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Cyberpsychology Summary
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Lecture 1 - Introduction to Cyberpsychology• Cyberpsychology is the study of the human mind and behavior in the context of human-
technology interaction (e.g. Virtual reality for treatment of anxiety, arti cial intelligence, robots,
video games, metaverse)
• Mainstream research focus on impact of internet on psychology of individuals
• Cyberpsychology = an independent specialized discipline within psychology
• People who are born right now = „digital natives“
• Increasingly technology is used in an intimate way (as if part of body, carried everywhere)
• Can facilitate the unity of otherwise unrelated people and mass global communication
• 58% of the world’s 7billion people use the internet
Lecture 2 - Cognitive aspects of interactive
technology use
Why interactive technology has impacted our brain and cognition
• Interactive technology: e.g. Twitter, amazon, google, video games
• Today there might be skills that we don’t need to train anymore because we can use e.g. our
phones instead
• No evolutionary adaptations but changes similar to extreme sport training (development/
plasticity) —> no structural changes but organizational changes
• Anterior brain regions (visual cortex) responds to particular objects or words —> changed as a
function of interactive technology use (new words/objects to attend to)
E ects of interactive technology on
• Features of internet use:
• multitasking (hyperlinks, noti cations) —> shallow processing, task switching
• Portable & always available —> cognitive o oading (outsource cognitive abilities to external
devices)
Attention and cognitive control - Study on media/multidevice multitasking
• Multitasking (how often they used one medium together
with another medium, e.g. email & TV)
• Task: indicate weather targets changed orientation
• IV = number of distractors (have to be inhibited)
• DV = performance
• For low number of distractors both groups performed
equally, for high number of distractors high multi takers
performed worse
=> High multitaskers have greater di culty ltering out
irrelevant stimuli from their environment (as seen in
the ltering task)
• Working memory experiment (n-back memory
task)
• Independent variable: 2-back, 3-back
• Dependent variable: Hit rate/FA rate high
• multitaskers (only) worse on 3- back task
=> High multitaskers are less likely to ignore
irrelevant representations in memory (as seen in the
2- or 3- back task)
• High multitaskers breath-biased media
consumption behavior is mirrored by breath-biased
cognitive control
• High multitaskers have a bias toward exploratory
rather than exploitative information processing
=> High multitaskers are used to rapid switching and quick exploring rather than going into depth
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, Memory and learning
• Internet has become an extern to rely on any time
• We seem to automatically think about the internet when needing (di cult) information
(representation of internet related words primed —> harder to inhibit computer words)
• We seem to remember information di erently when the internet is available —> knowing that
answers will be erased/no longer be available helps remember (better than explicit instruction to
remember info)
=> memory is outsourced to the internet, knowing we can look something up leads to poor
encoding (do not feel need to remember)
=> Internet is similar to social forms of transitive memory (e.g. knowing my partner know certain
information)
E ects of video gaming on cognitive ability
• Most research focused on action video games with high
cognitive demands
• When comparing video game players (VGPs) and non-video-
game players (NVGPs) on a anker compatibility task
(indicating whether there was a diamond or a square in one
of the circles - while having to ignore distractors)
• it showed that with more distractors/di culties VGPs has
more attentional resources to process the ankers and
performed better (larger compatibility e ects in hard task)
• When comparing video game players (VGPs) and non-video-
game players (NVGPs) on a attentional blink task (being
‚blind‘ to stimulus after focusing attention on ‚L‘ on possibly
not being able to report the second letter ‚X‘)
• Di culty reporting a second target shortly after a rst
• Task: at the end of the trial, report white letter + X presence
(yes/no)
• VGPs showed a smaller attentional ‚blink window‘ —> able to
switch attention very fast
• Possible that VGPs were already better than NVGPs before
experiment (& that’s why they started playing video games)
• Experiments should be true experiment where participants
get randomly assigned to playing action video games or Tetris
(results for attentional ‚blink window‘ still show better
performance)
How might AVG improve performance on attentional control?
• better/faster visual perception • Contrast
• Improved visual attention sensitivity
• Better cognitive control • Spatial cognition
• Spatial acuity • Multiple object tracking
• Temporal resolution
—> action game play increases not one particular skill but increase ability to extract patterns in
environment and develop the ability to exploit task-relevant info more e ciently while suppressing
irrelevant/distracting info
—> action video game play may be thought of as fostering learning to learn
Methodological considerations
• Cross-sectional studies (compare existing groups that might di er before forming groups)
• No causality
• Third factors (privilege to buy video games —> privilege of better education)
• Expectation e ects/demands characteristics (e.g. pre-screening leads to strong expectation
to perform well)
• Selection bias (e.g. people who think they are very good respond to advertisement for study)
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, • Experimental studies (e.g. training)
• Control condition should be real placebo (same expectation e ects in both conditions)
• Statistical power low (few subjects, between-subject comparison)
• Selective reporting of multiple dependent variables (studies are costly so researchers
capitalize that and measure multiple e ects in one study, but only report signi cant e ects)
• Same subjects participate in multiple studies and are reported in multiple papers
• Publication bias towards positive outcomes
Can we train our brains?
• Evidence that if one trains a task they get better, but is
generalization of cognitive ability improvement possible?
• Design:
• Cognitive ability tests (baseline) Reasoning, verbal short-term
memory, spatial working memory, paired-associates learning
• Training: Group 1: training reasoning, planning, and problem solving abilities, Group 2:
training short-term memory, attention, visuospatial processing, mathematics —> Similar to
commercial brain trainers!, Group 3 (control): answering obscure questions using available
online resources
• Repeat of cognitive ability tests
• When testing how many digits participants could remember in a sequence and how many
object-place associations participants could remember (paired associates learning)…
• … all groups improved over course of training but not signi cantly more than the control group
and the e ects did not seem to generalize to other cognitive functions
Summary
• Interactive technology has radically changed our life, and likely our mind/brain
• Internet fosters multitasking, leading to high distractibility; breadth vs depth
• Availability of internet reduces memory consolidation. Cognitive o -loading
• Video games potentially enhance cognitive ability, but e ects appear very general, and there are
many methodological concerns
• Unclear if bene ts of brain training transfer to other tasks
Future outlook
• Use of interactive technology in other cognitive domains: education,
aging and patient rehabilitation, fundamental research on cognition
• Future outlook: long-term e ects largely unknown, arti cial intelligence,
robots, argument reality/cognition (brain chips)
Literature
The "online brain": how the Internet may be changing our cognition (Firth et.al)
• The online world might in uence:
• attentional capacities (stream of online information encourages divided attention
across multiple media sources at the expanse of sustained concentration)
• Memory processes (shift in the way we retrieve, store and value knowledge)
• Social cognition (new interplay between internet and social lives, self-concepts and self-
esteem)
• Cognitive decline is associated with a less engaging lifestyle
• 6 weeks of engaging in online role playing game —> reductions in grey matter
How does the Internet gain and sustain our attention?
• Internet use entertained with: education, travel, socializing, commerce, work, entertainment
• Attraction mechanism: aspects of the Internet that fail to gain our attention drowned out in sea
of incoming info, info that captures attention are logged, noticed and expanded upon
• Habitual checking behavior due to behavioral reinforcement from „information rewards“
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, Cognitive consequences of the attention-grabbing internet
• Media multi-tasking: interact with multiple inputs simultaneously on shallow level
• Worse task-switching • greater cognitive effort (associated with
• Increased susceptibility to needed to sustain maintaining goals in face
distraction (despite greater attention of distraction)
activity in right prefrontal • Decreased gray matter in • Poorer overall cognitive
regions) prefrontal regions performance
• Even short term engagement with hyperlinked online environment reduces sustained attention
• Media multi-tasking may be driven by informational rewards
The Internet and transitive memory
• Ability to a cess info online causes people to become more likely to remember where facts
could be retrieved rather than the facts themselves
• Transitive memory: people opt to outsource info (so they are able to remember the source)
rather than attempting to store all info themselves
• Cognitive o oading: implicitly reducing allocation of cognitive resources, since they know this
will be available fo future references externally
• Internet bypasses some typical transnational aspects as people have no responsibility to retain
unique info for others to draw upon
• Internet = single entity (does not require to remember what/where exact info is externally stored)
• Internet is becoming supernormal stimulus (making all other options for cognitive o oading
redundant
How does a supernormal stimulus interact with normal cognition?
• During internet info gathering (compared to books) => no di erence in activation of the dorsal
stream (where) and reduced activation of the ventral stream (what)
• Reduced regional homogeneity and functional connectivity of brain areas
involved in long-term memory formation and retrieval
• Internet search training => increases in white matter connecting frontal,
occipital, parietal and temporal lobes
• Cognitive o oading found to improve ability to focus on aspects not
immediately retrievable (—> freeing up cognitive resources)
• Analytical thinkers with high cognitive capacities use their smartphones
less for online information searching
• Online searching increases our illusion of self-knowledge
How does the online environment a ect our fundamental social structures?
• Real-world and online social network signi cantly associated with amygdala volume
• Grey matter volume of other brain regions predicted by
Facebook friends but no relationship to real-world social networks
• Tendency to hold many weak social connections might be associated with
high associative memory capacities (name-face pairs in right entorhinal cortex)
• Online & o ine social networks similar in size
• average of 150 friendships
• 5 hierarchical layers (primary partners, intimate relationships, best friends,
close friends, friends with sizes of 1.5, 5, 15, 50, 150)
• Social connections formed in online world processed in similar ways to those of o ine world
• Similar structural patterns of (online) social networks despite huge quantitative potential
because of: constraints on social cognition (limitation on attention) & investment in social
relationships is limited by time
Social cognitive responses to the online social world
• Whereas real-world acceptance and rejection is often ambiguous and open to self-interpretation
media platforms directly quantify social success (friends, likes)
• Relying on online feedback for self-esteem can have adverse e ects on young people
(cyberbullying, anxiety, depression)
• Upward social comparison (online & o ine), online upward social comparisons more drastic
(would rarely encountered in everyday life) => negative body image & self concept
• new platform for improving mental health, social connectedness, social support, self-e cacy
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