Thursday, November 21, 2013


 This is my digital scrapbook entry for Cognitive Psychology Fall Semester for Dr. Kim Darnell's class.
First, let's start with cognitive neuroscience. I will provide the link below for the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode I will be referencing.
In this episode, Vedek Bareil suffers from a massive brain injury resulting in severe hemorrhaging in his parietal lobe, among other brain areas. He is pronounced brain dead, but is later revived. Near the end of the episode, he has electronic implants put in his brain where damage occurred. One of the ship members touches him after he wakes up from his surgery. He then says, "When you touch me, it doesn't seem real...more like a distant memory..."
So, how does this relate to the parietal lobe? Well, let's go over the functions of the parietal lobe. The parietal lobe is involved with spatial recognition and movement through space. It is also responsible for integrating sensory information with other information in the brain. When he says that feeling a touch does not seem real, I believe this serves as evidence of his parietal lobe damage. I theorize that there was a malfunctioning in his parietal lobe that did not allow him to integrate his sensory information correctly, so that he does not attribute the touch to being real. Any kind of sensory information may also be affected, such as smell and taste, if this were the case.

Perception:

A term from the perception section of our book is the law of good continuation. This is one of the Gestalt Principles, and states that when an object is overlapped by another object, we still perceive that object as being continuous even though we cannot see the entire object. It also states that points that are close together will be perceived as a continuous curved line as opposed to separate entities. 
(Memory alpha, 2013)
In this picture, the clapperboard is in the way of two of the actors' heads. However, we still perceive them as continuing behind the clapperboard and not just disappearing behind it. We know that the people still exist even though we cannot see their entire faces and bodies. This is how the law of good continuation works. 

Attention:

(Reeves, n.d.)
This picture illustrates a person trying to put together some kind of furniture. From the look on his face, it may be from IKEA (we all know that their instructions are completely useless). This person probably has not put together this kind of furniture before. This task would be undertaken using a controlled process. A controlled process is used in a situation that is new to the person or one they have not encountered before. It requires a great deal of attention and effort and usually takes a lot of time to complete. They are usually step-by-step in nature. Putting together a new piece of furniture can definitely be challenging. There are usually instructions that are broken down for the person who is building the new piece of furniture. It may take several hours to complete as well. The puzzled look on the person's face indicates that this will probably be a hard and long venture.  

Memory:

In this episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon is trying to train Penny to do things the way he wants through conditioning. Every time she behaves in a way that he approves of, he gives her a chocolate. Over time, her behavior changes and she is acting more like how Sheldon would want her to act. Conditioning occurs when a certain response is elicited from a certain stimulus. For example, I could train my dog to always sit when he hears a clicking noise if I can associate sitting down when he hears a click with a treat. This is part of our implicit memory, which are the memories that we are not consciously aware of and that are hard to explain. Penny may not even know she is being conditioned with chocolate and may have a hard time explaining her change in behavior.  

Language:

In this episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, something strange happens to Chief O'Brien. He starts talking to his comrades, but he is not making any sense. His words seem to be random and jumbled. No one can understand him. However, he seems unaware that he is not making any sense and is confused on why everyone is looking at him strangely. From this clip, it seems that Chief O'Brien may be suffering from Wernicke's aphasia. Wernicke's area is responsible for the comprehension of speech and language and also for retrieving words. This form of aphasia is typically marked by speech that is articulate but that does not make much sense and an inability to realize that what they are saying is not making sense. To them, they think that they are communicating just fine. This type of aphasia is also marked by trouble comprehending language. I can infer from the confused look on his face when other people are talking to him that he may be experiencing trouble in understanding what they are saying to him as well.  

Problem Solving:
(Goodison, 2010)
In this photo, a guy is trying to choose the best hair style for him. After trying multiple different ways of styling, he finally comes to the solution and finds his perfect hair style. This is a type of problem-solving technique called trial and error. This type of problem solving involves identifying the problem (what hair style he wants to have) and trying out many different solutions before arriving to the solution that you want (in this case, he tried three separate times before deciding on a hairstyle). This type of problem solving can be time consuming and is actually the least efficient method to solving a problem. It is the least efficient not only because it can take up so much time before coming to a solution, but a solution may not even be found since it mostly relies on luck to get to the solution.  

Decision Making:
(Payne, 2013)

In this image, the woman is stating that the boy dropped his ice cream because God found out what he did to her stamp collection and he is now paying the consequence. She is correlating his misfortune to retribution for her destroyed stamp collection. This is an example of illusory correlation. This occurs when we think that two events are related, even though they are not. The reason this occurs is that we are always trying to find meaning and patterns in the world around us. Sometimes, due to this, we find patterns in the world that do not really exist. The kid dropping his ice cream has nothing to do with what he may have done to her stamp collection. He may have tripped or the ice cream cone was poorly made to begin with. Either way, she is attributing what happened to something that has nothing to do with the situation at hand. This is an example of how our reasoning can go wrong and lead us to a false conclusion, and in this case an illusory correlation. 
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)