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Lecture Notes
Chapter 9

• Too complex, lack the "tools"

• Can be studied scientifically

• Translate private events ---> symbolic expression
• Symbols must be understood by others

• Describe and use psychological events private to ourselves

Tool use

• Van Lawic-Goodall (1970)
  • "...the use of an external object as a functional extension of mouth or beak, hand or claw, in the attainnment of an immediate goal."
• An expression/act of intelligence
• Wide range
  • Clam smashing by gulls
  • "Tool-kits" by chimpanzees

• Hannah and McGrew (1987)
  • Tools; hammers and anvils
  • Behaviour: cracking palm nuts
  • Imitation, tool possessiveness, tool movement
• Brewer and McGrew (1990)
  • Tool-kit; sequential tool use
  • Honey extraction: specific tools for different jobs
  • Suggests foresight and anticipation: planning

• General displays of tool use
• Bodily care
  • Brushing, scratching, shading
• Different evolutionary vectors for tool use development?

• Capuchin monkey
• Mother manipulated infant's head wound with worked stick and masticated bark
• Tool use, planning, empathy
• Retention of knowledge of mother's own wound treatment
• Extrapolation of pain relief from personal experience

• Chimpanzees
• Steps
  • Treat mirror as another chimp
  • Self-directed behaviours
  • Self-recognition

Two issues

• Having an experience (consciousness)
• Being aware of an experience (self-consciousness); sense of identity

Auditory Attention

• Dichotic listening
  • Two inputs, one to each ear
  • Report from one input; filtering
  • Most information from unattended ear lost
    • Some limited implicit memories
    • Classical conditioning
      • Previously pair aversive US with word; test with word
• Cocktail Party Effect

• Location
  • "Attentional spotlight"
  • Expectation ---> faster perception
  • Inhibition of return
    • Sweeping of attentional spotlight across field
    • If nothing at location, inhibited from returning to that spot
  

• Nature
  • One thing at a time

• Language disturbance; speech centres isolated from other brain regions
• Inability to comoprehend and produce meaningful speech
• But, can repeat speech and learn word lists

• Inability to visually recognize and identify items
• Can identify objects by touch
• Not full loss of visual perception
• Brain perceives form, but can't identify it
  • e.g., mimes holding a gun when shown gun picture


• Corpus callosum cut; disconnects cerebral hemispheres
• Sensory information to hemisphere from opposite side of body; muscular control from hemisphere to opposite side of body
• Speech centres in left hemisphere

• Posthypnotic suggestibility
• Posthypnotic amnesia

Social Roles

• Barber (1979)
• Social behaviours, not special states of consciousness
  
• Expectations
  • Orne (1959) and the "rigid hand"
  • Prior knowledge
  • Role playing?
• Authority figures?
• Experimental setting?

• Recording of electrical activity of the brain

Brain Waves

• Alpha waves
  • Relaxed, awake
  • Nonattentive
  • Slow
  • Spontaneous, synchronized neural firing
• Beta waves
  • Alert, awake
  • Fast
  • Directed, irregular neural firing

Sleep Cycles

• Stage 1
  • Brief, transition state
• Stages 2 and 3
  • Deeper sleep
• Stage 4
  • Muscle tension, heart rate, breathing decline
  • Deepest sleep: delta waves

Cyclic Pattern of Sleep Stages

• Stages 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, REM, 2, 3, 4, ...

REM

• Rapid eye movement
• EEG is unsynchronized
  • Looks like beta waves
• Dreams

• Biological rhythm
  • Circadian rhythm cycle
    • 24 hours
    • Temperature, hormones, behaviour, activity
  • Light cues
  • Hypothalamus
    • Suprachiasmatic nucleus
      • Rhythm generating neurons
      • Pattern generator

• Medulla and pons
  • Soma here...send axons to cortex
  • Serotonin
    • Inhibitory
• Restoration theory
  • Healing time
  • Body processes slow down
• Protection theory
  • Evolution
  • Energy saving
  • Protection

• Pons
  • Excitatory on brain activity
  • Inhibitory on motor neurons: cataplexy

• Freudian dream theory
  • Wish fulfillment
  • Unconscious messages
  • Interpretation of symbols
• Activation-synthesis hypothesis
  • Awake
    • Actively interpret incoming stimuli
  • Asleep
    • Sources of incoming stimuli inhibited
    • Brain keeps trying to organize cortical activity
  • Pontine reticular neurons
    • Send motor stimuli
    • But muscles inhibited
    • Cortex "invents" content
      • Dreams are very movement oriented
• Synaptic exercise hypothesis
  • Synapses change with learning
    • Lost or gained
  • Asleep roughtly 30 per cent of your life
  • Perceptual and motor cortex
    • Dreams: hallucinations
  • Fetal dreaming

Sleep Deprivation

• Usually run for 2-4 days
• Gradual drop in functional levels
  • Attentional tasks, memory load, performance
• Mood change
• Sleep deprivation psychosis
  • Relatively rare
  • During night
• Is it sleep, or REM, that's lacking?

• Fish
• Don't dream