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 L

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 L

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 L

Research Proposals Should be “Theory Driven” Most proposals are organized around a specific theory What is the difference between a theory and a question? L

The Parts of a Research Proposal Background Statement of the theory Prediction(s) that follow from the theory Experimental Method and Design Timeline Budget References L

The Parts of a Research Proposal Background Statement of the theory Prediction(s) that follow from the theory Experimental Method and Design Timeline Budget References L These aren’t necessary for your project

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 this applies to your theory, you will make this constraint explicit in your proposal L

Cognitive Operations What does the brain actually do? Some possible answers:

Cognitive Operations What does the brain actually do? Some possible answers: – “The mind” – Information processing… – Transforms of mental representations – Execution of mental representations of actions

First Principles “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 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 AaAa AUAU SCSC ASAS SAME DIFFERENT

Mental Representations 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?