What is embodied cognition ?

A theory of cognition based on embodied cognition, is a theory that assume that cognition and the physical body are embedded and depended upon the other to work. In embodied cognition it is commonly assumed that cognition is developed through physical interaction with the external world (here the internal world is to be considered the mind). This creates several special consideration that should be taken into account, especially when talking about human cognitive development.

Ackerman et al (2010) made a study that showed how tactile information affected the way humans speak and think. In their study they conducted interviews with test subjects, that during the interview had to hold hard or soft objects. The result showed that when holding a hard object your views and the words you were using became harsher. While holding a soft object made a test subject have softer words and views. This shows a clear relation between the physical body and the mind among the test subjects.

The world and words
The theory goes that, when learning words like soft and hard, as well as other abstract harsh or soft words, the human mind must also create an understanding of physical properties such as soft and hard. There is a interaction between the knowledge of the tactile sensation of the physical properties of an object and the abstract word for these tactile feelings. They develop mutually and dependent of the other. 

In Helen Kellers self biography there is a scene where her assistant help her to feel the tactile sensation of water while at the same time writing the word water in Kellers hand. What this does to Keller is creating a new understanding for the word water. 

"Before this experience Helen was able to use symbols, say, to ask for water by spelling out "w-a-t-e-r." In this she was much like the behaviorist's animal or the computer scientist's Turing machine. But it was only with this step via perception into semantics, to understanding that the word meant water, that "the mystery of language" was revealed to her." (Barwise 1989, p. 6)

As we can see, there is a difference between  between knowing a word, and understanding a word. As Ackermans study propose there is a reasonable assumption to believe that humans learn this through physical interaction throughout their childhood and this gives rise to the obvious correlation between what a human is holding in her hand and what her views are.

Knowledge like this can be applied to understanding human development. For instance, how can a child develop without feeling, seeing, smelling, tasting or hearing the world? Can a child learn what a hard object is without ever touching it? What Ackerman studies implies, and most theories based on embodied cognition, is that humans needs to interact with the world in other to develop. It is important for a human to interact with the world in different ways in order to learn about her surroundings. This explains why playing should be considered learning for a child, and why it is important for a child to play in order to learn about its surroundings.

This is of great importance for theories of embodied cognition. The assumption that human cognition exists and develops through a interaction between the mind and body.


References:
Ackerman J.M., Nocera C.C., Bargh J.A. (2010) Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions. Science, 328, 1712-1715.
Barwise, Jon. The Situation in Logic. Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1989. Print.

Distinction between Short term memory and Attention

Recent research has been able to discover a neurological distinction between short term memory and attention

It has previously been believed that short term memory demanded constant neurological maintenance. As such it was believed that short term memory was a product of constant maintenance of representations, placing short term memory as a product of focus of attention.

Recent research conducted by Lewis-Peacock et. al. (2011) shows that attention and short term memory is neurologically distinct. While the constant neurological activity that maintained focus of attention shifted into representing some other information, short term memory would be retained and was correctly recalled a short period of time afterwards. The study conducted utilized fMRI trace neurological activity during the time which the test subjects conducted one of two tests.

In the first test conducted, the test subjects were to pair different pictures. There were pictures from three categories (faces, places and objects) with six pictures from each category. The pictures were paired into nine pairs, pairing each picture with a picture from another category. During a training the test subjects learned these pairings. Then the actual test began. In the test the test subjects first saw a picture that was to be paired with another picture based on what pairings they had already learned. At the end of the test they saw another picture and their task were to answer yes or no if the two pictures were matching, according to the pairings they had learned. In half of the tests there was a distraction between the two pictures. The distraction was always chosen to not match any of the other categories in the test.

The test subjects were told to use one of two strategies to accomplish their task. There was a prospective and a retrospective strategy. A prospective strategy meant that the test subjected watched at the first picture and retrieved from their long term memory what picture it was paired with then they tried to remember this picture. A retrospective strategy meant that the subjects were meant to keep the first picture they saw in their memory, then when they were prompted to see if the last picture in the test matched the first they used their long term memory finish the task.

The test results showed that when the first picture were presented to the test subjects (target) the brain activity in areas associated to it became more active, this were true for both strategies.

In the top line, where the distraction were absent, we can see that the target picture created activity in the brain. However for the test subjects that used the prospective strategy the target associated brain areas quickly diminished while areas associated to the second picture (associated) increased slightly. When using the prospective strategy the the test subjects where already thinking about the picture when it showed up on the screen and their task were simply to see if it matched. For the retrospective strategy the test subjects task were to remember if it was the correct pair when the second picture showed up.

When the distraction was added to the test is when things starts to get interesting. As can be seen on the graph, brain activity in areas associated to the irrelevant (irrel) category greatly increased after it has been presented to the test subject. While the target and associated categories both diminished to a baseline activity. Even though the test subjects were able to keep it in their short term memory and accomplish their task. This proves that a persistent brain activity in the brain region and therefore any persistent focus on the category, is not essential to complete a short term memory task.

In the second test of the study the researchers wanted to be more precise. The experiment used again three different categories; English words, pronounceable pseudo-words, and line segments. The test subjects task was to respond whether the probe presented to them, yes or no, was synonymous in meaning (in the English words category) if it was rhyming (for pseudo-words category) or of the lines matched (for line segments category). At the beginning of the test they were presented by two stimuli, from two different categories, on a computer screen. Then after a short period of a blank screen, they received a clue to which of the two categories that were relevant for their response. Shortly afterwards a new stimuli were presented to them and the test subjects were to response if the word or line segment were correct, according to the rules explained earlier. Then the clue and and response session were repeated. In 50% of the tests the second clue and response was of the same category as the first (this was called a repeat), while in the other 50% it was of the second category that was presented earlier (this was called a switch).

The red and blue colors represent the two relevant categories presented at 

the beginning of each test. The red triangle represents the clue received for

the red category. The blue triangle represents the clue for the blue category.

The squares represents the where the test subjects were probed and asked

to answer. Grey represents the category that was not present at each test. 

The result of the test shows that in the both the repeat and the switch tests the neurological patterns associated to the irrelevant stimuli remained at a baseline activity. In the both tests the second stimuli (the one that was not asked for in the repeat test, and the second category that was asked for in the switch test) quickly dropped to a baseline activity. But in the Switch test that test subjects still succeeded to recall and remember the second stimuli.

This study proves to us that short term memory is not something that is created through a constant neurological activity. It also proves to us that there is a discrete distinction between attention and short term memory. This is because focus on a specific category or stimuli demands neurological activity, while short term memory works regardless of this. Although we know that short term memory is entangled with attention and as such attention and short term memory are two phenomenons that affects each one another. This study also creates a understanding of the nature of short term memory and how we should understand it.

As Lewis-Peacock et. al. describes short term memory can describe as an emergent property of the interaction between long term memory and attention. This study gives support for that theory commonly described as "embedded component" theory.


Reference:
Lewis-Peacock J. A., Drysdale A. T.,  Oberauer K.,  Postle B. R., (2011). Neural Evidence for a Distinction between Short-term Memory and the Focus of Attention. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24:1, pp. 61–79.

Working memory and mind wandering

New studies suggest that there is a clear correlation between working memory capacity (WMC) and mind wandering, or task unrelated thoughts (TUT). One of the newest studies was conducted by D. Levinson, R. Davidson and J. Smallwood as mentioned online in this article. The correlation between WMC and TUT is not entirely new and there is a lot of interesting articles to take not of in this field. But I must present some criticism against above mentioned article (this is referring to the article written on psychcentral.com, not the scientific report produced by Levinson, Davidson and Smallwood.).

The rest of this blog post will be written with the assumption that this article has been read.

High WMC predicts more and less mind wandering

While it is true that high working memory capacity does predict more mind wandering and task unrelated thoughts under some circumstances, the opposite is also true. During some circumstances high working memory capacity predicts less TUT. It is my belief that while the article discussed is true, it is also misleading. They key to understanding is that high WMC is a predictor of more TUT during easy tasks and easy tasks only. As the article writes briefly, without taking any further notice of "it doesn’t mean that people with high working memory capacity are doomed to a straying mind.". This has to be stated much more clearly. As a matter of fact, this has been proven in real life studies. In 2007 Kane et. al. proved that people with higher WMC will mind wander less often then low WMC subjects in contexts that demands; higher concentration, provides a higher challenge and requires higher effort by the subjects. 

As seen at the image (from Kane et. al. 2007) to the left, high WMC subjects managed to control their thoughts during high concentration and therefore could focus on task related thoughts. But as Levinson, Davidson and Smallwood also showed in 2012, high WMC subjects mind wandered more during tasks which required less concentration (for further statistics see Kane et. al. 2007) 

WMC and mind wandering 

So, what we have learned is that WMC affects, among other contextual factors, how often a a person mind wanders. We know that there is a clear relation between mind-wandering and WMC, we can also reason that working memory is a limited resource and TUT occupies this resource. We can also claim that high WMC subjects can control their thoughts and stay more focused on the task at hand then lesser WMC subjects. So working memory is also clearly intertwined with ability to focus.  

In Kanes study several other predictors to mind wandering was also found. These included how fun the subject thought their current task where, anxiety, stress and being bad at their current activity. These were factors that led to higher mind wandering, regardless of the subjects WMC. 

As Kanes study was conducted in real life, there is a high ecological validity in the study, but at the same time there is also greater chance of errors in the collected data. But as can be seen by the figures presented in Kanes study one can see a relation to the study conducted by Levinson, Davidson and Smallwood. As their study showed in laboratory environment that tasks with low concentration demand and less challenging tasks led to high WMC subjects mind wandering more often. Reasoning leads us to believe that this later study complements Kanes study and proves the hypothesis that working memory is a resource and that TUT occupies it. 

What neither of the study shows is that you can predict your own WMC by observing how often your mind wanders, since WMC is only one predictor of mind wandering, and any the nature of the task at hands predicts whether or not MWC should predict more or less mind wandering. 

References: 

Kane, M.J., Brown, L.E., Little, J.C., Silvia, P.J., Myin-Germeys, I., & Kwapil, T.R. (2007). For whom the mind wanders, and when: An experience-sampling study of working memory and executive control in daily life. Psychological Science, 18, 614-621.

Levinson, D.B., Smallwood, J., & Davidson, R.J. (2012). The Persistence of Thought: Evidence for a Role of Working Memory in the Maintenance of Task-Unrelated Thinking Psychological Science

Women should speak up for equal payment! Or should they really?

In my previous blog post I wrote about how stereotypes can affect women to become worse at negotiating under the presence of a stereotype threat. And hopefully such knowledge can help women to regain equal rights in a work environment as men. But can the whole western world just trust women to fix the problem for themselves? Or do society and men have to work together with women to achieve this? These are hard questions to answer and certainly a subject where opinions take over actual truth, and by personal experience some men may resort to the fact that it is up to women to take the fight, not men.

The truth is that even if women did all they could to deserve the same job and salary as a man they may still get treated unjust, this is a scientifically proven fact . This blog post will briefly tell about a study how women stereotypes affect women negatively, similar to my latest blog post, the only difference being that in this study women are the victim of other people stereotypes, not their own stereotypes as is the case in my previous blog post.

Sometimes it does hurt to ask

In a study conducted Bowles from 2007 test subjects were led to take the role of an employer that is negotiating with a possible employee. The hypothesis sought to test here is whether or not we can see any systematical affect depending on the sex of the possible employee. Would a women experience negative consequences by using the same word, in a job interview, as a man?

The reasoning goes as follow; men and women should behave differently according to stereotypes. If a man or a woman should not act according to the stereotype this could have negative consequences (it might theoretically have positive consequences in other scenarios). As a woman is stereotyped as generally acting more nice and careful compared to a man it is reasoned that if a woman make it really clear that she is requesting a higher compensation, instead of just acting nice and agree to the offer she has been given, she will act outside of the stereotype. This will in turn affect the counterpart of the negotiation to believe that the woman is rude, and will be less willing to work with the woman, while the same thing would not happen if a man asked for higher salary as he is acting according to a stereotype.

Bowles conducted four experiments to test this stereotype. I will focus on number 2 and 3 of these studies. In test number 2 test subjects were presented with a transcript of a job interview. They had to read what the interviewed said and later rated what they thought about the interviewed and how willing they were to work with this person. The text they received were presented as either said by a man or a woman, but the text it self was identical in both cases. The interviewed either asked for a higher compensation or did not ask for a higher compensation. From the results it was clear that if the interviewed asked for a higher salary the interviewed was considered less nice and more demanding. But if the interviewed was a man there was no great difference in willingness to work with the person, but if it was a woman the willingness to work with the person was greatly reduced.

The conclusion is that if a woman demands more in a job interview she is treated differently than a man. And in this scenario she would be less likely to get the job at all, therefore it might actually do more harm than good for a woman to ask for higher salary.

Now you might think "Hey, this test was only when reading a paper, is this really accurate?". Well, Bowles thought that as well. So in test number 3 the same test was repeated. But this time they recorded videos of men and women doing saying the same text as in the previous test. The test subjects watched the videos and rated the person in the video in a similar fashion to the previous test.

The results here was even more precise, but unlike the previous test we could see a difference whether or not the test subject was a woman or not. From this test we could see that if a man asked a man for higher compensation in a job interview there was no significant difference whether or not they would receive the job. But if a woman asked a man for higher compensation she was less likely to get the job. If a man or a woman asked for higher compensation from a woman they were both less likely to receive the job.

The results concludes that a man or a woman that asks for higher compensation from a woman and woman asking for higher compensation from a man, where all considered less nice and more demanding, and as a result they were less likely to receive a job. But if a man asked a man for higher compensation they was just as likely to receive a job.

Conclusion

Gender inequality can not be solved simply be women asking for higher salary as a man would. Because a man will receive the advantage of doing so. While there may be major differences in negotiation skills between gender, it is clear that by using the exact same words when asking for higher salary the negative effects are greater for women. For women to get an equal pay employers will need to learn of this effect and take action against it. But the problem is that we can not tell how an employer effectively takes action against this without starting to discriminate men instead. But the first step to defeat this inequality is to know about its existence. So spread the word and make sure that both men and women knows about this. As to my question in the beginning, men and women need to work together for a fair treatment on workplaces, women can't do it on their own if they get treated this way.

Reference:

Bowles, H. R., Babcock, L. & Lai, L. (2007). Social incentives for gen-
der differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations: Sometimes it
does hurt to ask. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Pro-
cesses, 103, 84–103.

The referred article can be reached Here,

Stereotype threat affect women salary

What practical impact can stereotype threat have on our daily life? There are several, in this particular blog post I will explain how stereotype threat can cause implications for women, when it comes to negotiating a salary. But other implications includes such things that women scoring lower on math tests due to stereotype threat.

In this blog post I will try my best to explain this effect, the reason I would like to write about this is, as explained by Tellhed and Björklund in 2010: 

"our anticipation is that female negotiators can benefit from learning that stereotype threat causes sex differences in outcome goals, which in turn causes sex differences in salary requests. Hopefully, learning about the effect that stereotype threat has on negotiators outcome goals gives female negotiators a chance to resist stereotype threat effects, by consciously deciding upon a more challenging goal." 

Needless to say, this is my anticipation as well. So I will try explain this phenomenon in an adequate manner, because I am positive that information like this might help some women to gain better salaries.

Stereotype threat leads to lower salary requests
First of all, what is a stereotype threat? To put it easily one can explain stereotype threat as a scenario where you are risking the possibility to confirm a stereotype, and as a result of this threat the particular stereotype becomes real! That is, if women have a stereotype of being bad negotiators and/or have a stereotype that in turns make her a worse negotiator in cases where she is experiencing a stereotype threat.

This was tested in a study done in Sweden 2010. In this study the test subjects where divided into four groups, two with women and two with men. All four groups were presented with a test. The test was equal to all groups. They were to enter a room where they should negotiate their salary (with an hired actor). The difference between the groups was how the test was presented. Two groups (one with men and one with women) got clear instructions stating that this was a hard test, to test their ability to negotiate, wheres the other two groups got clear instructions the test was easy and would not test their ability to negotiate.

The reasoning here is that in the first group of women would perform worse, since there is women stereotypes that are considered negative in negotiating.

By stating that the test is about their ability to negotiate a stereotype threat is created. The results of the study clearly shows that a stereotype threat affects their ability to negotiate. Among the man and women who wasn't under the influence of a stereotype threat there was no difference in the result of the studies. But considering the men and women there was a difference wheres the women scored much worse at the negotiating.

If you look at the results more thoroughly you can clearly see that women that were affected by stereotype threat made a lower reservation salary (the minimum salary they would accept) before the negotiation. And having a low reservation salary is proven to be a major factor of how much the negotiator requests and what final outcome they get from the negotiation.

Real life implications
It is believed that this stereotype threat is present in a real life salary negotiation. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that one factor that determines women lower salaries are due to stereotype threat (but this is by far not the only factor). As suggested by the study from 2010 it is suggested that women in real life situations make a lower reservation salary and in turn requests a lower salary in salary negotiations. It is believed (but not proven) that by knowing this effect and consciously request a higher salary can help to combat this effect and in turn generate gender equal salaries.

But as I said before, this is not the only factor that determines women salary. Tellhed and Björklund states in their article that according to Bowles from 2007 "men were less willing to work with a woman who had asked for a higher compensation than what she was offered in a job interview. However, the willingness to work with a man was unaffected by whether he had asked for a higher compensation or not."

So, what science tells us is that if a woman faces salary negotiations in a job interview she is likely to request lower salary and be a worse negotiator than a man, this can be combated by all women by consciously requesting a higher salary. But if a woman would do so they are less likely to get the job because men are less willingly to work with a woman that does so. This can be considered proof that men and women both have to work for gender equality.

In my next blog post I will comment on Bowles study from 2007 and try to explain why men are less willingly to work with women that request higher salaries.

The majority of the source material in this blog post comes from "Stereotype threat in salary negotiations are mediated by reservation salary" written by Tellhed and Björklund 2010. 

Priming and Stereotype Threat

And why these mess up classical intelligence tests, such as IQ-tests.

First of all, what does these mean?

Priming
Lets start by explaining priming. One good example of priming is some studies conducted by two dutch scientists and released in 1998. In these studies, they let test subjects be exposed for a priming session, with the stereotype of either a professor or a soccer hooligan (in one of the tests they were also subjected to the traits of intelligence and stupid), the test subjects then proceeded to complete a general knowledge test. The test, the subjects had to complete, was created by choosing questions from the board game; trivial pursuit.

The theoretic background to these test were that priming a subject with a stereotype or a specific trait would lead to an observable complex behavior in line with the stereotype or trait. This means, as the study shows, that subjects being primed with the stereotype of professors or the trait of intelligence will consequently provide a better result at a test measuring general knowledge. Likewise test subjects that were exposed with the negative stereotype of a soccer hooligan or the trait of stupid expressed a significantly worse result at a similar general knowledge test.

In the studies the priming procedure the subjects were exposed to, worked like this; The subjects received a blank paper and were asked to list behavior, lifestyle and appearance attributes of either a professor or a soccer hooligan for a preset amount of minutes (the number of minutes the subjects did this varied over the four experiments conducted in order to see if it made a difference). The same sort of priming procedure were conducted with the traits of intelligent and stupid.

The results of these studies confirmed the predefined theory, that this in fact lead to different results at a general knowledge test. Now before we go to deep into the results of the studies, we must first state that the general knowledge test were changed in all of the studies. The questions were all taken from trivial pursuit, but the amount of questions and the time to answer each question varied in between studies. But to give some examples of how great this test were; In study number 2 (of a total of 4 studies) they let the test subjects to be in either a control group (no priming), a 2 minute priming group or a 9 minute priming group. The two primed groups were all primed the professor stereotype. The results is as follow:

No prime = 45.2% correct answers
2-min prime = 51.8% correct answers
9-min prime = 58.9% correct answers

Now as we can see the results presented in this article shows that a priming effect can result in actual differences at a test. As the discussion follows, they reason that the test subjects didn't receive new knowledge as a result of the priming result, it is reasoned that the test subjects achieved a state of mind were they more easily could remember or more easily find the correct answer.

Stereotype threat
Now lets have a look at another know phenomenon, namely stereotype threat. This is a phenomenon that is closely related to priming and it might be very treacherous for psychologist conducting tests.

Stereotype threat was first described in 1995 by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson. And it is described as "..being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group". As they explain in their study the reason that black Americans have a stereotype of being unintelligent or dumb. Therefore, if they are presented with a test that is a to test their intelligence this will invoke a stereotype threat, since they have a risk of performing bad, therefore confirming the stereotype. This have several effects on the result, as it shows in their test.

What it shows is that it seems to have similar results to priming. Here the stereotype threat activates the knowledge of the stereotype. And that itself is enough to give significant results to a test. There is no need for a priming session here as in previously described, since the black americans is already well aware of the stereotypes and have been primed prematurely, before the test. The stereotype threat simply invokes the stereotype and it affects the test subjects , making them behave in line with the stereotype.

Now, in their article from 1995 they presented 4 studies. Lets present two of them. One of their tests (study 2 of you read the original source) were conducted as follow. Black and white female American students took a test, they all took the same test under the same conditions, the independent variable here being the way the test were presented. Half of the black and half of the white students were told that this test were to test their intellectual abilities. The other half of the students were told that the test were simply a tool in a larger study to understand problem solving. This leads to 4 groups.

The results of this study may be shocking. The black students in the group that thought their intellectual ability were tested, performed significantly worse than any of the other groups. To keep the information simply; this study showed that if you tell a black woman that her intellectual ability is being tested, she will perform worse than a black woman who weren't told the same, and she will also perform worse than a white woman no matter what the white woman were told about the test. This is a serious issue to take into consideration, I will talk more about that later in this blog post.

The other study I want to mention is one that has been very famous. It is for instance cited in the popular book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Where he writes that a test showed that by simply letting black students check a box to state whether they are black or not they only managed to score half the point of black Americans that didn't do so. And shockingly enough, he is correct. The people who did the test, both black and white were given a questionnaire, where some got told to cross out what skin color they had. Black Americans that had to do this scored worse than white Americans that did this and worse than Black Americans who didn't have to do this. By simply reminding them of their skin color they got primed by the stereotypes of black Americans and scored worse.

Now what does all this tells us? 
From these two articles we have scientific proof that if you let a black person state their skin color before doing a test, chances are that the will get a significant lower score because of that.
Chances are that if you explain to a black person that they will do a intelligence test, that might lead to a worse score.
By explaining to a professor, that they will be tested as a professor, you might prime them into another state of mind that leads to another score that they would otherwise get.

These are facts that is important to understand for a lot of people in this world, either if you are a scientist that is designing a new test and have to avoid involuntary stereotype threat and priming, or if you are an outsider that reads a scientific article about a test. If they didn't accounted for stereotype threat while designing a test, chances are that it is a bad test.

About IQ-tests: On a global scale, different IQ-tests differs and most of them can not avoid effects by the previously explained phenomenons. We have proof that if a black students faces a test that should test his intellectual abilities he will get a significantly worse score simply by knowing this. This creates a big trouble, damaging the credibility of the majority of IQ-tests conducted on black people over the entire world. We know so much that indicates that intelligence at a given more often is about a state of mind rather than a general intelligence regarding the individual. As these facts stacks we know more and more that IQ-tests is a very inaccurate way of testing intelligence.


The articles mentioned in this blogpost:

The Relation Between Perception and Behavior, or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit, By  Ap Dijksterhuis and Ad van Knippenberg, 1998.
Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans,  by Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, 1995