Closing Comments: Day Two at NOWCAM (Post 7)

We're in the final paper session of the conference which focuses on attention. This is the session that features a talk by a member of our very own lab, the inimitable Bill Chen. His talk described some results from an ongoing project called ORIS. Amongst other things ORIS looks at the relationship between working memory and attentional optimization. This was Bill's first conference presentation and it went very smoothly.

After this session we will relocate for second poster session of the conference back at the student union building.

All of us at the cognitive science lab have thoroughly enjoyed sharing our work and learning from other researchers. We would like to thank the organizers of NOWCAM and hope that we will be as good hosts when it is SFU's turn to host in several years.

Poster Sessions (Post 6)

[ PHOTO: Engaged in discussions at the poster sessions ]
[ PHOTO: Jordan explains fluid learning to a fellow NOWCAMP'er ]

The poster sessions at NOWCAM were a thriving hub of discussions, debates, mini-presentations, and networking. For two hours, attendees were able to meet with students and researchers, and dig deeper into cognition and memory studies. Way to go Jordan!

"I have no memory of that": Perpetrators' Memory for Their Own Crimes (Post 5)

Eyewitness memory has been an immensely fruitful research area in cognitive psychology - but eyewitnesses are not the only ones present during a crime. In fact, perpetrators' memory for their own crimes has been a largely ignored subject of research, even though the veracity of confessions is a rather contentious topic in many court situations.

There are many factors that may affect the accuracy of recall for the details of a crime - arousal, centrality of particular details to the crime (e.g. the box that money was taken from versus a jacket that was hanging nearby), gender of the perpetrator or witness, and consistency versus inconsistency of the crime with existing schemata.

Participants were instructed to carry out a mock theft of an exam from a professor's office. Arousal was manipulated rather excitingly by telling half of the participants that they would have to dodge security on the way! A week after the theft, memory for the crime was tested through free recall, a present/absent recognition task for objects in the professor's office, and a forced-choice recognition test for pictures of the office and the route the participants took.

Females recognized more objects than males at low arousal, but not at high arousal; males tended to make more hits than correct rejections in the recognition task; schema-consistent or central objects were remembered better; and recognition memory was generally better in the high-arousal condition.

False Memory and False Source Memory (Post 4)

The phenomenon of memory conformity is a well-established one - when one person reports some aspect of a shared event that another did not experience, the second person will later report personal recall of what the first person described. However, it is not yet known whether the false recall is really false recall, or simply a report of what that person "knows" to be true about the subject at hand.

This study examined the phenomenon by showing pairs of participants videos from slightly different angles, such that each saw two details that the other could not. Each pair was then asked about a number of details in the video in a cooperative task, and were then split up and asked the same questions individually, along with a source memory question - where did their knowledge of the scene come from? Was it a memory, information from their partner, both, or just a guess?

Items seen by one's partner were recalled at a very high rate, and participants most often attributed their memory of those items to both their partner and their own viewing of the video, even though they never saw those details themselves - a clear case of false memory. Interestingly, details not seen by one's partner were often attributed to the partner as well. It seems that both false memory and false modesty are at work here!

[PHOTO: Mike blogs live at NOWCAM 2009 ]

Tunnel Vision and Blame Attribution (Post 3)

Confirmation bias. Tunnel vision. Whatever you call it, the phenomenon of collecting information to support or investigate a particular hypothesis regarding a to-be-investigated event can compromise objectivity and lead to erroneous conclusions. Although Popper solved the problem of confirmation bias for science, the problem is far from solved in the minds of the general population. One domain in which this effect is especially apparent is industrial accidents - one must shift from a worker role into an investigator role, and any number of cognitive biases enter into play, such as the Fundamental Attribution Error.

How, then, can we remedy tunnel vision and prevent undue bias in investigations? Education is one idea - if people are encouraged to consider alternatives and adopt a pseudo-Popperian mindset, by which they attempt to falsify their preconceptions rather than confirm them, a reduction in bias may result.

In this experiment, participants read about an industrial accident after being assigned to one of two bias conditions - they were given an initial description that blamed an accident either on an incompetent worker or on a piece of faulty equipment - and were educated or not educated on the phenomenon of tunnel vision, hypothesis testing, and the consideration of alternatives. They were then asked to allocate blame. Unsurprisingly, people tended to blame whoever they were intially biased against, but education played a very small role - it failed to interact with bias.


Additional evidence was then provided supporting either the worker or the equipment as the responsible party, and participants were asked how supportive the evidence was of their initial blame allocation. Education had no effect on blame allocation, interestingly, and people tended to consider additional evidence as slightly supportive of their original hypothesis - no matter what the original hypothesis was!

Finally, more blame allocation was asked for. This revealed a large effect, whereby people initially biased against the worker who were educated in the FAE and tunnel vision revised their initial attribution of responsibility such that the worker and the equipment were equally at fault. Conversely, people with an initial anti-equipment bias tended to shift blame onto the worker if they were educated.

Initial biases are clearly resilient - though education has some effect, people who are aware of the fundamental attribution error are still all too likely to commit it.

Face recognition and the N400 Wave (Post 2)

Research byJustin Kantner, Iris Gordon, Krista Friesen, Andreas Breuer, Christopher Warren, & James Tanaka.

The second session presented research looking at what happens in our brain when we constantly see faces that are insignificant to us and are quickly forgotten.

With repeated exposure to a face, a mental representation builds. Upon recognizing a face, the stored representation is activated and an N250 wave occurs 250ms after stimulus onset in the posterior channels of the brain

The researchers constructed a “Joe /No Joe” task to capture face recognition in the lab.
In the experiment, participants compare three “types” of faces, of which Joe’s is one type. Their prediction was that the N250 wave will be more emphasized for the Joe-type faces.

They found that the N250 wave indexes existing and acquired faces, and subsequently indexes Joe in experimental conditions, which lead them to ask the question: “would a non-individuated non-task-relevant but highly salient face elicit the same N250? What are the conditions necessary to elicit N250?” In this case, the enhanced N250 is not a result of Joe being distinctive, rather it comes from repeated experience of seeing Joe.

Morning Sunshine: Day One at NOWCAM (Post 1)

[ PHOTO: NOWCAMP'ers fuel up on day one ]

University of Victoria is beautiful in the spring. Sunshine reflects off contemporary faculty buildings, and groups of bunnies mingle in the dew-soaked grass. There are lots, and lots of bunnies.

For those of you who aren't aware, NOWCAM stands for North West Cognition and Memory. The conference is designed to give undergraduate students the opportunity to present their research to peers in the form of posters or presentation.

Our group from the SFU Cognitive Science Lab consists of Calen Walshe, Mike Wood, Bill Chen, Jordan Barnes, Michael Fry, and myself. On the morning of day one we arise at a brain-tingling 7:30am among a sea of network cables, laptops, and last night's pizza boxes, and make our way to registration.

As students finish up munching on fresh muffins washed down with juice and coffee, the conference hall begins to fill up in anticipation of the opening welcome from Steve Lindsay followed by Dr James Tanaka introducing the first session on Perception.

By: Harry White