Context is Key. A guest post by Danielle Sugrue.

In our cognitive psychology class last week we had been informed that we had to give a presentation regarding language.  We were each assigned a question that we had to present for one minute on one slide.  My question was “what is speech segmentation?”  Speech segmentation is the ability to recognize words in a conversation; it is the break or pause in between each word we say.  But when you hear a language you have never heard before it becomes very difficult to distinguish where the pauses are when that person is speaking. Therefore, speech segmentation is not only the ability to perceive words in conversations but it is also aided by the context provided by the words and sentences that make up the conversation. 

            All of the presentations were very well explained and helped broaden my understanding of language.  I did enjoy the idea of practicing presenting in front of a class; however, I did not like how short the presentations had to be.  Trying to meet the minute requirement made me nervous.  I did not feel very confident once I finished because I was focusing more on the time rather than the information I had practiced to present.

            In addition, it was nice to mix things up and have the students teach the class instead of our professor.  It was fun and it was nice to see how supportive and respectful our classmates were. 

            The information provided by the students was informative and sparked my interest in language and how much there is to it.  One question that stood out to me was lexical ambiguity.  This refers to the fact that a word can have more than one meaning and that the word’s meaning in a sentence may not be clear.  Lexical priming experiments show that all meanings of a word are activated immediately after the word is presented but then context quickly determines the appropriate meaning.  For example the word bug can refer to insect, or a hidden listening device, or even being annoyed.  When these ambiguous words appear in a sentence we normally use the context of the sentence to determine which definition applies. 

            This topic was interesting to me because I never actually thought about how a word can mean something else if someone did not finish their sentence.  Take for example: “Amanda believed the senator…” This could mean a number of things, which then ties into semantics and syntax.  It is important to understand the meaning of the word and the rules for combining words in order to carry on a conversation and prevent serious misunderstandings.

What are you REALLY saying?

                 This week in class we discussed the psychology of language. However, what we looked over was the psychology of body language. As someone with a personal interest in body language, this is a topic I chose to delve into deeper. 

                By watching the above video, you can allegedly learn how to become “a human lie detector.” Now this may sound somewhat outrageous, but the study of body language is not entirely pseudoscience. Research results have actually shown some great promise and it is through these results, media acknowledgements, and personal experience that I will describe the psychology of body language.

                One main focus point for those interested in body language actually stems from political debates and public opinions. As a psychology and political science double major, I absolutely love watching political debates. When you watch a debate, you probably try hard to focus on the questions being asked and the responses being given. However, subconsciously you are also paying attention to the body language of the debaters; if the speaker’s opponent is making faces, rolling his/her eyes, making exasperated or aggravated noises, etc. You pick up on these things with or without actively trying to.

                  In a study done by Seiter et al. in 1998, viewers had more positive attitudes toward the speaker when the speaker’s opponent displayed visible disagreement by rolling his eyes, shaking his head, etc. When they witnessed this they were far more likely to rate the speaker higher in competence, character, sociability, and composure. This study shows that even without focusing on body language, negative body language draws our attention and evokes psychological and emotional responses. Another study done by Seiter in 2001 showed that the same behaviors can even lead viewers to believe the speaker’s opponent is deceptive and thus that the speaker is truthful. 

                 If you have ever watched the show “Lie to Me” (and if you have not you absolutely should!), then you would see a lot of cases of assessing body language, especially through facial ticks and expressions and cues. In the show they often point to real examples (often of politicians) and give legitimate explanations of what these subconscious signals mean. There are a lot of aspects of our body language that are subconscious and therefore virtually uncontrollable. For example, depending on who we are talking to, subconsciously our blink rate can alter to show that we may be emotionally or physically interested in the person we are talking to, or even that we are lying or nervous. However, it does not come close to ending there. Other eye mannerisms, such as the direction we are looking, can also give way to information. It is believed that if someone is looking to the left, it means they are reminiscing or trying to remember something. On the other hand, if someone is looking to the right it could mean they are lying or trying to make something up (note the meaning of directions can change if the subject is left-handed).

                However, this only examines eye cues (and not even all of them!). Another interesting thing about body language is how people try to consciously use it or be aware of it to hide things or deceive. For example, a common occurrence with people (I’m guilty of this myself) includes putting a very active effort into hiding emotions, i.e. smiling to hide if you are upset. We also try to be actively aware of other’s body language in hopes of understanding what our significant others, professors, or friends really mean (though without the appropriate training, background, and research, we often do this incorrectly). Poker players are known for their “poker face:” which is being actively aware of their own facial cues and those of others in hopes of deceiving their opponents. People who are arrested (especially on television) try to keep a straight face and use very little body language in hopes of deceiving the police and hiding their actual thoughts and feelings, but to the trained eye this is unsuccessful. We cannot control every single aspect of our body language. Think about this the next time you’re entering a poker match or trying to tell your significant other “No, I did not cheat on you” or tell your parents “No, I have no idea who broke that!” Or perhaps if you are someone’s roommate and want to be civil and maybe even kind, don’t let your body language deceive your façade. For all you know, the person you are talking to is going to be far more aware than you expect them to be. Especially if they just read this post.

articles referenced for this post:

http://www.psychologistworld.com/bodylanguage/eyes.php

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beyond-words/201210/the-science-body-language-the-debates

Excuse me, sir. That's a trash barrel. A guest post by Sal Schiano

Have you ever been to a fast food drive thru and tried to order your food through one of these…

                    ?

If you are like most people this may happen every now and again when you are distracted by other things or just having a rough day. A possible explanation for why this happens is as follows.

Our brains are essentially just incredibly fast computers, but they need some shortcuts to operate efficiently. We tend to categorize different concepts, through a process by which things are placed into groups, or categories. Once you know something is in a certain category you know a lot more about it. For example, because this trash barrel above does not look like your average trash barrel and is usually positioned right next to the menu at a drive thru window, it is harder for your mind to categorize it. The real purpose of the barrel is to make the trash toss from your car a bit easier. However if you are hungry and distracted staring off at the menu you may start to call out your order into the shoot of the barrel, misperceiving it as the order window.

Why does this happen? Because it looks just like something you would talk into…it also does not look like a normal trash barrel. Your rules for the category “trash barrel” may be a container that is round/square and open, holds trash and has a bad odor.

At first glance this does not fit into your rules of a trash barrel. Nor does it look like a typical member, or a prototype, of the trash barrel category, meaning it has low prototypicallity. This barrel also does not look like any other trash barrel you have seen in the past. For you, an exemplar of a trash barrel looks more like this…

               or this 

Hopefully though, you realize that the drive thru trash barrel does have some similar characteristics to the barrel you know, such as smell, and that it actually might be a trash barrel that you are ordering into. At that point you’d probably play it off, toss something in, drive up to the correct window, and order your food.

So why are categories important?

They allow us to recognize new things. After taking a second gander and realizing that the drive thru barrel really looks like a trash barrel, just with a funky attachment on top, we realize that it fits into the category of a trash barrel.

Once we realize the category we understand how to use it. Or in this case how not to use it, and we behave appropriately i.e. stop talking into a trash barrel.

Pay Attention or You Might Miss a Trick. A guest post by Kyle Luke.

          When I first started as a martial artist, I remember having sparring matches against opponents and getting a form of tunnel vision in which I completely focused on the opponent in front of me.  This was helpful because I was able to notice when my opponent was about to attack, thus I was usually able to counter the attack; however, it meant that I had difficultly perceiving anything besides my opponent.  My attention was so focused on my opponents that I used to lose track of my surroundings and I lost a good amount of points and matches because I stepped out of bounds. As I continued training and practicing my martial arts I was able to get more comfortable with my surroundings in the ring and was soon able to determine my location just by muscle memory,  which allowed me to divide my attention between my footing and my opponent.   Thus, much like the experiments conducted by Walter Schneider and Robert Shiffrin (1977) showed that it is possible to carry out two tasks at the same time with practice and by processing one of the tasks almost without thinking, I was able to achieve a similar outcome as I could track my location in the ring without consciously thinking about it.  This is pretty similar to the way I performed my sleight of hand and magic.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I used to practice and perform sleight of hand and magic when I was young.  I had to spend many hours practicing the techniques and the tricks so that I could perform them with little thought by relying on the muscle memory I had acquired by practicing and performing the techniques for days on end.  By using my muscle memory I was free to focus on interacting and communicating with the audience, which allowed me to get the audience to focus on what I wanted them to.

Many of the techniques that I used are based on the fact that people are not able to consciously pay attention to two things at the same time.  This worked because most people are not practiced enough to pay attention to one thing yet notice the subtle movement happening somewhere else.  The techniques rely on spectators getting a similar form of tunnel vision as the one I got in martial arts. They would focus on a misdirection that I caused and would be so intent on not letting anything sneaky happen in that location that they do not realize that the “magic” happened right in front of their very eyes. 

           Thinking about it now, essentially all the tricks and sleights of hand that I am able to successfully perform are due to selective and divided attention.  Due to the amount of time that I spent practicing my techniques I am able to divide my attention between both the audience and the trick without difficulty and I am able to influence what the audience pays their selective attention to.  The audience, which is generally looking to discover the secret to the tricks anyways, will focus so much on one location that they completely miss which is actually happening.  Therefore, next time someone is showing you a magic trick try not to focus so much on a small portion of the trick but on the act as a whole and see what a difference it makes.

*I included a youtube video with a simple trick that uses misdirection.  I tried to find the fairest video I could of the trick that did not reveal how it was done and this was the best I could find.  So take a look, think about what grabs your attention and what slides under it. Have fun.

How did I get all this knowledge in my head?

How do we know what we know? We rely on concepts, categories, and schemas. Categorization means the same thing in psychology as it means in daily life; it’s the process by which we place things into groups, or categories. For example, you have probably categorized receipts for taxes, or at least I did this when I interned at a law firm. I had to learn what receipts fell into what category to file them accordingly; an example from my experience would be restaurant receipts being filed with personal expenses, but parking slips or court personnel receipts being filed with court expenses. We use these categories to understand things we have never seen before and use that new understanding to adjust our schemas (ooh the connection is so exciting!). An example of this from my internship would include when I found delivery receipts for court documents: was this a personal expense or a court expense? I had to adjust personal expenses to include receipts for things relevant to court that were considered personal and professional responsibility (like photocopying evidence documents for the opposing side).

Now let’s see where schemas come in. Schemas are generalized definitions we make about categories. By watching the link you can see how schemas present in the movie “Bambi.”

*watch link now* schema example in the movie "Bambi"

As you can see, Bambi thought the flower was a butterfly because it fit his general definition of a butterfly. When he learned that it was not a butterfly, but was a flower, he created a new general definition, or schema, for all flowers. Therefore, when the skunk popped out of the ground and was “pretty,” Bambi thought the skunk was a flower. We constantly readjust old schemas and create new schemas so that we can have a place for everything. This helps us sort things we do not recognize, such as an odd looking animal or a super modern car.     

Another example of categorization and schemas occurs when you glance at the picture above. If you look at it quickly, you likely think “oh, it is orange with black stripes, four legs, and a tail; it must be a tiger.” However, when you examine it more closely you might realize the face looks more like that of a dog and might even take into account situational factors such as the white picket fence. So is it a tiger or is it a dog? Obviously you are able to figure out that this is a dog decorated to look like a tiger, so you categorize this with the other dogs. This seems easy, but things become more difficult when you try to figure out just how categorization works; we’re not even sure.       

Here I’ll explain different theories of categorization and you can choose which one you think is right. The first approach is the definitional approach to categorization. This approach argues that we determine members of categories by defining the category and then determining if the object fits the definition. The flaws with this approach stem from the definition itself; it is often so specific that it excludes things that should belong yet so vague that it includes things that don’t. The prototype approach to categorization argued that first you determine the prototype, or “typical” member, of a category and then compare the object in question to that prototype to determine category membership. The flaw with the prototype approach is that some categories don’t have a typical member; some categories are even ad hoc categories. This is how the exemplar approach to categorization arose; this approach focuses on exemplars, or actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past. The main flaw that I can see with this is if you don’t encounter a type of bird, does that mean it is not a bird? So I don’t know which approach is correct, perhaps none of them are. But nonetheless they all improve our insight into how our mind puts things into categories without us actively thinking about it. Whether or not we can’t explain it, it sure is impressive.

Is technology destroying our attention spans? A guest post by Nicholas Imlach

           Attention, or the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations, is something everyone does daily. Since we can only focus on or pay attention to one thing at a time, the question to ask is how do we hold the attention of students and help train their skills? An article I read this week brought up the notion of the digital age and its effect on people’s attention span. I found myself agreeing on some of the topics, but I found myself questioning others.

            First, the writer, Barry Schwartz, postulates that in this age people have “diminished attention.” I do not disagree with him. However, his follow-up point I have an issue with; Schwartz goes on to discuss how people are so used to getting their news and information online that if the information they are looking for is not succinct then they will lose interest. He goes on to say the information they receive is, in his words, “up-to-the-minute” but it is too short and “frustrating in their brevity.”

I have an issue with that statement because as someone who gets his information in short tidbits, I do not seem to have a noticeable issue with the brevity of the articles. I also have an issue because whenever one of my professors asks for a 10 page paper covering a specific topic I often end up with 8 or so pages of material and fill the rest. On the other hand, when a professor asks for a 2-4 page paper on a similar topic, I find it more difficult to come in under the four-page limit because I have to pick and choose the most important information. I feel as an information consumer we need to understand that shorter articles will not have all of the information on the topic, but they will be a good starting point to base a discussion off of.

The article goes on to talk about attention and how it is like a muscle and needs to be trained. I completely agree; attention needs to be strengthened and as consumers we need to be able to use our attention to learn as much as we can. In this age, people do not have the luxury to sit and spend 30 minutes to an hour reading articles on everything that interests them. There would be no time for anything else. Yes the information floating around on the Internet today is brief and succinct, but I argue that it needs to be. A few semesters ago,  one of my professors said something to the effect of the New York Times today has a month or year’s worth of information to someone in the early 1900’s.

Information is increasing, believe it or not, faster than the number of people on the planet. And in order to keep up with the inordinate amount of information available today, people need to have their snippets of information. Without them people would be stuck on a single topic for much longer than they should be. I will say the brief portions of information on the Internet should be used as a starting point to build a base of knowledge. I will end on agreement with Schwartz in saying that we need to continue to teach children that the 100 word news story is not the only source they have. Students should be taught to dig deeper and focus their attention on subjects that interest them and know that the short articles are a good base to begin to build off of, but should not be everything. 

article link

Where's the magic in that? A guest post by Kyle Luke

One of my favorite hobbies as a child was to buy and look at optical illusion books with my cousins and friends.  We would spend hours examining them and trying to figure out how it worked; needless to say we didn’t get very far in understanding the optical illusions.  Yet, it still interested us and I believe it was these hours spent wondering how images could change right in front of my very eyes that caused me to take up magic and sleight of hand as a hobby.  For years I performed as a magician for my little cousins and at volunteer events around my neighborhood.  During this time I never really considered just how similar the optical illusions I examined as a child and the sleight of hand I was performing now really were.  Yet, as I learn about the cognitive psychology concepts related to optical illusions, I have finally figured out that they are essentially one and the same. 

                Both optical illusions and sleights of hand use many of the same tools in order to fool people. By knowing how the people perceive information about their surroundings, those who create optical illusions or perform sleights of hand are able to trick the mind into perceiving whatever they want it to.  For example, the mind naturally tries to turn partial information it senses into something it recognizes; this is clearly demonstrated by the following example.

the mind naturally tries to turn partial information it senses into something it recognizes.

 This is actually a common method that magicians and illusionists use to perform their “magic.”  It is interesting to note that if people were to use bottom-up processing while watching optical illusions and sleights of hand, they would not be tricked.  However,  I know that it is impossible to only use bottom-up processing, as the mind naturally uses outside information along with what it senses from the stimulus.   

                As I mentioned earlier, I used to enjoy looking through optical illusion books as a child, amazed at how the figures seemed to magically change in my hands.  It was very similar to my fascination with magic and how I tried to learn all the secrets of how the tricks of sleight of hand were done.  Yet, what I did not realize at that young age was that once you understand how the magic trick is done, you lose the enjoyment of being completely amazed by it.  You realize that it is not magic and your sense of wonder leaves.  I realize that the same can be said for optical illusions.  All the optical illusions that we saw in class I had seen before and I already knew the tricks.  However, I did not truly understand just how the mind worked to perceive the illusions,  I only understood the basic concepts of why I saw the hidden word or why I was able to see a face instead of a mouse.  Learning about the cognitive psychological concepts that are used in creating optical illusions and magic tricks has given me a greater understanding and appreciation for them both.  It taught me the reasons why the secrets used in magic tricks and illusions work, which has given me an entirely different perspective on the subject.