Midterm 1
Wednesday next week!
Your Research Proposal Project
• A research proposal attempts to persuade the reader
that:
– The underlying question is highly important
– The proposed methodology and experimental design is the
best available approach
– That you have the knowledge and talent to do the proposed
research
– That you have a research program worth funding
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Your Research Proposal Project
• A research proposal is therefore similar to
many other situations in which you will try
to persuade someone of something
– The skill is portable
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Your Research Proposal Project
• As in other situations, your reader should be
assumed to be unconvinced and thus unwilling
to spend much time and energy entertaining
your argument!
• You must make your argument easy and fast
• The key to that is organization
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Research Proposals Should be “Theory
Driven”
• Most proposals are organized around a
specific theory
• What is the difference between a theory
and a question?
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The Parts of a Research Proposal
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Background
Statement of the theory
Prediction(s) that follow from the theory
Experimental Method and Design
Timeline
Budget
References
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The Parts of a Research Proposal
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Background
Statement of the theory
Prediction(s) that follow from the theory
Experimental Method and Design
Timeline These aren’t necessary for your project
Budget
References
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Assignment
• Rules:
– Must be human Cognitive Neuroscience
– Experimental approach may involve animal
research only if this is the best way to test your
theory
• Studying humans is preferable to studying animals
when you have a specific theory about human
cognition
• One moves to animal research because it tells you
something that human research cannot
• If thisLapplies to your theory, you will make this
constraint explicit in your proposal
Cognitive Operations
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What does the brain actually do?
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Some possible answers:
Cognitive Operations
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What does the brain actually do?
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Some possible answers:
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“The mind”
Information processing…
Transforms of mental representations
Execution of mental representations of actions
First Principles
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“cognitive operations are processes that generate, elaborate upon, or
manipulate representations”
– As patterns of activity in one or more neurons
– We often lack conscious access to these representations
– Neuroscientists still know very little about how information is represented in
the brain
Mental Representations
• Mental representations can start with sensory
input and progress to more abstract forms
– Local features such as colors, line orientation,
brightness, motion are represented at low levels
How might a neuron
“represent” the
presence of this line?
Mental Representations
• Mental representations can start with sensory
input and progress to more abstract forms
– Local features such as colors, line orientation,
brightness, motion are represented at low levels
A “labeled line”
-Activity on this unit “means” that a
line is present
-Does the line actually have to be
present?
Mental Representations
• Mental representations can start with sensory
input and progress to more abstract forms
– texture defined boundaries are representations
arrived at by synthesizing the local texture
features
Mental Representations
• Mental representations can be “embellished”
- Kaniza Triangle is represented in a
way that is quite different from the
actual stimulus
-the representation is embellished
and extended
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Rubin Vase, Necker Cube are examples of mental representations that are dynamic
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Shepard & Metzlar (1971) mental rotation is an example of
transforming a mental representation in a continuous process
Mentally rotate the images to determine whether they are identical or mirror-reversed
SAME
MIRROR-REVERSED
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Shepard & Metzlar (1971) mental rotation is an
example of transforming a mental representation
in a continuous process
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Shepard & Metzlar (1971) mental rotation is an
example of transforming a mental representation
in a continuous process
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can be transformed
– Shepard & Metzlar (1971) mental rotation is an example of
transforming a mental representation in a continuous process
– The time it takes to respond is linearly determined by the number of
degrees one has to rotate
– Somehow the brain must perform a set of operations on these
representations - where? how?
Mental Representations
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Mental Representations can be
transformed into abstract
information representations
– Posner letter matching task
– Are these letters from the same
category (vowels or consonants) or
are they different?
Mental Representations
•
Mental Representations can be
transformed into abstract
information representations
– Posner letter matching task
– Are these letters from the same
category (vowels or consonants) or
are they different?
– Are they physically the same or are
they the same in an abstract way they are in the same category?
A
A
A
a
SAME
A
U
S
C
A
S
DIFFERENT
Mental Representations
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Mental Representations can be
transformed into abstract
information representations
– Posner letter matching task
– Participants are fastest when the
response doesn’t require
transforming the representation
from a direct manifestation of the
stimulus into something more
abstract
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is
printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the
colour
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is
printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the
colour
RED
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is
printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the
colour
BLUE
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is
printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the
colour
GREEN
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is
printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the
colour
RED
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is
printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the
colour
BLUE
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is
printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the
colour
GREEN
Mental Representations
• Mental Representations can interfere
– Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t
read the word, just say the colour
– The mental representation of the colour and the representation of
the text are incongruent and interfere
– one representation must be selected and the other suppressed
– This is one conceptualization of attention
Mental Representations
• Representations in neural a neural code aren’t limited to
sensory information
• Other examples:
– Place cells in hippocampus represent location of an animal in a local
coordinate system
Mental Representations
• Other examples:
• Motor Neurons represent plan for future action
Mental Representations
• These are some examples of how a cognitive psychologist might
investigate mental representations
• The cognitive neuroscientists asks:
– where are these representations formed?
– What is the neural mechanism? What is the code for a
representation?
– What is the neural process by which representations are transformed?
First Principles
• What are some ways that information might
be represented by neurons?