Short term Memory:
How do we get to the memory we all relish having? Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed a theory in 1971, which conceptualises the system as follows: Input comes to your brain, let us say it is your first time seeing a black swan. You probably would like to remember this moment, so the next time someone claims „All swans are white“ you can say „Nope, I saw a black one with my very own eyes“. Now, how does this information gets printed into your memory?
First, you have a so-called sensory memory. Here, all the input coming from your senses gets stored for a short amount of time to get filtered for relevant and not-so-relevant stuff. Clearly, a black swan is something interesting, something catching your attention. All other stuff, how clear the water looks like, that a house in your sight misses a tile on its roof or that a couple on the other side of the river are taking some selfies for their super cute couple-Instagram account: all of this information is deemed irrelevant and decays (a nice word for „will be forever forgotten“).
One word was relevant here: attention. Attention itself is such mind-boggling, mysterious concept, it deserves a blog on its own. It guides the new information to something called central executive.
The central executive is analogous to our CEO in the office. She monitors all the actions going on, which strategy should be acted after, decides where attention should be drawn to and what should be ignored. Some might say, it is closely coupled with your free will, but that's a whole other debate. Like the CEO in our office, the central executive has a limit, it can only do a certain number of things simultaneously.
Like in a real office, its best to divide the work into departments: the visual (input coming from your eyes) and phonological (all the input coming from your ears). But there is another third party joining the workforce: your long-term memory. All the information you gathered throughout the years is stored here: how nice your aunt is (or the opposite), your shoe-size, what a giraffe looks like, that you don’t like broccoli or the formula for calculating a regression line.
The CEO does her job best when she can gather and combine information from all of the departments mentioned above.
The Pioneers: (essential readings)
Atkinson, R.C., & Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). Chapter: Human Memory: A proposed System and its Control processes. In Spence, K.W., & Spence, J.T. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Vol. 2, p.89-195). New York: Academic Press.
Baddeley, A.D. (1968). Working Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baddeley, A.D., & Hitch, G. (1974). Working Memory. In G.H. Bower (Ed.), The Psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and Theory (Vol. 8, p. 47-89). New York: Academic Press.
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OSPan Task
After solving a short mathematical equation like „(2*3) - 4 = 2“ participants had to determine if the answer is true or false. Straight afterwards, a letter appeared on the screen, let's say „K“. This would go on for a varying amount of rounds until the computer asks for the letters in the correct order. And indeed, it is exactly as horrible of a task as it sounds like.
Independent and Dependent Variables
The hallmark of experiments is the idea of manipulating something while keeping everything else constant. In this condition, you can then confidently say „this caused the change in responses“, this is the factor which significantly and consistently alters behaviour.
This „manipulated something“is the independent variable. It can be, as in the case of the Brain Drain Study, the group you got assigned to, having your phone out on the table, in your bag or another room, but there are a lot more possibilities: the temperature of the room, being in the placebo or the medication group, having some annoying music blasted in your ears (or not) while solving math problems, or even something so subtle as the phrasing used in questionnaires.
Dependent variables, on the other hand, are exactly what you want to measure, just as easy as this. These can be how long it took you to answer the math problems, if your response to a questionnaire changes because of the subtle change in phrasing or if you are less able to remember the string of letters presented because you have your phone out.
Cognitive Capacity
Cognitive Capacity is the term ascribed to the maximum of information being able to held in a single instance in your mind. One of the best ways to think of it is a filter: All information coming into your head, as for example the surrounding sounds, your visual impressions, the feeling of your shoes tied to your feet, and the smells coming into your nose, are first filtered for importance. Being aware that you're wearing shoes all the time wouldn't be helpful, but recognising a sharp smell would be helpful: it may be burning somewhere…
Cognitive Capacity is also a space for abstract concepts like mathematics, philosophy and all kinds of thoughts. There’s only limited space for thoughts and mental work, so use it wisely.
Cyborgs
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Many, many philosophers think hard about anything imaginable - what’s real, what’s not, how we could ever know that, what the meaning of life is… your usual 4 a.m. discussions.
They also have a tendency to play around with thought experiments: Imagined scenarios with set rules. One well known are zombies: perfect copies of us humans, but without consciousness, without a „self“. Okay, it gets very philosophical here, so we turn back to cyborgs.
Cyborg is a term ascribed to humans with machine-like features. The discussion here is, when to start calling someone a cyborg. Some might say, as soon as we have brain chips or bodies like Darth Vader, Terminator and co. Others, such as Andy Clark (https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/andy-clark), put the threshold way lower: He claims that we’re all natural-born cyborgs. His argumentation is as follows: We already use our phones as „extensions of our minds“ (just think of your calendar or calculator). They’re influence and our dependence upon them is, in his eyes, sufficient enough to put a direct link between us and the technology, effectively turning us into cyborgs.
If you feel like digging deeper into this topic, a good point to start is with Andy Clark’s book Natural-Born Cyborgs or Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0. Two books which will get your brain going (so better leave your phone somewhere else…).
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Generation X (~1960-1980)
A term mainly used by sociologists or people who want to sound smart (also sociologists). The usual definition of Generation X: a firmly defined group of individuals, with the definition being based on the date of birth: something like your zodiac sign, but instead of some weeks, this timeframe lasts for about 15-20 years, depending on your exact definition. The Generation X found its way into this world right after the so-called Boomers (~1945-1965), a generation described through the impact on birthrates after WWII.
Generation Y/Millenials
Another term from sociology. This time describing the cohort of people born in the generation after X (hence the Y). Growing up in the rise of technological advancements, the two group are said to differ to a noticeable degree. The timeframe is usually defined from the early 1980’s to the late 1990’s. And guess who comes next…. Generation Z: Late 1990’s (’96-’98 -ish) until 2012.