Lecture 1 – Thinking before doing
Mental representations
“Any mental content or operation that stands for something else in the world”
Examples of mental representations: categories, expemplers, symbols, mental
images, memories, truth, values, probabilities, schemas etc.
Function of mental representation
“For the most part we do not first see and then define, but define first and then
see”
- Classification
- Additional attributes
- Steering attention and interpretation
- Communication
- Thinking
Availability and accessibility
Information is available, but you does not need to have them all accessible at one point
Activation of mental representation
Accessibility can be defined as the activation potential of available knowledge
Study: people watched a video about a women putting make-up on or a women eating with
chopsticks
Result: the environment might make knowledge accessible and
affect the speed of recognizing words
How is knowledge stored in our mind?
Associative network models
Work like a computer. If I think about coffee, all information
about coffee in my mind is activated. Knowledge is activated like a spreading
event.
Schema models
Perceivers ‘go beyond the information’, Bruner (1957)
Schemas operate as a lens
Directs attention, memory, and judgement
Predictive coding
Bayesian processes:
- Priors affect perception
- Posterior (‘comparison between perception and prior’)
If I drink coffee every morning, I have a strong positive prior about the coffee. The posterior
is similar to the prior. When I drink it somewhere else, the prior is still positive but if the
coffee isn’t tasty, I have a different posterior and may change my prior.
Connectionist models
Connectionism: parallel distribution processing
- Nodes are like neurons, they make meaning
together
- Facilitative and inhibitive links
1
, - Concepts exist by means of dynamic interplay of distributed elements
- Input, connection weights (hidden), and output elements
Multiple format models
Different brain structures are affected differently by the
ways we learn
Embodied cognition
Do mental representations extend outside the
mind, both to the body and to the external
environment?
When thinking about coffee, you can smell the coffee, or taste it, or feel the awakenings
you get from drinking it
- Representations are modality-specific
- Stored ‘in the body’
- Partial re-experience
Situated cognition
Mental representation result form dynamic interaction between the brain, body, and
environment.
You don’t need to remember everything if you know some information is stored in for
example your phone, PC
Impulsive versus reflective behaviour
Four horsemen of automaticity
- Level of consciousness: how automatic certain behaviour is shown. Level of consciousness
relates to automaticity
- Level of efficiency: e.g., driving a car: the more you practice it, the more automatic it gets
- Level of intentionality: the more intentional, the less automaticity
- Level of controllability
Reflective impulsive system
- Two systems
- Impulsive
- Reflective
- Systems work in parallel
- Impulsive: always activated, works
with associations
- Reflective: needs motivation and
opportunity, makes propositions
- Knowledge representation
- Association
- Proposition (based on association)
Impulsive processes
Behaviour within the impulsive system is
based on spreading activation of knowledge
to motor representations according to ideo-
motor processes (you think about something
and you do it)
Thinking about behaviour is enough to trigger behaviour
Reflective impulsive system
You see something activate associations (schemata’s) activates behaviour
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,Reflective processes
Behaviour in the reflective system is based on
choices
Choices may, by means of intentions, activate
motor-representations in the impulsive system
- Choice can be based on
- Full consideration of pros and cons
- Intuition (‘this option feels good/bad’)
- Or anything in between
When processes are in conflict
The one with the most strength of motivation will win and
become your behaviour
Understanding priming effects
Empirical (in)consistencies
- Conceptual priming seems a very robust
phenomenon (e.g. lexical decisions)
- Behaviour priming effects seem difficult to replicate
- Lot of studies were underpowered
- Behaviour priming effects: false positive?
- Despite underpowered; a lot of empirical evidence
- Recent meta-analysis on 133 studies
Theoretical aspects
- The process is critical not the prime itself
- For example: stereotype of elderly = slow – walking slowly
- Moderators (e.g., value, self-relevance)
- New models: how does a prime affect behaviour?
Situated inference model
Idea about priming is different than the idea of the reflective impulsive model.
- Overlap in the first part: all kinds
of information is activated by the
prime
- Second stage is different:
misattribution happens. People
need to misattribute the
activated knowledge. Then you
will use the information that is
accessible in the final stage
Lecture 2 – Attitudes in action
How attitudes change and guide our behaviour
Attitude: a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some
degree of favour or disfavour
- Tendency: not perse a disposition, does not have to be stable, can be context dependent
- Evaluating: as a specific dimension
- Particular entity: things, persons, ideas or behaviours
Functions of attitudes:
- Knowledge & utility function: it is important to know what is good to approach and what to
avoid
3
, - Social-adaptive function: helps to bond with other people,
- Value-expressive function: show how unique you are
Measure attitudes
Explicit: asking people what their evaluation is
Most popular measurement: using semantic differentials: make use of adjectives that are
contrasting. The mean score on the semantic differentials is used as a proxy for the
attitude.
Implicit: immediate evaluation that comes to mind
when people are confronted with the attitude object.
Measurement: affective priming procedure: classify
adjectives in positive and negative. Those adjectives
are proceeded by primes of the adjective object.
1. Prime. Picture or word (Geert Wilders)
2. Interval
3. Respond to adjective
If you have a positive attitude towards Geert Wilders you may be faster to
classify ‘great’ as a positive adjective and slow to classify bad as a negative
adjective.
Mental representations
How are attitudes mentally represented?
The evaluative outcome of the 2 types of
measures may sometimes conflict. How do we
make sense of that?
Five different attitudes models that provide
how attitudes are mentally presented
Example: attitude towards an imaginary group ‘Xyfo’. Members have been often been
presented negative in the media. Many people know that this is a small fraction of the
whole group. They have positive interactions with the group and want to treat them equally.
Many people have positive explicit measures and negative implicit measures
Dual model
Attitudes are based on implicit (based on
associations) and explicit representations
(based on knowledge)
Implicit and explicit representations are
separated
Exposure to a member may trigger negative associations through media
Thinking of a member will lead to thinking about equality which result in a more positive attitude
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