2023: Modern Trends in Cognitive Processes
Evgenia Leonova, PhD, MBA
Life Sciences Executive, Entrepreneur, Lecturer, Speaker
Content:
Booming cynicism and the social psychological external reasoning behind of it
"Out of almost 8000 respondents from 41 countries, many agree that ‘powerful people tend to exploit others’ or that ‘kind-hearted people usually suffer losses’”
The scientists explain this phenomena as a ‘cynicism paradox,’ where people are primarily motivated by self-interests that are accompanied by emotions such as contempt, anger, distress, and antagonistic interactions with others. And the statistics show the situation got worse in the last few years.
According to Eric Neumann, et. al, 2023 the external events might increase the level of cynicism.
Some of the explanations they found are:
Combating superiority and stigma by changing how we analyze, interpret, and describe differences
Rebecca F. Schwarzlose, 2023 from the Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine addressed the important question in her research on the interpretation of differences and abilities of stigmatized groups of people such as people of color, and people with physical and mental disabilities.
She pointed out that while often an approach is scientifically sound, our interpretations of the findings are often biased by the assumption that people without stigmatized conditions are neurally and mentally ideal. In her article, she brought examples of often wrong assumptions and interpretations:
Students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) tend to perform worse than the student without diagnosed ADHD on controlled laboratory tests, but the groups did not differ on behavioral inhibition when tested in the context of video game play.
Autistic people perform better than non-autistic people on tasks requiring processing of sensory detail and people with depression make less biased perceptual judgments on certain tasks than people without depression.
The author believes that simple changes to how we collect and interpret our data can help us adopt this framework, counteracting long-standing biases and making our science fairer and more accurate:
How we interpret the body distortions
Michela Bassolino et al from the Institute of Health, School of Health Sciences, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Sion, Switzerland pointed out that body distortions have always been seen only from a perceptual perspective. His group brought up a new approach considering motor control. From their perspective ‘motor control’ can “help to unveil their origin and function: what factors contribute to the emergence of distortions and what function do distortions play in mental life? Addressing these questions is not only of theoretical significance but could open the way to exploit body distortions in areas ranging from prosthetic control to assistive.”
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People hide, research seeks → eye-tracking in the concealed information test (CIT)?
The concealed information test (CIT) is an attempt to analyze forgotten things. ‘The concealed memories are a common phenomenon across multiple areas such as criminal law and neuropsychological evaluations’.
The most common ways for analyzing the hidden hints were sweating, heart rate, breathing, and other autonomic nervous systems (ANS) responses.
Oryah C. Lancry-Dayan et al referred to the previous research where it was shown that memory can guide eye movements and if a person is familiar with a subject matter his/her eye behavior is a lot more efficient in visual exploration. The researchers showed big promises of incorporating eye-tracking into the CIT protocol.
Copying and reasoning in Cumulative technological culture
“This hypothesis rightly emphasizes that social learning is a much more effective catalyst than asocial learning for individuals to acquire new information. Elegant evidence demonstrates that collective intelligence is greater than the sum of individual intelligence.”- Derex M. et al. 2023
“Cumulative technological culture (CTC)?refers to the transmission of techniques or tools over generations that is accompanied by an increase in their complexity and/or efficiency . The dominant view, called the cultural niche hypothesis, assumes that CTC requires a high-fidelity transmission mechanism, with the rationale that innovations are quickly lost if they cannot be faithfully transmitted to others”.
Fran?ois Osiurak et al investigated the cumulative technological culture phenomena from the perspective of cognitive science and found that despite the diverse perspectives on the technological adaptations, the benefits of collective intelligence are significant and any coping behavior requires technical-reasoning skills.
Formalizing the concept of context in learning and memory
Context can change the meaning of anything, but this concept has not yet been utilized efficiently, in learning tools, economic decision-making, and motor learning. James B. Heald et al 2023, pointed out on the problem, looked at the subject?matter from a cognitive science perspective and developed unifying framework formalizing the concept of context and its role in learning. They utilized Bayesian model which sees context as something unobserved and something that needs to be inferred.
Healthy Happy HelpFul, by Dr. Evgenia Leonova
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