What are cognitive sciences, what do they do, and what interesting things can they tell about a person? We talked about this with cognitive psychologist Maria Falikman.
What is “cognitive”?
This word has been buzzing around lately. Wits say “I have cognitive dissonance” in situations where others exclaim “Wow!”; enigmatic “doctors of cognitive science” are found in translated texts, and it seems that it is almost indecent to know nothing about cognition. One of the leading Russian cognitive psychologists, Maria Falikman, told us about what this word really means, as well as about the achievements of scientists from various fields who together explore the processes of human cognition.
Psychologies: Let’s start from the beginning: what are cognitive processes and cognitive sciences?
Maria Falikman: Everything is very simple. Cognitive means pertaining to human cognition. To how we receive information, how we store, transform and use it, solving certain problems.
But if desired, absolutely any process can fit under this broad definition!
M.F.: Partly for this reason, the word “cognitive” has recently become a label that is glued to everything indiscriminately. And the “Doctor of Cognitive Sciences” in the West is a specialist in several fields of science at once, studying our cognition, language and brain. The point is that cognitive research is, by definition, interdisciplinary. They were born at the intersection of several sciences. By the way, cognitive science has its official birthday – September 11, 1956. On this day, at the symposium on the problems of information processing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, three important reports were made. The first was presented by psychologist George Miller, the second by linguist Noam Chomsky, and the third by computer scientist Allen Newell and political scientist Herbert Simon, who created the world’s first artificial intelligence model. From this moment the history of cognitive sciences is counted. Well, another reason that the cognitive sciences are too often mentioned in vain is that this is a very promising field in which a lot of money is allocated for research around the world. You understand, this is a very serious incentive.
Why is cognitive research so important from an applied point of view?
M.F.: Oh, they have so many uses! Let’s start with the simplest: how to organize the desktop on the computer so that you can always quickly find the files you need? This is a classic visual search task for cognitive psychology, which has been actively studied since the 1980s. From the same field of visual search can be called the problems facing doctors who have to study a lot of tomograms, x-rays and other images. Is it possible to unmistakably find signs of illness on them without missing anything important? By the way, just last year, cognitivists conducted a funny experiment, bringing back to life the “invisible gorilla” from the study of Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabry. Doctors were shown pictures of some internal organs and asked to suggest a diagnosis. Experts considered, studied, spoke. And most of them simply did not notice the small silhouette of a gorilla in the pictures. This is a very common error of attention: the doctor knows exactly what can and cannot be in such a picture. He also knows exactly what he’s looking for – and it’s definitely not a gorilla! So he just doesn’t see her. And automobile concerns, for example, are investing huge amounts of money in the development of systems for attracting the driver’s attention to unexpectedly appearing objects. Because the invisible gorilla in the picture is funny, and the invisible pedestrian on the road is already very sad. There are attempts to develop systems that would follow the driver’s gaze, detect when the direction of gaze does not correspond to an object that has appeared in the field of view, and attract attention. It is still difficult and expensive, but devices for capturing eye movements are developing at an incredible rate. And if motorists have to wait a little longer, then these technologies are already being used in advertising: it is not difficult to find out where, for example, a person looks first when opening a web page. So, there will be an advertising banner!
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Okay, but what about the computer desktop?
M.F.: The number of elements on it should not exceed six. Otherwise, you will inevitably spend extra time searching. Moreover, if you find one file, and after five minutes you are looking for another, then even it will not be possible to find it faster – the number of repeated searches in a saturated environment does not affect their speed in any way. So create folders. Grouping is our main tool. Well, ungrouping too: if a particular file is important to you, it is better to place it at a distance from all the others: this way you will immediately pay attention to it.
Dates
Maria Falikman was born in Moscow in 1976. Graduated from the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov, in 2001 – graduate school of the same faculty. She defended her Ph.D. thesis on the topic “Dynamics of attention under conditions of rapid sequential presentation of visual stimuli.” From 2006 to 2010 – Associate Professor of the Department of General Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University. Author of over 100 scientific publications. Senior Research Fellow, Center for Cognitive Research, Faculty of Philology, Moscow State University.
The influence of the computer on our lives is surely also a subject of interest for the cognitive sciences? Indeed, without computers, now it is impossible to imagine our process of cognition.
M.F.: You are right, but this is still a very young area of research. Many, for example, argue that computers affect our memory. But I think it’s too early to draw such conclusions. Human cognition, in principle, tends to delegate the load, transfer it to the environment. And it started long before computers. The knots on the scarf are also a reminder. What about writing itself? What is it, if not a sharp unloading of memory? That is, from this point of view, nothing new is happening. As long as the computer is a tool for solving certain problems, and a person solves them effectively, I do not see any problems. Of course, it is possible that the constant use of the computer leaves our memory without constant training. And suddenly finding ourselves without a computer, we may experience certain difficulties. But I’m not sure that we can already talk about some fundamentally different mechanisms compared to the pre-computer era. Although, I repeat, this knowledge divided between a person and a computer is a completely, completely new field of research. Technique in general is now developing faster, scientists simply do not have time for it. Remember how many conversations there were about 10 years ago about the so-called thumb-generation – “thumb generation”. About children and teenagers who are used to working with their thumbs, typing sms and using gaming devices. What a fertile field for research! So, there is nothing to study. The iPhone appeared, and no one uses thumbs, now you need to study touch screens – this is a completely different way to interact with the device.
“The most interesting thing is that there is still no answer to the main question: what is our consciousness in general?”
Can we expect that the development of science and technology will one day allow us to gain electronic immortality – to create digital copies of ourselves on flash drives, for example? It’s also a matter of knowledge, isn’t it?
M.F.: Rather, it is a matter of consciousness – where it is still hiding. But I’m afraid science isn’t too close to the answer. We perfectly identify the areas of the brain responsible for the analysis of this or that type of information (that is, for certain cognitive processes). But so far, it doesn’t look like we’ve become a little clearer about what our consciousness itself is. Particular problems are solved, but the most general – alas. Therefore, I can not promise you immortality on a flash drive. To do this, it would be necessary to translate into digital algorithms the entire subjective experience of a person. And it is absolutely unique for any of us! Here we are sitting at the same table and looking at it. And we can see two different tables. Because perception comes from two sides. There is a direct effect on the retina, but there is memory, past experience, knowledge about how many and what kind of tables we have seen before. One of the great cognitivists, Ulric Neisser, once wrote that it is precisely for this reason that manipulation of another person is completely impossible. To do this, one would have to control absolutely any visual, auditory and any other experience of a person from the moment of his birth. Without this, we will never be able to accurately predict what is going on in his head at any given moment.
“Invisible Gorilla”
In the late 1990s, American psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an interesting study. The subjects were asked to watch a video showing several basketball players dressed in white and black T-shirts passing the ball to each other. The task was to count how many passes the players in white shirts would make per minute. And all participants of the experiment coped with it perfectly. But at the same time, most of them did not notice at all that in the middle of the video, a man in a gorilla suit suddenly appeared in the frame. He slowly walked around the site and, hitting his chest with his fists, left. Psychologists explain this “invisibility” by the so-called “blindness due to inattention”: fully concentrating on one task, we completely do not notice what has nothing to do with it. In 2004, the experiment with the “invisible gorilla” was awarded the Ignobel (aka Ig Nobel) Prize for “research that makes you first laugh, and then think.” Yu. Z.