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Principles of cognitive theory
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Introduction
The mind is an intriguing element of the human life not only because of its complexity and capability but mostly because of its opacity. How does psychology begin to understand something so obscure and complex? Evidently, by observing and measuring the product of the cognitive processes that occurs through an interaction between the external and internal world.
The term ‘cognitive processes’ is a rather collective term referring to a range of mental processes such as perceiving, thinking, speaking, acting, planning and imagining (Ward, 2006). The processes themselves are immensely difficult to measure directly, if possible at all. However, one may gain insight into these mental processes through observing the covert products, such as haemodynamic and electrophysiological changes and the overt products, such as behaviour, accuracy, response times and eye movements. The scope of this essay is to review the evidence that demonstrates exactly how eye movements reflect cognitive processes. Due to the vastness of the topic, this essay will focus on only one of the aforementioned cognitive processes. There has been much attention and extensive literature and reviews regarding eye movements as a tool for understanding the processes of reading, visual perception, visual search and attention (e.g., Rayner, 1998; Liversedge and Findlay, 2000; Schutz, Braun and Gegenfurtner, 2011). All the mentioned research fields involve measuring eye movements while view some form of visual stimulus, this dissertation will explore a more aberrant field, evidence will be based on literature relating to eye movements when sensory visual input is absent, during visual mental imagery.
While reviewing the literature basic themes relating eye m...
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...nformation processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 372-422.
Schutz, A.C., Braun, D.I., & Gegenfurtner, K.R. (2011). Eye movements and perception: A selective review. Journal of Vision, 5, 1-30.
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Sima, J.F., Lindner, M., Schultheis, H., & Barkowsky, T. (2010). Eye movements reflect reasoning with mental images but not with mental models in orientation knowledge tasks. Spatial Cognition, 10, 248-261.
Spivey, M.J., & Geng, J.J. (2001). Oculomotor mechanisms activated by imagery and memory: eye movements to absent objects. Psychological Research, 65, 235-241.
Ward, J. (2006). The students guide to cognitive neuroscience. New York: Psychology Press.
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Sensory signals relating information about our physical movements, as well as information regarding external object motion, are required in order to preserve a stable and accurate view of the world, and estimate external motion. Space constancy is the visual system’s ability to maintain a view of the outside world that does not jump about and move with an eye movement (Deubel, Bridgeman, & Schneider, 1998; Stark & Bridgeman, 1983). A simple way of achieving this is to add the velocity estimates that are derived from afferent and efferent motion signals. The sum of these estimates would result in head-centred motion. For instance, the image on the retina of stationary objects in the world would gain a motion opposite and equal to any eye movement. As suggested above, reafferent retinal motion should provide a velocity estimate of similar magnitude to the efferent estimates of eye movement. If these two estimates are equal to one another, but have opposite sign, then their sum would correctly suggest null motion.
To be familiar with this field, section 1.2 illustrated eye gaze terminology, also to recognize importance of studying eye gaze behavior in real life, some applications related to gaze behavior present in section 1.3 in different fields, such as medical field, transportation field, psychology field, usability field, packaging field, and sport field. Finally,
There is almost no doubt that there is a relationship between psychology and philosophy. Indeed, many people actually considering that the philosophies related to and concerned with the mind and thought are the precursor to modern psychology. Of course, most of these philosophies were decidedly western, or popular in the west. However, the problem with our western views of consciousness in philosophy and psychology is that often times the way we view the conscious process leads to a so-called "infinite regression." That is to say, if we see consciousness as a set of rules guiding our experiences in life, there must also be another set of rules that defines how we know when to use those rules, and so on and so forth. (Kurak 2001, 18-19). In this paper, I will attempt to show how we can turn to Buddhist principles to help us gain a better understanding of human consciousness.
Research in this field found preferential differences in an adult when their eye gaze is directed towards an object, as opposed to faces with eye gaze averted from an object, in neonates (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002). Reid and Striano (2005) examined 4-month-old infants looking at adult faces with their eye gaze directed towards an object and averted away from an object. It was found that infants looked substantially shorter at the object that was cued by the eye gaze. They concluded that the cued object was familiar compared with the uncued object which was seen as novel and therefore attracted more attention. Reid, Striano, Kaufman, and Johnson (2004) expanded upon previous research and investigated neural activity using event related potentials to measure an infants’ reaction to direct and averted eye gaze. A positive slow wave measure was adopted and it was found that the amplitude was larger for the averted eye gaze condition compared against the direct eye gaze condition. This increase indicated that the averted eye gaze was seen as novel compared to the direct eye gaze, substantiating what had been found in previous research.
Shapiro, F. (2001). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures (2nd ed.). New York, New York: Guilford Press.
Matsumoto, K., Shibata, S., Seiji, S., Mori, C., & Shioe, K. (2010, June). Factors influencing the processing of visual information from non-verbal communications. Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences , 64 (3), pp. 299-308.
Vecera, S.P. & Gilds, K.S. (1998) What Processing is Impaired in Apperceptive Agnosia: Evidence from Normal Subjects. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10 (5), p.568
Humans have been studying eye movements for many years now. The first recorded person to publish studies that contributed to the field of eye tracking was Louis Émile Javal [1, 2] in 1878, roughly a century before computers started becoming commonly used. Javal observed human eye movement while reading and was the first to observe that eyes make a combination of rapid movements (which he called saccades) and short stops (which he called fixations). Javal conducted this experiment without the assistance of any instruments, using only his naked eye.
The report also discussed the advantages of pupil dilation accurately. It could help the research reach more and wider samples, such as minors. However, the report failed to encompass the limitations of pupil dilations. As was stated in the research article, pupil dilations could be affected by noise, such as “luminance and cognitive load” (Rieger & Savin-Williams, 2012).
To attempt to relinquish some of these concerns regarding the differentiation of mind and behaviour definition, Whiten (1996) established four distinct variations of mind- reading. These are implicit mind- reading, counter- deception, recognition of intervening variables, and experience projection. Impli...
Stich, Stephen and Nichols, Shaun. 1996. How do minds understand minds? Mental simulation versus tacit theory. In Stephen Stich Deconstructing the Mind. Oxford University Press.
In the process of human infants’ development, infants start to learn how to communicate with the others at the surprising early age, for example: Newborns can follow objects to make saccades to peripheral targets (Farroni et al., 2004);Infants’ responding eye gaze behaviour increase constantly since two months old (Scaife & Bruner, 1975); Cooper and Aslin pointed out that this preference showed up as early as the infants were one month old in 1990. Infants not only can respond to eye contact, vocal cues also are used for gaining more reference information during a communication, particularly when the speech is conducted forward to the infants. It had been reported in many studies that infants show more preference to infant-directed communication
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind In Society:the development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.
...occurring in foveal vision away from the midline however this is not visible or obvious when recognition of visual information occurs. There is an overlap at the centre of the fovea where information projects simultaneously to both hemispheres, this being consistent with the bilateral theory. On the other hand, split fovea theory is an interesting theory of fixation effects that has been inspired by previous research unconnected with split fovea theory and thus incapable of providing appropriate evidence. More recently, split fovea theory has been based on experiments conducted specifically in its support but in which fixation locations were not monitored and stimuli exceeded foveal vision. It is good to see that research in the area is beginning to improve but it is difficult to be enthusiastic about any theory when there is no compelling evidence to support it.
Blakslee, S. (1993, August 31). The New York Times. Retrieved May 2, 2014, from www.nytimes.com: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/31/science/seeing-and-imagining-clues-to-the-workings-of-the-mind-s-eye.html