Nearly half of the observers who saw the movie around 46% of the observers, they failed to
report having seen the event even though it was clearly visible even though it was happening
right in front of their eyes but they could not report it, why they could have missed it is probably
because they were too intent.
885
Too much caught in counting the all passes that way. This is again a figure of that particular
movie just a snap shot from there presented in Goldstein. So this basically shows you that here
there is a gorilla standing right in the middle and kind of I have seen that movie so kinds of does
a few activities tries to gain attention but if there is somebody who is completely intent on just
counting the wall passes and it is really very engrossed or concentrated in that task I still miss
noticing the gorilla and in that sense being blind to whatever is happening.
886
This is another example of inattentional blindness that which shows us that this is a real
phenomena and may happen quite a few times, it might also mean you might recall say for
example if you are in a party or somewhere you are talking to somebody if somebody who are
there is this other person who passes around kind of waves at you and you do not you know
notice because you are too engrossed in a particular conversation.
887
Now moving further and let me just give you another task you see in this picture here and now
you can tell me whether there is a change in the picture.
888
So again I am not really sure what the video quality will be like.
889
But you can see here and here if you notice any change, now what happens here is again if I try
and do this slightly more closely you will see that right next to the woman there is a yellow
colored poster pasted on that placard and that yellow poster is not really a pleasant is not aware it
is not available in this picture. So this is what is happening this is basically called a change
scenario so something in the demonstration changes in a blink of a second and a lot of times
because you are not attending to the whole picture at once you might miss this change, this
particular phenomenon is called change detection.
890
Now Rensink and colleagues they basically did a very similar experiment in which pictures were
alternated in the same way until observers were able to determine what was different about the
two pictures. So they actually presented a whole lot of pictures and they actually asked the
participants to keep track of whether they are there is any change or if there is any change report
that. Participants basically were presented this with this kind of sequence of pictures again and
again and it continued until they were able to determine what was different about the two
pictures and found that the pictures had to be alternated back and forth a number of times before
the difference was detected.
The experiment had to do it quite a few times to really you know get that change detected by the
participants now this difficulty in detecting changes in scenes is basically called change
blindness proposed by Rensink in 2002, now this is again one phenomena that is you know very
demonstrative of the fact that attention is so much more important to select relevant information
to select relevant stimuli from our environment and do you know and say for example if there is
important information you would want to know that.
You can say for example liken this to a scenario when you are going you know somebody's
asked you to look for a particular landmarks and you are kind of going and you do not notice that
particular maybe it is a poster on the road and you kind of miss it because you know are talking
891
or you are kind of you know attending something else okay. So when Rensink added a cue
indicating which part of the scene had change participants quickly detected the change.
So this can help if there is a cue which can grab attention and which can orient your attentions
towards the site where the change has to be made. So Rensink in that sense they add he added a
cue indicating which part of the scene which facial location in the scene is going to be change
and that kind of change is going to happen then the participants certainly could detect these
changes much more quickly. Moving ahead it is not really often that you know we may it is not
always that we miss out on such kind of changes in the environment.
Because there are obviously cues that help us to orient our attention towards such stimuli in the
environment, so there is an importance of these cues these cues automatically grab our attention,
they automatically attract our attention and they increase therefore the detection accuracy and the
speed with which we will respond to these kind of stimuli. Automatic attraction of attention by a
sudden visual or auditory stimulus is called orienting of exogenous attention.
Exogenous because the focus of the attention is outside the individual. There are you know
obviously a lot of time if you are doing something very interesting you kind of you know or
maybe driving or something you are doing if there is a flash of light or if there is a particular
kind for sound which is distinct from all other sounds you will certainly get oriented towards it
that is basically called orienting of exogenous attention.
892
Now attentional orientation that occurs when is one consciously decides to scan the environment
to find specific stimulus or just to track the environment it is called endogenous attentions, so
the first part I was describing was exogenous attention where the stimuli themselves attract your
attention they themselves grab your attention you get oriented toward them. It is not happen
always. Sometimes as if you remember in the visual search phenomenon you are looking for
something say.
For example on a railway station or say for example on an airport you have gone to receive
somebody and there are too many people coming out all of their faces you are scanning when
you are actually looking for a particular face you are looking for a particular person that you
have gone there to pick up that orienting of your attention which is basically decided by you
which you're consciously controlling and manipulating is called endogenous attention.
So how you orient your attention in the environment can be of two ways either the stimulus is
grabbing your attention or you looking for that kind of stimulus say for example in a visual
search kind of a phenomena.
893
Now both these types of attention are can and cannot involve overt attention. So we will talk
about the case where they involve overt attention what is overt attention, if you remember in the
beginning of the attentional chapter I was talking about overt and covert attention. Overt
attention is attention that is manipulated that is controlled by shifting of your eyes or by moving
of your eyes, this definition is taken from Carrasco work in 2010.
894
Now suppose I am showing you this particular picture and I ask you to find the face of Bob
Dylan in this particular picture. So I am kind of again taking it off and I am bringing it on and
now I am asking you that out of all these people here in this picture what you have to do is you
have to look for and find the face of Bob Dylan. What are doing here you are consciously
directing your attention probably scanning each of these faces each of these pictures present you
are going sequentially may be or maybe you are kind of have a sense and something pops out.
You are doing all of that on this picture and how are you doing this you are basically moving
your eyes.
895
In an eye tracking study you could actually also find out how do you move your eye. Overt
attention with eye movements if say for example basically can be tracked using a particular
device called the eye tracker. What does an eye tracker, eye tracker is a very simple device
basically a camera and a light source the light source kind of throws a light ray in your eyes and
that light ray is reflected and the camera tracks the reflection of the light ray and it in that sense it
can track the movement of your eyes it can track where your eyes are looking at any point in
time.
So it tracks the movement of eye from point one to point two or four from one point to another.
Now suppose there is this thing.
896
If you are kind of looking at a particular fountain and there is this study which was done if you
are looking at this picture of the fountain in Bordeaux France this is the pattern of eye
movements that was observed, so the first point where in your eye is land and then they start
moving all over the picture the first point is called first fixation, so wherein your eyes landed at
the first.
897
All these small dots you can see here all these yellow dots are called fixations because the eyes
move from point A to point B and stayed there for some amount of time. That amount could be
say for example the minimum amount that the fixation could be is around eighty two hundred
milliseconds your eyes are saying there and then they are moving towards other points, so those
the small dots are called fixation points. When you are moving your eyes along these lines from
point A to point B, you are doing something called a saccadic eye movements.
898
What you are doing is you are moving the eye from one fixation to the next fixation that is
saccadic eye movement. Typically people make about 3 fixations per second when you viewing
and unfamiliar seeing something like this if I give you scene to scan and tell me and find out
something in that particular scene you will be taking around three fixations per second, now two
kinds of factors determine how people shift their attention by moving their eyes.
899
First is bottom of factors basically based on the primary physical characteristics of the stimulus if
there is a bright color if there is an unusual shape that might attract your attention better than
some other things, so these are bottom-up driven eye movements the other thing would be the
top-down base eye movement based on the relationship between the observer and the scene you
know when the person looks at the scene and the demands of the task involve the person to scan
the scene say for example in the picture.
900
When I ask you to look for the Bob Dylan what you are doing here is you are basically doing
top-down governed eye moments. So you're basically decided that I have to look for something.
901
That is why you are moving your eyes over this picture again and again.
902
Some top-down determines we can talk about, so scene schemas an observers knowledge about
what is contained in the physical scenes. If you are looking at a particular scene if you are
looking at a particular scenario something about that scene and in that sense maybe you are
looking for something from that scene and that is basically wherein you are doing your top-down
kind of eye move, you are deciding I can take one example when Vo and Henderson in 2009
they showed observers pictures like the ones show you right away the observers looked longer at
the printer than the pan. I will just show you this picture right away.
903
If you see these pictures again and again a scene of the kitchen but here you can see that there is
a pan in the first picture but there is a printer on the second picture at the cook top now there is
something interesting about that scene isn’t it? You do not expect to find a printer in the kitchen
especially over the cook top okay so because there is something very specific about that thing
that actually made people look longer at that printer.
904
So the fact that people look longer at things that seem out of place in a particular scene kind of
tells us that attention is being affected by their general knowledge about the scene, their general
knowledge of what is usually you know to be found in a particular scene. Eye movements can
also happen or say for example attention can also you know move from one place to another
without moving your eyes, so I hinting about this in one of the earlier classes as well the
movement of attention without the movement of eyes is referred to as covert attention so shifting
of attention without moving of eyes is called covert attention.
905
They are having a lot of studies in which covert attention has been investigated and they have
used a procedure called Pre cueing so in which a participant is presented with the queue that
indicates where the stimulus is most likely to appear. So Pre cueing has been used to study two
kinds of attention.
906
And just tell you so, first is the location based attention Michael Posner did this kind of study. So
Michael Posner and colleagues were interested in answering the following question, the question
was does attention to a specific location improve our ability to respond rapidly to a stimulus
presented at that, let us say for example if there is a location and I have already told you that I am
going to present a number here.
And then I quickly present some numbers and you know I ask you later that which were the
numbers presented here because I have already told you the location because you have already
oriented your attention towards that particular location your performance will be slightly better
as compared to if I am not really telling you there you know the stimulus is going to appear and
then I present a particular stimulus that will be called location based stimulus.
907
Say for example in this experiment which was again borrowed from Goldstein's book I think it is
a typical posters paradigm you can say for example have the first things wherein there is an
arrow appearing over the fixation cross so arrow points towards the right side and the stimulus
appears on the right side. Okay so it kind of basically already Orient's your attention towards the
right side on an invalid trial a kind of point towards the left but the stimulus still appears on the
right that is called a invalid trial.
So a valid trial is where the cue is successfully predicting the location where the object will
appear invalid trial is when the cue is not successfully predicting where the object will appear.
908
Now it has been seen that when participants are given tasks like this and there could be many
variations valid cues are responded to much faster, so people will respond much faster targets
presented on pre cued locations because what has happened is even though you have not moved
your eyes generally the time period is much lower as well our eye movements. Even though you
have not moved your eyes you have shifted your attention to that pre cued location and that is
why any stimuli presented at those locations are attended to faster and more accurately.
909
The results of these experiments indicate that observers were reacting more rapidly on valid trials
than on invalid trials leading to the conclusion that information processing is more effective at
the place where attention is direct. These and other similar results have given rise to the idea that
attention is like a spotlight. It is like a lens that improves processing when directed toward a
particular location you know I was giving that example of a torch if you are in a dark room your
attention is like a torch you put your attention somewhere that is the part you are getting most
information out of. Now the other kind of attention one can talk about is object based attention
now when you select a particular object experience have also shown that attention can also be
associated with specific objects.
910
Experiment studying object based attention have shown that when attention is directed to one
place on an object the enhancing effect of this attention spreads throughout that. Probably you
are looking at a particular pen or if you are looking at a particular small object then the attention
will kind of cover that entire object. I will show you an example so Egly and colleagues they did
this experiment they asked participants to keep their eyes on the fixation cross then on one end of
the rectangle was briefly highlighted. I will show you the figure right away.
911
This is the thing participants were basically asked to keep their eyes on the fixation cross but one
end of these rectangles is brightly highlighted and there is where the target could appear okay, so
let us see let us see what happens I will just describe this in more detail. So this basically is
highlighting acts as a cue signal that indicates where a target a dark square that could appear and
that is what they have to detect.
912
Now the partisans task is here is to press a button when the target appeared anywhere on that
display the reaction times were found much faster when the target appeared on where the cue
signal predicted that it would appear, so again something is similar to the last finding if you pre
cue attention to a particular space or a particular object in this case your performance in terms of
detection and accuracy is going to be much better. However the most important finding however
in this set of experiments is that participants responded to much responded much faster when the
target appeared within the same rectangular object location B, than when it appeared at another
location C now note that B and C are at the same distance.
913
From A. So this is the thing if the object appeared in B versus the object appeared in C
participants were much faster at B even though the distance from B from A to B and A to C is
exactly identical. What is the difference, the difference is that B is lying on the same object as A
or as the queued location but C is on a different object. So this is you know the apparently
enhancing effect of attention.
914
And that has spread within the entire rectangle so even though the cue is at A spatial location or
let us say on that particular object there is some enhancement occurring at B as well because B
forms part of the same object this is basically called the same object advantage.
915
Location and object based, so this is basically typically an example of location based and object
based attention put together for you, so location is just like you are putting as pot light at a
particular location.
916
Object basis when you are looking at a particular object and your attention is enhanced
throughout that particular object so if you move the object your attention moves along with the
object.
917
In the location based if you change the location the attention there is not really shift, it is a very
specific location that you have selected to attend, so I hope these demonstrations, I am kind of
going to end here.
Refer Slide Time: 28:36)
918
These demonstrations about how attention interacts and affects your visual perception might
have been useful for you to realize how attention is important process and how attention affects
your abilities of perception as well. Similar examples would have also been taken with attention
and auditory perception as well, but I am not really talking about them because they are kind of
not in the scope of the course thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
919
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
920
Course Title
Lecture-29
Memory- I
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello everyone welcome to the course on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from
IIT Kanpur I will be talking about.
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Memory today now we have been in this course talking about different cognitive phenomena and
what those cognitive phenomena mean to us and how do they help us live our lives how do they
help us interact with the environment, now if you actually take a survey of whatever mental
processes one does and whatever these mental processes help us achieve in life help us do
memory appears to be a very interesting one. Why because memory is probably the all pervasive
mental phenomena.
That is going on all the time today we will try and see what memory is about generally if I were
doing it in a classroom I would ask you to generate a definition of memory, so what you can do
is decide how you define memory quickly generate a very small maybe a one liner or a 2 liner
definition of memory and keep it in your mind while I talk to you about you know something and
how formally memory has been defined. Now it is going through you know when I was going
through make this thing there is this quote of Tennessee Williams that I found out and Tennessee
Williams says very interestingly.
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He says has it they were struck you that life is all memory except for the one present moment
that goes by, so quickly that you hardly catch it going. It is all really a memory except for each
passing moment, now if I were to ask you which is that mental phenomena which is that
cognitive process that gives you the sense of self, that gives you the same that sense of continuity
that you are existing in this world that you are the same person that you were yesterday and say
for example while you are planning about your future you will be the same person that you today
are.
Everything that you know about this world everything that you have ever done everything that
you have ever experienced say for example seeing heard tasted smelt everything that you have
done on the face of this earth till this particular point in time while you are watching this
particular lecture is all part of your memory, obviously it might be different that you might
recall some parts of those things very vividly some of those things not, so vividly but they still
stored somewhere at the back of your brain.
Somewhere in the in your head and they form what is called memory in this particular chapter
while talking about memory I will talk to you about, say for example the processes that help you
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store this information the processes that help you organize this information and also the
processes that help you use this information to do a variety of things say for example I give you a
task hereto add two plus two to do some multiplication or, let us say to tell me a story or if I ask
you to you know describe me what you did last evening anything that I will ask you to do will
require you to draw on your memory and will require you to actually you know use your
memory.
To look into this you know in the shells of the memory and bring out information, also if I do not
ask you to you know do any particular task but I say for example will give you an apple to eat
you will need to draw on your memory that Apple is the fruit and it is edible to actually act on
that particular Apple, again you are using some of your knowledge something that is there some
part which is you know obviously part of your entire larger memory system to be able to do
anything that you would want to do. A lot of people would say that even processes like thinking
and you know dreaming and deciding have a lot to do with your memory whatever experiences
you had overtime, how have you organized those experiences which of the experiences which of
the you know events you have found that were very important to you have still you know been
kept almost as vivid say for example I you know ask you to describe to me you know a vacation
or a holiday that you spend at least five years or ten years ago and tell me in great detail about
what you did during that vacation. If that holiday were you know a particularly pleasant or even
in some sense unpleasant experience if it were salient, and if it were distinguish able for all the
mundane everyday activities, it is quite possible that even though the holidays 10 years or 15
years or 20 years back from, now you might be able to you know recall it you might be able to
really vividly relive it in the current moment by drawing upon your memory.
So in this chapter we will be spending a lot of time about you know talking about different
aspects of memory in the first few lectures, I will be talking to you about a particular model of
memory that was given by Atkinson and Shiffring wherein they basically divided memory into
sensory and short-term and working memory, we will talk about that, we will going further talk
about you know long-term memory as well which is basically about the information that you
have you had kept for a longer time, we will be talking about errors in memory we will be
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talking about what does the brain have to do with memory what happens with when a particular
area the brain is not responding.
We will be doing all of that in the course of the next few lectures and basically trying to
understand how memory as a cognitive function really helps us you know find that sense of
continuity of life, find that sense of you know being who we are, so with that kind of background
with that kind of you know informalish background let us try and define what memory is, I am
hoping that you had kept at too liner definition in your mind and I am now asking you to match
that definition with the definition I am giving up here. So my definition of memory again.
May be picked up from a particular book is that memory is the process involved in retaining
retrieving and using information about stimuli images, events, ideas, skills and a lot of things you
might add after the original information is no longer present. So that moment has passed that
stimuli is not in front of you anymore or say for example that simply has come to you after a
long time all of these thing show do you retain that information, how do you retrieve that
information from the back of your mind and how do you start using that information. Suppose
you met somebody you know two years ago on a particular railway platform or maybe in a
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theater and, now you met him right in front of your house doing something and you kind of
realize, this is the person I know and you are kind of going to talk to this person, so all of those
kind of things everything in that sense that you are going to do will draw upon your memory,
now there is an interesting case of a patient called Clive Wearing is probably referred to as the
ten seconds man or the seven seconds man you can find you know a video documentary of his on
YouTube Clive Wearing was a man basically he had you know a particular kind of amnesia a
disorder of memory where he could not recall anything for more than a matter of 10 seconds.
Now Clive Wearing was maintaining a particular diary and one of these people went through his
diaries and there is an excerpt there is a description, you know office diary right here and I will
just read it to you to give you a perspective of what happens when memory is actually not around
when memory kind of gets damaged in a particular way.
So this feeling of that loss of continuity this feeling of loss of the sense of selfhood can really
exist which is you know made really abundantly clear by if somebody goes through Clive
Wearing’s diary and it contains hundreds of entries it contains hundreds, of entries and I am
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quoting, I have woken up for the first time or I am Alive or things like that he has no memory of
who he is he has no memory of any past, he has no hopes of remembering anything in the future
and those kind of things what does he do, how do how does.
He maintain his type it is a very interesting documentary I am sure you find it on YouTube if you
look for it, so Clive Wearing has no memory of ever writing anything, except for the sentence
that he is just written. So you give him his diary that you have been maintaining this diary all
while long, he turns through those pages as if it is some stranger’s diary as if it is saying that you
know seeing that diary for the first time as if he is writing anything ever for the first time.
People have tried to question Clive Wearing, people have tried to question him about this you
know previous entries.
And Wearing then acknowledges that they are in his handwriting. So he remembers this is my
handwriting but because he has no memory of writing them he denies that they are his, so even
something that is happening right in front of you imagine if you cannot really recognize that is it
you or is it somebody else or you know does it really belong to you that is that kind of is a very
major setback. Now it is no wonder you know if somebody has that kind of a memory loss and
the kind of loss that Wearing is having is really confused and is not surprising that he describes
as being like death.
His loss of memory has robbed him of his ability to participate in life in any meaningful way and
he needs to be constantly cared for by others, so memory in that sense is that cognitive function,
if I may take the liberty of saying so on which all the other cognitive functions are actually based
and are functions like you know the operating system is like the background against which all the
other cognitive and mental activities are taking place and everything is taking place in this you
know in the reference or in the frame of this particular memory, so in that sense I think if talked
enough about how important memory is you know as a cognitive functions and I think that will
be reflected in the amount of time we kind of are going to talk about memory and the different
aspects of memory in you know this part of the course, now if I can simplify and if I structure try
and structure this memory for you how would you know really organize memory a very simple
way of saying this is using the help of English they could be the present or the present tense.
927
say for example this movement, the moment and the moment and actually just past as I was
saying it so the past is already as recent, so that moment the one that passed and the long past
will be that moment say for example when I had begun this lecture, so memory in that sense can
be organized into present and past and something that long past okay because memory is only
about things that you have already experienced it is not really have that you know any sense of
future or thinking.
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Or something like that. Now, here is the flow diagram of Atkinson and Shiffrins model of
memory and this model again this figure is drawn from Goldstein’s book on cognitive
psychology here and you can see there are three aspects of memory that Atkinson and Shiffrin
define. They say there is at least three parts to memory the first part is sensory memory, so as
you are experiencing the world through your five senses there is information that is imprinting
impinging on these senses and while this information is impinging on your senses you might
have a recollection of them and that is what is your sensory memory. It is very little and we will
talk about this pan and those kind of things in today is lecture at a later point in time. The second
important aspect of you know memory that Atkinson and Shiffrin define is the short-term
memory, wherein some information for a very short term you probably want to do something
with that information use it in some particular way, the third is long-term memory things which
have you have experienced long back are not really very long back things like starting from you
know a few minutes to a few hours to a few decades and you will see that there is a constant you
know give-and-take between short-term memory and long-term memory, say for example today
I ask you about your address about where you are living or where you were living five years ago
you will draw that information from your long term memory bring it to the short-term memory
and give me a particular output, so you will see the output is linked to short term memory,
anything that is performative anything that you are doing in this world will draw on what is
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called your short-term memory. Input is a first address at the sensory stage so that is your
sensory memory.
So Richard Atkinson and Shiffrin they gave this model in 1968 and this model was referred to as
the modal model of memory because it included almost everything or almost the different kinds
of features that were present in memory models of those days, this model had been extremely
influential and kind of shaped and gave direction to memory research for a lot of years for many
years that were to come.
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Now the stages in this model are called structural features so these are components of memory so
to speak, so the first component is sensory memory sensory memory is that initial stage that
holds all the incoming information from the sensors, remember I have not talked about attention
yet so I am talking about all the information that is coming in that stays for around almost just a
fraction of a second or just a few seconds, this is what is your sensory memory from sensory
memory if you for example attend some information, it goes to your short-term memory it is held
there for around 15 to 30 seconds and it has a very small capacity of around five to seven items,
so how the sensory information is passing from the sensory memory coming to your short-term
memory for further processing but it still stays there is no for not more than 15 to 30 seconds.
The important part the part on, which we draw upon for doing anything is called the long-term
memory, the long-term memory can hold a large amount of information over years.
Take is you know if I if you were say for example 25 years of age if I ask you things that happen
to you while you are 5 years of age you will at least remember some salient things. Maybe you
will remember something very specific from your childhood that where has it been all the while
because you are not constantly thinking of that thing while you are living your life. So it was
tucked away very safely very you know in a very well-organized way in somewhere in the back
of your memory a scope or memory store and given a particular cue given a reason to recall it
you will certainly recall it.
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So that is what long-term memory is there is no real you know not a lot of studies done about
the you know limitation of size in this long-term memory but certainly any information past 30
seconds or past one minute till you know maybe the time since you were born is all there in your
long-term memory. Now Atkinson and Shiffrin also describe the memory system as including
what are called control processes.
So they said there are these control process which are active and they can be controlled by the
person and then may differ from one task to the others, if I am giving you a particular task to
remember something to remember a set of digits to remember a particular number of words or
sentences you might engage in what is called rehearsal. What is reversal it is really simply what
people do repeating a stimulus over and over again as one might repeat a telephone number say
for example in order to hold it in ones memory and so that one does not have to look in the
phone book okay say, for example if you were on phone somebody is telling your particular you
cannot find that paper you might want to keep repeating that number till the time that you get a
you know paper or pen or say for example till after you have cut the call and you can save that in
your mobile phone.
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Let us take an you know an active example again borrowed from Goldstein's book say for
example there is a girl called Rochelle and she wants to you know look up a pizzeria.
In order to ask for a pizza so what she would do is, she was on the internet she looks on the
screen all of the information that enters her eyes is registered in what is called the sensory
memory so if you are looking at a particular page on the internet you kind of all of that you know
the sentences and everything is coming into your eyes that is what is called the sensory memory
every information is getting registered is the sensory memory. Now she has to use the control
process of selective attention because she wants to look for a particular pizzeria or she gets
attracted by a unique name of a particular pizzeria, so she does that she focuses on one particular
number and because she is focusing on this particular number this has entered what is called her
short-term memory, later she knows that she might need to call number again to order the pizza
next time and again she does not want to go to the internet and do that process again so what she
does is she decides then in addition to storing the number in her phone she is going to memorize
the number .
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Maybe there is somebody you know who would want to remember information as well so she
kind of tries to memorize this thing, so what she does is she does some rehearsal she processes
the process that she will use to keep this number via rehearsal is referred to as encoding so what
she is doing is by rehearsal she is encoding this information storing it somewhere in her brain, so
that she can you know call that number back to ask for a pizza. So a few days later she wants to
order a pizza again she will need to retrieve this number again from her long-term memory.
And dial that particular number. So again a graphic here where panels A B C and D. Panel A is
she actually looking through for the numbers.
In the they are there in the sensory memory panel B she is focusing on a specific number which
then enters the short-term memory, panel C she is rehearsing to encode that number in the long-
term memory, so that she can call upon that number at a later point in time. So here is via
rehearsal information grows from the short-term memory to the long-term memory and it stays
there becomes part of whatever that large storage thing is for.
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So she needs to call the Pizza next time the other day maybe next week then she can from her
memory recall and use that number to dial for a user obviously, she can look in the phone as well
but maybe say for example if you know she wants to recall and use it she has at least memorized
the number maybe a she has to tell it to somebody or something like that okay, so here you saw
how a very simple task.
935
Of looking for a pizzeria calling it does involve all three kinds of your memory it involves
control processes like selective attention and rehearsal and using these control processes that is
how you deal with the information that you are getting from the environment most times. It
could be any other example it could be an example with meeting somebody and those kind of
things, let us now talk about sensory memory, sensory memory I will be going to each of these
processes now in some detail so that we kind of understand them in more in a much better sense.
936
So sensory memory is the retention time is for very brief periods of time of the effects of sensory
stimulation, so sensory memory is the retention for brief periods of time of the effects of sensory
stimulation. If you see something if you hear a fading voice if say for example you see a moving
sparkler.
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I think we have done it a lot in Diwali or some kind of festivals if you actually take the sparkler
and if you kind of move it around you will see this wave of your smoke that gets formed and you
kind of remember that wave of your smoke and that is basically what has registered on your
sensory memory.
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Now as you swing this something that already talked about so as you swing the sparkler through
the air creating a trail of light you would realize that there is actually no light present at that point
along trail, your moving this you seeing that there is light moving, but you have actually moved
the sparkler away from that position you still see that trail of light. That trail of light being there
because you are seeing it is basically referred to as persistence of vision so even though the
lighted trail is not there is a creation this is the one which you seeing right away is the creation of
your own mind and this retention of that visual perception is called persistence of vision. You
might see that in some time say, for example it might also happen that you know somebody said
something to you and it is gone away but you know that voice keeps ringing in your ears that is
probably persistence of auditory information. Similarly say for example let us take this example
if you are watching movie in a darkened theater, you may see actions moving smoothly across
the screen but what is actually projected on the screen is quite different, what is projected on the
screen basically is a single frame and then the other frame and in the other frame in quick
succession from each other but what you see because of this persistence of vision is a continuous
movie, so a single frame is positioned in the front of the projector lens then when the projector
shutter opens the image on the film flashes on the screen the shutter then closes so the film can
move on to the next frame, so basically it is frame by frame you are being shown particular stills
but if all of those stills are shown are shown in a particular you know a sequence say for example
what is called frame rates per second FPS then what you see is you will see a particular movie
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when the next frame is arrived in the front of the lens the shutter reopens the flashing the next
image on the screen.
And it kind of happens around 24 times per second so 24 images are flashed on the screen every
second repeated by a brief period of darkness, but you do not see the darkness you do not notice
that these are separate frames and in that sense you basically are using this persistence of vision
to construct out of your own mind what the movie is like. So a person viewing the film does not
really notice these dark intervals between these images because of persistence of vision and
because this persistence of vision fills these gaps of darkness which are there between the
changes of each frame.
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Now I will describe to you a very interesting experiment that is kind of drawing on this particular
phenomena George Sperling in 1960 he wondered how much information people can take in
from very briefly presented stimuli, so he determined this in a famous experiment in which what
he did was he flashed an array of letters on the screen for around 50 milliseconds 50 mill seconds
is a much smaller time period and then asked his participants to report as many of the letters as
he can so this part of the experiment was called the whole report method.
So the idea is some array of letters will be flashed for around 50 milliseconds and the participant
will be asked to report this the number of letters the number of digits that they actually see. So
given this task what happened was that the participants were able to report on an average around
4.5 letters out of the 12 letters.
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So this is how it was done.
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If you can see at the first panel the whole report panel there were three rows of four letters each
and every time the participant is just being able to tell about four or five letters. So in the next
version what he decided he decided to use what is called the partial report method. So what he
did was he presented the matrix for 50 milliseconds before but he sounded one of the following
tones after the matrix presentation to indicate which row of letters the participants were to report,
so if it were a high-pitched tone then it was the top row that they had to report if it were a
medium pitch tone then they had to report the middle row.
If there is a low pitch tone they had to talk about the lowest row, because the tones were
presented after the letters turned off the participants attention was directed not to the actual
letters because they have come and gone but to the persistence but to the trace of you know of
those letters that are remaining in these participants minds once the letters have been turned off,
so this is an example of what the partial report method was like. What do you predict would have
happened?
943
When the cue tones directed the participants to focus their attention on one of the rows they
correctly reported an average of 3.3 or 4 out of 4 letters you know, so the accuracy and the
amount of the information they could now report has been enhanced quite a lot because they are
being told to focus on a very limited span of information. Sperling concluded from this
experiment that the correct description of what was happening was that immediately after the
display was presented participants saw an average about of 82 % of the letters in the whole
display.
But they were not able to report all of those letters because they rapidly faded away after the
initial letter was being reported.
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So Sperling then he does an additional experiment to determine the time course of this reading so
he wanted to check what is the time course in which these information fades away, so for this
Sperling devised a delayed partial report method in which the presentation of tones was delayed
for a fraction of a second after the letter is extinguished, so basically it’s about giving them time
to rehearse this thing. So the result of this delayed partial report method was that when the cue
tones were delayed for one second after the flash participants were able to report only slightly
more than one letter in a row.
The equivalent of about four letters for all three rows and the same number of letters they
reported using the whole report method, so if there is this time gap between the tone and the
presentation of letters then the participant is not being able to report it, so here is the delayed
partial report method.
945
So this is wherein you can see that from whole report to partial report or delayed the whole
report is the lowest at the right part and the partial report is around in the memory and the
accuracy is much better.
946
So Sperling concluded from these results that a short-lived sensory memory register operates
registers all or most of the information that first hits our visual receptors, but as this information
decays within less than a second, so if in the tone is coming one second later than the
presentation of this person participants do not have any clue of which information they have to
report so their reporting time or accuracy kind of goes up to what the whole report method was
like, so this brief sensory memory for visual stimuli has been referred to as iconic memory and it
corresponds to the sensory memory for vision.
And it kind of falls in the sensory memory stage of Atkinson and Shiffrin model. Other research
has also been done using auditory stimuli and it has been shown that sound also persists in mind
but the persistence of this is or is referred to as echoic memory it kind of lasts for a few seconds
after the presentation of the original stimulus and that since the range of a echoic memory or
auditory sensory memory is slightly longer than that of visual sensory memory or iconic
memory.
947
Now the sensory memory register can register huge amounts of information but it retains this
information only for very few seconds or fractions of a second. Many cognitive psychologists
believe that the sensory store is important for at least three things first is collecting the
information that has to be processed second is holding the information briefly while the initial
process is going on and third is fill in the blanks when the stimulus is interpreted, so something
that was happening in frame rates and while you watch a particular movie. Sperling experiment
is important not only because it reveals the capacity of one, the capacity of sensory memory
because it is much larger and its duration which is much briefer but also provides yet another
demonstration of how a clever experimentation can actually you know tell you something very
important about this cognitive and mental phenomena.
948
This is all about sensory memory in the next lecture I will talk to you about short-term memory.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
949
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
950
Course Title
Lecture- 30
Memory- II
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello everyone welcome to the course on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from
IIT Kanpur.
951
In the last few lectures we have been talking about memory in the last lecture we talked about
what memory means how is memory important at a cognitive function, how does memory help
us get the sense of continuity of life get and it how does memory really you know act as a glue
for all our sensory and sensory experiences all the things that we are you know we want to retain
over a period of you know time in our lives.
We ended the last lecture talking about sensory memory which is one of the important
components of memory as proposed by Atkins and Shiffrin in their modal model of memory. In
today's lecture we focus up on something called the short-term memory and we will try and see
what short-term memory is and how do we deal with short-term memory.
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Now short-term memory is the system involved in storing small amounts of information for a
brief period of time that is how Baddeley defines it. Now Baddeley says that short-term memory
is basically about two things small amounts of information also for small amounts of time, why
would you need these kind of small amounts of information and how will that be useful for it. So
anything you are doing say for example if you are you know doing some arithmetic calculation
mentally you would need just the two numbers and whatever operation you are doing this is
relatively smaller information.
And once you have successfully let us say multiplied or divided or added something that
information is not useful anymore. You just take the result and you know move ahead with this,
so this is how, also say for example let me take another example, if you are hearing you know
somebody or say for example if I am talking to you or you listening to me the beginning of the
sentence which I am saying remains there for a very short time after that it is gisted out and you
just remember the gist of the entire message.
So those are some scenarios when in short term memory can be very useful short-term memory
is basically like you know the RAM of your system wearing all the things that you are doing all
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the things you are currently involved in everything that is in the present is there in the short-term
memory, because you are drawing constantly from the long-term memory using that information
that you have drawn from the long-term memories and after using that performing some
operation in the short-term memory you let it go again back to the long-term memory, so that is
what the importance of short-term memory is.
Now what is the duration of short-term memory? So Brown and Peters and in Peterson they use
the method of recall to determine what is the duration of short-term memory, so what they did
was in their experiments participants were given a very similar task, the one I am going to
demonstrate to you.
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So say for example I could tell you that I will say some letters and then I will say a number, now
whatever letters I say your tasks will be to remember the letters when you hear the number
however repeat it and then begin counting backwards by threes so from that number say for
example if I say ABC 309 then you already start counting 309, 306,303, 300 to 97 so on until I
say recall as I am saying recall you have to stop counting immediately and say the three letters
you have heard just before that number, so this is something which you can do it very easily so if
I say ABC 506 then you can kind of you know start talking backward and then I say after
something recall then you have to say which thing you did. You have to constantly keep
counting and constantly I will say some letters to you.
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This is the whole demonstration so in the first trial I could say let us say FZL forty five trial two
I could say something else and you can keep counting and you know there could be different
digits so this was the overall thing. To actually admit it if you want to do it with one of your
friends what you have to do is it is important that the person counts out aloud so it is constantly
counting at the top of his voice and so that he is not rehearsing the letters the second most
important part this once a person is started counting you kind of take around 20 seconds and then
you say recall.
And then what you do is remember you accurately say for example see how much information
what are the three letters the person has remembered accurately and before he continues to the
next trial.
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Now Peterson and Peterson also did a similar experiment in which they varied the time between
they said the number and when the participant began recalling them, so they kind of tried to vary
the time between the recall signals comes and the number is there. Now Peterson and Peterson
and they found that their participants were able to remember around 80% of the letters after
counting for three seconds, so after counting for 3 seconds their memory is intact they are doing
very well they are remembering around 80% of these letter sequences that have been told.
But if they increase the time for which they have said recall by 15 more seconds the participants
could remember on an average of only 12% of the three letter group, so they have to constantly
keep remembering all those letter groups that you have said. Now Peterson and Peterson
interpreted this result as demonstrating that participants are forgetting relatives because of the
decay.
So they are maintaining the letters but the time gap you give between saying recall and between
saying the first sequence of letters as long as the time gap increasing the memory for those letters
is decaying off because you have to constantly maintain the letters which I am saying you still
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have to do the counting but you to maintain the letters which I am saying, now this is what they
say that memory is decaying because of the passage of time after hearing the first sequence of
letters.
Keppel and Underwood later at a later point in time they actually looked more closely at the
results which Peterson and Peterson reported and they found that if you consider the participants
performance very closely and on just the first trial there is a little fall-off between the three
seconds and the 18 second. If you are just talking about the first trial so for example if I say ABC
309 now ABC 309 after 3 seconds and ABC 309 after 18 seconds there is very little fall-off for
this amount.
Now why should the information, why should the memory for this is getting worsened up after a
few trials is it just time or something is happening. Now Keppel and Underwood suggested that
the drop of in memory was due to the decay of the memory trace. Peter and Peterson the
Peterson and Peterson had proposed it is not due to just the decay of the memory stress but it is
due to proactive interference.
958
What is proactive interference, proactive interference that interference which occurs when
information that was learned previously interferes with learning of new information. So as soon
as I am adding on the sequences of letters you are kind of finding it more difficult to remember
those sequences of letters that is what is happening okay. So it is not only time but it is build-up
of information that is leading to this decay and leading to this inaccuracy in performance.
Here you can see the results so if you see the three-second delay and the 18 second delay on all
the trials you see that the performance kind of dips off significantly. But if you are just taking the
first trial in mind you see even on the 18 second delay the performance is not veered off you
know very significantly.
959
Now Keppel and Underwood they proposed that proactive interference is what cause the
decrease in memory observed in the later trials of Peterson and Peterson experiment, thus
recalling the early letter letters in the list you know created interference that made it more
difficult to recall the later letters. Now you might have also seen this happening with you say for
example if I give you my mobile phone number and five days later 10 years later I tell you that
my wife phone number has changed it might actually make it difficult for you to remember
which is my correct number.
Nowadays it does not really happen because you will update your cell phone with the new
information, but suppose if you were to remember this information and I keep giving you new
information say for example it is my address, so I give you a one address and I ask you to come
to my home next time I kind of change the address and I give you another address and expect
you to remember that, what will happen is obviously some time you will kind of confuse which
is the address I am living on basically my earlier address will make it difficult for you to
remember my later and more recent addresses. That is typical example of proactive interference
and there are many ways you will find this happening.
960
Now let us we talked about the duration of short-term memory now let us talk about the capacity
of short-term memory, now there are certainly capacity limits on short-term memory as well. The
estimate ranges between around 4 to 9 items. So there have been different kinds of estimates
made and they say that is just around 4 to 9 items. Now we have in the earlier class talked about
short-term memory has very small capacity store so for very small amount of time but it is it as
short as four or nine items only how do you remembers other information.
961
If you really want to check somebody's short-term memory capacity what you could do is you
could use this demonstration from Goldstein's book on cognitive psychology what you just have
to do is you can just write first sequence of three letters then add one more letter at the ask them
to recall a sequence of four letters or digits may be you can do it so three digits four digits, five
digits, six digits and you have to ask the person to repeat that digits back to you without making
any errors and doing it in a particular order.
962
According to the measurements of digit span and the average capacity of the short-term memory
is somewhere around five to nine items that is basically about the length of a phone number.
Now this idea was initially proposed by George Miller in 1956, where he wrote a very significant
and very important paper called the magical number seven plus or minus two facing the size or
the capacity of the short-term memory is around seven plus minus two items.
More recent measures of short-term memory capacity however has set the capacity limit to be
about around four items. This is a more recent thing found in the work of Cowan in 2001. Now
this conclusion was basically based on the results of experiments like the one done by Luck and
Vogel's in 1997 in which they are measuring the capacity of the s and short-term memory by
flashing two arrays of colored squares separated by a brief delay and then they kind of say how
many squares they correctly remember. So I will show you this in a demonstration say for
example you see this array of squares and then there is a gap and you see this other area of
squares.
963
What you have to do is you have to judge whether the second area of squares has all the same
element as the first area of squares.
964
So participants’ task here was to basically indicate whether the second array was the same or
different from the first array and on the trials in which the second array was different a second
array was different the color of one square was only seen, so you kind of have to be really
attentive and check which square has changed its color maybe we can do this again so here is the
array the short delay, here is another array the, do you recall, did you recall did you make out
which color which squares color was changed.
965
Now the result of this experiment showed that the performance was almost perfect till they were
one into three squares in that array but the performance gradually and steadily began to decrease
when they started adding more than four squares. So Luck and Vogel concluded from this result
that participants were able to retain only up to about four items in their short-term memory, other
experiments using verbal materials have also come to around the same conclusion.
966
You can see this result of Luck and Vogel’s experiment from here, you see as the number of
squares is increasing from 1 to 3 to 4 to 8 to 12 the performances steadily and significantly
declining.
967
But 4 seems too less isn’t it, as I was saying earlier as well 4 seems too less information to be
aware, you know that we can recall that we can retain so how do we store so much information
even in our short-term memory say for example if you have to recall you know my phone
number which has ten digits it is certainly 10 digits and not just four numbers okay, how do you
do that how do we say for example if there is a long sentence we have to remember how do we
remember that long sentence these kind of questions can be asked and let us see in the later
things how do we do it.
968
We do it by using a particular phenomenon called Chunking, so Miller in 1956 introduced the

concept of what is called chunking to describe the fact that small units like words can be
combined to make larger more meaningful units like faces or even larger units like sentences
paragraphs or stories say for example if I give you this list of words monkey, child, wildly, zoo
jumped, city, ringtail, young these are eight or nine words if I ask, if I ask you to repeat them
very quickly.
or let us say if I ask you to repeat them in pairs ringtail monkey, jumped wildly, young child, city
zoo maybe this is a slightly easier than the earlier disorganized array of words if I organize it
even better the ring tailed, monkey jumped wildly for the young child at the zoo is better
remembered as compared to the first one, so what is it that is happening in these three examples
what is it that is changing, what is changing is the organization of the information into groups or
chunks and what you are doing is you are kind of remembering a chunk as a whole.
So if you see at the last sentence it has exactly the same number of first it has all the words that I
said in the first example but now it has a structure to it, it has an organization to it and what you
969
will remember is the gist of what this message was and you can kind of reconstruct from that gist
the sentence that I will ask you to repeat, if I give you eight or nine separate and unorganized
words in the first where in the first level you found it difficult to repeat it, so that is pretty much
what we are doing.
Let me also do some simple demonstration here.
970
Say for example I try and recall these letters there is a gap could you recall every one.
971
Or say for example now you try and recall this letter which one was easier I have seen in class
demonstrations and I hope with you as well that this congregation of letters is easier to remember
because these are names or abbreviations so you can actually organize them into CIAFBINBC
and CBS so there are only four chunks if you organize them accordingly and that is what
chunking is all about.
So let me define chunking for you slightly in a more formal way. So chunking has been defined
as a collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another but are weakly
associated with other elements in chunks with elements in the other chunks, so you can have
units working together and distinctive or distinguishable from other units. So you can have
ringtail monkey but if you have a ringtail child that will not make the association very well. So if
there is ringtail monkey coming together you will remember it much better.
972
Ericsson and colleagues demonstrated an effect of chunking by showing how a college student
with average memory ability was able to achieve amazing feats of memory, so they are trained
this kid their participant was named SF and he had a typical memory span like all of us of seven
digits, but he received extensive training for about 230 one hour sessions and then he was able to
repeat sequences up to 79 digits without making an error, how was SF doing that obviously the
SF was using chunking to recode the digits into larger units and formed that forms slightly
meaningful sequences.
Say for example 3492 became 2 minutes and 49.2 seconds now 2 minutes and 49.2 seconds now
this is the way if you kind of remember this kind of can become you know a way or a cue to
remember this information in a more meaningful way and in that sense this can be basically used
to enhance your memory, so a very simple tip will be for people who want to improve their
memory having done a course on cognitive psychology.
973
And read something about memory so start organizing information better start storing
information in ways that are meaningful to you and so that those meaningful ways can be cued
with very little effort. Now coming back another similar example is based on the interaction
between the short-term memory and the long-term memory and it was provided by an
experiment than Chase and Simon in 1973 where in what they did was they showed chess
players’ arrangements of chess pieces taken from actual games for five seconds.
So chess players and a novice person who had never played chess they were shown arrangements
of 24 pieces or 24 chess pieces on a particular board and then they were later asked to recall
which were the pieces, so the chess players basically were asked to reproduce their positions, the
position that they had seen.
974
And it was like the chest and the Chase and Simon compared this performance of a chess master
who had played or studied chess for around 10,000 hours to this performance of a beginner who
had only had around less than hundred hours of experience. Now the results of this particular
experiment showed that the chess master had placed sixteen pieces out of 24 pieces correctly on
his first try itself compared to 4 out of 24 pieces that the beginner person could do.
Also the master required only four trials to reproduce all of the 24 pieces correctly as compared
to the beginner who could not even do the same even after seven trials, so you see there is
something here. Now is it that the chess player is an expert.
975
So here is the data so the master around you know does this correct placement sixteen correct
placement on the first trial itself beginner does only four.
976
So then does the master have better short-term memory than the beginner or does he have you
know better knowledge of chess is that helping him in some way or the other that was the
question that was asked, Simon and Chase they answered this question by testing the ability of
the Masters and the beginners to remember random arrangement of chess pieces, so if you have a
played chess if you are you know a familiar with chess if you arranged something in a particular
way you will know that there are specific positions and there is a you know a specific name for
each position so if you are a chess master you can recall those positions by experience and you
can say that.
But when you are actually looking at randomly arranged pieces there is no name for those kind
of positions and then let us see what happened, when the pieces were arranged randomly the
familiar patterns were destroyed and the chess masters advantage completely vanished, so it was
not that it is short-term memory was better it was that he knew those familiar positions from
obviously a lot of practice and skill that is required over 10,000 hours of chess training and that
was what was helping him organize those positions better there were names of those positions
and that he could have used to organize that.
977
So you see here there is no advantage for the master if you cannot chunk on the basis of previous
knowledge that is pretty much what we all do if we are fed in new information.
978
Now how do you feed in new information in short-term memory that is the third question one
can ask you feed a new information into the short-term memory by a process called coding or a
process called encoding. Now determining how stimulus is represented in the brain by firing a
specific neuron as was a seen by you by Umbel and Wiesel as I mentioned in one of the earlier
lectures is called the physiological approach to coding, that is one way to do it.
The other way to do it all is following the mental approach to coding, what is the mental
approach to coding the mental approach to coding is by asking how stimulus or an experience is
represented in the mind say for example if you go you know go somewhere and you meet some
new person and you just have a short conversation with him you come back and you are trying to
recall that person maybe there is something similar something salient about that person maybe
that he belong to a city where you had done your previous schooling if you remember that person
according to that knowledge it might help you recall better.
Now similar things you would use in chunking as well so there could be a variety of ways in
which one can encode information.
979
The first kind of ways auditory encoding. Auditory encoding involves representing items in the
short-term memory based on their sound, so what Conrad did in 1964 experiment he showed
participants a number of target letters which flashed very briefly on a screen and then the
participants were told to write down the letters in the order in the exact order they were present
and Conrad found that when participants made errors they did make some errors though when
persons made errors they were most likely to miss identify the target letters as another letter if
they sounded very similar.
So if they sounded very similar there was a scope of confusing them say for example a lot of
participants were you know misidentified F as S because they sound so similar to each other.
980
Conrad concluded on the basis of this these results that the code for STM is or the preferred
encoding method for STM or short-term memory is auditory rather than visual.
981
Now it is not that we do not encode visual information or it is not that we do not encode
information in a visual manner we also do encode items and information in a visual manner and
visual encoding basically involves representing items visually as say for example would occur if
you are trying to remember the details of a floor plan or a blue print of a particular you know
building something like that or the layout of a streets on a map, if you are dealing with specific
visual information that does not is not really easily encoded in the verbal thing you will use it
visually as it.
Now this use of visual quotes in the short-term memory was demonstrated in an experiment by
Sergio Della Scala and their colleagues in 1999 in which the participants were presented the
tasks like this one here.
982
So I will show you this array of squares some of them are black and then I will ask you to fill
exactly.
983
Which squares are black in this particular experiment now both of these demonstrations are
drawn from Goldstein's book cognitive psychology?
984
Now, Della Sala in this experiment found that participants were able to complete patterns
consisting of an average of around 9 shaded squares before they started making mistakes. So up
till nine squares they could correctly remember but they started making mistakes if the number
of squares was more than nine.
985
Another way of coding information other than auditory and other than visual is basically starting
to code information on the basis of semantics on the basis of their meaning and their relationship
to you know whatever knowledge you already have, something that I was telling, now semantic
coding is representing items in terms of their meaning. An example of semantic coding in STM
is provided in an experiment done by Wickens colleagues and in this experiment what happened
was that on each trial participants were represented with words related to either a fruit or
profession so there were two groups they were presented items say the names of fruits and the
other group was presented names of professions.
So participants in each group they were listening to three words for example banana, peach and
apple and then started counting backwards for 15 seconds and then attempted to recall all the
three words, now they did this for a total of four trials and with different words presented on
each trials, so every trial they will say for example see some names of fruits then they will start
counting backwards and they will be told another three fruits and they will start counting and
they'll continue counting backwards to remember all of these.
986
Now the basic idea behind this experiment was to create what is called proactive interference by
presenting words in a series of trials from the same category, so if you are repeating the same
kind of words trial by trial these new trials will actually interfere with the older trials I will show
you a demonstration.
Say for example you can see in trial in the fruits group the first trial is banana, peach and apple
the second trial is plum, apricot and lime the third trial is melon, lemon and grape the four trial is
orange, cherry and pineapple so the fruits group is basically getting all of these fruit names. The
second group is the professions group and they are also being said these profession names only
on the fourth trial they are not told a professions name they are actually told a fruits name and
three names of food.
So first trial is lawyer, firefighter, teacher second is dancer, minister, executive doctor, the fourth
one is the name of three fruits, now what do you think happened here.
987
Now it was found that for the fruits group on the first trial the average percentage recall was as
high as 86% but performance dropped gradually and steadily on trials two three and four as
additional names of fruits were being presented, now this additional information forms the part
of the same category of the first trial and in that sense there is proactive interference starting
from the second trial, third trial and the fourth trial.
The blue data points I will show you now indicate that the presence of proactive interference is
there. If you see in this figure here, on the fourth on the professional group what happened was
that because the fourth trial had names of fruits instead of professions there is no proactive
interference there what is called release from proactive interference that is why the performance
of recall on the four trials is also very good.
988
So you can see here in this particular result.
989
That in the fruits group you will see that the performance is steadily and gradually declining
from trial one to trial two three and four. In the profession’s group you will see that the
performance is very good on the first trial it comes down on the second trials goes further down
on the third trial but on the four trial there is already release the participants performance already
kicks up and this is and why is this happening is because the things presented the names
presented on the fourth trial were different from all the names presented in trials one two and
three. So this phenomena is basically referred to as release from proactive interference, because
the four trial had names from a different category participants had no trouble in recalling this
new information and their performance increased and it became better.
Now these were some aspects about short-term memory that we studied today we talked about
the duration of short-term memory we talked about capacity of short-term memory and we also
talked about different ways in which information can be encoded into short-term memory. I hope
this session on short-term memory would help you understand more about memory as a mental
function in the next chapter we will talk about other aspects of memory that were proposed by
Atkinson and Shiffrin, thank you so much.
990
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia
991
@copyright reserved
992
Course Title
Lecture – 31
Memory - III
by
Prof. Ark Verma
Kanpur.
993
We have been talking about aspects of memory in our recent lectures we covered sensory
memory in first of this series and we talked about short-term memory in the last lecture. Today I
am going to talk to you about another aspect of short-term memory let us say a rethought version
of what short-term memory will be doing and the name given to this is called working memory.
Now the concept of working memory as opposed to short-term memory was put forward by Alan
Bradley. Alan Bradley one of the most influential researchers in memory basically proposed that
short-term memory processes must be dynamic and they must also consider the number of
components that can function separately.
Now one of the ideas why Alan Bradley must have thought so is that short term memory or let us
say if you liken it to the RAM of your computers it deals with a lot of information it deals with a
variety of information and it manipulates these variety of information whereas the whole concept
of short-term memory might be taken to think, that it just passively stores information for some
time before it passes on to the long term memory. So these were some of the conceptual
differences which probably led to the formation of this concept of working memory. So
according to this idea with this in background it can be probably proposed and Alan Bradley
994
might have thought that, the digit span task must be handled by a separate component altogether
while comprehending of the paragraph.
If you remember speakers study as well might be handled by a different component.
995
The model Baddeley was proposing was first described his paper by Graham Hitch and the paper
was written in 1974 Badly and Hitch and it was later modified, so later versions and more recent
versions have also come of that model but this model basically says that short-term memory it
has a very specific component called working memory and working memory they define as a
limited capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information and this
temporary storage and manipulation of information is basically dependent on complex tasks such
as comprehension learning and reasoning whatever, the person might be called upon to do.
Whatever task you have at hand you probably take it to what is called working memory.
996
From this definition we can say that we are actually talking of a more dynamical system as
opposed to what the initial conception of short-term memory was, so two differences might be
pointed out that while short-term memory is concerned primarily with storing information
manipulation of information is basically the job of working memory, also short-term memory has
been thought of as consisting of a single component while in working memory you can think of
different independent components, different components working in an independent fashion
though they might be interconnected as well .
997
So working memory as such can given this new conception accomplishes the manipulation of
information through the action of three components. As proposed by Alan Bradley the
components are the phonological loop the visual spatial sketch pad and the central executive.
Phonological loop, it is supposed to consist of two components it consists of the phonological
store which is a limited capacity store and holds information for only a few seconds and the
articulator rehearsal process which is responsible for the rehearsal that can keep items in the
phonological store from decaying. Suppose somebody told you a phone number to memorize and
before you find a pen or before you find you know your cell phone to you know quickly type that
number and do you might want to keep repeating that, so that the information this verbal
information or let us say this phonological information is maintained in the phonological store.
This phonological store as I already said holds verbal that is language like an auditory
information that is the one of sounds, the visual spatial sketchpad on the other hand holds visual
and spatial information anything about the visual world anything about location of objects those
kind of things if you are given a task of keeping three bags at the boot of your car and you have
to just you have just been asked that do you think these three bags will fit in the boot of my car
you might want to really visualize what the boot of your car looks like and try and fit these
998
things in an imaginative fashion before saying yes to this question. This kind of information this
kind of manipulation is basically supposed to be achieved via the use of this visual spatial
sketchpad. The third component basically is the Central Executive.
Wherein the major work of the working memory occurs. The central executive pulls information
from the long-term memory and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and the visual
spatial sketchpad by focusing on specific parts of a task and switching attention from one part of
the task to other. Suppose it is like desk secretary where you go and give the task and the
secretary decides where this particular file needs to go to, whether it needs to go to phonological
loop or it needs to go to the visual spatial sketchpad. So one of the main tasks also this
phonological loop is to decide how to divide attention being in between two tasks.
So if you are given a task to working memory the Central Executive is the process that will
decide whether and how this task is supposed to be handled which parts of the task will be
handled by the phonological loop and which parts of this task will be handled by the visual
spatial sketchpad. Herein you can see a graphic representation of the phonological loop.
999
And the visual spatial sketchpad you will see that the circle which is the central executive it is
kind of coordinating between those these two things, an example given in this figure by
Goldstein is basically when you are kind of you know listening to instructions and still driving
the car, you are listening to instruction and maintaining them in your phonological store while
you are actually visually and spatially coordinating the car on a different path according to
whatever the instructions are being given to you. So this is one very dynamic kind of an example
wherein you are basically using both the phonological loop and the visual spatial sketchpad at
the same time in the same task.
Let us elaborate a little bit on the phonological loop what are the different effects what are the
research findings in this, so the phonological loop one of the major findings.
1000
In the related the phonological loop is called the phonological similarity effect which is basically
that, if you are kind of trying to maintain letters or sounds which are very similar those might be
confused with each other. If you remember Conrad’s experiment he did this experiment with the
people who were asked to remember digit and who were asked you remember letters of the
English alphabet and they were confusing they are making some mistakes but more importantly
the mistake was basically being made, on those letters which sounded very similar to each other
like the s and the F example that was there. Also another effect about the phonological loop is
the word length effect, word length effect occurs when memory for the list of words is better for
short words and than for long words if.
I give you a list of words to remember and some are like three or four letter words and the others
are five or six or seven letter words, maybe then the typical finding is that the memory for
shorter words is better, than the memory for longer words. Another important phenomena is
called articulatory separation, articulatory separation is one of these ways.
1001
Wherein the operation of the phonological loop can be disrupted, so this occurs when a person is
prevented from rehearsing some verbal information by asking them to repeat an irrelevant sound,
so if I have to ask you to remember few phone numbers maybe a list of phone numbers but I say
okay you have to remember, this still I tell during remembering this you still have to keep saying
any irrelevant sound like dada da b aba ba whatever so what happens here is that because you are
kind of repeating these irrelevant sound, it blocks the rehearsal space for the numbers that I have
given you and that results in what is called and what has been described as articulatory
separation. You cannot maintain too much verbal information at the same time in the
phonological loop, that is why this particular phenomenon occurs.
1002
Baddeley in colleagues they basically found and they did this a very simple experiment that
repeating the, the, the, the, and continuously not only reduces the ability to remember list of
words but also eliminates the word length effect.
1003
Here you can see the typical word length effects they were percentage recall of shorter words is
much higher than longer words.
1004
But when participants are asked to repeat the the the the continuously you see that the advantage
for the shorter words is completely you know or almost gone and their total percentage of recall
is almost equivalent to what it is for the longer words.
1005
Coming to the visual spatial sketchpad, now the visual spatial sketchpad as I said handles visual
and spatial information and is therefore involved in the process of visual imagery you know, the
example I gave if you have if somebody asks you whether these three or four bags will fit in the
boot of your car, you will have some memory of how the boot of your car looks like what are its
dimensions and what you will try to do is you will try to fit each of these bags imaginarily in an
imaginative way in your car and you will say that okay maybe this bag will be put horizontal this
bag will be put vertically maybe I will slant this bag over this one and this is how it will fill up,
so this is basically a typical example of visual imagery and visual imagery is obviously achieved
by what is called the visuo spatial sketchpad.
Now another very interesting and very famous experiment about visual imagery was done by a
Shepard and Metzler in 1971, now Shepard and Metzler measured participants reaction time to
decide whether a pair of objects were same or different, so they made these imaginary objects
and the task of the participants was to tell whether the two objects are the same or they are
different. So from this function they are trying to see how the partnership perform it could be
seen, that when two shapes were separated by an orientation difference of around 40degrees it
took two seconds for the participants to decide that the pair was same and but for a difference of
1006
140degrees it took around four seconds. So the whole idea is that say for example I will show
you the figures the figures are like this.
So if I give you know one pair in panel A and the other pair in panel B what you have to do to
achieve this task is basically try and mentally rotate the first figure in panel A and see whether it
resembles the other figure in panel B or say, for example if you to try and rotate the first figure in
panel B and see whether it matches the second figure in panel B. So you will have to maintain
this in your memory and then rotate it and then try and match it with this figures with the second
figure and here you can see as the number as the angular difference between A and B.
1007
As orientation differs the time taken to recognize or the time taken to say whether that is the
same or different also increases.
1008
Based on these findings Shepard and Metzler concluded that participants were following the
problem by rotating the image of one of the objects in their mind a phenomenon which was later
named mental rotation.
1009
Now Lee Brooks also did some experiment in which he demonstrated how the interference can
affect the operation of the visual spatial sketchpad.
1010
So what he did was he the task was something like this there are two figures here 5.20, 5.21 from
Goldstein's cognitive psychology. Now the task is basically to visualize the figure F in 5.20
maintain it then you cover it while visualizing this in your mind still and then what you do is you
start at the left most corner, left top corner and actually you move around to the around the
outline of the F and what you have to do is for an outside corner say in and for an inside corner
say out. So you have to kind of move around the trajectory of this figure and say in or out take
that decision.
1011
Now a different task could also be that you visualize the F again but this time you move around
the outline of the F in a clockwise direction and in your mind say out if the corner is an outside
corner in if the corner is an inside corner remember, you doing the opposite of this in the last
task.
1012
They asked many people to do this task and they found that most people find the pointing task
much more difficult, the reason is that holding the image of a letter and pointing are both visual
spatial tasks. So the visuo spatial sketchpad in that sense becomes over loaded, in contrast saying
out or in an articulatory task that is handled by phonological loop, so speaking does not interfere
with visualizing F if you remember again I will remind in this first task.
1013
You have to mentally point out or in where in this one you have to say outer, so that is why in
the second one the visuo spatial sketchpad, basically does not really get overloaded because
some of the information is verbal and has shifted to the phonological store, now coming to the
central executive now the Central Executive is the component that makes.
1014
The working memory actually working you are describing that sometime back, so it is the
control center of the working memory system it’s measure is not to store information but to
coordinate, how information is going to be used by the two working components. Now Baddeley
describes the central existing as the attentional controller, he says that this one determines how
attention will be focused on a specific task and how it will be divided into two tasks depending
on the task demanded how easy or difficult a task will be.
1015
Now the Central Executive is therefore essential in situation say for example if a person is
attempting to simultaneously drive and use a cell phone, not that it is advisable to do so if
somebody is trying to do that then a Central Executive is basically and it will spring into action,
now in this example the Central Executive would be controlling the phonological loop process
that is talking in the phone, the sketchpad will basically be doing the navigation which is
basically identifying the landmarks and the layout of the streets and taking the car off. One of
1016
The ways the Central Executive has been studied is by assessing the behavior of patients with
brain damage as, we have seen the frontal lobe is supposed to play a central role in working
memory therefore patients with frontal lobe damage have found to be having more problems
with attention control. For example a typical example could be perseveration that is repeatedly
doing the same behavior again again even if the one does not achieve the desired goal.
1017
Now say for example I will give you an example a problem that can be easily solved by a rule
that pickup the red object, a person with frontal lobe damage might be responding correctly on
each trial as long as the rule stays the same, as soon as you change the rule the person with
frontal lobe damage will find it very difficult to adapt to the new rule and it will continue doing
the same task again and again, will continue picking the red object again and again, even though
the rule has already changed. So they have why is, this because they are having difficulty in
changing their attention from the first rule to the second rule that is what the problem here is.
1018
Another example of how the central executive controls attention is provided by situations in
which a person might be focused you know might be supposed to focus attention on some
relevant stimuli while ignoring the other irrelevance, in visual search kind of a scenario you have
to focus your attention on the targets while at the same time ignoring the distracters, some people
have been found to be better at focusing attention than some others. Another component here
another important aspect here could be the episodic buffer, which also is part of this working
memory thing, now the episodic buffer basically you know is something it is basically one aspect
of working memory that can hold more than it would be expected based on just the phonological
loop or the visuospatial sketchpad.
So for to account for this extra information that are held in the working memory one might even
has proposed what is called the episodic buffer.
1019
For example people can remember long sentences of consisting as many as 15 to20 words now,
the ability to do this is achieved by a chunking which we have talked about earlier in which
meaningful units have been lumped together have been joined together. Now Baddeley decided
that it was necessary to propose an additional component of working memory like the episodic
buffer to address these different kinds of abilities which are not being explained already by the
phonological store and the visual spatial sketchpad.
1020
This new component that is the episodic buffer can store more information thereby providing
extra capacity and it is already connected to the long-term memory, thereby making this
exchange between long-term memory and working memory possible because even if you are
working at new information even if you are manipulating new objects in the world which you are
being given you are certainly drawing upon the scale and experiences that you've gained and that
is stored in the long-term memory. Here is the complete model of Allen Baddeley’s working
memory model.
1021
And hearing you can now see all the four components, so there is the Central Executive, there is
the phonological loop, there is the episodic buffer and the visuospatial sketchpad and each of
these in their own way will interact with the long-term memory, this is a complete model which
has been used to explain so many findings, so many research findings from working memory.
1022
Now note that this model also shows that visual spatial sketchpad and phonological Loop and
also are connected to the long-term memory. Now the proposal of the episodic buffer represents
one step in the evolution of Baddeley’s model because the initial model did not have the episodic
buffer provided for. This has been stimulating research in memory for over 30 years since it was
first proposed in1970s.
Now the exact functioning of the episodic buffer still seems a little vague it is not really been
completely specified but it is supposed to be a very important aspect. Now let us come to how
the working memory is specified in the human brain, now there have been quite a few ways in
which people wanted to study how does memory really exist in the brain or how do you know
look at the brain and say something about working memory. Now four of these things have been
done say for example analysis.
1023
Of the behavior after brain damage when people have brain damage in areas which are supposed
to be related to a memory per say recordings have been done from single neurons single cell
recordings, this is basically limited to animals and not really humans, then EEG signals which is
electro encephalography if you remember the methods chapter I have talked about that if you
remember the method chapter I have talked about it might be a good time to go back and refer to
them.
1024
Now one of the tasks was done with the monkeys so the delayed response tasks, now early
research on frontal lobe and memory was carried out in monkeys using what is called the delayed
response task basically this task required the monkey to hold information their working memory
during a delay period, so that is why delayed response task.
Now what happens in this task is the monkey sees a food reward in one of two food wells the
monkey is inside the cage there are two food wells outside the monkeys cage and the both wells
are covered the monkey sees that the food reward is kept in one and then they are covered and
then a screen is lowered so that the monkey cannot see you know where this is so it cannot
maintain that information and then after the delay the screen is raised.
1025
But the monkey has to do is that it must remember which of the food well had already received
the food before it was covered and then uncover that well and take the food out and eat it that is
very simple and monkeys can be trained to accomplish this task.
1026
This is the setup of this particular task.
1027
Now however when the prefrontal cortex was removed their performance monkeys performance
dropped to the level of chance and they were found to be correct only 50% of the time, now this
basically supports the idea that the prefrontal cortex is very important for holding information for
brief periods of time.
1028
Does this happen in humans as well, are these the same areas in humans as well, so people have
also investigated the brain activation in humans. Now the conclusion that many brain areas are
involved in working memory has been confirmed by research using neuro imaging techniques
such as PET that is positron emission tomography and functional fMRI and functional MRI,
basically the idea is to measure the brain activity in humans in response to tasks which involve
memory or working memory.
1029
Now here is the figure it shows that what are the different areas found in humans which are
found to be involved in memory operation, so you will see that there are particular areas which
are involved with verbal and numeric information other areas involved with objects information
other areas with spatial information and problem-solving, all of this is very well demonstrated in
this figure from Goldstein's book.
1030
Now Vogel and co-workers they did an experiment on the allocation of attention by measuring a
component of a component of ERP in humans which is recorded during a working memory task.
Now the response they were measuring was related to encoding the number of items in working
memory, so a larger ERP response would indicate that more space was used in working memory,
so they previous research, on the basis of previous research they determined that which
component generally is involved in working memory and then they were doing this test to see
that if the task we are giving involves more or less working memory.
1031
So Vogel and colleague separated participants into two groups based on their performance on a
particular test of working memory, now participants in high working memory capacity group
those who had higher working memory capacity were found that they were able to maintain a
larger number of items in working memory as compared participants with low working memory
capacity.
1032
Both the groups viewed this simile as shown in the figure I will just show you the figure right
now and they first saw a cue indicating whether to direct their attention to the left side red
triangles on the left side or the red triangles on the right side of the displays and then they saw a
memory display for around one tenth of a second followed by a brief blank screen and then it
was a test display. Now on some trials what happens is that I will just show you the figure.
1033
Now so this is the thing there is the fixation cross and there is a cue and then there is the
memory display wherein they have to remember where this red rectangles are and then there's a
delay and then there's a test display okay so they have to determine whether any rectangles is still
there or not. Now on sometimes the red, the two red rectangles presented on the left and right
side of the screen as shown in the figure here in panel A but on a few other trials two blue
rectangles were also presented they were also added to this entire array. Here you can see trial
panel B wherein the blue rectangles have also been added in addition to the already present red
rectangles. So the amount of work in maintaining this will slightly become harder.
1034
So the participants task here again was to respond to the test display by indicating whether the
orientations of the red rectangles in the cued side of the test display was the same or different
than of the memory display so they would have to maintain both that it is a red rectangle and it is
orientation. Now the results show that the size of ERP for both groups they'd kind of try and
compare the size of the ERP component for both the groups. The left pair of bars here shows that
when they were two red rectangles it was still a higher response for the low working memory
capacity group but a good but a lower response for a high working memory capacity group but if
you see in the second panel in the right pair of bars you will see that addition of two blue
rectangles does not increase the response too much in the high working memory capacity group
but it kind of causes a drastic change in the response in the ERP response of the low working
memory capacity group.
1035
So what is basically happening here is that by addition of two extra red blue rectangles in the
display you are increasing the amount of effort in the participants and the low working memory
capacity participants because this task involves ignoring the blue rectangles as distracters the low
working memory capacity participants are finding it hard to ignore that and that is why their ERP
response to this task the one shown in panel B here is much higher. Now what does this tells us,
another, the fact that adding the two blue rectangles had little effect on I am just kind of
repeating this so that you kind of follow this.
1036
So the fact that adding the two blue rectangles had little effect on the response of high capacity
group means that these participants were very efficient at ignoring the distracters so the
irrelevant blue stimuli did not do much damage to them, did not take up any space in their
working memories this means that the central executive was functioning well for these
participants. The fact that adding the two blue rectangles caused a large increase in the response
of the lower working memory capacity group means that these partisans were not able to
sufficiently and properly ignore the blue rectangles which were anyways irrelevant to the task
because the task has not changed so it tells us blue rectangles were acquiring a lot of space in
their working memory and their central executive was not operating as efficiently as that of the
higher working memory capacity group.
1037
Now what can we conclude from this we can conclude that and Vogel in colleagues basically
conclude that some peoples central executives might be better than others at allocating attention
and at controlling this whole workflow information during a particular task. So I think that is all
about working memory and in the next lecture we will talk about some other aspects of memory
thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhn
Tapobrata Das
1038
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
1039
Course Title
Lecture: 32
Memory - IV
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello everyone to the lecture series on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur.
1040
Now in the last few lectures we have been talking about memory we have talked about sensory
memory we have talked about short-term memory and you have talked also about a concept of
working memory. Now the sensory memory and the short-term and the working memories are
still much smaller stores are still stores which hold information for not more than a few seconds
and in that sense they are more akin to you know memory that comes and goes and it kind of in a
more dynamic set up but what is that aspect of memory which we referred to in the first lecture
as providing us the sense of continuity of life that writes as the sense of being implies the sense
of that we are X Y or Z now that kind of memory is basically referred to as what is called the
long-term memory.
1041
Now long-term memory can be the memory of anything from just a few minutes past to your
entire life to a few decades old anything any information that you remember from so long ago
also long-term working memory can both be a memory of events let it be your birthday when
you were six years old, you are, let us say if you got selected to a particular position or you got
selected for a you know great college or something like that or say for example the memory of in
India won the World Cup in you know 2000 those kind of things are memories of events or
memories of episodes that basically comes under what is called declarative memory.
Now long-term memory also by the way includes the host of skills that we have learned that we
pick up while growing up say for example when you first learned to ride the bicycle or a bike or
a car or those kind of things will you just you know learn to draw, you learnt say for example
even things like you know the way you learn to speak and those kind of things. So procedural
memory basically is the memory for all the skills you have gained over a period of time.
So long-term memory in that sense includes everything that you can say that this is something
that I know all of your knowledge is basically pretty much in your long-term memory, now what
happens if say for example your long-term memory is damaged or say for example you cannot
1042
remember items for you know more than a very small amount of time here is an excerpt from
Goldstein's book about conversation I think this is from Oliver sack’s book.
It is basically about a conversation with a patient's of amnesia from patient of amnesia and then
the author is kind of talking to this person and he basically asks him you know what year is this
what is the time, when this person basically has had amnesia since the age of 19 it seems, so it
kind of the person asked him what year is this and this patient replies it is 45 and telling a few
incidents that happened in the year 1945 and this person asks what is your age and the person
and this guy replies that I am 19 years of age.
Now a lot of time has passed and this person is obviously not 19 at the moment it is many years
later that this conversation is happening so our friend here the author who is having this
conversation it thrusts the mirror towards him it is kind of a rude thing to do but he thrust the
mirror towards him and he says you kind of you know enjoys doing that and this patient yes
really perplexed he gets really you know panicked at the sight of himself in the mirror and he has
no memory since the time he was 19 to the time when say for example he is 38 or 45 or whatever
point in time this conversation has been happening.
1043
But imagine something like this happening to you know one of ourselves how would it feel say
for example if the entire chunk of life is gone and it is absent and you cannot really remember
anything about it. That will be rather hard I would say another conversation with the same person
say for example you know this guy the author here is trying to make him remember something so
he kind of says.
He tells to him that I remember telling me about your childhood growing up in Pennsylvania
working as a radio operator and those kind of things how your brother got engaged to a girl in
California so this person remembers yes you are right but wait I did not tell you that this
information that you are telling me is right but I do not have a memory of telling you all of this.
Now this is where this person the patient gets really perplexed so the author is telling a story that
a man I will tell you a story that a man went to his doctor complaining of memory lapses and
after he has told the doctor everything and the doctor says something the patient says what kind
of lapses are you talking about. So it might be possible that the patient or amnesia and does not
remember anything past a conversation and in that sense the person is living in that very short
1044
span of time probably living that shortest man of time again again because no new memories are
being formed.
I remember a movie I think Drew Barry more and Adam Sandler appeared in this and the movie
was called 51 first dates in that movie also you will find that you know the patient Drew
Barrymore or sorry probably Adam Sandler suffers from a particular injury in accident and she
suffers this kind of memory loss and the entire you know movie you will see that them, reliving
that whole time of the first date they had because this accident probably happened just after the
first date was completed.
Now these kind of movies and there are many movies on these kinds of things you will find you
know in Hollywood and probably in Bollywood as well but what do these information tell us that
memory is a very intrigued integral part of our lives and it is something that kind of forms the
core of our existence and personalities. So let us now come back and try and define what long-
term memory is and we have been talking about what long-term memory is about.
1045
So long term memory or long-term memory processes are the processes and it is a system that is
responsible for storing information for longer periods of time. Relevant information might not be
forgotten ever but most information is stored there for a relatively longer period of time at least
as compared to the short-term or working memory or sensory memories. It is supposed to be an
archive of information about past events in our lives and knowledge about everything we have
learned. The span of long-term memory as opposed to the span of working memory or short-term
memory as you have seen in the last lectures can be huge; it is probably very difficult to measure
what the span of a long term memory is actually.
Herein you can see a demonstration from Goldstein's book wherein this person is trying to
remember what long term memory is, the first aspect you know when the person just sits down
on the chair is probably still in the short-term memory maybe it is going to be there up to a few
seconds or maybe a minute at max but everything else since the most recent five minutes - as
long as 10 years ago is all in the long-term memory.
So this is what I am going to be talking about in today's lecture that what is this what are the
processes with which we store memories, we make memories in the long-term memory and what
1046
are the processes involved in you know taking out information from there and using it and so on
and so forth. Now what is the again a difference between short-term and long-term memory you
can see say for example you know you meet somebody and that person you know is telling you
about some particular episode.
Obviously you are talking to this person you're making some judgments but in your long-term
memory you're kind of trying to have all that information sells here in this conversation there is a
Cindy and Tony talking. So Cindy tells that you know Jim and I went to see the first James Bond
movie at the short-term at least the information that is being accessed or activated by Tony is the
fact that you know Cindy went to the movie with Jim but in the long-term memory and there is
this interaction obviously happening all this information about what James on James Bond is
what that movie was about I have also seen that movie and judgments and decisions that see
Cindy is probably a James Bond fan and those kind of things are all happening at the same point.
So all of that information is basically being drawn from the long-term memory it is sometimes it
is obviously coming to the short-term memory when he is actively thinking about that and then
going back to long-term memory. So this is something which you have to really you know
1047
remember that whatever our common sense conception of memory is more basically efficiently
portrayed in the concept of long-term memory, any memory that we may talk about as laborers is
generally and more often than not long-term memory. Here is the demonstration by Murdoch and
in which he wanted to test the long-term memory of participants and you can also use this
demonstration of on any of your friends.
So the idea is that there are these 15words here and you try and repeat these words to one of your
friends at the rate of one word every two-second and after that you ask this person to recall and
rewrite those words or recall those words one after another in any order possible. So the
procedure will be termed to as free recall.
1048
Now when Murdoch did this experiment with a large number of participants and he plotted the
percentage recall for each of these words against the words position in it is in a particular in the
list he obtained what is called a serial position curve. So what is the serial position curves serial
position curve looks something like this.
1049
And wherein you will see that words in the first to fifth position are basically are remembered
best and then what is remembered best is the words in the most recent connections, the words say
for example in 18,19, 28th position or first second and third positions are those that will receive
the best recall. You will see the words which were told first are obviously remembered better but
the best or the most recalled word are those who which are said most recently.
1050
Now Murdoch's a serial position curve indicates that the memory is better for words at the
beginning of the list and at the end of the list than for words in the middle of the list, so if you
look at this figure here the worse in the middle of the list are the ones which are least
remembered. Superior memory first stimuli presented in the beginning of the list has been
termed as a phenomena called the primacy effect a possible explanation of the primacy effect or
is basically that the participants did have the time to rehearse these words in the LTM.
So when I am saying when I am starting to say these lists this list of words say for example I'm
starting to say let us say barricade children, diet, ground, folio and those kind of things as I am
saying these words at the rate of you know one word every two seconds you have this chance
because I have told you that I will ask you to recall these words later to rehearse these words you
are probably also repeating these words at the same time while I am saying them in order to not
forget them.
But when more words are added to the list your rehearsal kind of becomes lesser and lesser the
words at the beginning of the list received your100% attention and received the best rehearsal
but the words which came after the second third fourth fifth and tenth twelfth words they
1051
received proportionately lesser amount of rehearsal and lesser amount of attention and that is
why the recall kind of you know decreases steadily while you are reaching towards the middle of
the list.
Now the idea for more rehearsal of words Dewey Rundus wanted to test it and he again derived a
serial position word by presenting a list of 20 words at the rate of one word every five seconds in
a time for rehearsal and then he asked his participants to just write down all of the words, the
serial position curve the red one here you will see.
1052
Basically came out pretty much the same as the curve that was gained by Murdock.
1053
Now Rundus actually he added a small twist to his experiment by asking his participant to study
the list as it was being presented by repeating words out loud during the five-second interval
between words, so he said that while I am you know repeating a word every five seconds during
that five seconds you repeat whatever words I have already said. They were not told which
specific words to repeat they could probably the parts were free to repeat whatever words they
would want to. Here is you can see the performance the dashed curve here which you see the
blue one.
1054
Basically indicates how many times each word was repeated and it was found that how many
times the number of times each word was repeated very striking resemblance to the first half of
the serial position curve. So you will see this if you notice the first half of the serial position
curve tells you that the words in the beginning of the list were remembered better, now because
you know that which are the words most rehearsed you see that these are actually the words
which were most rehearsed.
So the amount of rehearsal for the words at the end of the list is the lowest the amount of
rehearsal for the words at the beginning of the list is highest and in that sense this amount of
rehearsal may then very well be you know used as the reason to account for the primacy effect.
Now this is how you know you can see that very cleverly designed experiments can tell you a lot
about mental phenomena.
1055
Now superior memory you have seen also in the same figure here that there is very good
memory that is very good recall for words at the end of the list, so superior memory for items at
the end of the sequence or the list is called the recency effect, one possible explanation for the
recency effect is that some of these items are still present in the short-term memory. That is there
but Glanzer and Cunitz wanted to test this idea. So they first derived a serial position curve in a
usual way and I will show you that figure very soon and then what they did was in another
experiment they measured the curve again after having participants count backwards for 30
seconds right after hearing the last word of the list so that there was no rehearsal or no
maintenance happening for these words at the end of the list.
1056
This counting prevents the rehearsal and allowed time for information to be lost out of this short-
term memory and then this delay caused by counting eliminated the recency effect so there's no
recency effect in the curve that you see is obtained by Glanzer and Cunit. So you see you can
obviously manipulate the amount of rehearsal that has been and that amount of rehearsal is
certainly going to you know play with the amount of recall that is going to happen. Now let us
talk about how do you store information in long term memory, how do you push information to
the long term memory and we will talk about that now.
1057
Now all three types of coding auditory coding that is by virtue of sound visual coding by virtue
of visual perception and semantic coding that is by analysis of meaning can take place for the
long-term memory as well, but the preferred coding strategy for information the long-term
memory has to be semantic coding. Because if you analyze the words for their meaning if you
analyze how new information is related to the older knowledge that you have already had, that
will basically you know very deeply plant the new information and your recall will be better and
you might be able to remember this information a relatively longer time.
Now semantic coding is basically illustrated by the kind of errors that people do the kind of
errors they mistaken the kind of recall tasks which involve the long term memory. Say for
example miss reading words like tree as bush will indicate that the person got the gist of the
meaning of what the tree is but he probably did not remember the exact word, kind of confusing
two words which mean alike.
So maybe that is why you got confused between the tree and the bush, so you are not
remembering the exact word but you are remembering the gist of the idea.
1058
That is how semantic encoding is achieved a study by a Sachs in 1967 demonstrated the
importance of meaning in the long term memory. Sachs had participants listen to a tape
recording of a message and then measured their recognition memory to determine whether they
remember the exact wording of the sentences in the passage or the general meaning of the
passage.
1059
This demonstration of our say for example when you really want to check for somebody's long-
term memory one of the ways to do that is basically testing for a recognition memory.
Recognition memory basically is just that if you have remembered a list I will give you a couple
of you know props I will give you some cues and then I will basically asked you whether these
two items were the items that were presented in the initial list that I asked you to memorize that
is pretty much what the recognition memory is about.
And this is different from recall memory because recall memory I am not giving you any cue. I
am just asking you to remember right out of your memory whatever I had told you earlier if you
have played or if you have you know watched say for example TV a program such as KBC you
will see there is they are basically checking for the recognition memory or not relay the recall
memory. Now an experiment similar to what Sachs did
1060
So I am going to tell you a story a very small story and I will take a bit of a test. So in Holland a
man named Lipperhsey was an eyes glass maker, one day his children were playing with some
lenses they discovered that things seemed very close if two lenses are held about a foot apart,
Lippershey began experimenting and his spyglass attracted much attention. He then sent a letter
about it to the Galileo an Italian scientist Galileo at once realized the importance of the discovery
and set about building an instrument of his own.
1061
Now this was the passage now can you tell me which exact sentence indicates which in basically
and how this is changed, so now you have covered to the passage and now basically you have to
indicate which of the following sentences is identical to the sentence in passage and which
sentences are changed. So he sent a letter about it to Galileo that great Italian scientist Galileo the
great Italian scientist sent him a letter about it a letter about it. A letter about it was sent to
Galileo the great Italian scientist and he sent Galileo the great Italian scientist a letter about it.
Now which of the ones is the sender's that is exactly mentioned in the passage. Earlier so I think
this one he sent about the first one is basically the correct one. A lot of people kind of mix it
sentence one is the only one that is identical to the one in the passage.
1062
However a lot of people identified numbers three and four as the matching as matching the one
on the passage even though the wording was different why are they doing this it is just said right
away one of the reasons could be that these participants are apparently remembering the gist and
the sentence is meaning but not its exact wording this is pretty much how we store information in
the long-term memory.
1063
Now coming to long-term memory and the brain there have been neuropsychological studies
about investigating things in the brain, the method of dissociations has been used in memory
research to differentiate between short-term memory and long-term memory by studying people
with brain damage that has affected one of these functions by sparing and sparing the other. So
there could be patients whose short-term memory is impaired but long-term is intact, there might
be patients whose long-term memory is intact but short-term memory is impaired.
So there was a very famous patient called Henry Molaison and Glenn Humphreys was a very
famous psychologist who worked with him all his life now HM basically and Henry M has been
referred to as hm ever since so HM basically was having seizures.
1064
And what happened was that he was having these epileptic seizures and the doctors of that era
and they basically eliminated part of his temporal frontal temporal lobes where in the memory
was supposed to be there, so that operation that was basically meant to eliminate his seizures also
unfortunately eliminated his ability to form new memories. Now it seems unfortunate situation
occurred because in 1953 the surgeons did not realize that the hippocampus is crucial the
hippocampus got removed so hippocampus is crucial for the formation of new long-term
memories. Once they realize the devastating effects of removing the hippocampus on both sides
of his brain HM’s operation was never repeated on any other patient ever.
1065
Here is a picture of Henry Molaison he died recently I think a few years ago while still being a
subject of one of the studies, he a lot of memory research has been done with the help of HM.
Another way in which a long-term memory has been studied is by using methods of neuro
imaging.
1066
Some brain imaging experiments have demonstrated the activation of different areas of brain for
short-term memory tasks versus long-term memory tasks. For example Deborah Talmi and
colleagues measured the fMRI response to a task involving short-term memory and long-term
memory he first presented a list of words to participants but instead of asking the participants to
recall the words they presented a single probe word, so they are looking for recognition test the
probe was either a word from near the beginning of the list or a word at the end of the list or a
word that had not been presented earlier at all.
1067
The participants task was to indicate whether the word has been presented before, so a very
simple task based on recognition memory. Now their brain activity was measured with fMRI
after the probe was presented and as the participants were preparing to respond. The results
indicated whatever they found out with respect to brain activations indicated that the probe
words that were from the beginning of the list you know activated areas of the brain associated
with long-term memory and short-term memory, because words of the beginning of the list
would be in the long memory and would then be transferred to the short-term memory because
they are being recalled.
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In contrast the words at the end of the list only activated the areas from relevant to the short-term
memory because these words have not already got to the long-term memory. Although Talmi’s
experiments demonstrates very well the activation of different areas for short-term and long-term
memory the results of many other experiments have not been really as clear-cut. Now you can
probably think that this might be the case because short-term and long-term memories might not
be as disconnected from each other as a theoretical model would you know make it to be. This is
all about long-term memory and I hope you kind of followed what long-term memory is about
and how it is important in the next lecture we will start talking about some other aspects of
memory, thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

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NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Lecture – 33
Memory – V
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello everyone welcome to the course basic cognitive processes I am doctor Ark Verma from
IIT Kanpur.
We have been talking about memory in our most recent lectures.
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In the last lecture we also talked about long-term memory previous to that we have been talking
about short-term and working memory and even sensory memory. Now today I am going to talk
to you about types of long-term memory.
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We will go into more detail about what are the different kinds of contents that long-term memory
has and we will also talk about some of the investigations into how the different areas of the
brain contribute to formulating these different kinds of memories also what happens when some
of these brain areas are damaged and how does that impact peoples recording of that memory.
Let us say two major divisions of long-term memory can be done along the lines of explicit and
implicit memory.
Now explicit memory is simply that memory that you can recall and describe and you know talk
about in more detail while implicit memory is that about which you cannot talk in more detail
but you can certainly demonstrate that memory by performing a particular skill or engaging in a
particular task on a different node explicit memory consists of two parts episodic memory that is
memory for personal experiences episodes say for example as I was saying in the last class.
If I ask you to describe a summer vacation spent at one of your grandparents’ house those kind of
things come under what is called explicit memory. What comes under semantic memory is your
knowledge about facts is your knowledge that you have gained over period of times that apple is
an edible fruit, that peacock is a bird that whale is mammal all of these are facts the Prime
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Minister of India is Narendra Modi is a fact. So all of those kind of information and you see lot
of early school quizzes having general knowledge they basically ask you to remember facts.
So that all is also part of this explicit memory so explicit memory will contain the episodes that
is the experiences you had which you can actually simulate by remembering them reliving them
in some sense and the knowledge of facts which you do not need to relive in any detail
whatsoever but you at least need to remember what that fact particularly was. Now another kind
of memory which I was just mentioning implicit memory is basically memories that are used
without awareness. So you are kind of using those memories without really consciously being
aware of them. So the contents of implicit memory in that sense cannot be reported.
The fact that I learned how to drive a car and that I drive a car almost every day now still does
not mean that if you ask me exactly how did I learn to you know maneuver the brakes or how did
I learn to you know control the pedals how did I learn that task I cannot really talk about that it
was a procedure it was a skill that I acquired and obviously I have still retained that skill and that
can be a you know demonstrated if I drive the car right now.
But if you ask me to give a description that becomes slightly difficult and in that sense implicit
memory is memory that cannot be reported but demonstrated by a action. So if you get these two
basic concepts right this is pretty much what your long-term memory will contain.
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Now implicit memory trying to elaborate on that a little bit implicit memory can be of three
types priming procedural memory and memory that is gained through conditioning. Now
priming basically is a phenomenon if you repeat a particular stimulus where you present a
particular stimulus the presentation of this stimulus will kind of make you ready make you
prepared make you react better to the presentation of another stimulus which is similar in some
way to the first stimulus that was presented.
You will find it easier to recognize words that are familiar or the words that have been recently
used if you are reading a particular novel you are reading a particular book and then maybe in
this lecture I use one of the words that you have read in the book you will very quickly recall the
meaning of that word. So what has happened is that you have recently just read that book in a
read that word in a particular book that will be primed by my mention of this word.
So your memory for the meaning of that word kind of gets revised in some sense. Another kind
of memory under implicit memory is exactly the memory for doing things say for example for
typing notes for riding bicycles those kind of things so procedural memory the memory for skills
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and tasks is your implicit memory. Classical conditioning is one form of learned memory
wherein you learned by remembering associations between two kinds of stimuli or events.
Say for example and it has been done you know very much I mean a lot of research in classical
conditioning has been done in psychology from the simplest examples could be say for example
if you associate a particular stimulus let us if you associate color white to something unpleasant
and say for example every time you see color white and you know a shock will be administered
to you later you will learn that color white you know stands for an unpleasant experience.
You can and we always link these kinds of memories, say for example advertisement industry
uses conditioning quite a lot. Say for example you see a lot of advertisements that are you know
played on the television nowadays have pictures or have things that you know remind you of
some pleasurable experience say for example a lot of advertisements have you know women
appearing and posing for those particular goods which also sometime do not have anything to do
with women.
So what is happening is the advertiser in that sense is using the sexuality of the woman to really
promote you know associations for that particular product and that product today might be
anything having nothing to do with women at all but if the person kind of goes to the store as he
has been primed with that pleasurable experience and that pleasurable experience is linked with
this particular product its very likely that the person will choose that product over aisle filled of
so many different kinds of varieties.
So these three kinds of learning is even though are not really explicit and you cannot really talk
about them that yes I am learning this association and I am going to use this information can still
be useful and it will basically be manifested in your choices in your performances of tasks and
whenever you are going to you know do something. Now this is basically what explicit memory
and implicit memory mean.
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Now here in you can see again a graphic description of what the long-term memory can be you
know structured as so you have explicit or conscious memory which contains episodes and
semantic memory and then you have on the other hand implicit memory which is not conscious
and you cannot probably talk about it as clearly and it basically has the three tasks of priming
procedural memory and conditioning.
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Now here in again is a demonstration of how somebody like cliff here is constantly being
involved in using both explicit and implicit memories at the same time a very simple task that
you are doing remember we started this course with saying that we will analyze behavior into
many smaller components and see that how these smaller components were together or join
together to explain that behavior that is pretty much what cognitive psychology is about.
So you see here Cliff this guy is basically experiencing two types of explicit memory and three
types of implicit memory at the same time, he might be browsing something on the internet so he
is probably you know maybe he is checking his emails. So on one hand he is basically you know
looking at this conversation with one of his friends which is episodic so he is remembering that
conversation with his friend also he is looking at say for example maybe he is you know
remembering some fact about cognitive psychology at the same time which is his semantic
memory he is reading recently viewed words so the words which he had might have read
recently are read easier and the meaning is recalled earlier so that is priming he is typing that is
procedural memory basically doing something that you know he tells that reading red vehicles
will make me anxious so he is kind of remembering that as well all of that is happening in the
implicit level.
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So you see at any point in you can take your own examples as well if you are doing something
say for example if I asked you to plan a vacation you to you know let us say a place any place in
India maybe Goa or somewhere you might be aware of you know aware of you know some you
might be recalled of some of your previous experiences with that place, so those episodes will be
activated you might be you know aware of that Goa is you know city which has coast at the
coastal area of India so you will remember that semantic factors well.
And then at the same time you might kind of you know use some of your other skills which are
basically implicit in nature say for example the association that Goa is you know always thought
of as a place to have parties and treasure is already that classical condition the mention of the
word kind of makes you happy that is what classical conditioning is happening so implicit
memory is also being invoked here.
Now this is again an example to say that we are using all these different kinds of memory almost
all the time and this interaction and interdependence is already always playing out.
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Now let us come to try and you know seeing some experimental studies about these explicit and
implicit memory, so we kind of gradually be talking about that. Now Tulving basically said that
the defining property of the experience of episodic memory is that involves mental time travel.
So if I ask you to describe me in more detail about a vacation that you had in let us say in the
year 2000 and where did you go and what were the experiences you had while you are recalling
that going to that place you are transported in some sense to that time and era and in that sense
you are experiencing back that entire episodes.
So that is pretty much what the episodic memory is doing, it is asking you it is allowing you to
do this kind of mental time travel. Tulving he describes this experience of mental time travel that
is episodic memory as self knowing or self remembering so as soon as you start looking into
your memory and start recalling previous episodes that have happened previous experiences that
you have gone through basically invoking or exercising your episodic memory it can be referred
to as remembering or it can be referred to as self-knowing.
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In contrast with a mental time travel property of episodic memory the experience of semantic
memory is a slightly narrower. So the experience of semantic memory is basically involving just
accessing the knowledge about the world that does not really necessarily have to be tied to that
entire experience to answer some questions about particular facts whether Swan is a bird or it is a
mammal or it will not really ask you to invoke the memory of when you first read about or saw a
swan. It will just you know the the facts that Swan is a bird is automatically invoked it is
automatically brought to your memory and you can answer this question in a second or two. So
ideally the semantic memory is basically not about episodes but it is just about facts. So not
really you do not really need to travel back in time to where you first saw the swan or where you
first read about the Swan or were told about the swan you do not really need to get all of that
information because that is not relevant to the task.
So what you do is you just get grab the fact that is one is a bird and throw it towards me and say
that yes this is the fact and this is what I know and you are doing this with the help of what is
called your semantic memory.
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Now there have been neuropsychological evidences on the separation of semantic and episodic
memory, so there has been a lot of debate and there has been it has been said and shown time and
again that episodic memory and semantic memory are two different aspects of memory. So one
of the neuropsychological cases that I can talk to you about is the case of KC who was a guy who
was riding his motorcycle at the age of 30, he kind of you know went off a freeway exit ramp
and suffered severe damage to his hippocampus and the surrounding structures.
So what happened is as result of this injury KC basically lost all of his episodic memory he now
cannot remember anything or any of the relevant events of his past however he knows that
certain things happened that would correspond to what is called semantic memory I will tell you
things like.
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he is aware of the fact that his brother died two years ago now that is a fact but he is not really
aware of the things related to his brother brothers death and the circumstances that he
experienced the fact that of his brother he is not able to recall that.
KC also remembers the fact that where say for example eating utensils are located in the kitchen
and the difference between a strike and a spare in bowling, so he remembers these things as facts
but he does not remember the episodes linked to where he learned all of this knowledge. Also
KC has lost so KC basically on the basis of these things you can say he has lost the episodic part
of his memory but the semantic part of his memory is almost all right okay.
Because he knows all the facts he knows his brother died, he knows you know where the kitchen
is, he knows you know other things about the bowling game, but he does not know whether he
has bowled it ever over say for example if you ask him to describe where did you where did you
go to bowling last week he would probably not be able to tell you that.
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A contrary case to this one to the case of KC was that of an Italian woman who was in normal
health until she suffered an attack of encephalitis at around the age of 44. Now the first signs of
problems after this encephalitis attack were headaches and a fever which was later followed by
hallucinations lasting up to four or five days. Now when this woman returns home after a six-
week stay in the hospital she started having difficulty in recognizing familiar faces familiar
people she also had trouble shopping because she could not remember the meaning of the words
on the shopping list.
So she would read a shopping list she will not remember what these things are which are written
here. She could no longer recognize famous people she could no longer you know recall facts
such as the identity of who Beethoven was or the fact that Italy was involved in World War II
because she is a Italian woman you could ask these kind of questions she all of these semantic
facts all of these things are completely absent.
However despite this severe impairment of memory for semantic information she was still able
to remember events in her life that were going on currently so she could remember what she had
done during the entire day that say for example I woke up at you know 9 AM, I had I had my
breakfast I went for a walk and I you know did some study all of that she remembers and say for
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example also things that happened weeks before or months before basically those that were
episodes.
So although she has lost all her semantic memories this Italian woman is still able to form newer
episodic memories. Now if you kind of contrast the cases of KC and the case of this Italian
woman and you put them together it will basically demonstrate to you what is called a double
dissociation. A double dissociation between episodic memory and semantic memory, so you
know certainly that episodic and semantic memory are two different concepts and administered
by probably two different brain regions.
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So hearing you can see this double dissociation aware but if you do not remember what double
dissociation means you might refer to one of the lectures on the methodology part where double
dissociation basically tells you that if a patient is okay in skill A but deficient in skill B if patient
one is bad at scale A good at scale B patient two is good at scale A and bad at scale B you can
you know deduce from this that scale A and scale B are basically different and are administered
by different brain regions.
So this is what you kind of find here that KC is good at a semantic memory but poor at episodic
memory and this Italian woman is poor at semantic memory and good at episodic memory.
(Refer Slide Time: 17:1 4)
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Now there has also been brain imaging evidence to show that semantic and episodic memory are
different so Levine and colleagues they did their experiment in 2004 they asked the participants
to keep diaries and diaries on audiotape describing everyday personnel events say for example it
was the last night of our salsa dance class, we went for dinner at this particular restaurant and all
of these facts from their semantic knowledge as well that by 1947 there are 5,000 Japanese
Canadians living in those kind of factual knowledges is and whatever episodes they are having
and they of audio taped all of these you know in a cassette and all of that so when participants
later were made to listen to these audio taped descriptions while they were in an FMRI scanner
the recordings of everyday events that is episodes elicited detailed you know episodic
autobiographical memories while the other recordings which were basically factual knowledge
reminded people only of facts and semantic memory was invoked.
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Here you can see brain areas that were activated by episodic and semantic memories you will see
the yellow areas are basically those activated by episodic memories and the blue regions are
those activated by a semantic memories. So you will see there is also a neural level dissociation
between episodic and semantic memories as I demonstrated in the you know by the cases of KC
and this Italian woman.
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Now the results of this experiment just to summarize indicated that while there is an overlap in
the activation caused by episodic and semantic memories there are certainly major differences
other research has also found the differences between areas activated by episodic memory and
semantic memory.
1090
Now there have been also obviously we demonstrated right away that episodic and semantic
memory are two different things but there has also been reports of connections between episodic
and semantic memory, obviously they have to be connected to you know form a coherent story
and give us this coherent sense of being. So the distinction already although has been made
between episodic and semantic memory they have also been shown to be connected in a variety
of ways.
Say for example if we are learning facts potential semantic memories maybe you are you know
paying a lot of attention to this video and learning something about cognitive psychology and
learning something about let us say in this lecture episodic and semantic memory you are
simultaneously usually having an experience as well. So maybe you are sitting in a particular
room maybe weather is good outside maybe you know you're kind of having this episode of
sitting in a particular room and listening to this particular lecture.
So while what you will recall let us say is the facts about things about you know episodic
memory and semantic memory from this lecture you will also take away with you this episode of
sitting at a particular place and listening to the lecture so a kind of very similarly you know
things that people do in classrooms.
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So episodic memories I am just kind of going to elaborate this connection a little bit episodic
memories can be lost leaving only semantic memories. So 20 years from now maybe you might
still remember what an episodic memory or what semantic memory means but you might forget
wherein or in which setting or say for example which room were you sitting in watching the
video that you remember these facts that you first got aware of these facts okay.
So this is one of the ways to show that you know during a particular event during a particular
episode in life you might sometimes you know recall that episode and the semantic facts as well
but it can also be possible that you kind of do not remember the episode but you at least
remember the fact. It really it happens very often where the people who have traumatic
experiences.
Now semantic memory can be enhanced if associated with episodic memory, now research has
shown that you try and you know associate this knowledge of facts with you know with different
kinds of episodes with the entire episodic experience you can enhance your semantic memory
and it can stay on for much longer say for example if the knowledge about.
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Let us say the facts associated with high school graduation somebody’s farewell party after 12 th
class or 10th class you know has some personal significance it will be remembered better you
know a farewell party in class 12th or graduation courses you might have done if something very
significant happened maybe something pleasant suppose you have won a particular you know we
had in our College Mr. and Mrs. fresher if you kind of won that kind of a sashay you will
probably remember that entire event much better.
Maybe a you know till the time you grow old. So the idea is that semantic memory that the fact
that you won mister or miss fresher at that day if you kind of link it with that entire episode of
your fresher function of farewell function you will remember that much much better. Now
Westmaccot and Moscovitch they showed participants did actually have better recall for names
of public figures such as actor singers and politicians whom they would associate with personal
experiences.
So say for example if you have a particular you know you are a fan of a particular bollywood
actor or particular cricketer or somebody and you probably found him you know you met him on
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a particular airport while you are traveling you will remember this person may be better okay if it
if it if this person is you know kind of associated with any personal experience.
Coming to the third fact semantic memory can influence our experience by influencing our
attention. So the knowledge of facts the you know all the facts that you remember can also
influence your experience by influencing how you look at things or how you attend to things.
Say for example Abhishek and Aditi are watching a game of cricket and later when they are
asked to recall whatever happened in the game.
So Aditi remembers the details of the play he remembers say for example batsman X got caught
in square leg or fine leg by playing a pull short to a spinner so its adequate detail that is there but
Abhishek does not remember this entire information he just remembers that the batsman got out.
Now it is probably because Aditi had been a player of cricket she has you know figured in a girls
cricket team in a school so she kind of remembers each and every detail about that thing while
Abhishek who is never been fond of cricket so much he does not remember it.
Now it remembers chess example which we were talking about in one of the earlier lectures
because your semantic memory has this knowledge of this facts you will attend to details better
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and this attention to details will impact your memory much better. So this is again one example
showing that semantic and episodic memory are linked together.
Priming procedural memory and conditioning are aspects of implicit memory and now let us talk
a little bit about them as well. Now priming basically occurs when the presentation of one
stimulus which is the priming stimulus changes the response of an, change the response to the
subsequent test stimulus now say for example if I prime you with the word and then I later you
know ask you that whether Swan is a bird or not, because you have been primed with this
concept of bird, you will be able to answer that question much faster.
This is called one kind of a semantic priming, there could be very simply even repetition priming
I will say for example if I repeat repeatedly present one word one kind of test stimulus to you
which is the same or as resembling the later stimulus that will come in you might be able to
answer questions about that later stimulus faster and it has also been shown experimentally say
for example if I you know show you the word bird you might respond much more quickly to the
representation or same bird or something you know which is also a member of the bird class.
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Conceptual priming occurs when the enhancement caused by the priming stimulus is based on
the meaning of the stimulus if I repeat the word furniture to you and later the test stimuli consists
of let us say a chair or a table or a sofa you might be able to respond to chair table or sofa much
easier in much faster way as compared to words so typical paradigm of priming is I will probably
just explain this right away is that you see a test stimulus then there is a gap and after that yes
you see a priming stimulus and then there is a gap and after that you see what is called a test
stimulus.
Now on the basis of the relationship between the priming stimulus and the test stimulus your
responses to the test stimulus might be increased or decreased be faster or smaller slower be
more accurate or less accurate. So if in an experimental setting I mention the word furniture in
one of the episodes in one of the screens and then after some point in time on the I present a
word called table and I ask you whether it is you know real word or it is not a real world you will
be able to answer that it is a real word faster because you have just been primed with the word
furniture.
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So the knowledge associated to all the furniture is activated and because table is part of that
knowledge it gets primed and you can answer anything about the table much quicker and much
more accurately that is what conceptual priming basically means.
Many experiments have been done in which researchers have demonstrated implicit memory
using a variety of techniques. Say for example an experiment was done by Peter Graf and
colleagues who tested three groups of participants they were eight patients with Korsakoff’s
syndrome now Korsakoff’s syndrome is basically a disorder as a base is a very acute memory
disorder which happens due to alcohol abuse so people do not, people suffer from very you know
a very severe amnesia and they cannot remember a lot of things.
So patients without amnesia who are under treatment, so the second group consisted of patients
without amnesia and were under treatment for alcoholism so the first group is coworkers
Korsakoff’s syndrome people who are alcoholics and amnesic both the second group is patients
who are not amnesic but they are alcoholic and the third patients who had who did not have
amnesia or were not alcoholics so three groups of patients they had.
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They presented these patients with a list of words and ask them to rate the words on a scale of 1
to 5 as to how much they liked the word, so one meant I like this word very much five meant I
dislike this word completely. Now this basically got the participants focused on rating of the
words and they could not guess that they will be asked to recall these words later that is what
happens immediately after rating the words in the list participants were tested in one of two ways
either they were given a test of explicit memory so they were asked to recall these words or they
were given a test of implicit memory in which what happened was they were given a list of three
letters and they had to add some more letters to make and the words okay.
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To make newer words and make the words that came to their mind. So the result of the recall
experiment showed that people with amnesia performed very poorly and they had a poor recall
as compared to the two other control groups now this poor recall kind of confirms that the poor
explicit memory is there so they are a kind of obviously what is expected with patients of
amnesia. While the result of the implicit memory test tells a different story. It was found that the
percentage of primed words that were created in the word completion test demonstrated that
amnesic patients also performed just as well as the controlled.
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So here in you can see the results you see the implicit memory test the amnesty group performs
as good as the alcoholic groups and the inpatients wherein the explicit recall test the amnesic
group fairs much poorly as compared to the inpatients and the alcoholic group so this is basically
one of the tests which also tells you something about you know memory that priming or say for
example implicit memory might still be left intact even though explicit memory has been
suffered you know has been as severed you do things like amnesia.
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Another example of are repetition priming in which a patient with brain damage was presented
with you know was he was participating in an experiment by Warrington and Vice France and
they were testing five patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome so the researchers presented
incomplete pictures such as the ones which I will show you right away.
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So these incomplete pictures were presented to five patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome.
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Now what happens is and they were asked to complete this and they were basically asked to
identify what these pictures were. So you were shown pictures like this and they were asked that
what of what each of these pictures meant. So the results indicated that by the third day of testing
these participants would make much fewer errors before identifying the pictures than they did at
the beginning of training even though they had no memory for any of previous days training so if
you ask them what did we work on yesterday they will probably not be able to answer.
But if you ask them to recognize these pictures they will they are slowly getting better so some
learning is essentially happening some implicit memory is essentially being formed again an
example of you know to demonstrate that explicit and implicit memory are slightly different
skills now the improvement of performance again just to summarize represents an effect of
implicit memory because the patients are learning from the experience even though they cannot
remember the having that experience or they cannot remember the episode of that experience.
Here you can see their performance.
1103
Now procedural memory basically is all so-called skilled memory because it is memory for
doing things that usually require action. Now the implicit nature of procedural memory as we
have talked earlier as well has been demonstrated in amnesia patients who can master a skill
without remembering any of the practice that had that has led to this you know skill advancement
with HM they were doing this task called mirror drawing every day he would go to the
psychologist and the psychologist will teach him to do mirror drying and mirror drawing is
basically this you can see.
1104
You are looking at an object in the mirror and trying to draw it. So with HM he had to just copy
this you know thing you know by seeing in the mirror and he was doing it after days of practice
HM basically became very good at mirror drawing though if you ask him about the episode he
will not remember he will probably say that you know it is the first time I am doing this task but
he was certainly getting better at it. So implicit memory certainly you know getting increased
and is getting better.
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This was the case with other amnesic patients as well see for example Jimmy G the person we
are talking about in the first and would still tie his shoe so he knows at least that skill is still
there, Clive Wearing who was a pianist I have been talking about him in the earlier lectures still
could play a piano, KC this guy who suffered a motorcycle accident later became a librarian he
learned to sort books in the library and could live his life you know decently even after that. So
you will see that these kind of you know facts.
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These kind of demonstrations that amnesic patients can still retain skills learned in the past and
even learn new skills they basically led to an approach of rehabilitating patients with amnesia by
teaching them new tasks okay so it is okay I mean whatever is lost the episodic semantic part
whatever is lost that's alright the implicit tasks that they can still learn are actually taught them
and you know they even though they will not remember the episodes of training they will
certainly remember you know the training they have got they will certainly remember the skill
they have got.
1107
And you can obviously also you know associate this with your personal experiences say for
example do you exactly explicitly remember the day you learn to ride bicycle or a car or say for
example how to maintain balance while you are riding on a bike but obviously if given a bicycle
you can demonstrate by riding it that you know the skill of riding a bicycle so that skill is there
but that episode might obviously be forgotten.
So another last kind of implicit memory thing and we can talk about is classical conditioning
now classical conditioning basically happens when two of the following kinds of stimuli are
present, so there has to be neutral stimulus that initially does not result in a particular response
and there has to be conditioning stimulus that does result in response, say for example and this
was basically this is being borrowed from Ivan Pavlov’s experiment done long long ago so he
presented food and food naturally generates a salivating response and then what he did was he
paired the food with the bell which again gave the salivating response because the food is
presented.
Later it was found that these the dogs who with which this experiment was being done, they
started salivating to the bell alone so what the dogs have done is they have linked Bell with the
food so every time they or whatever response they were giving to the food is now also being
given to the Bell as well.
1108
So conditioning is actually a very important thing, you know it is evolutionary useful as well
because it allows organisms to develop expectations that helps them prepare for contingencies so
you know say for example that if you have seen a snake or say for example if you know there are
dark clouds in the you know in the sky it might be going to rain you know there is a high chance
that it will rain and you will immediately you know go and grab your umbrella if you are going
out for a walk. Now classical conditioning again is an implicit thing. So you have this knowledge
and you might use this knowledge but you might not necessarily say well obviously the example
of the umbrella you can still say that I know how it is going to rain but how did you know it, how
did you automatically guess by seeing the thing, by seeing the black cloud that there is going to
rain. So you have kind of learned this over and over again because you've made this association
there are so many other skills we have learned through classical conditioning which are
important parts of our implicit memories and which kind of also define how we interact with this
environment.
1109
That was all about long term memory about explicit implicit memories about episodic semantics
and procedural priming and conditioning memories and in the next lecture we will talk about
some other aspect of memory thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
1110
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
1111
Course Title
Lecture-34
Memory-VI
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Kanpur.
1112
Now as you know we have been talking about memory in the last lectures we talked about long-
term memory we talked about explicit implicit episodic semantic priming procedural in those
different kinds of memories in the last class. Now today I will probably be talking to you about a
more basic aspect and the more basic aspect being how do you create memories how do you take
information and place it in your memory.
1113
We will also be talking about what it takes to retrieve information already present in your
memory out and use it so today we will be talking about encoding and retrieval.
1114
So let me ask you, you know a very simple question and you can think over it for a couple of
minutes and say how do you create a memory, how do you make a memory and you know you
can tie this example out of say for example how do you study a particular course say for example
this course or any other course that you might have done in a regular classroom as well how do
you really do that? How do you let us say make sure that you have remembered everything that
was you know taught as part of the course all the assignments all the knowledge that were given
so that you do it very well perform very well at the end of the you know semester while the exam
is being held. So there is this demonstration in Goldstein’s book where in five different students
are asked and they are asked how do they prepare for a particular course and they kind of
describe that and some detail.
1115
And I will kind of just discuss this video to show you that how different people might have
different strategies of making memories or encoding information into their long-term memories
say student one says that the main technique he uses is to study while studying is to make up a
story in his mind so he says that you know there was his friend and he kind of changed his name
to Helmholtz and he kind of attached all those things that he knew about Helmholtz to this
person.
So let us say the Amar name has changed to Helmholtz and then you start saying that you know
Amar is a rather queer person he kind of tries to make sense of things that that they are but they
are actually not there and say for example you, he named one of his other friends, other friends
name Amygdala and he said that this person is an emotional person so what he is doing is he is
creating a fake story.
But in this fake story all the important details that he wants to remember are attached to these
specific characters of the story. So in this way what happens is he has organized or he has pasted
the characteristics or important facts that he had to remember to these characters in a particular
story in that sense he will remember the story well he is remember the characters well so he does
not really need to explicitly mug up the important details.
1116
Because he knows the story he knows the gist he knows if you have to talk about Amygdala, you
have you at least know that Amygdala is the center is the organ of the brain that is more as a part
of the brain that is associated with emotions. So this is one way of doing it obviously the other
way is that there is this second student who says that he or she would like to go to the classroom
early and study to remember that they kind of prior to go into the class make notes and when the
class is going on this person is taking more notes because the notes are already there he is not
really or she is not really making notes while the class is going on.
So it is kind of dedicating more time to listening while in the class because the notes have
already been prepared and just complementing those notes with things that he might have or she
might have missed earlier. This is one way of preparation so that you remember all the material
at the end of the semester about the course so this is and it is very different from the first one the
third one says that I kind of like to teach somebody.
1117
Whatever I have learned say I remember one of the people I know whenever the he or she would
comeback from the classroom after a day in school this person would teach somebody else say
for example you know a friend or a relative everything that they have learned in the you know in
the school during that day so what will happen is that because this person taught that material
and some of you might already be aware of it for example whatever material you have learned
once you have taught that material to somebody else you kind of master that material that
material gets really well established in your memory and you will not forget it you know as
easily as some of the other material that you have not really taught. So this is another third way
of doing this, the fourth way is that the person can organize their notes it can be tables and
graphs.
1118
And those kind of things and this organization and this organized way of making notes kind of
also might help people remember certain information.
1119
Similarly there is the fourth student who actually reads each chapters takes notes and then
organizes the material on the computer screen now you see five different students if talking to
ten other students as well different people have different strategies to encode information in the
long-term memory.
So this is what we will be concerned about. How are you storing information in your memory
you might have your own idiosyncratic way your own unique way of storing information. So
what does this tell us it tells us that nobody and there is no standard way of loading information
into the long-term memory and people do it according to you know their own preferences their
own likes and dislikes or say for example their own study strategies.
So then how does one study or how does one investigate peoples’ manner of you know storing
information in the long term memory, we will kind of try and you know do some generalizations
do some estimates of what people are doing when they are storing information in their long-term
memory. Now one of the things that probably a lot of people do is called rehearsal.
1120
A rehearsal basically means you are getting information into memory by repeating this
information over and over again. Now this repetition could be verbal or this repetition could be
writing something down taking notes teaching it to somebody having read it and then repeated
while you read the class, so a lot of people are in some sense doing one or the other kind of
rehearsal.
Now there are two main kinds of rehearsal that one can talk about first is maintenance rehearsal
whatever I am saying and you are also repeating it in your head again and again without really
wondering, bothering about the meaning of what I am saying then you are basically doing
maintenance rehearsal, so you are plainly repeating information to remember but without
analyzing it for meaning or possible connections about possible connections with what you
already know.
So maintaining in rehearsal is basically when you are typically just repeating or parroting
information. How good or how bad it is we will talk about in sometime the other kind of
rehearsal is called elaborative rehearsal say for example this person who was fond of making
1121
fake stories so what he is doing is he's elaborating whatever concepts he has learned by making
stories about them and remembering the gist of that information.
It has been seen the research has shown that the more effective way of transferring information
into the long-term memory involves thinking about the meaning of an item thinking about the
meaning of this information or attempting to connect this information with whatever you already
know. A good tip about this course or any other course that you might be doing is that you have
to try and create your own examples.
You have to try and create whatever I am saying or whatever you might be hearing in any other
class create your own examples link the examples that I am giving to something that has
happened in your experience as well and in that sense you will understand this much better you
will remember this even better after years and months and you know much, much longer time.
So again just a tip so there are two kinds of rehearsal possible maintenance rehearsal and
elaborative rehearsal and it has been shown by research that elaborative rehearsal is a better way
than maintenance rehearsal. So that said let us talk about something else now one of the ways
about rehearsal or say for example why elaborative rehearsal might be better than maintenance
rehearsal was proposed by Craik and Lockhart back in 1972when they proposed what is called
the levels of processing approach.
1122
So Craik and Lockhart basically said that memory depends on how much the information is
encoded deeply so how deeply you encode some information how deeply you analyze some
information basically decides how well you will remember that information after a given period
of time. An information that is more deeply analyzed more deeply encoded is remembered for
much longer periods or periods of time as compared to information that was not so deeply or
analyzed in a rather shallow manner.
So they basically distinguish between deep processing and shallow processing. This is according
to the levels of processing approach the depth of processing is determined by the nature of the
task during encoding now let us do this demonstration here there is a list of words here there is
the word called chair mathematics lamp and car and you are kind of reading it one of the
questions.
1123
I could ask you is just count the vowels on each of these words and then you move on to another
word and while you reach the end of the list you kind of start counting backward by threes and
once you have done this you reach a particular number let us say 76 you kind of try and write
each, each of these words so, so what you are doing is you're just looking at the number of
vowels in these words you are not really looking at the meaning not really linking the meaning.
1124
You know to your knowledge or anything you are just looking at the vowels thing. Another
demonstration could be say for example you have to you know again reach each of these words
you have to but you have to utilize you have to visualize how each of these objects might be
useful to you.
If you were left deserted on an uninhabited island so there are these words umbrella exercise
forgiveness Rock hamburger sunlight those kind of things but you have to think of them as per
how useful these words will be if you were left with either of these objects if you are on a
deserted island remember the movie castaway wherein this this gentleman who was a you know
left stranded on this island.
1125
So there are these two tasks wherein one, wherein you are counting the number of vowels in the
list of words another when you are kind of imagining how useful these words will be if you were
left with their any of these on a deserted island. Now Craik and Lokhart level of processing
shows or it states that memory basically depends on depth of processing something which I
already repeated this variation into the two ways one in which you are counting the vowels.
1126
And the other which were imagining that how, how will you use these items when you're in a
you know deserted island tells you the fact that the second task will be easier a lot of people
found that a second task was much easier okay. So let us talk in more detail about what
shallower and deep processing means. So shallow processing basically invokes little attention to
meaning so what you are doing in the task one was you are doing shallow processing.
So it involves less a little attention to meaning, shallow, shallow processing occurs when
attention is focused only on the physical features it is not about the semantic feature so it's not
about elaboration in any sense. So such as a word is presented in lowercase or capital letters or
something like that whereas deep processing involves closer attention to the meaning closer
attention to how this item is related to you know something.
That you already know. Now again there is a demonstration so the procedure for Craik and
Tulving’s experiment is right here there could be a word and there could be different questions
1127
asked about that word which will invoke different kinds of processing different levels of
processing that you can do with that word, suppose there is a word called bird, and I can ask you
a very simple question is the word printed in capital letters another word is pain and I can ask
you if the word rhymes with the word train, a third word is car and I ask you to fill it in a
sentence I say he saw a dash on the street is it possible that car can be filled in this particular
blank.
Now this is what something was this is what you know a Craik and Tulving did in their 1975
experiment and what they found was that the that were used with the fill-in-the-blanks question
were remembered much better than words which were just paired with the questions about
whether the word is in lower case or uppercase okay.
1128
So what does this tell you? It tells you that the depth of processing with respect to if you are only
focusing on the physical characteristics versus if you are focusing on the use and meaning of
those words it determines pretty much how better or how worse you will go you are going to
remember that word. Now it is all good this whole approach of levels of processing and it kind of
seems to fit in well as well and if you think about it enough it seems intuitive as well, still it can
get slightly difficult to decide you know what is contributing to this depth of processing what is
leading you know how is depth of processing basically making the memory better okay.
1129
So you can say for example you know if you ask the deserted island task the words are
remembered better but then you say that how but you do not really have any answer as to why
this deserted island task is going to you know make your memory about this list of words better.
So there were some experiments done so we will talk more about these encoding and retrieval
things and see how does this actually help.
1130
So let us test about how encoding gets influenced by retrieval by varying the type of encoding
how can retrieval also be effected. So there are these different encoding strategies and they can
be actually you know used to effect your retrieval performance on a particular thing. If I ask you
to remember the word chicken you can just say she cooked the chicken or you can say the great
word bird swooped down and carried off the struggling chicken. Craik and Tulving 90s found
that a memory for a word is much better when this when the word is presented with a complex
sentence. So if the two sentences are there she cooked the chicken and in the second she the great
bird swooped down and carried of the struggling chicken people would remember chicken better
if they were reading chicken in the second sentence now why is this happening.
1131
Because it is carrying much more information where in this word chicken is deeply and very well
placed so most of the participants kind of in this experiment did better to remember the word
chicken if it were presented in the context of sentence two versus sentence one. Other way of
encoding could be by forming visual images so Bower and Winzenz in 1970 they decided to test
whether visual imagery that is images in the head connect that connect words visually can create
connections that enhance memory.
So they use a particular procedure called paired associate learning in which a list of words is
presented later first word of each pair is presented where the participants task is to remember
whether the word the word it was paid with so the test phases I will just present one of the pair
and you have to tell me the second of the pair.
1132
Obviously in the first part I have you know ask you to learn the pair is as well. Bower and
Winzenz presented a list of 15 pairs of nouns such as boat tree to participants for five seconds
each one group was told to silently repeat the pairs as they were presented and the other group
was told to form a mental picture in which the two items were interacting. So you might you
know imagine boat tied to a tree in the second case while you might just be repeating boat tree
boat tree again in the first place. Which group do you think would have remembered the words
better, certainly this second group.
1133
So another way of remembering words or remembering any information for that matter could be
by linking the words to yourself. So what could happen is an example of this is basically called
the self-reference effect. So memory is found to be much better if you can relate the word or any
new incoming information to be learned to be associated to yourself. So Rogers and co-workers
in 1977 they demonstrated by using the same procedure that Craik and Tulving had used in their
depth of processing experience.
1134
So what they did was they had this list of words and they could ask four different kinds of
questions with relevant to these words. Say for example if the word is happy they could just ask
if this word is printed in smaller case or higher case if the word is again they would probably ask
whether the word rhymes with the word snappy or does it mean you know mean the same as
happy or upbeat something like that and the self reference.
1135
question will be does this describe you. So they had this list of words they could ask these four
kinds of questions the fourth question was always does this word describe you is this word
related to you in any way, they found that the fourth question certainly and in most cases for all
participants led to much better recall of the words that this fourth question was paired with, so it
kind of tells you that you are better we are better at remembering information that is irrelevant to
us in more ways as compared to information that is not relevant to us.
1136
Another thing is you could generate new information related to words if you are generating some
material yourself if you are learning something and you write it down yourself in your own
words you will remember and learn that information much better again an experimental
demonstration so Islamic and Graf had demonstrated this effect called the word generation effect
by having participants study a list of word pairs in two different ways there was the reading
group who read this who read pairs of words in crown horse saddle lamp shade etc.
1137
And then there was the generating group who were basically they were basically asked to fill in
the blank with the word that is related to the first word. So after reading either reading or
regenerating the list of words they were presented the first word in each pair and they were told
to indicate the word that went with it.
1138
Say there is this list of the words and what they basically found was that a generating group did
much better in recalling as compared to the reading group. Another aspect another the manner of
encoding could be organizing information you remember, one of the students said that I organize
information in tabs and entries and my notes and that helps me understand whatever I am
learning in a much better way. So the memory system also uses organization to access
information.
1139
So you are reading a particular list of words which is Apple desk shoe sofa plum etc.
1140
And then these words are recalled better if they are grouped together so if I put all the fruits
together all the furniture together other kinds of tools together then you will probably remember
them better. One of the reasons that you will remember thus this kind of an organized list better
is that you have sorted these words into categories and if kind of remembered the instances of the
category.
1141
So Bower and co-workers in 1969 they tested for the memory of words which were presented in
an organized form from the beginning during encoding in form of an organization tree. So they
wanted to see if you already give organized formation is that recalled better or say for example it
is recalled better at the participant themselves organize it.
1142
So they give this kind of a tree so there are minerals there are metals and rare metals common
metals alloys and there is stones precious stones and masonry use stones and so this is already an
organized tree.
1143
One group of participants were studying these four separate trees for minerals animals clothing
and transportation for one minute each and they were asked to recall as many words as they
could from all four trees in the recall test it was found that the participants tended to organize the
words response in the same way their responses in the same way as the information was
organized in the tree and they could recall good they recalled in an average of 73 words from all
four trees.
1144
In the second scenario another group of participants saw these four trees but these four trees the
elements in this four trees were randomly organized, so that each tree contained a random
assignment of minerals animals clothing and transportation. Now these participants were able to
remember only 21 as opposed to 73 in the last in the other group and so organizing material can
be concluded to be a very useful way of remembering information.
1145
So here you can kind of you know let us try and summarize what all factors could be used to
encode information better and how this encoding information better can improve your recall and
retrieval of that information in a later scene, so one of the ways is you have to create connection
you could create complex sentences you could do your own imagery thing or you could link the
information to yourself the second is active creation you could either generate information or you
could do testing.
The third is organization in which you can recall by groups as the information of such as an
organizational tree you could present in an organized way or you can form a meaningful
elaboration.
1146
Now you come to one of these things called testing we kind of miss it probably testing basically
also has shown to be resulting in better recall. So Roedigar and Karpicke basically they tested the
advantages of testing.
1147
So what they had was they had two groups they had participants read particular passage and they
had participants solve math problems and then in the testing group the participant took a recall
test of that passage and in the second group which is the rereading group they just read the
material again and then there was a delay and the delay could be of one week two days or five
minutes. Now after delay it was seen that the testing group was much better than the rereading
group after if the delay was as long as two days or one week.
1148
So that is pretty much the result of this group so it tells you that testing also has an advantage so
for students it might be a good idea to test themselves again and again repeatedly for that kind of
information so that your memory of that particular information gets revised and you know stored
better.
1149
So this basically is referred to as the testing effect here you can see the results. So you can see
that the testing group is much better than the rereading group even after one week of that
information.
1150
So just to sum up words in a complex sentence can lead to better memory forming visual images
obviously can lead to better memory linking to self generating information organizing
information say for example presenting information in organized tabulated kind of manner can
lead to better memory and the third is testing, testing also leads to better memory in that sense
periodical testing of whatever you have learned any particular course might be a very useful
strategy to follow.
So the kind of assignments you get during this course every week might be a good way to
remember whatever lectures you have had during the entire week and that kind of probably you
know goes a long way in helping your learning of whatever material we are giving out here. So
thank you for this lecture we will kind of talk about another aspect of memory in the next lecture
thank you.
Acknowledgement
1151
Prof. Satyaki Roy
NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
1152
1153
Course Title
Lecture-35
Memory- VII
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Kanpur we have been talking about memory.
1154
In the last few lectures and in the last lecture we talked about encoding and he specially talked
about what are the different processes by which you can encode information to your long-term
memory, we talked about a variety of encoding processes and we showed through the use of
these different experiments that how these different encoding you know processes the different
kinds of encoding procedures can have an impact on your retrieval how good or how bad your
retrieval of that you know content will be later.
In today's lecture we will talk a little bit in more detail about retrieval and we will also talk about
you know this mental function of memory is realized in the brain you would have noticed that
you know in one of the earlier lectures also we have been talking by and by about how different
areas of the brain are involved in memory, but we will try and do a more detailed analysis of that
relationship. Now let us talk about what retrieval is.
1155
So retrieval is basically when you are trying to bring back information from your memory in
order to you know use it or in order to describe it to somebody and so on and so forth, one of the
important aspects in retrieval is if you are presented with information that can help you retrieve
that any know content more easily or seamlessly so retrieval cues become very handy then what
are retrieval cues retrieval cues of words or other stimuli that help us remember information that
is stored in our memory.
Say for example there is this excerpt that I have taken from Goldstein and it describes a child’s
going back to a place where he had spend some of some of his childhood at his grandparents
house and what he does is this child goes to the grandparent’s house and kind of his moving
around the house there are, so many things in the house that will remind him of episodes and
things that he experienced while he was let us say 8 years old 10 years old and was spending this
holidays in that particular house.
Now each of these stimuli each of these stimuli or say for example if they are words written or
something like that at that place will act as cues of retrieval of that information that has been you
know along past and apparently forgotten till this particular moment. You might also recall say
1156
for example you know in your own experience if you meet somebody you know who you have
not seen for ten years or 5 years or 15 years may be just the sight of that person reminds you of
the kind of experiences you have had together of the kind of you know conversations you might
have shared with each other and everything around that era kind of gets relived in just a
flashback.
So this is basically what retrieval cues are now there are also different recall methods which
might basically effect how well or how poorly you will recall particular kinds of information so I
will just describe two kinds of recall methods to you.
So free recall is basically when a participant is simply asked to recall a stimulus if a participant is
just said that whatever you learned in class today and the child is come home and maybe one of
the parents is just asking repeat to me whatever you have learned in the class. Now you are not
giving any cues you are just asking this child to repeat straight out of his memory whatever you
know about a particular subject that he or she might have learned in this school, so these you
know things and these kind of stimuli that you can ask you know the participants to use a free
1157
recall with could be about previously represented events or experience that have happened in the
participants life.
Something like whatever he had experiences he had in the school. Cued recall could be when the
participant is already presented with retrieval cues to aid in recall of the previously experienced
stimuli for example if you if one of the parents is you know taking up a book and he is saying
which pages did you cover in the class today and then from that you know from the number of
pages that the child points out the parent is reading out some sentences and asking whether you
learned about this and what did you learn about this particular topic.
This will basically be an example of cued recall. So you are giving the child some cues as to
recall that information and in that sense you know you are giving him in some sense some help
you know to recall that information from, now experimental demonstration of the same could be
found in Tulving and Pearlstone’s experiment in 1966, so what they did was in an experiment
they presented participants with a list of words to remember and these lists of words were drawn
from specific categories.
The kind of recall they would ask these partners to undergo would could be either a free recall or
a cued recall.
1158
The list of words will be presented and the memory test instruction will be just recall whatever
lists of words were repeated to you. In a second condition or with the second group which is the
cued recall group you present the list of words in the acquisition phase and then you tell them to
recall all the furnitures that you know all the furniture names that you heard or let us say all the
bird names that you heard now what are you doing here, you are basically giving them a category
and they can now fill up those categories with whatever words from the list they remember that
fall under this category. What happened as the result you can already see that the percentage of
words recalled is much better in case of cued recall as compared to in a free recall.
1159
So the results of this particular experiment Tulving and Pearlstones experiment demonstrated
that retrieval cues do aid memory participants in the free recall group perform much worse than
the participants in the cued recall group. In another experiment Mantyla 1986 presented his
participants with a list of 600 nouns such as banana freedom tree and so on and so forth, now
during the learning phase the participants were told to write down three words they could
associate with each noun.
For example for a banana they could write say for example it is yellow in color bunches are
made out of it and it is edible, so any know three words the participant could generate
themselves.
1160
When the participants took a surprise memory test in which they were presented with three
words they had created and asked to reproduce the original word they would remember are upto
90 % of the 600 words that they were made to learn.
1161
So here you can see the results, if they were you know given cues that they had presented
themselves they recall was around 90% if during learning they saw the banana and the cues
created by somebody else were given, so somebody else kind of tries to give cues then the
performance is slightly worse but it is very good but if you know there is no cue provided then
their performance of recall is much lower it is even less than 20 %.
1162
So you see that cued recall kind of helps participant retrieve information better information
learned could be information could be learned to the almost the same extent, but you do not have
a proper retrieval cue to bring it out. Let us talk about some of the conditions wherein you can
have good retrieval scenarios. So one of the aspects of when you are matching encoding and
retrieval is this concept of encoding specificity, now encoding specificity is basically when you
are encoding or learning new information given a particular setting.
If you kind of revisit that setting that information becomes easily available to you and that
information becomes more easily retrievable. If you remember the you know the child is going to
the grandparents house example given that the child was going to this house after 10 15 20 years
and the child was interacting with objects that have been in the house, since that time all of those
objects are acting as retrieval cues for you know the memories of that time but that entire setting
that entire presence in say for example one of the rooms where the child would have lived or
played that entire setting basically makes this available because the information was encoded or
learned or the experience had been gone through in that room, so that is basically an example of
what encoding encoding specificity could be like. Godden and Baddeley in 1975 they conducted
what is called a diving experiment wherein one group of participants put on a diving equipment
1163
and studied a list of words while they were underwater and another group of participants studied
a list of words when they were on land. They were later tested for both of the groups were tested
for this list of words and the results showed that the best recall occurred when the encoding and
the test conditions were matching. So I will show you the results right here so you can see at the
extreme left and the extreme.
Right both the part and the encoding and retrieval conditions are matched and the performance is
maximal.
1164
Another simple example of encoding specificity or a similar example to encoding specificity
could be state dependent learning, now state dependent learning is basically about that
information that is learned in a particular internal state such as a mood or a state of awareness
say for example if you are excited or happy or even angry and you are saying some things and
some information is being told to you versus if you are in awake state of awareness or you are
slightly drowsy or if you are under the influence of some you know drugs or something,
information that you kind of are gaining under those states of awareness or under that under the
influence of that particular mood will be very readily available to you once you are in that same
mood again. So according to this principle memory will be better when a person is internal state
during the encoding part during the retrieval part matches his or her internal state during
encoding of that information, so for example Each and Metcalfe basically they did this test they
demonstrated and that person is memory is better when a person’s mood during retrieval matches
his mood during the encoding part.
So they basically ask participants to think positive thoughts while listening to merry music or
depressing thoughts while listening to melancholic music and then the participants were later
asked to rate their mood, so as very pleasant up to very unpleasant.
1165
Once this has occurred they were asked to study lists of words about positive or negative. So
once mood was established they were asked to memorize this list of words which were about
while they were still in there positive or negative mood. After this study session ended the
partners were told to return after two days. Two days later when the participants returned the
same procedure was followed to induce the same mood, so now what is happening is they are
probably in the same mood as in when they had learned that information.
The results showed that they did much better when their mood at recall was matching their mood
at you know when the encoding was happening. Herein you can see again in the extreme right
and extreme left you can see when the encoding mood and the retrieval mood matches the
performance is better when the encoding mode and the retrieval mood and does not match the
performance is slightly lowered.
1166
Another aspect again of encoding specificity or a similar example could be transfer appropriate
processing. Now transfer appropriate processing is basically that memory performance is
enhanced if the type of task at encoding matches the type of task at retrieval, so if you are doing
something say for example transfer an example of transfer appropriate processing could be say
for example if you are doing the same thing while you know you are learning something and you
are doing the same thing while you are retrieving. So I will give you an example Morris and
coworkers in 1977 they did an experiment with two parts.
The encoding part of the experiment had two conditions first was the meaning condition second
was the rhyming condition, in the meaning condition they had to focus on the meaning of the
word in the rhyming condition there to focus on the sound of the word.
1167
And demonstration could be something like this here you can see, the sentence is blank had a
silver engine, so what they had to do is let us come back to this participants in the board
conditions during the test part they heard a sentence with one word replaced by blank and two
seconds later they heard a target word, the task for the memory group was to answer yes or no
based on the meaning of the word the task of the rhyming group was to answer yes or no based
on the sound of the word.
Now you see what the task is so from the meaning condition the sentences the blank had a silver
engine, the bracket word is strange so now the person has to answer whether the meaning of the
word train matches that blank. Similarly the Blanke walked down the street, the target word is
building participant has to on the meaning of the word building decide whether it can fit in that
blank or not okay.
This is the meaning part the second part is the rhyming condition so blank rhymes with pain
department and the target word is let us say train and the participants has to say yes train rhymes
with pain or maybe if there is another word it is not, the second word is the blank rhymes with
car and the target word is building, so now he has to say because building does not rhyme with
car he has to say no. So what you are seeing is in these two conditions the participant is doing
1168
something related to meaning in the second condition the participant is doing something related
to rhyme of these different words.
Now in the retrieval part of the experiment this was the encoding part in the retrieval part of the
experiment participants of both the groups were given a rhyming recognition test, so for the test
partisans were represented with 32 words.
That rhymes with one of the target words during encoding and 30 towards that did not rhyme so
the list contained of 62 words, 32 rhymed with the target words 30 and one did not and the other
32 did not the rhyming words presented in this test because it is a new case is always different
from the rhyming words were represented during the target you know which were presented
earlier. So participants’ task was to indicate whether each word presented during retrieval
rhymed with one of the targets that they had seen that they had heard during learning.
1169
The results showed that the participants who were in the rhyming group during encoding
remembered more words than the participants who are in the meaning group, so encoding during
meaning task and retrieval in the rhyming condition was a much poorer encoding during rhyming
tasks and retrieval during rhyming task was much better.
1170
Now coming to memory and the brain Donald Hebb in 1948 introduced the idea that learning
and memory are represented in the brain by physiological changes that takes place that take place
during a synapse, now if you remember the chapter we did on brain and behavior you might want
to recall all of that for you know getting these concepts now. Now let us assume that a particular
experience that when a particular experience happens neuron A fires and it causes sense and
impulse to neuron B and then neuron B as well fires.
So Hebb’s idea was that this activity strengthens the synapse by causing structural changes
greater to neurotransmitter release and increase firing.
1171
Hebb also proposed that changes occurs in hundreds and thousands of synapses that are activated
by a particular experience, say for example if you are learning a particular skill if you're learning
let us say sword-fighting for the first time there are constantly a lot of changes that are going on
in your brain with kind because you are learning a completely different motor activity. Now
these proposals became the starting point for modern research of memory and its physiology.
1172
Say for example herein you can see that you know what is happening at a synapse and they are
kind of trying to record this using some technical single cell recording I will elaborate about this
in a while.
1173
Now one outcome of these changes which Hebb was proposing happening at the synaptic level is
called long term potentiation, what is long term potentiation is basically enhanced firing of
neurons after repeated stimulation, say for example if you are learning one skill again and again
you are practicing again and again there is the neurons that fired in the first instance of learning
that skill will fire again and again on the second, third tenth and 15 instances of the same skill
and in that sense they will basically learn that skill so in that sense you are learning of that skill is
being encoded at the neuronal level.
1174
So LTP basically you know shows that repeated stimulation not only causes structural changes
but it also leads to enhanced responding.
1175
Now if and I think this question a lot of people would have asked many at times that where does
memory you know occur in the brain is it one part of the brain that all the memory for everything
sits or is it say for example the entire brain that the memory sits how is it actually done. Now let
me tell you that memory does not really occur in a specific site in the brain or a specific place in
the brain it is distributed across a range of different areas the frontal cortex is important for
memory while for other areas like the medial temporal lobe can also be said to be important for
memory.
1176
Here you can see the perirhinal cortex, the parahippocampal cortex, the entorhinal cortex, the
hippocampus and the amygdala are some of the structures which are considered very important
as far as memory is concerned.
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The medial temporal lobe houses the hippocampus it also houses what is called the peri renal
cortex, now Davachi and coworkers in 2003 they designed a study to determine how do, these
areas respond the name of the objects presented as part of a memory experiment. So participants
were shown around 200 words while they were in an FMRI scanner and they were instructed to
create an image of a specific place that went along with each of these words. Say for example if
you hear the word dirty you can imagine say for example a garbage dump or maybe a railway
platform. Now 20 hours later the participants were presented you know a recognition test in
which they had the same 200 words that they had learned during the earlier phase and with some
you know around 200 new words.
1178
During this part of the experiment they were not in the scanner and so the first testing phase was
now out of the scanner and they were to basically talk about which are the words they had seen
before, so a correct answer would be old when the word presented was already seen earlier and
new when the word was not presented earlier. Davachi found that participants remembered 54%
of the older words and forgot the rest 46% of the words.
These results basically indicated that activity in the perirhinal cortex was greater for remembered
words than for forgotten words and so it could be concluded that the peritoneal cortex you know
in the peritoneal cortex the words that generated more activity during encoding were likely to be
familiar to the participants during the recognition test, so what basically they found is those
words that were old generated more activity in the parirhinal cortex those words that were new
generated less activity in the perirhinal cortex.
So it kind of tells you that the perirhinal cortex is that area of the brain which kind of codes for
familiarity which kind of will tell you that this is some stimulus I have interacted with earlier.
1179
This is the setup of Davachi’s and colleagues study the participants in the you know FMRI
scanner and is imagining a place associated with this word.
1180
So here in you can see the result.
1181
Other structures in the medial temporal lobe are also involved in memory for example the
parahippocampal area is important for remembering spatial information and the entorhinal cortex
is responsible forusing recognition memory. Now let us talk about memory consolidation every
time you retrieve some information you kind of need to re consolidate that memory as well, so
consolidation refers to the process that transforms the newly formed fragile memories to more
stable and permanent state where they are more resistant to disruption or change.
So if you are going through a particular experience that memory will be formed but it needs to be
consolidated before it kind of goes to a more stable and more permanent stage.
1182
Now this process involves reorganization in the nervous system which kind of occurs at two
levels.
1183
Synaptic consolidation which occurs at the synapse level and happens rapidly over a period of
minutes whatever structural changes are going on in the neurons with respect to that experience
you are having, second is systems consolidation which basically involves a gradual
reorganization of the circuits within the brain regions and basically takes place over a much
longer time. So it is kind of happening more gradually and kind of leads to better you know
organization of that entire circuit.
1184
Early research inspired by Hebb’s pioneering work on the role of synapse and memory focused
on synaptic consolidation. So early research is more about synaptic consolidation. More recent,
recent research has now focused on the phenomena of systems consolidation and the role of
different brain areas or the entire networks in the brain areas and how they contribute to forming
memories. So hippocampus plays a role in the standard model of consolidation let me talk to you
about what the standard model of consolidation is.
1185
There are two theories the first is the standard model of consolidation and basically the point is
the graded property of retrograde amnesia in which amnesia is worse for experiences that have
occurred just prior to brain injury plus other evidence have kind of led to this model, so the
model kind of proposes that memory retrieval depends on hippocampus during consolidation but
once the consolidation is complete it does not in any longer require the hippocampus.
1186
So incoming information is supposed to activate a number of areas in the cortex, activation is
distributed across the cortex because memory typically involves so many sensory areas getting
activated and other cognitive areas in which you are thinking and deciding about these things so
this is because the memory for event and things may involve a lot of activity. The hippocampus
is kind of the area is going to coordinate this activity of these different cortical areas, so it will be
cortical areas related to the sensory in information about this experience there might be cortical
areas activated which have to do with the higher cognitive process like thinking, deciding and
those kind of things.
Hippocampus is the area which will coordinate this activity in this network of areas.
1187
The major mechanism of consolidation is called reactivation, a process in which the
hippocampus is replaying this neural activity associated with a particular experience or memory.
During reactivation activity occurs in the entire network connecting the hippocampus and the
cortex so well this activity leads into the formation of connection between these cortical areas the
major areas of the brain, remember we are not talking about synaptic level connections here this
reactivation process occurs during sleep.
1188
Or during periods of relaxed wakefulness and can also be enhanced you know by conscious
rehearsing of a memory.
So if you have learned something if you learned some material it might be a good idea to at some
point you know in a relaxed State try and remember what all you learned during the class so
what you might be doing is probably you know doing some kind of a systems consolidation
wherein you are rehearsing this entire thing. Eventually the quadrille connections become strong
enough so that the different sites in the cortex become directly links and the hippocampus
became is no longer necessary.
So after the consolidation is done memory is you know placed and is in a distributed fashion
across the brain you do not need the hippocampus again to bring out that memory. So according
to the standard model of consolidation the hippocampus is strongly active during when the
memories are first formed but much less active and the memories are consolidated until
eventually only cortical activity is necessary to retrieve these remote memories.
1189
This is kind of you know a representation of how over time these network cortical networks
might get strengthened with respect to you know newer memories.
1190
The other model is that multiple trace hypothesis according to the multi trace hypothesis the
hippocampus is involved in retrieval of remote memories and especially episodic memories.
Evidence for this idea comes from experiments like the one by Giboa and co-workers who
elicited recent and remote episodic memories by showing participants photographs of when they
were 5 years old till very recent photographs.
1191
The result of this experiment showed that the hippocampus was active during both recent
memories and remote memories. Now the fact that there is evidence supporting both the
involvement of hippocampus in both recent memories and remote memories it has led to a lot of
discussion among memory researchers as to whether or not hippocampus is involved during the
retrieval of remote memories.
1192
Now interesting concept of after consolidation is the concept of reconsolidation. Now Nader and
researchers have worked in this area and they proposed that once a memory is reactivated it must
undergo what is called a reconsolidation which is a similar process to consolidation that occurred
after the initial learning but this happens much more rapidly. So one can say that memory
becomes susceptible to being changed or disrupted every time it is received every time.
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It is retrieved every time you kind of remember something again it might be you know a
susceptible or amenable to change or a manipulation. so reconsolidation might provide an
opportunity for reinforcing or even updating new memories for example an animal that returns to
a location of a food source and finds that the food has been moved to a different place can kind
of you know benefit with reconsolidation he will update the new memory with the fact that now
the food is not here it is probably moved to you know location B.
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So this updation will happen and the updated memory will be reconsolidated. Good experiment
was done by Alen and Colleagues they used classical conditioning to create a fear response of
freezing and to presentation of a tone. So they did is they present, they paired a tone and an
electric shock for a rat and then what they did was they injected their rat with anisomycin now
anisomycin is an antibiotic that inhibits protein synthesis and prevents formation or consolidation
of memories.
So an important aspect of this experiment was around the timing of you know when the injection
of anisomycin was given. In condition one rat received the pairing of the tone and the shock on
day one and received the anisomycin on day two, on day three it was checked it was played the
tone was played and it was checked.
1195
At the rat did you know freeze to the tone this is expected because conditioning already
happened on day one and an anisomycin was not injected until day two, in condition two the rat
receives a pairing of the tone on in shown in shock on day one and it is immediately injected
with anisomycin on day three when the rat is tested with the tone it does not freeze because that
connection between tone and shock was not formed as anisomycin was injected immediately.
1196
In day three what happens the memory becomes reactivated and becomes more fragile and just
as it was immediately being formed.
1197
So what was happening is you kind of play the tone the rat is getting into the freezing behavior
and then you place freezing inject anisomycin and then you see that the rat still freezes on day
three because the activity because the memory was not reconsolidated does this occur in humans
as well.
1198
So Nader basically in an experiment you know Nader thought that it does and in an experiment
by Hupback and colleagues in 2007 it was shown you know that it actually happens with humans
as well so this experiment was very simple a group of participants learned a list of words on day
one on day two the other group so there are two groups reminder group and non-reminder group
on day two one of the groups learned the new list of words and another group.
1199
That was a reminder group learned the same list of words, when one day three these two groups
were asked to remember the list one the no reminder group recalled around 45% of the words
from list 1 but mistakenly remembered 5% of the words from list two the reminder group
recalled36% of the words from list 1 but mistakenly they kind of remembered around 40 and 24
percent of the words from list two - according to Hubpack and colleagues what happened was
that the reminder on day 2 reactivated the memory for list 1.
1200
And it became vulnerable to change and in that sense they some of the words from list to kind of
you know got mixed up with the words from list 1 and that is why they are mistakenly
remembering more words from list 2 while they are being asked to recall list 1 as well. A
practical implication or outcome of research on reconsolidation is a possibly treatment for post-
traumatic stress disorder.
1201
So clinical psychologists Alan Burnett tested the idea that reactivation of memory were followed
by reconsolidation can provide a way to alleviate symptoms of what is called the post-traumatic
stress disorder this basically involves you know having a flashback of the traumatic event again
and again. The idea was to reactivate a person’s memory for the traumatic event and then inject
propanolol basically a drug which kind of blocks the production of a stress hormone in the
amygdala.
So what is happening is that he had two groups of PTSD patients both of them listen to a 30-
second recording of themselves describing their traumatic experiences and while they are kind of
reliving this experience they received propranolol injection while the other group just received a
placebo. It was found one week later when both groups were told to imagine their traumatic
experience again.
1202
Again listening to this30-second recording it just found and then you know to determine their
reaction to the imagining this experience skin conducting response and blood pressure were
being monitored. It was found that the propranolol experience much smaller increases in their
heart rate and skin conductance than the placebo group.
This showed that the reactivation of memory and the absence of reconsolidation and the presence
of reconsolidation basically led to you know significant decrease in the symptoms of PTSD even
months after this particular treatment. So you have talked about retrieval and you know how the
brain kind of participates in memory in this lecture and I hope this whole point was clear to you
and we will talk about other aspects of memory in the next lecture Thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

Co – ordinator NPTEL IIT Kanpur
NPTEL Team
1203
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Basic Cognitive Process
Lecture – 36
Everyday Memory and Memory Errors!!!
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the lecture series on basic cognitive processes, I am doctor Ark Verma
from IIT Kanpur. We have been talking in the last few lectures about memory.
Today will be the last lecture on memory; we will be talking about everyday memory and
memory errors. Now when I say everyday memory, I am basically talking about memory as we
know it, memory as we talk about memory. We talk about memories of events, we talk about
memories about memories about episodes in our life, we talk about memories of people,
1206
memories of small skills that you might have learned, but we do not really describe how we
learned those skills.
But say for example, an interesting episode that happened once you learning to drive or an
interesting episode that you happened when you attended a particular class and things like that.
Now that is the kind of memory we know and we have been talking about, and we have been let
us say studying about in the past few lectures as well. But today, we will look into it from a
different perspective.
We look into how memories play a role in our daily lives. And also we will spend a considerable
amount of time in talking about whether and how we make errors about memory. So you will see
the topic of the lecture to be is everyday memory, memory about everyday events and the people
and stuff like that, and also memory errors. Do we make errors in memory, is our memory 100%
correct all the time.
So we will spend a considerable amount of time on this, we will try and see whether our memory
is accurate or not. If it is not, then why it is not accurate, what are the factors, what are the
sources that make our memory less accurate, then we assume it to be. If you ask a lay person, if
you ask people generally about how good or how bad their memory is, some of them might say
that you know my memory is not very good, I do not remember details of events; I do not
remember names of people or faces of people.
Or say for example, I do not remember you know things about say for example numbers and you
know figures and those kinds of things. Now that is one way of describing memory, we will
probably talk about cases, where people do remember stuff, say for example, episodes and their
episodes about, let us say a birthday party that you celebrated 20 years ago, you might remember
all of that in a lot of detail.
But is everything that you are remembering correct is everything that you are remembering part
of your memory. So those are the kind of questions we will talk about, you know generally
people are very confident, and lot of people will say that I have a photographic memory, what is
1207
actually, you know what do they mean by saying photographic memory, do they remember
everything in as much detail as a photograph has, or let us say they are just merely confident.
You know and these aspects of memory are very important, and they play a major role in a lot of
areas in our life. Say for example, the criminal justice system, the confidence with which a
particular eye witness describes his or her recollection of a particular criminal act or criminal
event, kind of definitely influences the judges or the jury about you know whether this person is
identifying the correct criminal or not or say for example, if this person remembers the entire
event in adequate detail or not. Now these are cases wherein these, you know the accuracy of
memory actually becomes very important. And there has to be a way to know whether and what
the person is remembering is correct or not. Also it is important to realize that a lot of times we
do not ourselves know that whether our memories are correct or not.
A lot of time she would say that no I remember confidently that this person had met me in the
place X and we were doing some action Y or something like that. And to your surprise
sometimes somebody would come and tell you know, I am not that person or probably I did not
meet you there, I met you at a different place, we were doing something different, than you are
saying.
And those kind of corrections sometimes they come as a big surprise, sometimes people not
believe them, they are very important in the sense of understanding that our memories are not
always accurate. Now let me begin the lecture today by talking about somebody who believes
that her memory is correct most of the time. So this is the memory, this is the recollection from a
patient called A.J.
And this patient had this photographic memory; she said say for example, let us read this excerpt
out for you just from Goldstein’s book.
1208
She says, I am 34 years old and since I was 11, I have had this unbelievable ability to recall my
past. I can take a date between 1974 and today, and tell you on what day it falls, on what I was
doing in that day if there was anything of great importance that occurred around that time, and
these details. This person says that whenever I see a date flashing on the television I transport it
to that date automatically.
I remember all of that happened on that particular day and almost with detail okay. Now the
thing is this, this becomes slight hazard for the person as well, because it is not stop, it is
uncontrollable and it becomes rather exhausting for the person, you might enjoy something like
this happening for a short while, but if it is happening continuously it is out of your control, and
it is happening with each and every date that you were reading somewhere. It can become that
much of a hassle.
1209
So this patient A.J basically contacted James McGaugh was researcher at UCLA. And James
McGaugh basically conducted a series of tests of the details of which you might find in the paper
by Parker, Cahill and McGaugh published in 2006. But this is interesting, where this person
describes in memories is happening automatically and not under her conscious control. It is like
you tell the day to the person, and the person is almost time travelling to that instant and living
the entire day. Now this is interesting.
1210
So when given a date she would actually within seconds relate all the personal experiences also
any special events that might have happened that day, and these recollections proved to be
accurate if checked against a diary of daily events that this person has been keeping for almost
24 years. Also might have you know come out true if you cross check with other people around
that time, or around that person at that time.
Now these memories basically, you know because they are constantly out of our control and they
are triggered all the time, started causing this person distress.
1211
And she says that it is a trouble for me turning this kind of movie off and you know I cannot
forget the negative events from the past, the positive memories also kind of keep the balance
okay. Now this is something which one should reflect upon and say that, in life there are so many
things that happen, there might be good things that are happening, there might be bad things that
are happening, memories of everything there is a reason why, we do not constantly remember
everything, because we have to move on in life. So if somebody is you know suffering from this
kind of a disorder, I will not really call it to disorder, but this kind of an ability wherein
everything is almost alive all the time, whenever you see a date you try to remember all the
negative things, all the positive things as well, it becomes kind of problematic after point.
Now these kind of memories, memories of your experiences in a given time frame is referred to
as autobiographical memory, these are memories for personal experiences. What was happening
with you when you were at a particular point in time what was happening with you let us say
when you are at a given place on a given date what was going on say for example what was
happening on a particular date say for example 20th September in 2015 if you can remember all
of that in detail let us say some of you are birthdays might be on that day.
And you remember the party you remember the kind of cake that was there you remember the
kind of people that you invited what all happened during that party. That is basically part of what
1212
is called autobiographical memory, now let me try and formally definite this so autobiographical
memory has been defined as.
Recollected events that belong to a person’s past so it is obviously about the past and it is
basically for example things like what I have been talking about. So an autobiographical memory
of childhood birthday party might include images of a cake people at the party games being
played all those kind of things okay now this memory or autobiographical memories are slightly
complex they are more complex than you know something that might be measured in a
laboratory.
We have been talking about in the past in the last 3, 4, 5 lectures about the kind of recall test
where taken you know simply we were talking about somebody giving a particular list of fruits
of animals of objects and we asked the participants to learn that list and recall test can be taken
easily but autobiographical memory is that much more complex to test because first you do not
really have a way to verify other than is in the case of AJ there was a dairy that she was
maintaining.
1213
You might as well have people around that person who might verify that but also because of the
fact that these memories are more often than not charged with some emotional information they
are charged with details that you cannot really verify and they also have a lot of let us say things
that the person might have made up. So we will talk about this made up part in a short while but
the point here is just to say that these autobiographical memories are multidimensional.
Because they contain information about the spatial location where I was at that point in time
what was I doing where was I sitting suppose say for example I am in a particular you know
restaurant I was sitting on that particular table we ordered this food for the dinner those kind of
thing they would also have emotional components I was happy I was sad I was in bad mood I
was in good mood I was so happy this thing had happened, I was anticipating all of those details.
Also a lot of times these autobiographical memory have sensory components as well, so you
might have vivid images you might have you know vivid sounds that you’re reliving at that point
in time, you might also have things like you know I tasted this particular dish at restaurant and it
was amazing. So autobiographical memory in that sense is a much more complex form of that is
why I said this is the memory we generally talk about when you are talking about memory in the
lay man term okay.
So it is not completely as simple as the experimental test of memory that we have been doing.
Let us talk about some experiments that have been done in this area now Greenberg and Rubin
they found that patients who had lost their ability to identify or recognize visual objects because
of a damaged to the visual areas of the cortex.
1214
Mainly the occipital lobe and associating areas also experienced loss of the autobiographical
memory, so the spatial the visual component of the autobiographical memory might be damaged
if you have damage in the occipital lobes of the brain Cabeza and workers in 2004 they measured
the brain activation caused by 2 sets of stimulus photos so they conducted this experiment in
there lab in Duke university.
And these photos were taken by 12 Duke University students, they were basically asked to take a
40 pictures of the campus over a 10 day period pictures that these people took themselves where
called autobiographical photos and there were 40 other photos that were taken by somebody else
of the same places, so I will show the figure here.
1215
So you can see there are autobiographical photos and they are laboratory photos again this is
source from Goldstein’s book and the chapter on memory and this is basically the kind of photos
that these people were taken.
1216
Now after taking the photographs each participant was shown his or her photos autobiographical
photos that is and photos taken by the other participants, which are called laboratory photos.
Now a few days later again they were called in the lab and they were shown the laboratory
photos they had seen before and some new photos which they had not seen they were asked to
indicate whether the stimulus was an autobiographical photo seen laboratory photo or a new
laboratory photo.
So they were basically asked to tell this is the picture where I have source this from is it the
picture that you took is the picture that you have seen earlier and was a laboratory photograph or
is it a new laboratory photograph which you have not seen earlier and while these people where
making these recognitions they were also in the scanners so FMRI was ON and they were
basically being scanned.
So this brain scans of these participants shown that while autobiographical and laboratory photos
both activated some of the same structures in the brain mainly the areas in the medial temporal
lobe that are associated with episodic memory the autobiographical photos also activated regions
associated with processing information about self with memory for visual space and those linked
with recollection.
1217
So what it tell us what this kind of result tells us is that autobiographical photos have this extra
component of self based information of information that is attached to the self if you remember
one of the earlier lectures we have talked about the self reference effect we have talked about the
fact that when you associate information to yourself your recall of that information is better.
Autobiographical memory is slightly similar in the sense that this memory is actually about you.
So autobiographical memory or recalling events which are autobiographical in nature will in
addition to the medial temporal lobe areas also activate the areas which are associated with self
processing or self based information processing in your brain. Now moving ahead one can also
questions like what kind of memories typically come under typically figure under
autobiographical memory what kind of memories are these and how do people recall them.
You know what are all of the things that can figure here. So memories of things like personal
mile stones.
1218
Transition points in your life things like when you archived something important when you
passed a very important exam when something significantly good happened in your life also
sometimes significantly traumatic events are also remembered things like transition points when
you passed a school went to college when you graduated from college and may be went for a job
may be one of you may be say for example when some you are married, all those transition
points in the life are also you know significant portions of the autobiographical memory.
And are remembered in organized as such. So when you start thinking of these events you are
kind of also thinking about yourself placed in these situations you are not remembering these
memories just as facts or just as episodes there is this extra component of self based processing
here. Now when participants over 40 generally are asked to remember these events in their life's
their memories found to be high for recent events and for events experienced in the adolescence
and early adulthood things like say for example events that happened when somebody was in
there late teens and early 20’s in those kind of events. Now this enhanced information for this
particular period is referred to as the reminiscence bump.
1219
So you will see the figure here and you will see that while the memory for recent events is very
good and a memory for too far of events is not really good but there is this bump here, so there is
this age group between let us say as a I was saying earlier 20s and late teens which is particularly
vivid in participants memories, you will see there is a slump of information from 25 onwards till
let us say 40 but there is this significant bump in almost the participants and this is a memory of
a 55 year old person.
So this is basically interesting and you can see say for example even if this is was tested in case
of emigrated people who emigrated at the age of 34 you will see that the emigration age kind of
corresponds to this reminiscence from because this is a such a significant event that was
happening in there, in these people lives, there were shifting countries they were arriving at a
new place may be looking for a new job may be looking for new homes those kinds of things so
that kind of correlates with these particular reminiscence bumps also it correlates with the fact
that when something significant happens in life the memory for those kind of events or memories
for events around that time period are specially enhanced, now there could be possible
explanations for this reminiscence bump and.
1220
Rathbone and coworkers basically proposed that memories enhanced for events that occur as a
person’s self image or life identity is being formed. So the kinds of events I was mentioning you
know passing from college getting a job or getting married that these kinds of events do play an
important role informing your self-image and do play say for example once you passed college
and you come up with a particular job, that job kind of adds a lot to yourself, say for example
somebody becomes a doctor or somebody becomes an engineer or somebody becomes marketing
specialist.
Now you will start identifying at these professions and also you might start identifying that I am
x and y and I am a doctor, so these kind of events are playing a particularly important role
informing your self-image, so the Rathbone and coworkers would say that because events are
playing such an important role in helping you form yourself image that is why these you know
memories are recalled much better than some of the other memories, now there is another angle
to this, there is a cognitive hypothesis.
The cognitive hypothesis basically proposes that there are periods of rapid change followed by
eras of stability these cause better and stronger encoding your memory, so that why these
memories are remembered better say things like adolescence and young adulthood perfectly fit
these kinds of description, so adolescence or just when you just transitioning into an adolescence
1221
or say for example you are transitioning from an adolescent to a young adult in your 20s those
are specially times of turbulence.
Because quite a few things are happening people in this point in time or going through a lot of
turmoil you know emotionally and otherwise and these kind of things are generally followed by
you know relatively stable areas in life relatively stable periods, and so these relatively stable
periods might allow for better encoding of those events at happen in early adulthood or
adolescence and in that sense they would you know lead to better recall again this is what are the
other explanations of the same thing.
Now there is a third explanation well the third explanation is called the cultural life script
hypothesis, now the cultural life split hypothesis basically says that events that happen in a
person’s life story that is all the events in a person’s cultural person’s life and a cultural life
script events happening that at a particular time say for example when I was 18 years old versus
in I was 24 years old versus say for example 16 years old these kinds of events have some
special significant in you know when say for example.
If I sit down some point at some point in time to write my auto biography and because these
events are that much more important that is why I will make special case for them and remember
them much better than I will remember some of the other things that would happened around that
time. These are three possible explanations people have given to explain what is called the
reminiscence bump okay, so the reminiscence bump is what reminiscence bump is when you
recall information from particular periods of time slightly better than you know periods after or
before that particular period.
1222
So this is again comparative of these three kinds of explanation self image period of assuming
somebody’s self image cognitive encoding is better in periods of rapid change, third is cultural
life, so it is culturally shared expectations structured, so at that point in time the people are in
your culture expecting you to get a job or say people are in the culture expecting you to get
married. So these kind of you know these kind of cultural importance on that particular period
helps you better recall this.
Helps you better organize this kind of and that is why the better recall is there. Now let us move
further, there is also as I was saying in autobiographical memory an enhanced portion about.
1223
Emotion an enhanced aspect of emotion attached to it and you can talk about many of the
autobiographical memories you might say for example pose the video take 10 seconds off, take
a minute off, and think of all of the information that you are remembering about your past from
this movement backwards if you are doing this experiment what you might realize, and if you
might want to tabulate this, you might realize that you remember particularly those events better
that were associated with highly emotionally charged events highly emotionally charged
happenings and this probably is the case with the everybody.
And that is why it is very important to look into the emotional component of autobiographical
memory so personal events such as say for example beginning or end of relationships or say for
example events that are experienced by many people simultaneously something big say for
example has happened, say for example in 9/11 attacks in the United States of America these
kinds of events tend to be remembered much more easily and much more vividly than some of
the less emotionally charged.
See for example you went to the market to buy a pair of Jeans is much less emotionally charged
as compared to you went to the restaurant you know with a date, something very interesting
happen in your family. So you have to kind of understand that why each of these events are
being you know remembered better, now La Bar & Phelps in 1998 they tested the participants
1224
ability to recall arousing words and neutral words immediately after they were presented and
they already observed better memory for the arousing words.
Arousing words are those words that would create an emotional turmoil or an emotional
disturbance that in your mind say for example if I say word like disgusting or if I say word like
calm, the word disgusting kind of has this extra negative valiance attached to it and it might be
recalled slightly better than the word like stoic or calm or something like that okay, so already
we know that emotional words have process slightly specially in the memory and they recall this
better. Now Dolcos and coworkers basically tested participants’ ability to recognize emotional
and neutral pictures one year after they would present and still observed better memory for
emotional pictures. So somebody could show you series of photographs, some mundane
photographs let us say everyday happenings and some slightly charged emotionally photographs
say for example pictures of birthday party or say for example on the other hand pictures of an
accident or something like that and even after one year you know peoples memory for these
emotional pictures have been found to be higher. So one can say please say at this point in time
that emotionally information is processed just slightly differently than other kinds of information
and your recall for emotional information in that sense will be better. Let us say moving further
what is the area in the brain that might be helping us do it.
1225
So the amygdala among all the areas of the brain that we have been talking about that are
implicated in memory, amygdala seems to be the most important area in memorizing emotional
information okay. Emotional information things associated with the positive emotions as well
and thing associated with negative emotions like fear etc, and amygdale is suppose to be one of
the very important areas in doing this.
So I will take an example Dolcos and coworkers they obtained fMRI scans when people were
remembering a list of words things like you know the arousal and calm words and this basically
revealed a higher activity in the amygdale for the recall of emotional words. So it is already
being shown in some way, that amygdale might be involved in recalling or encoding or retrieval
of this emotional words.
Now also a case from neurophysiology there is a patient call BP, who had this amygdale damage
and so he was found to have preserved memory for the non emotional parts of a story shown to
him via slide show but much worse memory for the emotional part of the story, see the patient
was taken particular slide show was arranged which had long story parts of that story were
highly emotional parts of the story were rather mundane and it was found that because this
person had amygdale damage, he had much worse memory for the emotional part of the
information.
1226
Again so it appears overall that emotional information may trigger mechanisms in the amygdala
that will help us to remember events that are associated with emotions. Again remember
amygdala is one of the older brains structures and recalling or processing emotional information
might also had evolutionary benefits for people, say for example things like you know highly
charge positively emotional event might have survival values or highly charged negative events
might have values about adaptation that one has to adopt to you know a different kind of a set up.
Now another kind of memories again part of the auto-biographical thing is the flash bulb
memory, so what are flash bulb memories?
Say for example if I ask you, if say for example you are in the US at that time, where were you?
When did you? What for you doing when you first heard about the 9/11 attack? Or let us say
closer to home what were you doing when India won the 2011 cricket world cup? If I ask you
questions like this you might have some description, you might have some you know
recollection of you know this particular event and some of you might have a very vivid memory
you know, I was at this place watching the match with my friends, we were having food, and we
1227
you know we did this after India won the finals or we say for example you know went to a
particular place for a party all of these people were invited.
So these kind of memories these are called flash bulb memories, now memories if you try and
define this memory is that refer to memory for circumstances surrounding hearing about highly
charged events, but not the memory for the event itself. So I am not really talking about the
details of the match here, I am talking about what were you doing when you know when India
won the world, say for example you were at some place or somebody called you and told you
this.
You will not really have information about the event per say but you will have information about
what happened around that time when you heard this news, what happened when you first heard
about the 9/11 attack, what happen when you first heard about let us say the assassination of a
particular you know assassination of Rajiv Gandhi for example.
These are some of the events that could be rather vivid and they are exist as flashes because you
kind of remember a flash of all of that information in an instances. Now according to Brown and
Kulik, there is something special about the mechanism for these flash bulb memories, so what is
that? These memories are not only occur in that highly emotional circumstances but are also
remembered for longer periods of time.
So they would say that flash bulb memories are remembered for a much longer period of time,
than ordinary memory say for example simple episodic or semantic memory kind of things. Also
they say they are specially vivid and details so somebody could actually go in a lot of detail and
tell you there are was doing these things I was eating this, I was with these people when you
called and told me let us say that the India won the cricket world cup.
So they are referred to you know they are refer to this particular mechanism as a now print
mechanism, because you can really in detail you have everything organized you just have to
press print then all of that information will come out exactly as it happened at that point in time.
Now this is about what you know people have described about this.
1228
However lot of subsequent research has shown that although people report that these flash bulb
memories are especially vivid and they tell that you know they are often very accurate and I am
very confidence about this, a lot of research has shown that is events or these memories are you
know rather inaccurate some times and they lack a lot of details.
So I will describe an experiment of this kind say for example Neisser and Harsch in 1992 did a
study in which they asked the participants about how they had heard about the explosion of their
space shuttle challenger, and participants in this experiment what they did was they filled out a
questionnaire within a day after the explosion and then filed out the same kind of question, 2.5 to
3 years later.
And it was found in this experiment that a large number of these participants when they first
reported hearing about the explanation at one place let us say Pago at somewhere, the later after
2.5 to 3 years changed it to you know that of hearing on TV. So I will see what is a example, so
this is a response of one of the participants.
1229
So I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about it, I did not
know about any detail that it exploded and the school teachers and students had you know all
being watching which are thought was so sad, so that was then after the class I went to my room
and watch the TV program and learned about it. This is somebody’s you know recall just one day
after the event.
1230
After 2.5 to 3 years two and a half years later the same person describes this event like this so
when I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my fresh men dome room with my
roommate and we were watching TV, it came on a news flash and then we you know learned
about it. So you see after 2 to 3 years, people might not recall the exact events exact
circumstances surrounding that thing but they might recall the event in some detail.
So that is something special about the flash bulb memory, another experiment about flash bulb
memories was done by Talarico and Rubin in 2003.
1231
So what they did was they tested a group of college students on September 12, 2001 a day after
9/11 and they asked them questions like when did you first hear a news and other similar
questions about an everyday event that happen in a person’s life, that occurred you know in days
just preceding that. So two kinds of information were taken one kind about the event and the
other some you know normal mundane detail about you know where did you buy your milk from
or something like that.
After picking the everyday even the participants had to create a two to three words descriptions
that could act as a queue for the event in the future, now because this needs more help to be
recalled. Now some participants were retested one week later some six week later and some 32
weeks later on both the events. Now one of the results of the experiment was that the participants
obviously remember fewer details and made more errors at longer intervals after the events with
little difference between the normal everyday events and the flash bulb memory of 9/11.
Let us say but another result was that it did indicate a difference between flash bulb you know
another finding indicates difference between the flash bulb and every day memory, what is this
difference? The differences about peoples belief, so what they find is that people’s belief that
their flash bulb memories were accurate stat e much higher for the flash bulb memories but did
not stay constant for the every day event. So I show you the figure here.
1232
So here you can see on the right side that people’s belief about the everyday memory is much
lower but people’s belief about the flashbulb memory being accurate on 7 point rating scale still
says much higher their information in terms of detail might not be as good but their belief in a
fact that these memories’ are accurate was much better.
1233
Now another experiment again about the 9/11 attack Davidson & co workers in 2006 asked
participants as questions such as how did you hear the news, where were you when you heard
about the attack and who was present in that point in time and they also had participants again
answer questions about an everyday event. The most interesting event that had occurs in the few
days just preceding 9/11.
Now one year later is participants are again contacted for a surprise memory test they had no
clue that their memory will be tested at the point of first test was taken in which they were asked
is same kind of questions.
1234
So they were given 0 points if they could not remember the event at all or very inaccurately 1
point if they memory was partially correct and less specific and 2 points if they matched exactly
the one they had made originally.
1235
The resulting congruence score was again determined by adding all these three scores it was
found that the congruence score for 9/11 memories were fairly high, their confidence and their
report is fairly high even one year later but the score for everyday event much lower it goes to
from .77 for the flashbulb memories to .33 for the everyday events.
Also they found that whereas all the participants had no trouble remembering 9/11 only 65% of
them were able to recall that every day event we should had reported in the first instance.
1236
Here you can see the results you will see that the percentage of people remembering something
about the 9/11 was almost 100% whereas only 65% of people remember anything about the
everyday event.
1237
Now the result of both these studies or the studies we have been describing till now shows that
memory for the flashbulb event does decline over time and not like photograph as it was earlier
said. The poor recall of everyday events in the latter study could also be due to lack of good
quality retrieval cues, you see the study before this we did have, you know the participants did
create some of the cues themselves. So therein you could not explain this because of this fact but
here they did not really have very good cues story remember the every day events.
1238
Now better memories for events like 9/11 might also probably be due to 2 characteristics first
that this events are highly emotionally charged events, so they are better stood, better organized
in the brain the second is because this events get the benefit of added rehearsal now this benefit
of added rehearsal is referred to in the narrative rehearsal hypothesis and where does rehearsal
come from it comes from lot of discussion about these kinds of events.
If it is public event you would have experienced at in your, at in your own way then you would
have read about it in the newspaper then you would have seen it on the television then you would
have participated in a discussion about that event, so what happens is time and again there is this
rehearsal there is narrative rehearsal that is happening sometimes your participating in it
sometimes there are other people you have just partly listening to it.
So that rehearsal kind of you know revises this whole event again and again and your memory
becomes better for each of these events but you remember this the number of rehearsal that are
happening the number of ways the story is changing you might also be you know entertaining or
including some of the false information about this event.
1239
Now talking about false information there is a certain fact that the memory has a very
constructive nature you know you do not remember everything verbatim as it happened, you
might say for example add a lot of things yourself based on what you are expectations are based
on what you think about it, you know somebody to describe the event wherein best friend and a
person whom you do not like where involved, may be they were having a quarrel.
And you are asked to relate this quarrel to somebody else may be even just for one day after the
event happened your description might contain facts that, that you know absolve your friend of
any guilt and put all the guilt on the person you did not like so much and it kind of goes on and
on and creeps in misinformation. So there is very interesting experiment of Frederick Bartlett
did, it is called of war of the ghosts experiment published in 1932 but had done much earlier.
1240
So what happen is participants come to the room they read this passage about the war of ghosts
wherein the two gentlemen who go to a particular river with particular river and the one of this
gentlemen and they say can know 5, 6 people coming out of it from the river and they tell that
you know we are going to make war and you join us, so one of these peoples says that you know
I have no arrows so the other he tells to the other person that I have no arrows and I have not
informed anybody at home where I am going so you should follow these people the other person
follows these people goes to some place, where there is apparently some war and they are
fighting suddenly somebody’s hit with a arrow.
It is the second young man who had gone with these people and as soon as this person is hit with
the arrow these people disappear they go somewhere and this person says oh may be these
people have come up come here with whoever goes, so he comes back he say he talks to these
people he says that you know I went with the ghost who fight war and somebody who was hit
and but I am completing fine the next day he wakes up he kind of spits blood and dies.
1241
So again this event people were reading and Bartlett basically asked them to repeated
reproduction in which same participants came back number of times and it tried to remember the
same story at longer and longer intervals after that first read it. So at longer times what happens
is after reading the story the participants were forgetting most of the accurate information from
the passage.
So what they were doing is they were adding information out of their own head in to this thing
and the story was kind of getting changed and changed again and again after every reproduction.
That is pretty much what happens with the lot of new story you would hear everyday lot of you
know how rumors travel faster and faster because this is the nature of memory, memory is
constructive by itself and you are bound to add something or the other from your own side
knowingly slash unknowingly almost all the time.
So this kind of changes in the story could have happened because the participants are creating the
memories from two sources first is the original stories and the second is whatever the knowledge
they have, say for example is somebody has some stereo type stereo typical knowledge that this
would happen they kind of adding something here.
1242
Now this idea specifically that people are adding something here calls for something called
source monitoring what is source monitoring
1243
Source monitoring basically is the process of determining the origins of our memories or the
knowledge or our beliefs say for example what is the best rumor you heard since couple of days
where did you hear this rumor from did you experience it, did somebody tell you did you read it
in the gossip magazine, where did you get this.
Now source monitoring errors are also called source misattributions you misattribute the
particular memory to wrong source. Now source monitoring involves an example of the
constructive nature of memory because when we remember something we usually retrieve the
memory first and then you using the decision process to really check where did this memory
come from where did I get this knowledge about or otherwise you see people wondering you
know who told me this.
Did I read about it somewhere did somebody tell me those kinds of things you see people
wondering about.
1244
Now source monitoring errors are rather common that happens with everybody all the time but
some of them could be rather sensational for example there is the case of cryptomnesia happened
with George Harrison who was part of the Beatle band and he was basically sued for
appropriating the melody of a particular song from the Beatles, he is so fined which is basically
song which figured out in a much a earlier album from the group called Chiffons and the point is
when the discussion happened, he said that I had been hearing this song so much that I thought
that it is mine.
So it is again a misattribution that happened and it led the person to believe that this is exactly
the memory he created himself. So this could be the things there are again cases of piracy that
happened all the time.
1245
But again some of them could be you know not really mistakes; somebody genuinely believes
that what they have created. Now source monitoring errors are important because the mechanism
you know that lead to these source monitoring errors or source misattribution are generally the
same mechanism that lead to the formation our memories in general. Say if you are saying that
you are suffering from you know the source monitoring errors you are prompt to making so
many source monitoring errors, it might be a good idea to really check for everything that you
have to say at some point.
Because that is the is the same process that you are using to describe anything in general, all the
memories you have in general probably then are suffering from some kind of error, so you might
want to reach it before you assert something so confidently you know in a particular scenario.
Now Johnson describes a memory as a process that makes use of a number of types of
information, he says that there are at least 2 kinds of information that you might be building
upon. 1st is the primary sourcer of information.
That is information about the actual event if you were there if you were party to the event, if you
are experiencing for the first time that is one. The 2 nd is additional sources information things
1246
like your knowledge of the world, the preceding events that might have, say for example, again I
take the example of quarrel, suppose one of the parties is involved in the quarrel, you know you
do not like that person so much or you just hate that person. Automatically your description will
start containing information that will put that person at guilt.
Even though there is no guilt of that person involved, so you are bound to in your descriptions of
the event, bring in some of your personal bias and kind of color the event in that way. So this is
something which we have to very careful about. An experiment was about the same thing was
done by.
Jacob and co workers in 1989 and it demonstrates the the effect of the source monitoring by
testing the participants ability to distinguish between famous and non-famous famous. So what
happens was in the acquisition part of the experiment the participants read a number of non-
famous names, things like Sebastian Weissdorf, you know anything, anything for that matter,
you can take Indian names also if you want to imagines this. Now in the immediate test which
happened just after the participants saw the list of these non famous names.
1247
They also saw a list of non famous faces, participants were told to pick out the names of famous
people from a list of non famous names that they have just seen, new non famous names that
they had not seen earlier and some of the famous names. What happens here is that just before
this test.
They were told that all of the names that they have seen in the first part were all non-famous, so
everything they said was everything was non famous, because the test that have been given
immediately, participants would correctly recognize most of the non-famous older non famous
names that they were exposed to earlier. In the delayed test 24 hours later what happened they
were tested again on the list of the same names. Participants were more likely to recognize the
old non famous names as famous. So what we are doing is they are doing this.
1248
so you read this in the 1st phase you read non famous names, then they read non famous names
from the acquisition plus new non famous names, and new famous names. Immediately if you
tested they would recall the non famous names much easily but if they were tested after 24 hours
they will actually take some of the non famous names and identify them as famous names.
So what they are doing is after 24 hours they are already mixing the fact that some of these
names are famous or some of these names are non-famous.
1249
Now source monitoring also as I was saying stereotypes has also been found to affected with the
things like gender stereotypes. So for example Marsh and coworkers in 2006 showed that people
performance on source monitoring test, can be influenced by gender stereotypes. So I will show
you the example, for example I say a statement like baseball and I tell you that this was said by
Chris. That I will give you a break and I will give you a puzzle, Chris is male pat is female
gender is now revealed.
Then I ask you, who would said that I like base ball? 90% times you might say Chris, because
Chris is the male person, you can adapt this to an Indian setting as well, I like you know some
adventure sport and then I say this person is male and this is person female who would have said
it, because it is considered stereotypically that the most of the adventure sport might be liked by
men, so you might attribute the male name to that statement even though that might incorrect.
1250
So that is one way, the results do indicate in this and some other experiments that gender labels
did effect the participants memory judgement, 83% of masculine statements were associated
with the male and only 65% of masculine statements were associated with the female and in the
reverse case as well.
1251
Now here you can see masculine statement, male name better thing feminism statement female
name less of the association.
1252
Now real world knowledge also affects memory formation as people a make inferences about the
stuff based on their experiences and knowledge. In a very classic experiment Bransford and
Johnson had participant read number of action statements in the acquisition part of the
experiment and then tested their memory for the same statement later.
1253
So things like experiment group read John was trying to fix the birdhouse, he was pounding the
nail when his father came out to watch him and helped him to do the work. The control group
would read John was trying to fix the bird house; he was looking for the nail when his father
came out to watch him and helped him to do the work. Now they were given a test statement.
1254
John was using a harmer to fix the birdhouse when his father came out to watch him, and help
him do the work, now the participants were asked a test question, that whether you saw this
sentence before, so you will see sentence here, did have the word hammer while in the other two
did not mention hammer at all, but one was about pounding and one was looking for the nail.
Participants in the experimental group said that they had previously seen 57% of this test
statements. So if they were pounding wall they would say that I have seen that hammer, 57% of
the time as compared to the control group. Why because, because of the word pounding used in
the 1st statement here in, a participants would infer directly that if he was pounding the nail he
must have been doing it with the hammer. So automatically infer the role of the hammer there.
So this is the experimental design you would see.
1255
Acquisition phase read pounding nails and some other sentences used sentence before, the test
sentence has hammer they would say yes, 57% in the control part looking for the nail have you
seen this sentence before as hammer only 20% of the people. So sometimes these kinds
information or the knowledge of the world might also influence your memories.
1256
Now an interesting effect about this is the misinformation effect, the misleading information
presented after a person witnesses an event can change how the person describes that event later,
this is called misinformation effect. So a classic experiment about this was done by Loftus and
coworkers in 1978 where in participants saw a series of slides in which a car stops at a stop sign
and then turns around the corner and hits a pedestrian.
1257
So some of the participants then answered questions about a questions like did another car pass
the red datsun while it was stopped at the stop sign or they were asked did another car pass the
red Datsun while it was passed the yield sign, yield sign we already we have to stop.
1258
Those in this miss information group for more likely to say that they had seen the picture of the
car stopped at the yield sign. So they kind of making this miss information effect another
experiment Loftus and Palmer they basically showed participants films of a car crush and then
asked either how fast the participants were going when they smash the car into each other.
But how fast the cars were going when they hit into each other, later participants were asked to
estimate the speed of the car in the smash group they estimated the car speed to be around 41
miles per hour while in the hit group they estimated the speed of the car only to be at 31 miles
per hour. So you see the word is also influencing their memory or that description of the event.
1259
Here is the figure of that experiment.
1260
Now the MPI basically the miss information effect kind of as three explanations is first says that
according it kind of replaces some misinformation kind of replaces the original memory. So
according to the memory trace replacement hypothesis, it states that MPI kind of impairs or
replaces memories that were formed during the original experience of the event. The other thing
could be that this original information is forgotten.
Because of retroactive interference so new information is causing information on the

interferences on the older information which occurs when more recent information interferes
with memory for older information. Also it could be because of source monitoring errors so
according to the source monitoring hypothesis the person incorrectly concludes that the second
information is the one that is actually the one they have experienced. So these three factors could
be those that have affected the person’s memory.
1261
Another important factor here is the eyewitness testimony now testimony by an eyewitness I was
talking in the beginning about a crime can also be affected by this misinformation effect. So
eyewitness testimony however is considered to be one of the most convincing types of evidence
to a particular jury but unfortunately a lot of research has shown that a lot of times many
innocent people have been incarcerated based on mistaken identification by eyewitnesses. So
these errors may because due to a variety of reasons difficulty in pursuing the persons face and
others which lead to inaccurate memory for what was perceived.
1262
An example is errors with attention, a lot of times when weapons is involved in the crime scene
participants mistakenly force all their attention to the weapon and because of this faulty use of
attention they don’t remember they do not see the perpetrators face in most cases and they will in
that sense miss identify the perpetrator a lot of times. So that is one standing in Johnson did this
experiments they studied weapons focused by measuring how will the participants remember the
details of a simulated crime they found that participants were more likely to recall the details of
the perpetrator in a no shoot condition versus in a shoot condition where there was a weapon and
which was allow to shoot.
1263
So here is the figurative of that experiment.
1264
Now also errors could be due to familiarity a very interesting case happened a ticket agent at a
railway station was robbed and it subsequently identified the sailor has been robbed, later the
sailor showed that he was not at that particular place and the ticket was asked why did you
recognize the sailor the person says that I that this sailor seems too familiar for this sailor seem
familiar because he was living very near to the station in everyday brought ticket from the ticket
agent. So someday familiarity could also lead to errors.
And errors like this which the person would not even know of a lot of times persons would be
very convinced that no this is the exact person that has you know committed this particular
crime. So I hope this is telling you that our memories are not always accurate but actually seldom
accurate and one has to be double sure triple sure of what you are saying, where this is
information actually coming from now in a paper titled “Good you identified the suspect”, Wells
and Bradfield is very nice experiment they had the participants view.
1265
The video of an actual crime and then asked them to identify the perpetrator from a photo spread.
Now the photo spread does not really contain the actual perpetrator, all of the participants
recognized picked one of the photographs as a following their choice and they received either a
confirmed feedback a neutral feedback or a disconfirming feedback, it was shown the people
who received.
The confirmed feedback actually identified.
1266
And were very confident of their choice even though the photo spread did not actually contain
the perpetrator this is called the post identification feedback effect and this is something which
creates serious problem in the criminal justice system because jurors are strongly influenced by
the level of confidence that these eyewitnesses might have in their testimony. So again
something to think about.
1267
Also you might have seen in lot of movies involving the court that the effect of post questioning
is also very important so in another questions Chan and coworkers they basically did this
consider this question and they did that how does taking a recall test after witnessing an event
before being exposed to misleading post event information influence the memory. So what has
happened is there is a event happened and then you ask a lot of questions about that event to the
person and the person kind tells you that whatever he remembers so this is schematic view tape
from 24 a criminal.
1268
series take cued recall test give some misinformation take a cued recall test after that 50% of the
people are affected by the misinformation, view the 24 tape play some games something else
give misinformation take a cued recall test only 20% of the people are affected by the
misinformation so it shows that a lot of times.
1269
Taking a extra test doing this extra act recall exercise which might be done a lot of times in
somebody is in court also leads to problems if after immediately having crimes have happened
and police have come and they question the person again and again might lead to misinformation
might lead to somebody being prone misinformation. Now is this reversed testing effect happen
this reverse testing basically shows a taking a recall test right after seeing a particular program or
a event might make you more sensitive to misinformation.
Now if you wondering why this more sensitiveness to misinformation is happening you might
want to recall the last part of the previous lecture where in we were talking about
reconsolidation. So when you are actually going over a particular event again and again the
memory would become fragile it would become susceptible to change and then if somebody
gives you misinformation somebody says something you might be effected by that.
1270
So that is the whole point about everyday memories I probably showed you a lot of evidence that
shows that our memory is not accurate all the time rather it is seldom accurate and one has be
double sure and very sure of where you know getting your description from where your memory
is being sourced from. I will thank you for this lecture we will talk; we will talk about other
topics in the next class thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
1271
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Lecture-37
Disorders for Perception and Attention
By
Prof.Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to lecture series on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma from IIT
Kanpur.
We have been talking about various cognitive functions in the last few lectures today I will begin
a series on the disorders of these cognitive functions that we have studied. Today’s lecture will
be about disorders of attention and perception the cognitive functions we studied first of all
during the beginning of the course.
1273
Now some of you might ask that why there is a need to study disorder machine that is not really
working well but the point is that a well functioning machine or a well functioning system does
not really tell us a lot about how the machine would function, how the parts are related to each
other how they work together with each other and those kind of things. It is sometimes only
when a machine is broken you would actually realize that you are okay part A is connected to
Part B in a particular manner and those kind of things.
Now this is precisely why it is very important to study the cognitive functions and their disorders
at the same point so what we will be trying to do in the lecture of today and the lecture after this
one is basically covering the disorders associated with the cognitive functions that we have
covered in this course. This will basically give us an idea about how the theories that we have
been reading about pan out in real life scenarios where there are people who are afflicted with
these disorders and how do these theories help us understand those disorders, the causes of those
disorders also whether these theories can help us rehabilitate or help out these people who are
suffering from these disorders.
1274
So this is pretty much the basis or the pretty much the reason why I have included the disorders
of these cognitive functions as the last two lectures of this particular course. So today we will be
talking about perception disorders and attention disorders I will begin with a interesting disorder
of perception then maybe we will go on to a couple of disorders which have - which have more
to do with attention than perception per say. Now having said that let us let me begin with
describing a very interesting case.
So have you ever wondered with questions say questions like what color is number seven is
number seven of us particular color is number three or four of a particular color? What does
Monday tastes like if somebody asks you that Tuesday tastes bitter or Monday tastes sweets how
do you really react to that? Things like say for example what would it mean to touch a particular
color so these kind of questions might seem slightly metaphorical slightly poetic to you.
But you will be amazed to know that there are class of people there is a small minority of people
that act that actually experiences these things. There is this class of people that actually
experiences color whenever you mention to them a particular letter or a particular number. Now
these class of people are called synesthetes persons having synesthesia. Now what is
1275
synesthesia? Synesthesia basically is that condition wherein a person if it is if he or she is
presented with a particular stimulus might simultaneously and consistently experience another
sensitive event at the same point in time.
So when people with synesthesia are presented with a stimulus, they will tend to consistently and
automatically all the time experience another sensitive event whenever you mention a letter to
this person he will experience a color simultaneously and the experience will be so joined that it
would feel like that letters are of a particular color. There was this description in one of the
books I have been reading so the material from here is basically inspired from David grooms
book introduction to cognitive psychology process and disorders and one of the cases he
mentions is basically about a particular child who comes back home from school.
And mentions to you know the parent that I have been having trouble with this yellow colored
seven or I have been having troubles with you know blue colored eight and the parent is kind of
surprised at what this person is saying and this child does not really know that it is a special
condition he would assume, he would have been assuming that this is exactly what everyone
feels like so interesting cases or synesthesia you might actually do things like YouTube and find
so many videos have been compiled on the experience of synesthesia on what it feels to be like
to be a synesthete and what do these different experiences actually involve.
1276
So we will try and cover the theoretical and we will try and cover the demonstration part
discussion pattern synesthesia while there might be a lot of videos you might find on the Internet
which will help you experience the condition more closely.
1277
Now the commonly reported experiences in synesthesia include experiencing a color on seeing
or hearing a letter a letter or a number or even words for that matter so if you tell somebody
about particular letters of the alphabet they might report back experiencing colors simultaneously
if your string specific words they might tell you that you know you are having this particular
synesthetic experience at the same time it could also be that some people might be linking colors
with faces days or weeks but also things like they might say that you know I feel this sound in a
particular way or I see the musical notes in a particular way, my seeing taste and tasting colors
something like this. Baron Cohen and colleagues have done a lot of research in the area of
synesthesia and a lot of it is published some of the common papers are in 1996 now synesthetes
basically the people who have this exquisite ability also report that inducers generally follow a
reliable sequence particular kinds of letters will reliably produce very consistent color sequences
particular kind of say for example if somebody is experiencing spatial arrangements particular
letters will induce very specific spatial arrangements at the same time.
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Now early incidence of synesthesia when it was first reported was basically in a very famous
paper by Baron Cohen and colleagues in 1987 and they were examining this a synesthete called
EP who called herself an artist who has experienced lifelong condition of hearing words and
sounds in color. So this person actually EP is an interesting tale she's given out an advertisement
in the newspaper asking people to you know come and explain the condition she was having.
So baron-Cohen basically tested and established the replicability of EP synesthetic experiences.

Yeah actually establishing that she was undergoing these experiences and these experiences were
consistent and automatic over a period of time, the comparison was typically like 100% of EP
synesthetic experiences were replicable she could replicate and tell them on simply what she was
experiencing while only 17% of non synesthete controls could actually repeat that kind of a
performance. Now for many synesthetes the color induced by the first letter determines the color
of the entire word say for example if you have a condition wherein you will see yellow color
every time you come across the letter C then any word that starts with C will be colored yellow
for you but with EP it was special in the sense that each letter of the word would induce separate
colors and she would actually experience the word as a mix of all of these colors now this was
interesting and this test was basically done with her on pseudo words which do not have any
meaning at all. So you could just combine letters in a particular sequence that is pronounceable
but not really is a meaningful word so that was done.
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Now we can talk about let us proceed to talk about the nature of synesthesia what is synesthesia
actually like. Now Mattingley and colleagues in 2001 they reported accuracy levels of around
eighty two hundred percent in a group of fifteen synesthetes compared with thirty to thirty five
percent in a group of fifteen non synesthete controls in reporting the synthetic experience.
So it has been again verified and multiple times reported that the people who are basically having
this condition are almost eighty to hundred percent times accurate in the reporting of what they
are actually feeling, also there were reports of more concerns or the reports by synesthetes was
more consistent over a longer period of three months test retest intervals as compared to that of
non synesthetic controls even after one delay one month delay of testing.
So if you test synesthetes experience over a longer period of time for three months and you
compare the non-synesthetes experience even after one month of time there will be a lot of gap
there will be a lot of the non-match between these performances this kind of tells us that this
experience is real and this experience is replicable and the people are actually undergoing this
particular experience. Now synesthesia usually is a unidirectional process say for example if a
1280
letter induces a particular color the letter will consistently automatically and always induce that
particular color.
But it is important to remember that the color will not induce memories of that letter. So if you
are seeing that color say for example at some unrelated place that color will not remind you of
that letter. So induces and target, so there is this concept in synesthesia that there are inducers
which induce the synesthetic experience the simultaneous sensory experience of the other
modality but it does not really a kind of transfer from target to the inducer. So synesthesia is a
unidirectional process.
For most synesthetes simply imagining the inducer can also lead to synesthetic response if I were
a synesthete and I was thinking of the letter C or a letter P and let us say as I already said letter C
might induce a yellow color letter P might induce a blue color while saying this while already
even imagining the these letters I would assume to have this synesthetic experience of
experiencing this color. Now all those synesthetic experiences are limited to a fairly low level
perceptual state such as colors or spatial locations there rather than the appearance of a face or an
object.
1281
So there are basically very low-level perceptual things say things like color spatial arrangements
those are typically things that get associated with a particular synesthetic experience not really
very complex things like faces or objects or you know events in those kind of things. Also some
synesthetic experiences have also been linked to developmental experiences.
So some of these synesthetic experience have been shown and Witthoft and Winawer basically in
2013 they linked consistent letter and colour associations in eleven synesthetes to a Fisher-Price
colored letter set. So for example these participants would have learned their letters learn their
alphabets through this fisher-price set is basically a set of toys which had colored letters.
And probably these people recall seeing those letters in the specific colors produced by the
fisher-price people this is a toy company that is and they kind of made those associations to such
an extent that it led to the synesthesia happening. So this link is also been made however there is
nothing to say suggest here that there is a causal relation it is just a coincidental relation which
has been traced by Witthoft and Winawer in their 2013 paper.
1282
Now Carpenter 2001 reports that most synesthetes regard the condition as a good thing they do
not really mind having that condition they are not really particularly troubled by having that
condition though they also report one of the patients who said that this was becoming a problem
for him to handle. For the most part this is not really debilitating experience of any kind this is
rather an experience that people have and they interpret it in various ways but not really as rather
troublesome, one of the patients as I already said reported having some kind of trouble with this.
Now Stephen and Blakemore in 2004 they reported the details of 6 anesthetists who had
experience seeing colors on hearing or thinking about letters or numbers despite having been
blind for a lot of years. So they are not blind anymore but they experienced as seeing colors even
though they did not really have a lot of experience in seeing colors for a longtime. So Stephen
Blakemore basically commented that this suggests that synesthesia persists for persists for very
long periods of time with little or no natural experience in the referred modality.
1283
Now let us talk about the incidence and the familiarity of synesthesia Baron-Cohen and
colleagues in their 1996 paper estimated the incidence of synesthesia at about one in 2000
individuals with about eighty percent of the patients being eighty percent of the affected being
females. Ward in 2013 sites prevalence rates of 0.2% for the population they could taste a shape
1.44 letter or number versus color synesthetes all these people will experience color when they
will hear a particular letter or a particular number and up to 20% for those who image sequences
into a spatial arrays suggesting that an approximate approximately equal number of men had
synesthetic experience. So this last kind of people they will actually put events in a spatial
arrangement that X happened first and then Y happened and they are all arranged all of their
experiences in a spatial manner. So these are the different kind of synesthesia as possible and we
also discuss about the kind of incidence rates for these synesthesia.
1284
Now there have been a lot of experimental research with synesthesia since this is an interesting
phenomenon itself so several researchers basically have used the versions of the Stroop test
proposed by JR Stroops in 1935 to investigate the occurrence of synesthesia. If just to remind
you Stroop test is basically wherein you are asked to name letters which are in some colored ink
you are asked to read these words out and say for example it could be a blue written in a green
ink, it could be green written in a blue ink and so when you are reading blue and one of the
things is asked so you can either be asked to read the letter or you can either be asked to name
the color of the ink and because these two information’s are both automatic you will see the
color immediately and you will read the word immediately, there is a conflict between two, these
two sources of information and participants have reported slowing down in naming these colored
words because of this interference. Now how does that map onto synesthesia, let us see.
Typically a synesthete is asked to identify the actual color of a series of stimuli. So there will be
colored words or color letters or numbers and these participants will ask to tell what the color of
these you know stimuli are. Now some of these stimuli are actually inducers. So they will induce
some different colors. So they could be a letter let us say there could be a word called cap and
cap basically will induce a yellow color because C stands for yellow.
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As we have been talking about, now when the inducer color say for example matches the
synesthetic colors the word is written in yellow and it induces the yellow color itself then the
responses will be significantly faster compared to when the inducer color is different and the
stimuli is of a different color. So this basically the second part will interfere with the
performance and the responses are found to be significantly slower than on neutral trials. So this
is something which they found out.
And these findings taken to suggest that synesthesia is something that cannot be switched off it is
almost as automatic as reading a word when you are presented with the word and hence they are
termed as mandatory processes or automatic processes. Now Mattingly and colleagues in 2001
they modified the Stoop task a bit to investigate whether the conscious processing of an inducer
is necessary for a synesthetic response now see we have been talking about when a person you
know comes across an inducer a target synesthetic experiences generated almost automatically
consistently in all the time.
Now they wanted to test whether it is necessary to consciously perceive the inducer if the inducer
is presented in such a way that you cannot consciously perceive it whether it would still cause
1286
the synesthetic experience. So what they did was that they presented induces very briefly
followed by a visual mask. So let us say for a period of around 35 to 50 milliseconds below
which it is not possible to consciously experience something and then you hide this off with a
particular mass that comes after it.
So it is known now that such brief and mask presentations are registered in the brain at some
level but they can influence the responses of the participants in ways which we have discussed
earlier in priming studies etc.
Now this technique incidentally prevents conscious awareness of these kind of stimuli which you
are presenting and neither the synesthetes nor the control participants in this kind of arrangement
were able to report what they had seen. So they are not really conscious of whatever was
presented to them under these kind of conditions no synthetic interference was found none of
these individuals also reported having a synesthetic experience of any kind.
So it was concluded and reliably so that conscious awareness is therefore necessary for the
synesthetic experience to occur so we know a few things of synesthesia by now that it is
1287
automatic mandatory process it cannot be switched off. It is consistent happens all time and now
also we know that the inducers need to be consciously perceived for synesthesia to occur.
Such a finding has also been supported by a studies that have used visual search paradigms. So
when asked to search for the red F among blue letters synesthetes did not have any added
advantage as a blue F will not pop out because of their experience of the letter as red okay. So in
a visual search scenario the property of that letter being an inducer also does not make it stand
out in any sense. It does not lead to any significant advantage per say. It also suggests that
conscious attention to the inducer is therefore necessary before the synesthetic experience is
actually set in. In visual search scenarios you will see a lot of time your search is not really
consciously you are probably looking at one thing but your but your covert attention way now
looking at some other things as well.
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Now let us talk about a few brain imaging studies of synesthesia just to revise. FMRI or
functional brain imaging techniques basically allow the researchers to examine changes in the
measure of brain function as volunteers perform different tasks. Areas that are predominantly
active during any of these tasks receive more oxygenated blood and which can be tracked and
hence you know one can generate a spatial map of brain function say for example if there is the
fusiform gyrus which is known to be involved in face recognition that is the area which will start
receiving more blood.
And there are ways to trace more blood in a particular area as compared to less blood in other
areas. Other ways is EEG electroencephalography or ERP event-related potentials these basically
these methods record very minute changes in voltage detectable from electrodes that are rested
on dropharts on a scalp and these measures are very sensitive to millisecond level changes that
are happening in brains processing. So they give us a very good temporal resolution of how
processing in the brain is happening though they are not really able to give us a very good spatial
resolution of where this processing is happening. So there is a second thing we've probably done
all of this in the methods part and this just kind of doing a division here.
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Now a transcranial magnetic stimulation TMS is also one of these methods that allows of some
inference of the functional involvement of the brain areas. So what happens here is there is an
electromagnetic coil that is placed on the scalp to induce an electrical pulse in the underlying
cortical region, so it is basically a coil and you place it on the head and it kind of induces a
magnetic field in the cortical region now what this does is it leads to either excitation or
inhibition of that particular cortical area and you know can be used to either test the excitability
or the involvement of that area in any given task which will give to the participant after that.
1290
Now there have been studies using these kind of methods with their synesthetes and one of them
I will just mention so Nunn and colleagues in 2002 they used FMRI to report that synesthetes
showed increase activity in the area v4 of the occipital lobe in the and this area v4 is basically the
region that is connected with color perception and when in this activation was found when these
participants were actually listening to the inducer compared to the non-Inducer version, if you
are listening to these letters and if you are a synesthete there is a certain activity actually going
on in the color perception color perceiving areas of your brain verifying for the fact that you are
in a you know actually experiencing those colors.
Now this signal was not found in non synesthetic control participants who had also been asked to
associate colors and words. So it is not something that you can learn and you know start having
an experience of it is something that is a condition and that is there by itself you cannot really
learn to have synesthesia for that matter. These kind of consistent findings were also supported
by Hubbard and Rama Chandran in their paper in 2005.
Now these findings tell us something about the synesthetic color experience and they tell us that
you know it basically is based on the real experience of color it is not that somebody is
associating a particular letter with a particular color it is actually happening in the brain when
you listen to that letter you do experience that color very reliably some of the other studies have
1291
also fails to detect similar activity and there are suggestions that different forms of synesthesia
may be associated with different patterns. So again these kind of linkages with the brain.
And with these areas of synesthesia are also you know have also been established. Now coming
to the coming to summing up what synesthesia was about let us talk a little bit about the theories
that have attempted to explain synesthesia. One of these theories maintains that all of us were
synesthetes at one point in time during early stages of childhood when say for example we were
growing up but we lose these connections between these different sensory experiences during the
course of development probably because these are un adapted and they are not fruitful for any
you know meaningful interaction with the world. Rama Chandran and Hubbard point out that the
brain areas involved in color perception areas like v4 are actually immediately adjacent to the
areas involved or areas that become active during reading of letters. It might be just a
coincidence or it might not be a coincidence that these areas are very close together.
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The Grossenbacher and Lovelace they basically put forward a particular hypothesis called the
disinhibited feedback theory and the disinhibited feedback theory proposes that connections
between different sensory pathways exist in normal brains but that the activity of these pathways
usually inhibited to prevent un adaptive crosstalk between these sensory chains. Interesting
evidence has been reported about this disinhibition hypothesis say for example Neufeld and
colleagues in 2001 found no difference between the 14 auditory visual synesthetes and 14 non
synethetic participants using FMRI in terms of the functional connectivity between the auditory
and visual areas where they found greater connectivity between the sensory areas and the IPS in
the synesthetic group suggesting that it may be the links via this integration area that is the IPS
that are suppressed in non-synesthetes but are not suppressed in synesthetes and that is what is
allowing them to have this multimodal multi-sensory experience. Now we have talked a little bit
about synesthesia let us move our attention to a different kind of a disorder. Again synesthesia
was a disorder of perception this another disorder called blind sight.
1293
Now Poppel and colleagues in 1973 they were studying a group of ex-servicemen who had
suffered visual field deficit as a result of gunshot wound through their striate cortex and to their
striate cortex and they asked these participants to make judgments about the correct location of a
flash of light presented to their blind side. So the idea was that these people have lost sight in a
particular visual field because of the injury in striate cortex and then what these people are asked
to do is that people will show a flash of light in the blind region and they will be asked to detect
it or try to detect it. Now as the servicemen could not see the flashes the light was paired with the
sound of a buzzer.
And on hearing the buzzer these were, these people were asked to move their eyes in the
direction to which the flash light was. While the servicemen found this a very difficult task
almost all of them were able to gaze their eyes to move their gaze towards the light which
accidentally which basically they cannot see. So this was a very interesting phenomenon how are
these people being able to move their eyes to the direction of the flash even you know though
they cannot really see the flash. So the buzzer is just a hint that there will be a light flash but it is
not in any way tell you about the location of the flash so these people are in some ways being
able to decipher where these you know flashes of light are occurring even in their blind visual
field. Now vice grants in 1974 he describes a patient DB.
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Who seemed to demonstrate the same kind of are makeable ability he could report the details of
objects appearing in the blind areas of his visual field despite having no conscious experience of
seeing them. So if let us say if this person is blind in the right visual field if you keep an object
somewhere there this person after some time will be able to tell you what have you kept or the
general shape and whether this is moving or not those kind of things even though he is reliably
shown to be blind in this area completely.
Now they did this series of experiments Weiskrantz and colleagues they did this you know series
of experiments in DB and they basically systematically were trying to investigate the perceptual
abilities preserved in the blind areas of DB. So DB it was found the DB was able to detect the
presence of an object indicate its location in space by point he would also discriminate between
moving and stationary objects horizontal and vertical lines and could also even distinguish the
letter X from O if it was presented in the blind area. Now this is something completely
interesting so Weiskrantz basically named this phenomenon as blind sight.
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Let us talk about blind side a bit more Cowey in 2004 summarizes the arguments put forward by
skeptic such as Campion at all, so a lot of people were actually skeptical about you know
whether blind sight is a real phenomena at all so people like Campion colleagues they basically
favored what is called the stray light explanation so they said that these participants are basically
being able to detect these objects in the blind visual field because of stray light that is reflecting
from around the areas and falling in the region where they can see. So the stray light hypothesis
goes like this Campion in colleagues they favor the stray light explanation of blind sight which
suggests said that the blindside patients responded to light reflected from the object onto the
functioning areas of the brain. So this is what the stray light definition is. Now they were
describing a patient who reported that he actually used such a strategy to distinguish between a
vertical and horizontal bars presented to the blind areas of his visual field. Now this patient
claimed that he could see a faint glow in the preserved areas of the visual field and use this cue to
undertake this particular task.
So it could be shown that you know people are not entirely blind and they are not being you
know they're not really using the blind area to decipher the where the light flashes they are
actually using light reflected from a different source and using that as a cue to actually guess
where this you know stray light, where this light flash will be
1296
Now Campion and colleagues demonstrated that such a strategy could actually be used and you
know could be utilized to get an accurate localization of light in a blind area of a person's visual
field of normal subjects whose vision had been masked. So you put a mask on these people's
vision and you will see that these people are can also use this stray light to locate these things
however some of the explanations given by these the stray light theorists did not really hold
them, as they could not explain DB’s ability to distinguish between letters such as X and O or
two different spatial frequency gratings with the same average brightness. In addition DB could
also locate objects even against a rather bright background wherein you will not really you know
be able to use this stray light explanation very favorably. So whereas as Campion's normal
subjects could only locate this light source against a low-level background illumination.
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So if there is a flash of light and you can locate it even against a bright background it tells you
that you are probably not using the reflection of the light another theory which talks about blind
sight was given by Wessinger and colleagues in 1997 and they suggested that Blind Side was
attributable to small areas or islands in the scotoma, scotoma is basically the areas of blindness in
the vision field within which vision is spared and that Blind Side may be mediated by what is left
of the primary visual pathway rather than other secondary pathway.
So they are saying that there might be areas in the blind part which are you know partially
preserved or partially still active and participants can be using these partially preserved areas to
know guess where these light flashes are or where these different objects are. Now Kentridge and
colleagues on the other hand they tested this suggestion while looking for scattered regions of
spared vision in a patient using procedure that ensured no effects of eye movements. So this
person basically so Kentridge generally basically wanted to test this you know proposal and they
actually went out and tested this with particular people. They found out Kentridge and colleagues
they noted that blind sight does not extend across the whole area of the scottoma but was evident
in only some areas even after eye movements had been eliminated. So again there is particular
areas in the scottoma particular areas in the blind region where in the blind site is actually active.
Are these the same areas where in the people are experiencing something or is the spared island
you know spared island thing true?
1298
So this could not lead to the conclusion that even though there might be some spared islands of
vision within this scottoma these areas could not account for all phenomena in blindside, they
could not allow counting for movement or other things like that. In 2004 also reported results
from an FMRI study where an FMRI scanning of several blind sight patients could not show a
single shred of evidence for sparing of the striate cortex in the area of the scottoma even then
these people were not were able to detect objects in their blind region and hence were patients of
blind sight.
1299
Coming to the final words just coming to what blind site is about so one of the possible
explanations or implications of blind sight that have been put forward is that we have two
separate visual systems one slightly primitive non-striate system that does not really build upon
the striate cortex area and a more advanced striate system that is the you know enhanced area
wherein we do all kinds of complex calculations.
The primitive non-straight system might be sensitive to movement speed and other potentially
important basic low-level characteristics giving without even giving rise to conscious perception.
So these, these calculations are so a low-level or so simple or initial to do that they do not really
need to be consciously known that you are calculating the motion or you are calculating the
shape or shape or color etc.
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The other similar explanation was that the striate and non-striate systems have evolved for
different roles. For example the striate system has evolved to allow for the identification of an
object whereas the non-street system has just evolved for the localization of the object and it is
possible that what is happening during blind sight is that only the striate system is damaged
whereas the non-striate system remains active and remains preserved and that non striate system
is basically leading to you know the incidences of blind side in patients having scotoma, patients
having blind regions because of damage to the striate cortex. This was all about Blind Side we
have talked about disorders of perception we have talked about synesthesia we have talked about
Blind Side.
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Let us now turn towards disorders which might more be disorders attention than perception.
Some of this very interesting disorders that one comes across is the is order called unilateral
spatial neglect there are other names for the same disorder as well say for example hemi attention
or contra lateral neglect or spatial neglect etc now what happens in this particular disorder? In
unilateral spatial neglect that is what we will refer and this as the USN patients do fail to respond
to stimuli which they can actually see.
So there could be a patient who has a normal vision but still fails to react to objects or events to
one side of the space, hence this is termed unilateral. Say for example they could be a patient
who is who has having some deficit in the left part of the brain and will basically neglect
everything that is forming in the right visual field even though the visual apparatus is completely
intact even though everything is actually seen but the patient do not you know interact with that
object they do not report seeing that object they completely report being oblivious to that objects
presence.
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So you can see here this is the drawing by a patient of a unilateral spatial neglect and you will
see that if you ask this person to draw a clock this person draws all the numbers only to one side
of the visual field and does not draw anything to the other side. It is not that the eyes are not
working again. It is not a disorder of visual perception it is basically that this person is not being
able to attend anything that is on the contra lateral visual field this is what is called unilateral
spatial neglect.
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Now the main cause of unilateral spatial neglect is a stroke or hemorrhage which is basically an
interruption to the brains blood supply. Up to 84 percent of patients with damage to the right
hemisphere of the brain from stroke will show evidence of ignoring information on the left side
of their visual field. Similarly up to 64 percent of the patients with damage to the left hemisphere
could show the opposite pattern they will start ignoring information on the right hemisphere now
for some reason and it has been shown that the left neglect following right hemisphere damage is
markedly more severe and persistent than is right neglect following left hemisphere damage
because probably the right hemisphere is still does some of the remaining processing. Now
patients with USN unilateral spatial neglect may fail to notice an object in clear view on the left
side. They ignore people approaching from the left side they would eat food only from the left
side of the plate they would basically dress only the right side of the body. There is interesting
anecdotes about USN you might find in a lot of books in neuropsychology that there was this
patient who was suffering from unilateral spatial neglect every time you know he would go on to
shave or go on to dress himself he will just shave one side of the face and wear shirt or pant only
on one side of the body and not on the other side. It is because this person is not being able to
attend to anything that is on the contra lateral hemi field. Now USN if you kind of dwell on.
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The kind of description I have given of this particular disorder may impact people's daily living
may exclude them from rehabs and is associated with longer hospital stays and dependence on
the other if a person is not capable of really looking at anything on one entire side of the visual
field obviously the person would need a lot of help even doing daily chores like you know
brushing their teeth or shaving and things like that.
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A disorder for attention so there has been considerable debate about this as well. So USN seems
to be a failure of or a difficulty in responding to information on one side of the space that cannot
be explained by any sensory loss there is no basic sensory loss here there are visual systems are
intact and functioning normally. Now the obvious difference between a unilateral spatial neglect
and visual field loss that the former can exert influence on across modalities that is the USN can
actually exist across modalities hearing might also be affected listening might also be affected
while the visual field loss things like you know in blind sight is basically limited to one modality
only. USN has been as I was saying reported in audition tactile exploration touching body
sensation etcetera. While visual field losses are strictly retinotopic. USN varies indifferent
spatial frameworks that is it may occur from objects to the left side of the body or for objects on
the left side of a particular you know something, for example if I'm looking at a particular car I
might not see the left side of the car but only the right side of the car. So it can be you know in
that sense as well.
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Now USN may occur for the left side of the each object within a scene. So if you are actually
you know a patient of USN you are looking at a particular painting you might not be able to see
anything on the right side of painting or say for example if you are you know if you are right
hemisphere damage you won’t be able to see anything on the left side of the painting. Now
Marshall and Halligan in 1993 they described how patients kept on drawing pictures only of the
left side of the plants when asked to copy pictures, so they gave people these you know drawings
to copy and they would consistently only copy the left side in plants but not the right side
because they are not being able to see that. Is USN again a disorder of attention? Patients have
been shown to attend to the left if cued to do so. This is interesting because the visual sensory
system is working fine if you can somehow get them to attend to this neglect side they have been
shown to be able to attend that. This is something which will you know kind of establish that this
is more a disorder of attention than perception, also if a stimulus appears in face of a competition
with you know within a rival with a rival in the good side then it is inevitably acknowledged. So
if for example you are giving two stimuli to people one is on the left side one is on the right side
and the left side is your neglected side if you could draw the attention to the left side the
participant might be able to see it but if at the same time there is a competing object on the good
side that is the right side this competition will lead to this ignored part being ignored
permanently. Now there seems to be gradient also between the left to right and there is no clear
boundary say for example till a particular point a person will see after that you know the activity
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or the experience of that object will be going on in tapering off. So there have been a lot of
studies, studies say for example.
Case studies by Bisiach and Luzatti in 1978 they what they did was they asked the patients to
describe say for example they asked the patients to describe the piazza del Duomo is famous
landmark in Milan and they basically were asked to describe these things or draw these things
from memory. Now interesting thing was they would they could describe the landmarks on their
right but when they were asked to describe the same landmark from the other end so say for
example the situation was stand on the North's corner and explain and describe all the land mark,
so these people will describe everything on the right from the north once they had given all of
these descriptions they were said change the ends go to the south end and again describe
whatever you see this time whatever landmarks they had left in the previous description came to
the senses and they could actually describe the entire thing. So this is again a demonstration of
this being more a matter of attention than perception. It is due to something that is wrong with
brain
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that these of these objects to this contralateral hemifield is completely ignored or completely
missed and cannot even be accessed by memory. Marshall and Halligan they also did a very
similar demonstration with the USN patients wherein basically they say that there seems to be
having similar findings that this seems to be more of a disorder of attention than visual
perception. What could be.
The possible rehabilitation process in USN so we could encourage patients to look towards and
be aware of the left side and that has basically you know not really been able to produce a lot of
outcomes though however the movement of the left arm or some kind of moment the left visual
field has led to participants being able to attain through things in the neglected visual field as
well.
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Let us try and explain what USN is about. So USN basically occurs at a remarkably high
frequency following stroke and is also been reported following damage to a wide variety of brain
areas including the parietal temporal and frontal lobes even also sub cortical, sub cortical areas.
Now this has led to the idea that normal spatial attention may reflect a dynamic and easily
disruptive competitive balance between the widely distributed network in the hemisphere. So it
says that all of these areas of visual processing perceptual processing and memory they are
competing within the two hemispheres.
So in this view what they say is that the left hemisphere is pushing attention towards the right
space whereas the right hemisphere is pushing attention towards the left space and in a normal
individual this is balanced so that you get to attend both the spaces. In unilateral spatial neglect
what happens is we are not really just seeing the effect of the lesioned right hemisphere but the
lesioned left hemisphere but also its exaggeration due to the fact that the good hemisphere the
you know intact hemisphere is kind of suppressing everything out of that particular visual field.
So its exaggeration due to the suppressing effects of the undamaged hemisphere is basically
probably leading to this kind of neglect of this particular hemi field. Now let us come to a third
disorder.
1310
Visual agnosia, agnosia basically comes from a Greek word agnosia means no knowledge so
visual agnosia is no knowledge visually of something now patients with visual agnosia are not
really blind and the sensory processes are usually intact however the condition refers to an
impairment in the ability to visually recognize objects, this might also be you know coming out
as a disorder of attention and perception. Now they can move around and navigate spatially
everything is fine. They can also recognize objects via other modalities say for example there is a
patient when she was asked to look at a candle and tell what this is name the object she was not
being able to do that but if there she was asked to take the candle in the hand touch it and tell
what this candle is she could do it perfectly well. So these people just cannot recognize objects
visually that is why the disorder is termed as visual agnosia. Now two kinds are proposed a
perceptive agnosia and associative agnosia. Someone suffering from a perceptive agnosia can be
thought
1311
To have normal visual equity with an inability to draw an object to say whether two similar
objects are the same or different or even to describe the components of the object, so they are not
being able to build the percept in the first place. Someone on the other hand, suffering from
associative agnosia would be able to draw an object or match similar objects to this particular
object.
And would also be able to describe the components of this particular object but they would be
unable to recognize the objects they had just seen or drawn. So in that in these people the the
problem is not with creating a percept but the problem is with associating the percept to whatever
knowledge that the person already has. So herein you can see the drawings of a perceptive
agnosia patient.
1312
So they are not really even being able to draw these very simple figures that would be otherwise
rather easy to do you know from the perspective of normal individuals.
1313
Now Lissauer in 1890 proposed that these two stages a perceptive and associative agnosia are
rather you know hierarchical and sequential in the first place. So he says that in the a perceptive
stage of perception the elements or the components of the objects are established and in then in
the associative stage these are integrated to form particular objects and then linked to the
knowledge which will help you identify and recognize these objects. This would mean that the
patients with pure a perceptive agnosia have an intact store of knowledge about objects but they
are unable to distinguish the shape of the objects because they are unable to identify the objects
visually. They are not being able to create that percept to link to that knowledge but patients with
pure associative agnosia are rather able to perceive the objects but are often able to
unidentifiable. Now this principle was found useful in differentiating the patients with pure a
perceptive or associative agnosia and those who could say for example the idea could be that
those who could not copy had the perceptive agnosia those who could at least copy but could not
name had associative agnosia.
1314
Now there could also be related forms form agnosia, integrative agnosia, form agnosia is
basically very similar to what a perceptive agnosia is like. So it is used for patients who are
unable to discriminate between objects who are unable to copy line drawings of objects again it
comes out of the research Farah, 2004 integrative agnosia is basically the term which is you
know used nowadays for associative agnosia, at this term it reflects the actual difficulties the
processing difficulties, these patients are facing.
So it is used to refer to patients who can perceive the individual shapes who can kind of create
the percept but they cannot integrate these shapes into a representation of a whole object say for
example if you are showing this person particular let us say television he might be able to get this
rectangle shape and the square shape and those kind of things but will not be able to integrate
these shapes to form the particular object and hence he will not be able to name that object. Now
how would be a life with visual agnosia. Patients say for example like HJA which was reported
by Humphreys and Riddoch with visual for madness actually experience a very confused and a
distorted visual world.
1315
In which almost everything feels distorted nothing seems to really familiar and even basic forms
are indistinguishable from each other because they are just geometric shapes line drawings lines
and you know forms all mixed up into each other nothing really identifying itself as a unique
object. It is almost like looking at the world through a very powerful microscope wherein despite
seeing all the details of everything that is around you it is hard to put together a mental picture of
these objects.
Now Goodale and Milner describes such a patient Dee who had severe visual form agnosia as a
result of carbon monoxide poisoning. Now despite being unable to recognize visual objects from
their shape she could use the surface characteristics like texture and color to help recognize
objects. So other modalities are working completely fine it says that they are not being able to
associate or integrate this information visually, also it there could be a difference in perception
between animate versus inanimate objects.
1316
So a patient was named SA who could identify animate objects much better than the inanimate
objects while another patient HJA could identify inanimate objects much better than the animate
object. So these kind of dissociations have also been reported similarly other patient JBR could
name the line drawings of many nonliving objects such as spade or a hairbrush or you know
hammers things like that but you could not name the line drawings of living things say for
example such as a dog or a fly or musical instrument such as trumpet and this is reported by the
studies of Warrington and Shallice1984.
1317
Now Farah and McClelland in 1991argued that there is a difference between identifying the
living person versus a non living person and this difference basically this difference which is
coming out is might just be an artifact. So I was saying that in most cases whenever there is
impaired knowledge of perceptual attributes with intact knowledge of functional attributes there's
also impairment for inanimate objects.
So this impairment in recognizing inanimate objects is not really a perceptual impairment or

attentional impairment is basically an impairment that you do not know about the perceptual
attributes but you at least know about the function part. Now because perceptual attributes are
crucial for identifying inanimate, animate objects the identification of inanimate objects is
crucially linked to the functional attributes in semantic memory
1318
Now coming towards the end talking about prosopagnosia, is basically a form of agnosia that
relates to faces. The term prosopagnosia was first used by Bodamer in 1947 who examined ten
patients who he believed showed a face specific deficit. So these people were not able to
recognize non face you know faces but they were able to recognize non-face objects completely
normally. People with prosopagnosia cannot even recognize familiar faces of family members
friends or even themselves in a mirror though their visual and sensory processes otherwise for all
other classes of objects are working completely fine.
1319
However individuals with agnosia area often able to use other cues such as voice recognition to
recognize a familiar people. It just means that the identity and the semantic information has not
been lost it is just that the visual Association of the face is gone, Bruce and Young did a lot of
work with prosopagnosia and they use this evidence gained from studying individuals and from
studies of normal individuals as well to produce a model of face process, the model suggests that
the recognition of identity and expression facial speech analysis are independent processes and
subsequent evidence from different brain damage patients have actually supported this
particularly vision.
1320
So this is the model here it shows that expression analysis facio speech analysis or face
recognition unit or say for example viewer centered descriptions of faces are all independent
things identity is an independent process and all of these kind of operate in cooperation with each
other to get you the overall percept of somebody's face though they are functionally or other
independent of each other.
1321
Now given that face recognition is one the most demanding and sophisticated tasks that our
visual system undertakes it is completely unsurprising that an impairment in this ability can be
acquired through brain damage. There has to be something wrong with the brain for this kind of
deficit to emerge, our brain damage rarely leads to complete destruction of the ability to
recognize faces there is a lot of variation in the severity of impairment into the kind of
experience that these patients of prosopagnosia are having, also they might have different levels
of preserved skills for facial processing as well and it is not completely gone. Now living with
prosopagnosia so data from imaging studies has also demonstrated that most cases of
prosopagnosia have you know found they have damage in the fusiform and the lingual gyri
although there are cases of damage in the more anterior temporal, now face recognition is also
being shown as a key and the fusiform area has also been shown as a key structure in face and
object processing in numerous other studies and it has been shown that an area in the fusiform
gyros typically now known as the fusiform face area is a critical region in recognizing faces.
There is this variability however in the location of the uniform face area in individuals and this
may help to explain why prosopagnosia sometimes seems to occur with damage only in one of
the hemispheres.
1322
Such variation has led researchers to think that there is no single area in the brain that is
responsible for crossing faces rather a distributed neural network of areas composed of many
bilateral regions is involved in perceiving faces. Barton 2008 reviewed data from ten patients and
concluded that severe impairments were found in patients with the you know in the bilateral
occipital temporal lesions involving the fusiform gyros which had led to a prosopagnosia. Also
he concluded that the right fusiform gyros was involved in the configural processing of faces and
that memory for faces were more severely disrupted when these bilateral lesions also included
the right anterior temporal lobe. So again you can see that these different areas are involved in
different ways in processing of faces because face generally is a slightly complex percept. Now
is prosopagnosia a face a specific disorder. Riddoch and colleagues in 2008 they studied the
patient FB.
1323
And they found that she was unable to identify faces of famous people and those she was
actually previously familiar with but could make age gender and expression judgments also she
could learn object names almost as fast as other controls. So it could be safely concluded from
you know studies on FB that she demonstrates a relatively pure form of prosopagnosia
everything else is intact all other, ability is intact only the ability of recognizing faces is
suffering. So that is why this was regarded as a pure form of prosopagnosia. Now McNeill and
Warrington in 1993 they described a case of an WJ who took up farming and became
prosopagnosic and remarkably showed the evidence of being able to recognize his sheep despite
being a remaining prosopagnosia to human faces. Assal also described.
1324
A farmer was initially unable to recognize either humans or cows but after six months regained
the ability to recognize humans but not cows Duchaine and Garrido also report that dissociate
these kind of dissociations are not really enough to provide the support for face specificity for
prosopagnosia.
1325
So this is all about disorders we have covered quite a few disorders both of attention and
perception in the study I hope this would help you gain some insight into the theories that we
have studied earlier and try and link those and you could try to link those theories the kind of
experience that these disorders have described thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
1326
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title

Lecture-38
Disorders of Memory
By
Prof.Ark Verma
Hello everyone welcome to the course series on basic cognitive processes I am Dr. Ark Verma
from IIT Kanpur we have been in the last lecture talking about disorders we first visited
disorders of attention and perception today we will be talking about disorders related to memory.
You have seen we spent a considerable amount of time talking about the organization of memory
talking about how memory is an important cognitive function.
If you remember one of the earliest lectures Jerry Fodor and Karl also say for example thought of
memory as a horizontal function that kind of applies to most mental operations that people would
do. So disorders of memory and reading about disorders of memory is that important and it is
important in that respect so let us begin talking about disorders of memory. Now the general
name given to disorders of memory.
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Is the name amnesia, amnesia typically involves forgetfulness which goes beyond the daily
everyday forgetting you know you might keep your keys somewhere and forget it you might
keep your book somewhere and forget it you might forget the name of a particular person that
you meeting or the face of this person or a particular you know concept that you learned in the
class but all of these kinds of forgetfulness are rather normal and happened to almost everybody.
When I am talking of amnesia I am talking of forgetfulness that goes beyond this general level of
forgetting so forgetting in normal people is you know observed in everybody.
But we are talking about forgetfulness that is going beyond this part, going to the extent that it
starts interfering with daily activities of people when you started from your home to you know
go to your office or your workplace or your school and during the way you kind of forgot where
the office is. Now this kind of extensive forgetfulness might be you know quite disabling a
person suffering from amnesia might quite be unable to you know remember any recent events
like the happenings of the current day like happenings of the previous day also say for example
in some cases they might not remember who they are whatever they have been experiencing for
the past decade or.
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So maybe two decades three decades something like that amnesia therefore can be a very
disabling condition it can probably you know make the person dependent on a care giver or a
caretaker for the rest of their lives. So amnesia is therefore a rather serious disorder. Now
amnesias this class of disorders of memory can arise out of a number of causes, there might be a
lot of reasons various reasons that could lead to amnesia. The first class or the more severe
reason of amnesia could be organic amnesias, now organic amnesias are basically caused by a
number of physical damage to the brain.
And those physical damages could be because of infections meningitis encephalitis those kind of
things strokes, head injuries or degenerative disorders such as the Alzheimer's disease. Organic
amnesia generally tend to be rather severe and disabling and they are also irreversible in nature
because any damage to the parts of the brain is irreversible generally these injuries would not
heal the effects of the infection on the brain will not go away and in that sense the amnesia will
be rather permanent in nature.
Now there could be psychogenic amnesia as well. Psychogenic amnesias are caused by
psychological factors such as depression increased tension etc these will involve the temporary
1330
suppression of you know disturbing memories. Somebody might not have gone through a
particular brain injury but might have gone through a very traumatic episode in their lives and
because of the shock and because of the highly emotionally charged you know nature of that
particular event the person chooses unconsciously or subconsciously to suppress that event and
that kind of the memory of that entire event goes away this will be an example of the
psychogenic amnesias.
Now psychogenic amnesias can also be rather disruptive and disorienting to the patient but they
are rarely completely disabling. They are not really pervasive as the organic amnesia we have
been talking about. Now the psychogenic amnesias because there is no brain damage involved
are also generally reversible after adequate amount of medication or counseling or some kind of
rehabilitative therapy and they would eventually with course of time disappear completely as
well. So we talked about organic amnesia, we talked about psychogenic amnesias they could also
be in the middle we could just talk about four kinds of organic amnesia that may be.
Now the first kind of organic amnesia is basically Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is a
de generative brain disorder which first appears as an impairment of memory generally increased
1331
forgetfulness but it later develops into a more general dementia so patients suffering from the
Alzheimer's disease might not only have disorders or problems with memory but they might
have problems with decision-making orienting themselves and other you know related disorders
which are basically linked with the front elopes of the brain, as Alzheimer’s disease happens
mostly in the senile population affecting up to about 20% of the elderly from age groups of
above 50 55 to higher ages. Alzheimer' disease is neuro degenerative disorder which basically
involves the tangling of neuronal fibers something which has been shown to be responsible for
other kinds of senile dementia as well. So this is something which is brought on by age, it is a
degeneration of areas of the brain tangling of the neuronal fibers and has been linked to other
kinds of dementia where in you know basic cognition aspects are lost as well.
Now because of the overlap with symptoms of general dementia Alzheimer's disease cannot be
considered to be a pure form of amnesia. It is not really a disorder only in memory it's a disorder
of memory plus some kind of decision-making process plus some kind of attentional and
difficulties and so on and so forth. So that is why it is you know it is that much more difficult to
investigate the nature of memory loss in Alzheimer's disease.
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Another kind of an organic amnesia is basically caused or named as the Korsakoff syndrome
now Korsakoff syndrome is basically a brain disorder which results from excessive alcoholism
and is characterized by a memory impairment that affects both the recent and the past memories.
It was first reported by Korsakoff in 1987 and is one of the most studied forms of amnesia till
now. It is not really marred by additional complications of any extensive dementia or mental
retardation or anything.
So it is a pure disorder of memory. It is caused by alcoholism some damage to the parts of the
brain which we will see later but it is purely a disorder of memory that is why a purely disorder
that can be classified as a pure amnesia. Now there is also another cause of organic amnesia
which is known as the Herpes simplex encephalitis. It is a disease it is a viral infection of the
brain that can result in severe amnesia. It is basically characterized by a relatively sudden onset
as compared to the slow onset of amnesia as for example in the case of DJ Alzheimer's disease.
Also organic amnesia can be brought upon by surgical procedures typically surgery of the
temporal lobes might lead to some kind of amnesia in a lot of cases and a typical example of this
was the patient called Henry Molaison, we have talked about him in the past as well he is
1333
basically bilateral hippocampus were removed during a surgical procedure to relieve him from
epilepsy but it resulted in a you know vast amnesia of you know a particular kind that we will
discuss in some shortly. Another cause of amnesia could be post electroconvulsive therapy
amnesia.
Now what happens is that in case of patients suffering from mental disorders or psychological
disorders a lot of times you will see that people you know resort to the use of electro convulsive
therapy or shock treatment for alleviating the depression in these patients as if which this might
also lead to amnesia. So ECT basically involves administering an electrical shock to the front of
the patient's head and sometimes you know patients have reported having periods of amnesia
post this electric shock. Now this also has been extensively studied in order to evaluate the
usefulness of ECT for treatment of these depression patients.
Now let us come to discussing about these amnesias in a slight more detail and how these
amnesias might affect one of the aspects of memory called the long-term memory. In one of the
recent lectures we have talked about how long-term memory autobiographical episodic and
semantic is one of the kinds of memories that we most talk about and that we are most concerned
1334
with when we are talking about memory, now one of the symptoms of the organic amnestic
syndrome is the impairment of long-term memory, that is organic amnestics will have difficulty
in consolidating new information into their long-term memory.
And you will also have problem in retrieving old or past long-term memories from their storage.
Interestingly organic amnestics generally have an intact short-term memory and are generally
able to carry out normal conversations you might not even notice that, is there and that there is a
problem with these individuals unless you start talking about things which have passed long ago
or say for example you might discover that these people are not really remembering even things
that happened minutes ago. Talland in 1965 carried out a study involving 29 Korsakoff of
patients all of them significantly impaired on a whole battery of long-term memory tests.
But found that their scores on a short-term memory test or tests of the short-term memory was
almost as close to that of normal patients, others liked Baddelley and Warrington in 1970 who
have also reported normal short-term memory span in Korsakoff of patients. All of these kinds of
studies led Pujol and Kopelman in 2003 to conclude that Korsakoff patients show normal
performance on tests of both verbal and non verbal short-term memory. So it tells you that
1335
amnesias can selectively affect and disabilitate the long-term memory of the participants while
leaving intact the short-term memory and working memory concepts.
Let us talk about two kinds of amnesias that one can talk about anterograde amnesia and
retrograde amnesia are the two kinds. So anterograde amnesia is basically disability or
impairment of memory for events that are happening post the onset of amnesia. So once let us
say there is a point in time where somebody has the onset of amnesia everything after that will be
very hard to retrieve. In retrograde amnesia everything before the onset of amnesia will be very
hard to retrieve so these are the two different and two major kinds of amnesias that one can
actually talk about.
1336
So herein you can see so if there is an onset everything after the onset comes under anterograde
amnesia everything before the onset comes under retrograde amnesia.
1337
Now this distinction between anterograde and retrograde amnesia can provide a way of
distinguishing the locus of amnesia as either a learning disorder or a retrieval disorder. Now
anterograde amnesia can be more indicate obviously learning disorder well as retrograde amnesia
can be used as an indication for retrieval disorder obviously it is possible for a patient to have
both anterograde and retrograde amnesia and which cases you will say that both AA and RA are
present in the particular patient. An interesting observation that was made by a Ribot in 1882
was that he concluded that the retrograde amnesia of these amnesic patients shows a typical
temporal gradient wherein the degree of impairment kind of is inversely proportional to the
recency of the event. So if the event is very recent the degree of impairment will be too high if
the event is too long ago in the past the degree of impairment will be slightly lesser. This
relationship given by Ribot is also referred to as the Ribots law.
1338
How do we test for these amnesia so if there is a cognitive disorder you would like to be able to
test the patient test the presence of this cognitive disorder and test the extent of this disorder and
consequently find out ways to help these patients. So if you are trying to test anterograde
amnesia it is slightly easier because it is more of a learning disorder so you basically have to test
whether the person can learn this new information or not.
And so you can give tests you know you can give new materials to the participant to learn over a
period of time words pictures stories names faces whatever you might want to give then test their
retrieval after you know a time gap of days or years or you know some time. Now testing for
retrograde amnesia becomes slightly more complicated as the testing has to be done for events
that are events and materials that are not known to the tester himself.
So you cannot really test for a particular patient that what happened when you were six years old
because the patient is not there you know because the tested is also does not know and cannot
verify whether this person is telling the correct thing or not. In one of the last lectures you
remember I have been talking about the constructive nature of memory. So the constructive
nature of memory might make it very difficult for an individual to be tested for retrograde
amnesia because even though he might be remembering maybe in a few strands of information
1339
from that particular time that you are asking him about but a lot of information might just be
made up and that is very difficult to verify.
So what happens is tests for remote memory do either involve testing of past public events or the
tests of past personal events which only the patient or the close people of the patients, say as a
child and you ask the child about things that happened 10, 15, 20 years ago you can kind of
verify those events with the help of the parents or the close relatives that would have been
around that time so tests of past public events by the way is much easier because the events are
known to a wide variety of people and similar test items can be given to many different people.
And their performance on these tests can be measured. If there were 20 people around me and to
each of them I basically asked them to relate what happened when India won the Cricket World
Cup 2011 I can kind of compare their the amount of information that you would each recall
about this particular event and I can cross verify and I can check whether they remember the
details or not. Tests of past personal events is difficult for the exact same thing. People have
cannot be tested for this auto biographical information unless there is somebody to verify it so
however this inform and also this information that we are talking about the past personal events
1340
may vary widely from person to person it becomes difficult therefore to test anybody for this
information also it becomes as I mentioned already very difficult to verify the accuracy of the
responses that the participants are giving.
Now let us talk about more specifically and anterograde and retrograde amnesia and anterograde
and retrograde impairments. So both Ribot and Korsakoff suggested that most patients will
manifest both anterograde and retrograde amnesia if there is if they are experiencing organic
causes. Anterograde amnesia together with retrograde amnesia has been observed in demanding
Alzheimer’s patients and Korsakoff patients also patients are herpes simplex encephalitis. Pujol
and Koppelman in 2003 have reported that in retrograde amnesia in Korsakoff patients can
extend back up to 30 years or more before the onset of because I am before the onset of amnesia
and it will also show a much temporal gradient of the kind that Ribot was mentioning under
Riborts law.
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Here you can see this thing it is a source from Albert and colleagues the images from Groome's
book on cognitive psychology you can see and this blue line that represents Korsakoff patients
the impairment is much more for more recent events and the impairments are much higher for
and preservation is much higher for events that were much older. So you see for events up to 40
years of old 40 years of age the preservation of information is there but events that are as recent
as five or ten years old there is a marked impairment.
1342
Now however a said pattern is not found everywhere. So this is again one of the patterns that is
reported but this pattern could not be found everywhere. There could also be some patients who
have severe anterograde amnesia but have very limited retrograde amnesia. HM had a very
severe anterograde amnesia he would not form any long-term memories after the surgery but his
retrograde amnesia was only for up to three years prior to the onset.
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Now they have also been cases of a focal retrograde and anterograde amnesia few cases of focal
anterograde amnesia without RA have been reported say for example Mair and colleagues in
1979 they studied two Korsakoff patients who had focal anterograde amnesia and then Cohen
and Squire in 1981 also studied NA a patient who had focal anterograde amnesia after a
particular accident. NA’s injuries and few other studies have confirmed that the damage in the
focal anterograde amnesia could be mostly restricted to the anterior thalamus.
So that might be the region which is involved in people learning new events and if that region is
damaged selective or focal anterograde amnesia is possible to be observed. Focal retrograde
amnesia cases are rather rare but some of the patients have also with severe head injuries and
following epileptic seizures and AJC have been reported to have focal retrograde amnesia as
well. Now focal retrograde amnesia has also been associated with lesions to various brain areas
but most commonly it has been linked to lesions in the temporal cortex. So that is one of the
regions which probably can be linked more to the long-term memory than to the learning part of
information.
1344
Now again coming and talking about this temporal gradient in retrograde amnesia Ribot 1882
reported that an amnesic tended to retrieve older memories much better than more recent
memories the same was also been observed in more recent studies like that of Brown in 2002. A
possible explanation put forward to explain this temporal gradient put forward by Sqire in 1982
is that older memories might be more durable because they have developed a variety of retrieval
routes over periods of years. If you remember what I have been talking about in the last part the
narrative rehearsal hypothesis because older events have been gone over.
and over again you have retrieved a particular information over and over again over a longer
period of time you have given various kinds of cues you have attached that information to too
many sources of knowledge so that if one source of knowledge is absent if it is damaged you can
still retrieve that information from other B or C air sources of knowledge. So Squire suggests
that the consolidation of a new memory might take several years to complete and that it becomes
increasingly resilient over time. So once something has become increasingly resilient over a
period of 20 30 40 years it might be that that information is preserved even cases of brain
damage like organic amnesia.
So this model which Squire was talking about is called the standard model of consolidation. So
we talk about this in more detail as we go ahead. Moscovitch and colleagues they proposed that
1345
memories of recent events are more vulnerable and are still held as individual episodic memories
that is why they are difficult to retrieve in cases like amnesia. These episodic memories
combined with you know combined to produce certain kinds of semantic memories which are
more lasting and does not really depend upon the hippocampal activity. So even in case of
damage it might be still possible to retrieve these kind of memories. Now let us talk about the
neuroscience part of amnesia.
Let us talk about the neural underpinnings of amnesia typically the regions of the brain that are
implicated in cases of organic amnesia are these regions the temporal lobes bilaterally, the
hippocampal bilateral the thalamus and the prefrontal lobes. These are the typical regions that are
associated with memory disorders such as amnesia.
1346
Is going a bit more detail the temporal lobes contain the hippocampus and this structure is of
particular importance to the creation of new memories. Surgical removal of hippocampus in parts
of the medial temporal lobes of the patient known as HM was found to have a devastating effects
on his memory and especially his ability to acquire and consolidate new memories. If you
remember we have mentioned this earlier as well the bilateral hippocampus of HM were
removed which led.
Now to the disability of forming new memories you know for him for the period completely after
the onset of the amnesia. The temporal lobes and hippocampus are also damaged in cases of
herpes simplex encephalitis and Alzheimer's disease. Though the lesions may get more extensive
and cover right from the majority of the temporal cortex to the frontal brain lesion. So the frontal
brain damage might be more distributed and much more extensive in case of Alzheimer's disease
or herples simplex encephalitis. Other areas of lesion could be the diencephalon that is a region
which includes the thalamus and the mammilla bodies of the brain.
1347
The areas which are damaged in the Korsakoff syndrome or patients are along these regions and
also regions which include the anterior thalamic nuclei. Both the trivial of past memories involve
different regions of the brain most notably the temporal and prefrontal cortex. So if you are
talking about retrograde amnesia if you are talking about retrieving information that is long past
you might be talking more about the temporal cortex and the prefrontal cortices. Now Korsakoff
patients have been shown to have a retrieval problems associated with prefrontal lesions.
Koppelman in 2001in his paper established that in Korsakoff syndrome.
The severity of anterograde amnesia is related to thalamic damage whereas the severity of
retrograde amnesia is a collated with the extent of prefrontal damage. So there is a type of here
the severity of anterograde amnesia is a link to a thalamic damage whereas a severity of
retrograde which is linked to prefrontal damage.
1348
Finally lesions in the temporal cortex have also been found to be linked with retrieval problems
HSE patients whose lesions extend beyond the hippocampus have been found to include large
areas of the temporal cortex are also found to exhibit retrograde amnesia in addition to their
dense anterograde amnesia. So HSE patients who have damage in hippocampus and large areas
of temporal cortex will have both AA and RA Stefanacci and colleagues in 2001 reported that in
HAC patients anterograde amnesia correlates with the extent of hippocampus lesions whereas as
retrograde amnesia correlates with the extent of lateral temporal lobe lesions.
1349
Let us now talk about we have talked about the extent of damage in organic Amnesias the
regions of brain that are involved in these organic amnesias let us now talk about the intact and
impaired memory systems. What are the memory systems that are left intact even in cases of
organic amnesias, one of the first areas are the motor skills. There is considerable evidence that
motor skills are preserved even in organic MSs retained their previously learned motor skills.
And can also learn new motor skills post the onset of amnesia. If you remember HM was able to
learn mirror drawing when he was taught even though he did not have an explicit memory of
learning mirror drawing but he could he got better at drawing those figures while looking in the
mirror. HSE patient Clive Wearring we have also talked about him in the past lectures retained
most of his piano skills both in conducting the piano session and in playing the piano but it is not
really aware of them if you give him the piano he might still be able to play but he is not aware
of the fact that he is a piano player he was a piano player also another patient PQ or retained his
ability to play the piano and to even you know the ability to learn to play new pieces.
1350
And there have been a lot of experiments in this area. So Glisky and colleagues in 1986 they
reported that amnesics could be successfully trained to carry out simple computer tasks with time
and patience obviously you will probably need a lot of patience to teach these people you know
these particular skills because they will probably forget the episodes you will have to be very
simple in your instructions and you have to make sure that these people are getting these, also
they observe there will be little to no generalization of the learning of say for example if you
taught a person a particular skill in a given setting it is rather difficult for that skill or for that for
the learning of that skill to generalize in a different setting.
So it might be that it happens in the same you know it learning happens in one setting it stays to
that setting if the person changes the setting if the person goes to let us say different room or a
different you know equipment the setting kind of changes and the learning is not generalized.
Cavaco and colleagues in 2004 reported normal performance of 10 amnesic patients with
temporal regions caused by HSC on range of motor skills including weaving figure tracing and
target tracking. So you are seeing all of these motor skills that people are doing the parts of
memory which are referred to as procedural memory is basically found to be intact even in cases
of organic amnesia. Now with these results in mind Cohen and Squire suggested that the
amnesics might have a preserved procedural memory but an impaired declarative memory which
includes both the explicit memory.
1351
Let us now talk about implicit memory. Now implicit memory again is that memory which you
cannot explicitly talk about you cannot really describe those events the episodes and the facts
completely but it has been shown that amnesties might still be able to retain aspects of implicit
memory effects of priming or conditioning might still be observed. Now there is a very
interesting experiment that was done by a Claparede in 1911.
So he did this that whenever he used to shake hands with the amnesic patients he would have he
would hide a pin in his hand and he would actually shake hands with these amnesic patients
whenever these amnesic patients would shake hands the pin will actually you know a pin will
actually stick through their skin they will experience some pain and they will take their hands off
eventually but they'll not have a memory of this episode after a few minutes.
So Claparade will come back again and do the same thing eventually what they discovered
Warrington and what they discovered was these patients started you know stopped to shake
hands with them. So it kind of told Clapparade that they are if they are not even explicitly
1352
remembering that the pin incident but they kind of have something tells them that you know you
should not shake hands with this person there is a pin in his hand.
Warrington and Weiskranz in 1968 showed that Korsokoff patients degraded when they were
viewing degraded pictures of common objects or words starting with the most incomplete and
they were kind of trying to rate this starting with the most incomplete version to the complete
version they demonstrated that Korsokoff patients exhibit an increase in the ability to identify the
object after a few trials. Again they will not have the episodic memory of seeing those pictures
earlier.
But if you repeat this adequate number of times they will get better at recognizing these pictures.
Graf and colleagues in 1984 they used the priming of verbal material could demonstrate the
impact implicit memory in Korsokoff patients and what they did was they actually used a task
when the subjects were presented with word fragments and they were asked to complete them. it
was found that patients responded with previously primed words so whatever they were
responding with actually was already primed even though these people might not have a good
memory of those things.
1353
Also their familiarity and context based recollection might be pared in patients of amnesia. So
Mandler in 1980 suggested that familiarity and recollection represent two alternative routes to
recognition, he believed that a familiarity judgment is an automatic process occurring without
any conscious effort and whereas recollection is a controlled process requiring conscious effort
and is deliberately carried out. So this is the typical difference between a familiarity judgment
and recognition. Now there have been studies which have shown that organic amnesties retain,
the ability to detect familiarity to an previously encountered item. You remember Claparades
experiment something similar Clive Wearing found his old friends familiar but could not locate
them in memory could not locate seeing them so one of the interesting incidents is recalled John
Kennedy who was suffering from or one of the US presidents were suffering from amnesia and
he would at some point in time even not recognize the staff but he would tell his nurse
sometimes that you know I know this person he seems to be a rather famous man but I do not
recall where I have met him or what do I you know what do I have to do with him.
1354
So similarly Huppert and Piercy in 1976 they devised an experimental procedure wherein they
showed their how Korsakoff patients and controls they were basically showing Korsokoff
patients and controls two sets of pictures the first set of pictures on day one, the second set of
pictures on day two. Shortly after the presentation the second test the subjects were tested for
their ability to judge whether particular pictures were familiar and that is they had previously
seen them or they were new.
So there they mix this test set with the familiar pictures and some new pictures. Also after this
above test they were asked to identify which of the pictures were shown on day one and which of
the pictures were shown on day two so they not only have to judge whether these pictures are
familiar or not familiar they also have to judge wherein time they have seen these pictures. Now
while the performance of the amnesties in control participants was equivalent on familiarity
judgment and amnesties could not do well at all in the task wherein they had to identify the
present the days on which these pictures were presented.
1355
So Huppert and Piercy they further demonstrated that the recognition performance of Korsokoff
patience was mainly based on the judgment of familiarity it was basically so they kind of had a
sense of that I have seen this picture earlier but they did not really have a sense of when had I
have I seen this picture. So you might see the results I don't really have the figure but this kind of
shows that these people performed very well on tasks of familiarity judgment but they could not
locate the source of that information.
1356
Now let us talk a little bit about episodic and semantic memory because we have been talking
about long-term memory here episodic memory is memory for specific events in lives semantic
memory is a set of knowledge or facts that you have acquired over time. Now Tulving in 1989
suggested that amnesties exhibit a selective impairment of episodic memory while the semantic
memories might still be intact. General observation points out that indeed amnesties usually
remember they are they are fine with the normal vocabulary despite of their inability to
remember any recent events in their life.
So they can talk and they can remember words what means those kind of things that you still
have but they do not really remember the events in the life's the episodes that have passed.
However other studies have shown that in some cases the semantic memory might also be
jeopardized studies of Korsokoff patients have been shown to have severely impaired episodic
memory along with semantic memory impairments. So both kind of memory disorders are
possible even though it might be said that this episodic memory is probably more impaired than
maybe the semantic memory.
1357
Alzheimer patients have also found to be shown impairments of both episodic and semantic
memory though the former is more severely impaired. So episodic memory is most severely
impaired. Addis and Tippet in 2004 reported that Alzheimer patients tend to suffer impaired
autobiographical memory extending over or a large period of time or the entire lifespan but they
also exhibit sometimes limited semantic memory impairment. Not really completely extensive as
the autobiographical memory impairment is but also some kind of semantic memory impairment
is also generally seen. Overall if you in of combine this it can be said that most semantic and
episodic memory might be impaired in most organic amnesics leaving less support for you know
for Tulving’s proposal for only episodic memories, damaged, at least a couple of known patients
say for example KC and were found to have almost no episodic memory but relatively normal
semantic memory.
So there are obviously some cases where in instances of intact episodic memory or intact
semantic memory will be found and completely gone episodic memory will be. So again some of
the things one of the things I would like to tell you about disorders is that no two patients have
exactly the same characteristics because no two patients might have the exact same extent of the
lesion that is when you are talking about disorders.
1358
And typically disorders like organic amnesia you might already come across with a huge variety
of manifestations in patients huge variety of lesion sites in patients and that is why it these
studies or these theories typically built upon case studies and there is less that you can
completely generalize across all patient's obviously you have to make generalizations and come
up with theories but those generalizations will tend to be much less accurate in case of
neuropsychological patients than in some other areas.
Now there have been theories of amnesia including deficit theories miller in 1966 argues that
HMs impairment was essentially a failure to learn new information that is because he was unable
to consolidate memories to form a temporary short-term and you know from a temporary short-
term memory trace to a more formidable long-term memory trace.
Similar explanations could also be thought to account for deficits such as those happen those
which happen in Korsakoff syndrome basically it could be argued that the apparent occurrence of
a retrograde amnesia Korsakoff patients might actually be a form of an anterograde impairment
that could not be detected in time and has been ensuing since quite a long time and it had been
continued to deteriorate. So you are kind of saying that whatever they have lost it basically was
1359
you know the onset is much earlier and the anterograde amnesia had set and so these people have
not really consolidated those memories that is when now when they look at they cannot retrieve
those memories. Also but if even if you take this into account the theory cannot completely
explain the occurrence of retrograde amnesia. In case of HSE patients who have a genuine
retrograde amnesia with the precise date of onset.
So there if you remember what I was talking about HSE the onset is rather sudden. So there you
cannot really argue that you know a retrograde amnesia is basically undetected anterograde
amnesia, had been lingering on in the patient for quite some time and that is why he is not being
able to recall all the previous information. So it is not really a really compelling explanation.
So you turn to a different class of explanation called the retrieval deficit explanations. Now
Warrington and Weiskrantz in 1970 proposed a retrieval impairment as the basic deficit
underlying organic amnesia. So you are saying, all kinds of organic amnesia might basically be
because of a retrieval deficit. Now a retrieval deficit is such that it could explain both and
anterograde and retrograde components of amnesia.
1360
Because this would explain a failure of the retrieval mechanism neutral mechanism could be
failing for past events and recent events as well so if it is failing for recent events it is basically a
manifesting in anterograde amnesia. If it is a manifesting in past events it is manifesting in
retrograde amnesia. A retrieval based theory also would predict equally severe anterograde and
retrograde amnesia though we know that there are amnesic patients who suffer from far more
severe anterograde amnesia than retrograde amnesia.
So again this theory also does not really do a very good job of explaining the incidence of both
anterograde and retrograde amnesia. The retrieval based account however can explain the
temporal gradient in retrograde amnesia by proposing that the earliest memories would be the
most rehearsed and hence they will be a compared to the most recent memories and then hence
they will be recalled much better.
1361
However the retrieval based account cannot readily explain the variations in the severity for AA
and RA, between different patients and also why some patients can have virtually no retrograde
amnesia but a lot of anterograde amnesia, say for example the case of HM. Also this account
cannot explain how when they in some patients they could be focal anterograde dementia or
focal retrograde amnesia because if there is one explanation that fits both the amnesia both the
kinds of amnesias, if there is that impairment if one has to occur the other should definitely occur
which does not really happen in case of focal AA or RA patients. Now because both of these
theories did not do a great job we could actually combine them and try and see if this can be
explained. So as either of the counts cannot explain the deficits in amnesia alone it has been
suggested that.
1362
The impairments of encoding and retrieval are independent of each other and they lead to
different disorders. The finding that impairments of learning and retrieval are associated with
lesions indifferent areas of brain have also lent support to this view so it has been suggested that
amnesiac may exhibit both anterograde and retrograde amnesia.
Because the brain regions mainly involve in encoding and retrieval are physically quite close to
each other, all and they are extensively interconnected. Now in all it can be concluded that most
amnesiacs would suffer from both AA and RA though their relative severity will vary from
patient to patient and depending on the extent of injury. One of these models about retrieval as
we were mentioning earlier.
1363
Is the standard model of consolidation so Squire basically in 1992 says that in addition to the
short-term memory consolidation process a slower form of consolidation continues to strengthen
the memory traces for two to three years after its acquisition. The trace therefore remains
vulnerable for a period of up to two to three years or for a few a few years post the input until it
is completely consolidated. Squire proposes that this long-term consolidation process involves
the hippocampus which plays a role in the initial encoding of the new information as well as its
consolidation into a long-term memory. Hence the relatively limited retrograde amnesia patients
such as HM may result from the disruption in the slow consolidation process because their
hippocampus has been removed.
1364
There is the multiple trace theory. So Moscovitch and colleagues in 1999 suggested that each
time an item is retrieved from the memory it creates afresh memory stress and forms new
connections. So in years following the acquisition of a new memory trace this causes the
episodic memories to be bound together to create semantic memories the binding is assumed to
be carried by the hippocampus but once the semantic memory is formed it becomes independent
of the hippocampus.
So the binding function of memory is being done by the hippocampus but after the binding is
complete the hippocampus does not have a lot to do with this information. The retrieval of the
episodic memory however always requires the hippocampus. So retrieval based deficits could
will generally involve some kind of hippocampul damage. Now this theory the multiple trace
theory can explain the finding that hippocampus lesions disrupt episodic memories from all the
time periods but only the most recently acquired you know semantic memories will be deficient
because the hippocampus is just recently removed there have been supporting evidence from
cases like HM and WR.
1365
There could be other impacts of amnesia as well let us talk a little bit about those so impaired
declarative memory squire or used that organic initial chip chiefly characterized by an
impairment of what is called declarative memory you can talk about. Mandler argues that
amnesia is essentially as disease of consciousness so you cannot consciously retrieve information
and that is and even that is basically what is leading to the amnesia.
1366
There could be impaired binding as well. So Cohen and Eichenbaum 1993 argued that the main
feature of declarative memory is that it involves the creation of associative connections between
different memories. So this binding is the main thing in contrast non-declarative memory seems
to be restricted to the strengthening of a single response for example motor responses
Eichenbaum 2004, suggests said that the hippocampus performs the binding function of the
memory.
And that and whereas non-declarative memory involves the cortex and cerebrum the areas again
involved in motor processing. This view has been supported by a lot of imaging studies say for
example Rosenbaum and colleagues in 1999 found that the patient KC had severe retrograde
amnesia for episodic memories and some autobiographical memories but could still retrieve
semantic memories before the onset. They concluded that the main function of the hippocampus
is to bind these memories together and organize the storage function.
1367
Impaired perceptual processing impaired perceptual processing while the function of

hippocampus is largely assumed to involve a memory storage animal studies has suggested that it
also plays a role in visual perception. So Graham and colleagues in 2008 presented some
evidence which suggests that the hippocampus may also have a perceptual function in humans
leading to some of their troubles you know some of the troubles of memory in amnesic patience.
So they suggested that memory storage involves a network of perceptual representations a sort of
a distributed you know representation which are distributed throughout the cortex and controlled
and activated by the hippocampus.
1368
So what is happening is damage to the hippocampus is basically going to significantly impair the
retrieval of these old memories as well as the processing of new input so if hippocampus is
damaged you will not be able to store incoming information in that distributed fashion also you
will not be able to invoke that information that has been distributed list stored in various regions
of the cortex. One of the problems for this theory however is that the studies of amnesic patients
have mostly failed to identify any major perceptual impairment.
Say for example Hartley and colleagues in 2007 tested four amnesic patients with for with focal
hippocampus lesions and only two of them showed any a trace of perceptual impairment.
Interestingly though however all four of the individuals were found to be impaired on spatial
memory. Similarly Lee and colleagues in 2012 found evidence for the involvement of the
hippocampus in the visual discrimination of complex scene stimuli.
1369
Now we can talk about some other types of memory disorders as well so impairments of short-
term memory impairments of short-term memory generally occur sometimes that involve a quite
different pattern of brain lesions than what you saw in the case of amnesia or long-term memory
impairments. Alzheimer’s disease patients may sometimes show severe working memory
impairment chiefly involving the executive functions, alerting orienting alerting orienting and
inhibiting.
1370
Concussion amnesia people who suffer from concussion on the head due to a you know
accidental injury on the top of the head basically will suffer from both retrograde and
anterograde amnesia which could be extensive in the beginning just after you know say for
example you banged your head or somebody's hit you on the head but kind of diminishes with
time. A footballer conquers by a collision on the field might find it difficult to remember events
just leading to the concussion but will eventually regain those memories back after a particular
period of time. These kind of Amnesia's are known as concussion amnesia which fall into the
category of posts traumatic amnesia and includes almost all kinds of brain injuries possible head
injuries basically. Russell in 1971surveyed a large number of concussion victims and to find that
typically retrograde amnesia effects the memories for a period extending or leading up to a
minute or two till this concussion or accident happened but in rare cases up to days or weeks
could also be formed.
1371
A characteristics of common concussion amnesia resemble quite a bit of organic amnesia as a
period immediately following the accident the patients are likely to show impairments in long
term memory tasks but they do slightly ok on working memory tasks. Although the effects of
concussion amnesia are on memory are usually temporary a minority of mild to moderate head
injuries may leave a more lasting impairment. We have talked about ECT and memory loss so
ECT has been shown to be useful in treating depression in some patients these benefits have been
found to be only temporary and therefore must be compared with the possibilities of a lasting
brain damage. So if a person has received extensive ECT treatment it might actually lead to you
know a lasting brain damage, in a period following.
1372
The ECT shock the patient typically shows both AA and RA which might seem extensive
initially but generally fades off you know with the course of time however it seems that for most
patients ECT only causes a limited impairment. A recent review of previous ECT study is
conducted by Reed and Benthall in 2010 they concluded that ECT treatment produces no lasting
benefits but it does cause significant memory loss in some patients.
So in that sense you can actually say that you know you have to evaluate whether ECT really
benefits the patient so much or it kind of leads to you know a typical impairments which will
anyways fade off after a period of time. So in that sense it could not be justified to use a ECT to
treat a large number.
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Patients. Patients with frontal lobe lesions also often show some kind of impairment of memory
though these tend to be rather different in the nature associated to you know different in two
different in comparison to lesions of the temporal lobe so these lesions basically say for example
the temporal lobe lesions could be thalamic lesions or otherwise, more specifically patients with
frontal lobe lesions tend to have particular difficulty in retrieving contextual information.
Information placed in a particular context possibly because they have an impairment of the
central executive component of their working memory so that's again something which was
shared and said by Shallice in 1988.
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Another characteristic of patients with frontal lobe lesions is a tendency of confabulation so
implying that the patient describes memories for events which did not really take place and are
apparently invented. So if you talk about patients with frontal lobe lesions they might come up
with descriptions of events that have not really occurred or they might be mixing everything
there might be strand of you know event that is correct but everything else is made up so come
confabulation this concept is termed is confabulation.
And confabulation has been found to be associated with impaired executive functioning and will
also a consequent loss of mental flexibility also it must be noted the frontal lobe lesions may that
is may somehow coexist with other kinds of lesions as well. For example many Korsakoff
patients have been found to have frontal lobe lesions along with diencephalon lesions and these
individuals often exhibit a marked tendency of confabulation and then retrieval problems are also
there in addition to their usual amnesic symptoms. We can we have been talking about amnesia
per say.
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But we can also talk a little bit about the memory loss in normal elderly people there is some
evidence for age-related decline in memory though not really readily deductible until till the age
of 65 or70. The degree of impairments is usually also not very great. So there might be general
forgetting and it might be slightly more than you know people experience in younger ages but it's
not as much as you know as severe as say for example in patients of amnesia. Studies were
indicated that normal elderly people may show a small you know a relative decline in their recall
ability but not really in their recognition. So if you kind of have you know cue in which they do
not really have to recall information they might still be able to deal with this information easily.
Elderly subjects.
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I mean elderly subjects have been shown, have been, have tended to show a deterioration of
explicit memory. So if you ask them explicit facts those kind of things might be deficient but
they their implicit memory remains a rather unimpaired, they seem to have problems in
retrieving contextual information or information from you know a particular temporal context.
So this happened at that point in time I was doing this that kind of information is generally
impaired.
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Parkin and Walter in 1992 demonstrated that elderly people were able to recognize a familiar
item but they would have a poor recall of context where did I meet this person I know this person
but I do not know where I met this guy interestingly the amount of decline in the context
recognition has been found to be correlated with the measures of frontal lobe functions a frontal
lobe impairment, so if you take a test of frontal lobe functionality with these people and you
know amount of decline that you are experiencing in context of cognition they have been found
to be correlated with each other. A possible explanation of these kind of age-related memory
declines may be that the elderly people lose some of their capacity to control of consciously
controlled processing. So they do not have this total grasp on where to pick up a particular
information from and so that they are kind of relying more and more on an automatic or a rather
automatic process so that is some information that comes automatically is easy and easily
retrievable is there but if the if you ask them to consciously recall some information that might
be slightly deficient.
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All in all recent meta-analysis concludes that the actual decline in executive function in the
normal elderly is rather slight it is not too much.
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So we can talk about psychogenic amnesias as well. Some amnesias might occur without any
evidence of brain lesions and may be brought on by stress tension and you know are usually
temporary. These include loss of memory for past events and in other words retrograde amnesia
anterograde amnesia unusual it is not does not really happen with the psychogenic cases. The
pattern of impairment psychogenic amnesia varies widely from case to case and Koppelman in
2010 points out that the psychogenic emissions may be global or situation specific it could be
either of the cases.
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The main feature which enables clinicians to distinguish between psychogenic and organic
amnesia is that those of psychogenic origin do not usually match up with the kind of impairments
that are experienced by organic amnesics. We can talk a little bit about rehabilitation while we
are winding up. So there are a large number of ways in which you would like to you know help
these people help the organic so that they can lead a slightly more meaningful life you can come
up with ways to help them cope with this loss of information and all of these come up come
under the umbrella term of rehabilitation.
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So for example one of the things could be maximizing memory informants so it might be
maximizing memory performance so it might be useful to advise the amnesic patients or even the
elderly to pay more attention to the input to process it more attentively to repeat what is said to
them to organize the information you know very in a neat way and to make meaningful
associations between new input and the items that they have already stored in their memory
Wilson in 2004 suggests that amnesic learn one thing at a time and one has to keep the input very
simple avoid jargon.
And use of long words also they would perform better if the learning is not context specific if
you are not you know treating them training them in a particular setting because this is not going
to generalize to other settings as we have already mentioned. Amnesics also generally benefit
through a space rather than mass learning sessions so if you if you make them learn small
information in spaced out sessions they might be able to retain that information much better as
compared if you give them a huge junk of information at one time.
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External memory aids have been found to be useful in these amnesics say for example an option
is to change the immediate environment and the living conditions of the amnesic patients so as to
reduce the dependence on memory. So you don’t have to you know recall everything and then
work, say for example if you might have seen this movie called memento or the Indian version
of this movie called gajini wherein this person had all of those cues written all over his body so
that he could remember that information which was relevant to recall. So put putting big labels
on the cupboards labeling doors as you know kitchen toilet etc might be helpful. Nowadays we
also have the luxury of electronic or computerized aids which have been devised to help out the
amnesties by producing reminders or carrying a for carrying out particular actions or a say for
example reminding them of their medicines etc well simpler example was neuro page which was
a fire you know worked upon by Hersh and Treadgold and was found to be very useful.
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Another interest interesting device that has come out recently was the sense scam which makes
the use of a digital camera attached to the user belt to photograph all the happenings of the day.
Loved and Conway have found 2011 that sense scam can significantly improve the amnesic
person's personal memories.
So whatever is happening and the end of the day the amnesic person is sitting in his room and
going through all the photographs of the day and attaching some kind of temporal context to
them some kind of information to them that will be relevant to recall those events let us say on a
later day. So this is all about amnesia we have been talking about amnesia organic psychogenic
and other causes that may lead to memory disorders thank you.
Acknowledgement
Prof. Satyaki Roy

NPTEL Team
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Sanjay Pal
Ashish Singh
Badal Pradhan
Tapobrata Das
Ram Chandra
Dilip Tripathi
Manoj Shrivastava
Padam Shukla
Sanjay Mishra
Shubham Rawat
Shikha Gupta
K.K Mishra
Aradhana Singh
Sweta
Ashutosh Gairola
Dilip Katiyar
Sharwan
Hari Ram
Bhadra Rao
Puneet Kumar Bajpai
Lalty Dutta
Ajay Kanaujia

@copyright reserved
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Course Title
Basic Cognitive Process
Summary
By
Prof. Ark Verma
Hello and welcome to the lecture series on Basic Cognitive Processes, I am Dr Ark Verma from
IIT Kanpur. In this course we have been talking about various cognitive functions for the past 8
weeks, in today's lecture I will try and summarize what we have done over the past 8 weeks and
also I have Ranjith with me who has been the teaching assistant for this course and has been
helping you out with all the queries and questions you had, and all the assignments and the
solution that we had over the last 8 weeks.
So before I go on to Ranjith and take some of the questions that you have sent let me try and
summarize whatever we have done in this course over the past week. We will also add some
points, ask Ranjith to share his experiences about doing cognitive science. Now we began this
course in the first week by talking about what cognitive psychology is, why we need to do
cognitive psychology, how is cognitive psychology different from other branches of psychology?
You are talking about the fact that cognitive psychology per se is more concerned with the
mental functions; it is not really concerned with larger behaviour, social attraction and those kind
of things. Cognitive psychology basically focuses on explanations that are rooted in the mental
functions, we have been talking about and we have seen some of the major mental functions that
we have that the brain, the kind of instantiates and we have been talking about mental functions
like perception, sensation, memory and attention.
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Now it is interesting if you see that we began our discussion with first situating where cognitive
psychology actually comes from. Cognitive psychology is an integral part of a larger
interdisciplinary subject called cognitive science wherein we are actually taking all of these
questions if we deal with in cognitive psychology but from an inter disciplinary or
multidisciplinary perspective. We began our journey in this course by talking about the brief
history of where cognitive psychology actually comes from, we have discussed how did it evolve
with philosophy, what were the antecedents of the thought that actually led to cognitive
psychology.
We spend a fair amount of time talking about behaviourism and talking about what consequence
behaviourism had on psychological thought in the 19th and 20th century and we talked about the
fact that behaviourism at one point in time wanted psychologists to only talk about things that
could be measured, that could be overtly observed but people reasoned that if you are going to
give any explanation about behaviour, if you are going to talk about or describe a human
behaviour in the sense you would need to talk about the black box.
The behaviourist regime probably believed that there is a stimulus and there is a black box and
there is a response, we are in cognitive psychology more concerned about what the black box is,
how does it function, what are its various components, how they are connected and in a sense we
are going to be talking about the functional aspects of behaviour. So this what we did in the
beginning lectures, in the first week when we were talking about the brief history of cognitive
psychology, then we slightly moved on to more foundational assumptions on the theoretical
assumptions wherein you know we have situated cognitive psychology.
We talked about things, about you know David Marr’s levels of explanation, we talked about
modularity, we talked about the theoretical underpinnings on which you kind of you know
situate the whole enterprise of cognitive psychology. Interestingly and I hope you would
remember that we have a major sense that cognitive psychology is an exercise in the abstract, we
are not really concerned with the neural under pinning's per se because that is a neuroscientist’s
job, we are not really concerned with artificial intelligence parallels.
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We are not really going to create machines here but what we are going to do is to get a abstract
but a full description of how each of these cognitive function are instantiated, how they are being
used to explain human behaviour. One of the beliefs, the central beliefs in cognitive psychology
you might have seen during this course is that mental functions are the core explanations of all
kinds of human behaviours and if you remember even in the first classes or in the introduction
lecture I talked about the need of atomising behaviour, the need of actually breaking down larger
chunks of behaviour whatever they may be into smaller components.
You would realize if you are doing this that any more complex or sophisticated form of behavior
that you might want to talk about can be broken down into these atomic components, these
atomic components generally turn out to be these mental functions or based or rooted in these
mental functions which some of which we have studied in this course, others we will study in the
second portion of this course. Now we have been talking about issues like modularity also and
modularity is a very interesting concept in cognitive psychology that was kind of helps us to
study each of these cognitive processes slightly independently, if you remember what Jerry
Fodor said.
He said that a modular system is a resistant to damage because if you have a large you know
program and you want to study aspects of the program it might be better if those programs, if
that program has been written in particular modules. If you have to make a change or if there is
an error or there is a bug you can actually go and edit that particular module, you do not really
need to rewrite the entire program.
That was one of the aspects of modularity that we were stressing upon and if you see how
cognitive psychology or studies in cognitive psychology are structured we are in some way
actually talking about these different mental functions. However I hope you would have noticed
that in all of these lectures that we have done and in the cognitive function that we have covered
we have also made a conscious effort to show you how these cognitive functions are
interconnected with each other.
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When we began with perception we also talked about how perception is linked to attention or
how perception mediates attention. When we did talk about attention we also talked about how
attention is connected to both perception and action and how does the mix of these three
cognitive functions helps you act and interact with the world around us. So those are some of the
theoretical standpoints we have taken in this course and I hope you would have realized that is a
very important thing to do wherein you will understand that how a particular cognitive function
does not really exist in isolation.
The concept of modularity is basically you know a concept for convenience to study them and
also say for example to understand the role of each of the cognitive functions independently. In
the second week we were talking about various approaches to cognitive psychology, we were
talking about the cognitive science approach, the artificial intelligence approach, we were talking
about the neuroscience approach and we were discussing amongst ourselves that how these
different approaches basically bring out their own unique perspectives to study the problem.
And the problem is basically how the mind is working you know, cognitive psychology or
cognitive science both of them at some point as described as studies into the mind, you know
what is the mind and that brings me to a very interesting thing that there is this concept of mind
and body and there is this great philosophical discussion on mind body dualism, we have
specifically not really gone into that debate quite a lot because that would probably be outside
the scope of this course but one of the things I could say is from a perspective of a cognitive
psychologist, you would not really you know specifically worried about whether there is a mind
or whether say for example how the mind is instantiated.
You are basically you know more interested as cognitive psychologist in the functional
architecture of the mind, okay. We assume that the mind might be composed of these mental
functions and we are also interested in studying how these different mental functions are
instantiated, how are they invoked, how do they lead to behaviour and all of this you can assume
that basically is happening within you know what you might want to call mind.
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So there will be a interesting debate you know in philosophy and say for example in areas of
cognitive science wherein you might want to take this discussion deeper and further and talk
about whether there is anything called mind or whether the concept of mind is necessary to
uphold or not. We have also in some little sense talked about neuropsychology and the
importance of studying disordered brains, that is why we capped off the lecturer with, we will be
capping off this entire lecture into series by talking about disorders of attention and perception
and disorders of memory.
As in one of the earlier lectures I was talking about it is important to study the damaged brain, it
is important to study a particular disorder of cognition because that gives us the idea of how
cognitive function or our theories into these different cognitive functions do a good or a bad job
of explaining real life scenarios wherein we are actually seeing that the system is broken down
and we are actually able to see where the deficits in the brain lie and where say for example you
know you can help these people, you can help come up with theories come up with you know
rehabilitative practices that can be helped you know these people to live their lives in rather
meaningful way. Now when I talk about the brain and I have already mentioned that, that a
cognitive psychologist is not particularly worried about the neural correlates of whatever
cognitive functions we have been talking but in practice a cognitive psychologist, the second
question you would ask after giving the function architecture is how is this implemented in the
brain?
You know so that is one of the reason why cognitive neuroscience works very closely with
cognitive psychology and therein what we are going to try to do all the time is trying to describe
a functional architecture of the brain or the mind in terms of specific cognitive functions but also
side by side asking the question that how are these cognitive functions you know instantiated in
the brain. Say for example you talk about memory and we have talked a lot about the regions of
brain that are involved in different kinds of memory, so once you are talking about memory it
becomes slightly important.
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It is probably the just the next question which you asked that you know which are the areas in the
brain wherein you know memory is stored, or say for example again is memory stored in any
specific area of the brain, I hope you would know by now it is not, but which are the areas
involved in you know creation of acquisition of human memory, binding of those new episodic
memory into semantic memory and those kind of questions can be asked about all the cognitive
functions. Also we talked about brain areas which are involved in attention processes, brain areas
that are involved in perception for example we spend a lot of time on visual perception, we also
spend some time on auditory perception, we will by you know now and be asking these
questions to ourselves. Now this is what we did in the first two weeks, third week we kind of
spend some time in understanding the research methodologies in cognitive psychology. I will tell
you why it is important to understand the research methodology in any subject.
It is important because everything that I have been talking about you know as far as the cognitive
functions are concerned, all of those data all of those inferences have basically been coming out
of particular experiments, We have say for example if somebody says that there is you know
three networks of attention, the alerting, orienting and innovation networks or executive
networks it has come out of you know decades of work by particular scientists who have done
experiments, who have shown time and again, these experiments have been replicated across
labs wherein you can you know with a certain degree of confidence say that these are the
particular cognitive functions and these cognitive functions are basically instantiated in the brain
in this particular way, both the description of cognitive function and the linkage of the cognitive
function to the brain have to be done by following specific research methodologies. So we talked
first about the basics of research methods generally from a psychologists perspective because as
not sure you know the kind of background all of you would be coming in from, but then we
moved on to talking about research methods and research methodology which are specific to
A lot of the research methodology that cognitive psychologists use typically with the help of
some of the tools, say for example an fMRI or EEG or PET etcetera are also used in the field
called
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cognitive neuroscience where what they are doing is they are now measuring the activity in the
brain when the brain is actually involved in these specific cognitive tasks. So you kind of travel
and make that link from demonstrating that this is the nature of the cognitive function.
Say for example priming occurs and then you kind of go on and tell people that you know, I
know that priming occurs but I also know that priming occurs in this part of the brain so my
claim is rather strengthened and it is in that sense it was necessary to talk about these you know
behavioural and other kinds of experimental methodologies. Also if you would have noticed that
we have made a specific effort of mentioning a lot of experimental studies in the material that I
have presented throughout you know this course on different topics, be it object recognition, be it
aspects of memory, be it aspects of attention etcetera, and most of these experiments basically
are actually you know the information that you would like to take away, that you would like to
take home with you.
Also at some point I will try and mention about the examination factors that are important for the
examination. It is important for you to remember these experiments, it is important for you to say
for example if you are quoting an academic argument about something have the idea of where
this experiment was conducted, where is this fact coming from, more often not the fact is coming
from a series of experiments which somebody did in a particular lab, and you generally would
like to quote that person while talking about that particular phenomena.
So also one of the reasons for covering these different research methodologies was that when I
am going to later talk about these different cognitive functions and facts about these different
cognitive functions I will be quoting a lot of these studies which you would have seen in the
material. These studies, how they have been done, I have already explained in the research
methodology section. So after I did that we started with again sensation and perception, we
talked a little bit about psychophysics which is basically about machine sensations.
We also talked about the interesting methods of a signal detection theory wherein talked about
how you know you can evaluate the presence or absence of a signal in a probabilistic manner.
We did both those kind of things. We moved onto visual perception in the second week wherein
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we were examining different theoretical approaches for perception. We began with talking about
the physiology of perception, the visual operators that there is, we talked a little bit about what
representation means.
Now when you talk about perception and this is something very interesting is that the perception
is basically in some sense the representation of the external world you know after that sensory
information that you gain that transudes into the currency of where the you know how the brain
communicates with each other, say for example we talked about how the light is converted into a
neural impulses of the optic nerve or sound is converted into auditory impulses at the ear at the
end of the auditory nerve.
So we are talking about how these you know basic inputs from the environment be it vision or
sight, be it vision or hearing or taste or smell are converted into neural impulses, so we were
talking about those kind of things and then we moved on to approaches of perception we covered
three major theoretical stand points, we covered Gibson’s ecological theory of perception, David
Marr’s 2.5 d theory of perception and also we talked about the constructists and other theories of
perception that were there.
Now the idea of really you know surveying these two or three theories of perception was to
actually bring to you how the different you know theoretical stand points have view perceptions.
You already probably remember that Gibson said that you know perception is not a passive act,
perception is when the individual is actively involved in interacting with the environment,
perception is for action, it does not lead to action per se, it is action and you would have seen
while by the end of the discussion on perception we talked about perception attention and action
things like way finding and you know things like interacting with objects and we talked about
object recognition theories and stuff.
We have found that this is a very interesting and important approach to perception, also we
talked about approaches say for example Davis Marr’s 2.5 d approach to perception wherein how
does a person you know from the sensory input builds 2.5 dimensional view of the
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World, 2.5 representation and then converts it from viewers representation to the objects
representation and when you are finally constructing the three dimensional view of the world.
So those things are also theoretically important, I hope you kind of gained something out of it
and you could appreciate how a very simple thing that for the most part take for granted that you
know that you can see colours and objects and motion and you know all these depths and all
these things almost automatically there are and again the spirit in to construct psychology that
there are these little, little computation that need to happen, these you know large chain of
representations that need to be build up because of which we will understand.
So for example, you are not really passively seeing something whatever you are seeing the
sensory information is being transfused and then that is you know going to the occipital areas
and then to the association areas where you are connecting the perceptual input to the memory
and the knowledge that you have about world and to the action possibilities like affordances.
And that is basically something that should give you a complete or more holistic understanding
of the process of perception.
Now when you talk about perception there is too much in this world to perceive, there is too
much information that you know that the world presents to us and one has to in that sense be able
to select and to be able to unselect some of this information. There is almost all the time too
many things happening around you but you cannot focus on all of them at the same time, so you
need to either select something that is important and that is what you will engage with the visual
stimulus or auditory stimulus or maybe something right just in your head which you want to
know you decide I want to focus on this part at this point in time I am not the other parts, so that
is basically achieved by this process called attention. We have talked about attention in a lot of
detail, we have talked about say for example aspects of selective attention, we talked about
divided attention, we talked about theories of visual search there and we have basically seen
through our discussions on these particular topics that how is attention.
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You know what kind of a role attention plays in modulating your interaction with the world,
modulating the kind of input that you are receiving in the world, also it tells you say for example
if you remember Treisman and Broadbent’s model and you know theories of attention that it is
not that what you are not really actively attending is completely gone, you might be processing
some of this say for example if you are talking about attenuated model of attention so you are
talking about things that may be you are prioritizing something attending in much more detail,
other things you might not be attending in that much detail but you still process in that in some
sense. So the shadowing task we are talking about the dichotic listening, the paradigm served as
a very good mean served as a very good experimental method to demonstrate that people can
attend you know or can be conscious of something, say for example the voice change and the
gender change and those kind of things of information in the unattended area or something that
you are typically not attending, per say.
So that is important that is you know that was a lot of discussion that we did and all of this
basically led us almost to the fourth and fifth weeks and then we came to the final sixth week
wherein we have talked a lot about, you know we are predominantly doing attention and then we
kind shifted our attention to memory and we have seen some of the basic models of memory, say
example Atkinson and Shiffrin model we talked about sensory memory, short term memory and
long term memory and while that was a useful model we also talked about the working memory
which is complement to the short memory.
We talked about how working memory is different from short term memory. Now the whole
concept of working memory is that which basically tells us that memory is also not really a
passive store, it is not really something you know it is not really like a shell you put something
there and stays there for some time before it is traveling to the long term memory. So we talked
about say for example how is working memory an active component which you know helps once
select specific information by use of central processes or central executive processes and you
know allocate the attention that might be needed to even carry out two tasks at the same time.
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So you talked about visual spatial sketchpad, we talked about the phonological memory and
talked about the control process, we also talked about the buffer at some point in time and this
complete model by Allen Bradley which has also undergone a variety of revisions tells us that
even memory in that sense may not be considered a passive process. Earlier information process
theory base models were basically taking different components of memories, different
components of memory as aspects that were rather passive wherein information goes, stays there
for some time then once the time is done it enough rehearsal is later it is received it goes from the
sensory to short term memory and short term to long term memory.
The concept of working memory however is different in that sense and told us that it is not like
that, we are actually constantly engaged with this information and we are kind of making
decisions of response selection, inhibition etcetera at this point in time, and then we came to
memory, we also started talking about you know different aspects of memory long term memory
say episodic memory, semantic memory, we also talked about what is the difference between
explicit and implicit memory and we learned that implicit memory is something very interesting.
Implicit memory is something which is you cannot talk about but you can say for example you
know show it by performance, say for example you will not be able to talk about how you
learned to ride a cycle but you can really ride a cycle and show me that you know how to ride a
cycle. We were talking about say for example influences that people have in life, say for people
have in their behaviour things like priming, things like classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning, you know classic learning paradigms but classical conditioning basically
leads to what is called an implicit memory, the influence, the association you would almost
automatically make and you will stick to those influences for long time, so we talked about these
aspects as well. We talked about the fact that you know how does for example how does one
understand everyday memory, say for example we were talking about autobiographical memory
that is basically the memory you talk about when you are thinking of memory.
So those are the kind of things you know we have been discussing, what is autobiographical
memory, autobiographical memory is memory about yourself and how is it you know easy or
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difficult to talk about autobiographical memory that is typically things that you would know. So
if an experimenter who wants to test your autobiographical memory becomes that much more
difficult. So all in all we talked about you know sensory memory, long term memory, short term
memory, we talked about working memory, we talked about episodic and semantic memory, we
talked about autobiographical memory.
We also spent a large part of one of the most recent lectures talking about the errors in memory.
Now that is an important aspect because we have say for example for the most part of people
assume that their memory is infallible memory, their memory is correct and it’s you know it is
always if they have something in the memory it is you know correct most of the time but if you,
when and when you see the lecturer of on everyday memory and memory errors you would
realize that it is a pretty simplified statement to make, memory, completely fallible memory is
prone to variety of errors.
Source attribution errors are one of the major kind of errors that happen and because of these
source attribution errors and also errors say for example faulty use of attention when you are
talking about things like weapon focus or say for example you know faulty use of stereotypical
things, the misinformation effect we have talked about, one has to realize that memory is a
constructive process, okay.
Whenever you are trying to pick up something from long past you are in some sense
inadvertently adding some of your own expectations and biases in the narration, there is a
folklore which says that when we start a whisper at one end of the room by the time it actually
reaches the other end of the room it’s the information is completely changed. If that is something
that can happen you know almost in the instant what would be happening of things that you have
you know you have been just narrating just out of your memory so we have been talking about
the fact of that as well. Now after we did talk about all of these cognitive functions and their
particular importance’s we have also in the last week talked about disorders, we talked about
unilateral spatial neglect, we have talked about in attention blindness, we talked about chain
detection, we talked about blind sight, we also talked about visual agnosias
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and we also talked about disorders of memory, you know organic and psychogenic amnesia. We
talked about anterograde and retrograde differences, we talked about amnesia that could be
because of temporal lobe surgery, frontal lobe lesions or say for example that could you know be
a result of electro convulsive therapy treatment.
So we have basically also gone into the space wherein one finds that there are interesting effects
like synaesthesia which is basically an interesting aspect of perception when a person can have
multiple sensory experiences with the same stimulus. So hearing a letter can induce the
perception of a colour and that is amazing in a sense that you know you could realize that how
this particular process is happening.
We also saw in one of the studies that actually the people who are hearing this letter, the
synesthetes, they actually experience you know activation in the region before of the brain which
is basically the one that experiences colour. So those are interesting things to know about, those
are interesting aspects to know that how does this particular theory work and how does this
particular theory go into you know explaining and doing a good job of explaining why these
things are happening.
The blind sight was one interesting example that even though because of the stereo cortex
damage there are areas of the visual field that are completely lost but still people are being able
to see, or say for example if not see but people are still being able to locate light flashes in those
regions. Now there are particular theories about these particular disorders but it is interesting in
the sense to know that a lot of that explanation still remains and that is typically what the
research in cognitive psychology is about.
We talked about also aspects of visual agnosia wherein the sensory system is completely intact
but the person does not detect, the person is not able to identify the objects, we talked about
unilateral spatial neglect which is typically a disorder of attention because the sensory processes
are intact and even when you know grab the attention of the participant in the heavy field that he
or she has been neglecting over a period of time a participant can report seeing that.
1398
So if you remember the experiment wherein the researchers asked the participants to describe a
particular landmark from one end and the other end they could eventually describe the landmarks
on both sides, even on the neglected side when the end was changed. So those were the details
that would help us and I hope you know it would have kind of fascinated you how these
disorders manifest themselves and how the theories of perception, say for example we are talking
about perceptual disorders or attention disorders or memory disorders.
Now what you have to do immediately is to you know to pick up all those theories which we
have studied in the earlier lecturers and try and apply those theories to understand these
particular disorders, that is typically the exercise one would expect you to, that will typically be
the take away that you know one would expect you to really have. So we talked about all of these
things, I think that I have summarized slightly broadly whatever we have done in the course of
this last eight weeks.
Before I go to Ranjith and before I start talking about the questions that you might have raised,
one of the thing that is interesting to also point out it that you will be having your exams
objective question papers for exams of this. It is necessary and that is something which I would
like to point out that you have gone through not only the theories but also the experiments
wherein say for example you know different kind of facts have been illustrated. So for the most
part if you are preparing for the exam it is necessary to really know the facts and really know the
experiments wherein those facts have come out.
Because that is what is your academic knowledge, you might have just learned something and
you might have something, you might have some facts but unless you can corroborate that by
mentioning a particular kind of literature that is not really going to help a lot. So this is pretty
much what I have to say about the course, I am hoping that you would have enjoyed the course, I
am hoping that you would have understood something about cognitive psychology and you have
gained some understanding of cognitive psychology.
You might feel free to email me personally on my iitk email address that is arkverma.iitk.ac.in .
If you have any queries or if you have any questions even later about cognitive psychology, if
1399
somebody wants to pursue cognitive psychology we have already a PhD program in cognitive
science here, we will also be having a Masters program in the next year onwards, so if you have
any kind of queries or questions you might directly email me and I will be happy to respond to
those questions.
I will move to Ranjith and I will ask him some of the questions that you have raised over time
and we will quickly have a small discussion on the fact and I will try and attempt to answer those
questions. One, so the first question I am going to ask which is given to me by the students is,
how can we talk about feelings like joy, happiness and sad without giving a reference to the
physical entity, this was mentioned in one of the lectures and we need a bit elaborate review.
Answer: So this is interesting because this is pretty much one of the questions that was you know
invoked while we were talking about the foundations of cognitive psychology. What I saying at
that point of time is that from the cognitive psychology perspective you can be content in talking
about the experience itself, obviously the experience is you know in some way related to
something, say for example you are not happy in isolation, so you are happy with respect to a
particular stimulus or you are sad with respect to a particular stimulus and that is something
which say for example you know is of descriptive kind.
But as a cognitive psychologist what I am interested in is not really what makes you happy so
much but how it makes you happy and what are the brain processes that are happening which are
leading you to experience these emotions. Say for example somebody feels sad or somebody
feels happy and there is you know in typical cognitive psychology there are studies wherein
people experiment with different kind of stimuli, for example they talk about there is
international effective picture database wherein people present happy faces and sad faces and
happy images and sad images.
And they measure how are people reacting to that, what it is going on in the brain, say for example
there could be behavioural responses and it has been shown in research that people respond to happy
faces much faster than they respond to sad or disgusted faces. So there are, you know there is lot of
research in this but the explanatory perspective in cognitive psychology is not really tied to the
stimuli that is
1400
indicating happiness or sadness, it is basically tied to the level at which this can be understood
and the level at which a cognitive psychology base explanation will operate is basically how are
you experiencing happiness.
What is it in your brain that is leading to happiness, also the functional architecture, say for
example what leads to say for example perception of certain things like happy or sad and those
kind, what are the basic building blocks of somebody feeling happy or sad, that is very much
what a cognitive psychology perspective would be. Question 2, so how is it different from the
behavioural perspective?
Answer: If you talk about behavioural perspective, the behaviour perspective would be that they
will not really be interested, that pure behaviourist stance will not be really be interested in
understanding what the, you know what is to feel happy or sad. The behaviourist stance would be
what are the stimuli that make you happy, what are the stimuli that make you sad and then a
systematic manipulation of those stimuli to achieve a particular kind of you that is pretty much a
behavioural stance, for example for this whole concept of operant conditioning wherein you
learn something on the basis of positive rewards and you know do not stop doing something if
there are punishments associated to it. So the behavioural stance is typically in giving a stimulus
and achieving a behaviour while the cognitive stance is somewhere in the middle. So after you
see the stimulus and before you do a behaviour what is it happening with you in terms of you
know what all is going on in your mind, in the mental processes.
Also what kind of you know reactions are going on in your brain, so this is basically the
difference between the behaviourist view of let us thing like emotions and things like say for
example you know the behaviourist part. By the way emotions as a topic will be covered in the
second version of the course which will be offered in January with the title introduction to
cognitive psychology, advanced cognitive process and that is where I will be talking about,
emotions in much more detail.
1401
Question 3: Going with the same question one of the twins has quoted, John B Watson, I don’t
know what context he has referred, so I mean the question is, we are studying the stimulus and
response control, kind of objectifying the theory of life. I mean that is what the question they are
asking, whether we can objectify the mind. Now that is that is one of the things, see that is where
if you will listen to the lectures you know that we have done, say for example in the foundation
of cognitive psychology section that is what I have tried to impress, that the whole point of
behaviourism say for example you know logical behaviourism per se says that you should not
talk about anything that is un observable in behaviour. So the whole point here is that, you know
the whole point of objectifying, say for example Watson’s stands on particular mental function
was could be so deterministic that it would say that for example if you can predict, you know if
you can predict human behaviour as per a set of your laws then you can actually you know
predict human behaviour in terms of you know.
As any physical function, as any physical or you know chemical reaction would be, but the thing
is that now coming to the objectification of the mind, the point is that cognitive psychology is not
really concerned with objectifying the mind per se, okay. There is an argument to that aspect and
I will touch it very soon but the whole point is that we are not really concerned with the stimuli
and the reaction; we are concerned with what is going on in the head.
Now what is going on the head is happening in abstract space and when you understand mind
and you understand you know a body you have this idea that mind is an abstract space, now how
is that abstract space instantiated. You cannot by virtue of giving stimulus space or stimulus b
and stimulus d and getting reactions A B you know d, e and f talk about what is going on in the
mind. So in that sense you cannot objectify the mind it is not really going to be working with
physical laws per say. So what you will be doing now coming to the objectification of the mind
is one of the theories that comes after say for example things like reductionism and eliminative
materialism so if you are going in that line then say for example I think Patricia church land
mentions that if you have completely understood how each of the mental functions is instantiated
by neural communication if we have completely understood how the brain is build up how each
of the
1402
neurons are connected to each other and how the activity in these sets of neurons leads to
particular mental functions then you might not need you know that whole concept of mind per
say. Then you don't really need the mind as a construct then you can start talking about the brain
and continue saying this is the brain which is doing this and not the mind.
That is basically that will probably be the at most objectification of the mind when we are in the
field able to understand the complete functioning of the brain. Just to tell you that we are too far
away from that we are kind of in the process of understanding the function of brain in the process
of understanding how the function of brain can instantiate the mind but there are huge gaps and I
think it will take us quite a long time to make this connection and to achieve you know
successful let us say objectification of the mind
Question: By the way, we are studying the mechanism which is underlying these mechanism we
can implement with artificial system example robotics actually the science for us if we find to
objectify or if we really study the mechanism underlying the process I mean we can't even
objectify the whole mind per say question may be the person didn't refer in what context what is
so we can't conclusively say whether he told that objectifying mind is wrong or correct. This is
the question posted in.
Answer: See objectifying mind again is not really a value judgment. It is basically about whether
you can do it or not and my answer is probably routed in that sense that may be you can objectify
the mind at some point of time but if you remember the last slide of the foundation lecture I said
even if you can objectify the mind per say even if you can say that you know whatever mind is it
is just neural activity.
And now we understand the complete brain the fact is as cognitive psychologist we are still
interested in something that is abstract the functional architecture say for example take an
example of a machine take an example of a computer pursue you know all the hardware you
know how each of the components of the mother board are assembled in all of you know the
hardware in all in its detail.
1403
But its say for example you don't really talk about the software always by talking about the
hardware, say for example you say that I have typed something you do not really say that I have
pressed this particular key which has given this particular signal and letters reached, you know
that is how this symbol P is appearing on a webpage. So the whole point is that as cognitive
psychologist we are really concerned in the functional part so much not really in the
objectification of the hardware components
And this lead me to other question, the classical question which we studied in philosophy of
mind may be this course is out of point but the question arises is mind body interaction, whether
Answer: Again the classic case of mind body interaction could be something very similar to you
know or probably a closest answers could be given from both philosophy but again I mentioned
Patricia Churchland about this whole concept of reductionism or eliminative materialism is the
fact is the closest instance of mind body interaction one could get is basically through the brain.
And how the various actions you know neuro chemical electrical actions that are electro
chemical reactions that are going on in the brain are instantiating the mind. There are theories
say for example there was a book by Roger Penrose. And I have sometimes mentioned it where
in say for example there are now feels like quantum neuroscience and wherein say people are
trying to understand even things like consciousness, from a slightly physical perspective,
perspective wherein say for example the action of the neurons is leading to a consciousness in
rather physical sort of a way, so in that sense there is obviously mind body interaction but is that
necessarily a dualist thing is something you know I would reserve my opinions on for example
there has been a lot of discussion on this in a classical philosophy modern philosophy as well
even philosophy of mind so if somebody is interested in these kind of questions i think
philosophy of mind and there are lot of books in philosophy mind if you kind of explore that
people like David Chambers and others have written about it a lot and those could be the
material that you would read and where in you we get I do not know answers but you will get
some information about these kind of questions there. Ranjith, we can broaden the perspective,
this is an outstanding question.
1404
Answer one of the thing about this course and we sometimes discuss it is that this whole concept
of cognitive science where does cognitive science as a field comes in and cognitive science is
basically you know all of these questions that you are asking as a cognitive psychologist
primarily a lot of these questions probably don’t fall in the preview of cognitive physiology or
let’s say do not have clear answers in cognitive physiology. Do you have clear answers in
neuroscience? Do you have clear answers in cognitive psychology, do you have clear answers in
neuroscience or philosophy in computer science, for that matter it is also debatable. So what
happens is a field like cognitive science, that is basically an interdisciplinary thing attempts to
look at these questions from all of these various perspective and tries to arrive if at close
answers, it is not really you know again the solutions are not there yet but things like cognitive
science are rather helpful in elaborating the factor illustrating these are multidisciplinary
questions that are not questions might ever be answered within one of these disciplines itself. So
the concept is as you already know is that as you pick knowledge from whatever it offers, so the
concept is as you already know is pick up from all unsolved questions from these various fields.
And you try to look at it, try to say example for in cognitive psychology we have been talking
about we are taking the help of cognitive neuroscience all the time. Cognitive neuroscience is
taking help of cognitive psychology by following the same kind of paradigm all the time. You
are put in some philosophical questions or say for example you are somebody who likes to do
computational modelling, so in computational modelling you are basically using principles in
you know parallel computation and you are using computational models to understand how the
process of cognition or a particular mental function that is a lot of work is going on in computer
vision, there is lot of work going on say for example in developing models of human decision
making process there is a lot of work going say for example in creating models of specific
cognitive functions, models of memory and models of attention models, of reading words, all of
those things are basically efforts in you know trying to solve this problem not even says solve
but understand this problem in from these different perspectives.
1405
And this leads to other question this person is from user interface, background that how this
course will benefit for him from his point of view? Answer: So how these courses benefit
somebody; let us say user interface design kind of background. Now one of the things is
whenever you are talking about a particular user whenever you are talking about designing a
particular product that is going to be used by your by human users human clients one of the
things is it will certainly help to understand how the persons you know thinks how the person
mental processes operate say for example, I could give an example of one of my seniors who is
working in triple IT in Hyderabad and at that point in time they were working on a project by a
software company who had commissioned them to design their web pages and you know one of
the things that those people would want to do is that see were in you know which are the areas of
webpage where the users are looking in, so which areas if you play say for example placing the
home button where should you place the home button where in the user finds its more convenient
to use.
So I think what you would want to measure here is how is the user interacting with my product
be it a webpage be it a particular you know utility device or something and what are the factors
that you can use to know to measure this comfort, you know measure the user experience. Say
for example if I remember correctly what they were doing was they were using eye tracker to
actually scan you know the page as to where the user was looking at any point in time and how
this you know looking at this different aspects of the webpage you know, and the difference say
for example if the home buttons are at top right corner or at top left corner there were ways to
measure which is more difficult or easy for the user. So these kind of feedback are taken by user
designed or user interface design companies all the times in designing these variety of projects.
Say for example even if you want to design a dashboard of a particular car how would you place
there is a basic architecture that is going to be the same but how would you place, say for
example other kinds of buttons or other kinds of functionalities which the user will find you
know easier to deal with, for all these theories of attention, for all of these, you know for any
moment which results in overt and covert time moments where they are paying attention.
1406
Answer: Exactly so you can use the knowledge that we shared in this particular course, say for
example theories of attention theories of perception how eye movements scan the particular
place and all of these will help you to understand, if you were giving a visual modality thing,
how it is going to help the person understand a particular thing. Ranjith: this is the end of
questions.
If you reached the end of questions I will invite Ranjith to talk about his experience. Ranjith has
done his Masters in cognitive science from CBCS, Allahabad; he is now he is a project staff in
one the projects I am involved in. I will just try and ask him to explain his experience about
doing cognitive science in the past three or four years I think he has been involved in.
Ranjith: So I completed my under graduation in electrical engineering so in that I had a course

on artificial intelligence, so that time I was intrigued by the term, it is called that they say these
are all biologically inspired algorithm, when they talk about some algorithm of artificial
intelligence. So that time I was intrigued by the question what biologically inspired algorithms,
but I thought my background will be a constraint to pursue something called neuroscience, and
that time I am not aware of that course for cognitive science and later I was persuaded my
fellowship in IIT Madras and from there I came to know there is an inter disciplinary field which
addresses all the questions of you know-mind brain.
And which has intrigued before so this is the this is the way that need to basic cognitive science
and later how it helped me to enhance my own knowledge level before cognitive science and
after cognitive science I came think of a complete shift in, how I thought about discipline. So we
had a compartmentalised knowledge which we have discussed before inter disciplinary multi-
disciplinary. So these concepts are not aware to me before I thought engineering is separate,
science is separate, arts is separate.
So when I studied cognitive science, you know like to address my own question I pick up
knowledge from whatever, discipline from linguistics you know philosophy from artificial
intelligence, from neuroscience so this will give a different perspective of you know tackling of
your own question, how this multiple discipline will help you to address your own question. So
my
1407
My mental block of compartmentalizing knowledge something as engineering or something as
science, something as arts this is shattered in the beginning when we started cognitive science.
Professor: So what was that made you particularly curious about let us say human behaviour or
the human brain and did you get any answers, while you were doing cognitive science and you
are doing still doing a research how does that you know help and how does that pan out? Ranjith:
so I actually, when people come to cognitive science I come with the fascination we are going to
predict human behaviour or how the mind operates or how can I able to detect how people are
thinking.
We can typical stereotype which to make for you know psychology you know read mind and
where people can study mind. So I also had the same thought when it is after pursuing while
perusing the study it is like a complete drastic difference in you know that we can’ do this so that
more questions before coming. So now the questions have increased actually that is.
Okay, so okay we will try and come to the end of this now and I hope, I will thank Ranjith for his
input and for his help with the course and whatever queries you had he helped answer then help
them and used to talk them in talk to me that these are the questions that people asking and I was
trying to also help him through this thing and he was the main person communicating with you
through emails and everything, through the assignments, solutions and those kind of things and
so I will thank Ranjith for his help for the course and I hope that you had a good experience
participating in the course.
I hope lot of you will be participating in exams and you will take away something from the
course that will increase your interest in cognitive psychology and say for example you know a
broader field like cognitive science per say. And there is a small announcement before it, we
have a skype, can you make it. So today I am kind of just taking questions which you already
sent, but there will be a Skype session that I would be hosting on 18th September at 7 p. m which
is basically wherein, I will be having a Skype session and all of you can participate in that and
1408
send in your questions live, and we can have some of the discussion like we had today directly
with you at point in time, thank you.
1409
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INDEX

S. No Topic Page No.

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)

(Refer Slide Time: 00:22)

What is the subject matter of psychology then.

(Refer Slide Time: 05:46)

As a science psychology applies what is called the scientific method? It emphasizes

(Refer Slide Time: 10:32)

Entering his anthropology class, he remembers that an exam is coming up soon.

(Refer Slide Time: 16:16)

He is perceiving his his environment, he is basically seeing people on campus walking. He is

When he thinks about different possible forms of transportation, so he actually is comparing

He is understanding whatever Susan saying, whatever he is thinking and also he is actually

(Refer Slide Time: 20:19)

Ministry of Human Resources & Development

Prof. Satyaki Roy

an IIT Kanpur Production

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)

(Refer Slide Time: 00:20)

I am Dr. Ark Verma, assistant professor of psychology in IIT, Kanpur.

(Refer Slide Time: 02:40)

(Refer Slide Time: 03:39)

(Refer Slide Time: 15:28)

(Refer Slide Time: 20:07)

So an organism basically learns to respond to a particular stimulus in a given situation if it is

Ministry of Human Resources & Development

an IIT Kanpur Production

National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)

(Refer Slide Time: 00:24)

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National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)

(Refer Slide Time: 00:18)

So in other words for cognitive psychologist or cognitive psychology it should be possible to

(Refer Slide Time: 07:57)

(Refer Slide Time: 10:21)

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(Refer Slide Time: 20:53)

Now coming to a different flavor of behaviorism which is logical behaviorism, logical

(Refer Slide Time: 28:23)

(Refer Slide Time: 29:12)

Ministry of Human Resources & Development

an IIT Kanpur Production