I decided to use Gestalt Laws of Perception for my first blog. How we view the world we live in can be different from one another and can be difficult for us to understand. One thing is for certain, is that we try to make the world make sense and there are many ways we do so. I would like to talk about the law of similarity.

The law of similarity can be best described as how we naturally group like items together, and that can be done in many ways. Whether that is by color, by shapes we see, or by the sizes of items that are in front of us. I have the pleasure of having my four-year-old and currently as a family we are working on puzzles. I tried to put a puzzle piece that fit perfectly in a spot, but my daughter had taken the puzzle piece out. When asked why she did it, she said that the puzzle piece doesn’t go there. The colors scheme was off, but she saw that the piece fit perfectly but was not correct in her mind because she associated the like colors and started to group them together by likeness of color.

This law is something that I catch myself doing as well with organizing likeness of colors when putting away items in my kitchen and feel out of place when I don’t group items together. I believe it depends on the person, but this law can hold true for everyone, just depending on what the item is, and situation is as well. I am not sure why as there is still being research done on to truly understanding this, but it could be caused by how we naturally group like items and could help us understand the way are brain associated similarities.

Top-Bottom, Bottom-Up Process

The idea that people look at things the same way is not even remotely possible. The top-down, bottom-up process is one of the most applicable aspects that I’ve read thus far. All of us see things in a different aspect than others. At the end of the day what you see as something compared to me is completely different than someone else.

When I was 18 years old, I had already signed up to join the military. I walked into the recruiter station and said I wanted to be on the front lines. I didn’t know what that meant, but the recruiter looked me in the eye and said “not a problem, come on in.” At that time, I was young and didn’t even know what it meant to be on the front lines. It was introduced to me before I left for basic training that I joined the Infantry.

After joining the infantry and training to be the person I wanted to be, I realized that this entire life I was about to embark on was completely different than what I expected. I was to train in an atmosphere that was completely different than what I expected. I was to be someone that I never expected to be.

What I learned in my two terms of service is that not everyone sees the expectations of what it means to be a soldier in the U.S. Army. I was someone that I never expected I would have to be. I joined the Army based off the realization that if the other men are going overseas to fight for this country, what makes myself any better than them. The answer to that question is nothing makes me better than them. So my entire enlistment was based off of the fact that if those men are going overseas to fight, then it’s only fair that I go and do the same.

I don’t think everyone has the same mentality that others do. We all have our own thought processes; we all have our own agendas to complete. Mine was that I’m not any better than the men going to fight overseas, so therefore I will go and do the same. I don’t think we all have the same mentalities, and we all have our own life agendas, but at the end of the day we should all be fighting to be who we want to be.

Top-Down, Bottom-Up processing all comes down to experience and what we expect and want to become with ourselves, the top-down processing for me was that the war I was seeing was something I wanted to contribute to. I wanted to be the person that was in the middle of it. I served almost three years of my life in Iraq and Afghanistan to be the person I thought I wanted to be. However, although this was the purpose, I strived for doesn’t mean it was the same purpose someone else was striving for. Others may have seen something else significant they saw that could be done to attribute themselves in the same aspect. Although I decided to be on the front lines to serve my fellow men, the next person may have seen a different area to contribute to so they could serve in the same aspect.

This week something that I thought was really interesting was about was looking at the two processing streams,a dn the differences between the two. The landmark discrimination task made me think about my personal experiences with navigating my environment.

The difference between these two streams is using identification versus location, and as I was thinking about this concept, I realized that I typically think about things in the sense of proximity and relation to location rather than a physical thing. For example, when I think about leaving the house for work, I don’t think about the fact that I have to take certain roads and turns, but I more so think about how long will this way take me versus a different way, and the proximity to what is more practical from where I am at currently. These two ways look different if i’m leaving from home or school for example.

I also thought about the fact that I only moved to PA a few years ago, and I grew up in the west coast, so everything was extremely unfamiliar to me beyond just the city I was living in now, but also the region of the country. I used specific buildings or recognizable street corners to make my way around the city for the first few months to familiarize myself with the area I was in rather than relying on a GPS.

I think there it is interesting to look at the different ways that every individual makes sense of their environment and how they familiarize themselves with new areas as well.

Schizophrenia is a mental health illness that affects approximately 24 million people worldwide, which statistically means 1 in every 300 people suffer from this chronic condition (World Health Organization, 2023). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies the disorder as a chronic mental illness that can involve positive symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and behavior), negative symptoms, and cognitive impairment (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). How it affects perception is something that is being discovered and studied. In the article, Understanding Delusions of Control: How Schizophrenia Alters Perception of Actions, author Mareike Kardinal, discusses a recent research article that showed how the perspective of an individual with schizophrenia may be different (Kardinal, 2023). To better understand the outcome of this research, we need to know the basics of how the disorder works, the ideologies behind perception, and the general interpretation of the results.  

Schizophrenia itself impairs one’s ability to live a healthy and independent life by distorting one’s reality due to varying disabling symptoms. Though there is no known direct cause of schizophrenia, there is an association between genetics and environmental factors. (World Health Organization, 2023). Treatment for Schizophrenia is more successful when it is a combination of talk therapy and medications, such as antipsychotics (NCBI, 2014). To how it affects the brain, a research article titled Structural and Function Brain Abnormalities mentions an association of schizophrenia with changes to brain systems, including, prefrontal, and medial temporal lobe regions (Karlsgodt et al., 2010). This demonstrates how schizophrenia physically influences one’s brain and how it functions.

There are different theories when it comes to perception and how they lead to our actions. This ranges between theories that support the ideology by Helmholtz, regularities, and Bayesian inference, which all focus on how different factors such as our past experiences help us determine what we perceive (Goldstein, 2021). We will be focusing on the Bayesian Inference which is that we perceive what is most likely to have created the stimulation we have received based on probability (Goldstein, 2021). In other words, what is most likely to happen will. To better understand the relationship between perception and action, we will reference the experiment by Leslie Ungerleider and Mortimer Mishkin (1982), which concluded the importance and connection of the Temporal lobe and the Parietal lobe. (Goldstein, 2021). The ventral and dorsal pathway shows how what we see or perceive is connected to our temporal lobe which is also affected by schizophrenia. (Karlsgodt et al., 2010).

 Following up on the article, Understanding Delusions of Control: How Schizophrenia Alters Perception of Actions, researchers did a controlled experiment to recognize if there is a perspective difference between individuals with schizophrenia and healthy individuals, and there was (Kardinal, 2023). In the experiment, Individuals with schizophrenia perceived the time interval between their action of flipping a switch and a light turning on. If there was even a half-second delay in the lamp turning on, those with the mental condition of schizophrenia reported that external forces controlled the lamp. Kardinal, 2023 states that researchers in this experiment realized that there was an association: the weaker an intentional binding was, the more those individuals with schizophrenia would attribute their actions to an external factor. An interesting factor that is included is that this study was inspired by Bayesian causal inference models, suggesting that blaming external factors could lead to decreased intentional binding. (Kardinal, 2023). This showcases how schizophrenia can lead to changes in perception when compared to healthy individuals.

Overall, this theory of how perception works and the different perspectives behind them helped me better understand the article. I was able to put together how it is all connected and the importance of recognizing the different parts of the brain and how together they influence one’s perception. It was truly so exciting to better understand what I was reading and how this very serious schizophrenia is and how affects those who suffer from it. I would love it if this study could be replicated with a larger pool of participants to see if the results are the same. These results help creates a better understanding of what it is like to be someone who lives with schizophrenia.

References:

 American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596

 Goldstein, E. Bruce. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Cengage, 2021. 

 Kardinal, M. (2023, May 25). Understanding delusions of control: How schizophrenia alters the perception of action. Neuroscience News. https://neurosciencenews.com/schizophrenia-action-perception-23344/

Karlsgodt, Katherine H, et al. “Structural and Functional Brain Abnormalities in Schizophrenia.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 Aug. 2010, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235761/#:~:text=Schizophrenia%20is%20associated%20with%20changes,memory%20and%20declarative%20memory%2C%20respectively. Accessed 29 May 2023. 

 Patel, Krishna R, et al. “Schizophrenia: Overview and Treatment Options.” P & T : A Peer-Reviewed Journal for Formulary Management, Sept. 2014, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4159061/.

World Health Organization. (n.d.). Schizophrenia. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia#:~:text=Schizophrenia%20affects%20approximately%2024%20million,as%20many%20other%20mental%20disorders.

Our brains are composed of several different units. Within those folds of neural networks contain four lobes that govern tasks from executive functioning to spatial processing. Understanding the functional importance each region of the brain is responsible for can be helpful when determining severity of damage from brain injuries such as TBI’s and strokes. The area a stroke takes place in is crucial, as damage to important areas such as the hind and mid brain could cause deficits in life sustaining functions like heart rate and breathing (Al-Oazzaz et al., 2014). In most patients’ cognitive impairment is inevitable, and as we’ve learned in pass lesson’s cognitive function is essential to language comprehension and the capacity to self-monitor.

Cognitive function refers to the mental processes and abilities related to acquiring, processing, and storing information. An important concept to note is that due to the brain being interconnected, localized function depends on different parts of the brain working together. The frontal lobe is the specific part of the brain responsible behavior and when there is a stroke in this area it can change an individual’s personality, which can result in impulsivity and socially inappropriate actions (Evans & Guy, 2023).  Recent developments in rehabilitation following a frontal lobe stroke have been noted to maximize independence and quality of life, especially those that are suffering from memory impairment.

In ischemic stroke patients, there has been noted deficits in cognitive functioning. However, through scalp acupuncture there has been an increase in activation of brain regions affected by stroke. Through this method of acupuncture, it increases blood flow and oxygen in the brain. Ischemic strokes are caused by blockages and lack of oxygen, so this therapeutic treatment has been noted to improve functionality and flow of blood in neural networks (Liu et al., 2021). Scalp acupuncture has also shown to regulate brain and nerve growth factors, this essentially improves overall cognitive functions.

The ability to store and process information is important to everyday life. The role of cognitive functioning allows us to make calculated decisions and achieve higher knowledge. On a wider scope cognition is vital to our overall health and adjust to new experiences in life, without this level of functioning we could not properly learn and survive.

References

Al-Qazzaz, N. K., Ali, S. H., Ahmad, S. A., Islam, S., & Mohamad, K. (2014). Cognitive impairment and memory dysfunction after a stroke diagnosis: a post-stroke memory assessment. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment, 10, 1677–1691. https://doi.org/10.2147/NDT.S67184

Evans, O. G., & Olivia Guy EvansAssociate Editor for Simply Psychology BSc (Hons). (2023,  May 10). Frontal lobe: Function, location, anatomical structure & damage. Simply  Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/frontal-lobe.html

Liu, H., Jiang, Y., Wang, N., Yan, H., Chen, L., Gao, J., Zhang, J., Qu, S., Liu, S., Liu, G., Huang, Y., & Chen, J. (2021). Scalp acupuncture enhances local brain regions functional activities and functional connections between cerebral hemispheres in acute ischemic stroke patients. Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007), 304(11), 2538–2551. https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.24746

While spending a considerable amount of time searching for a suitable article for this essay, I stumbled upon one that directly relates to one of the topics listed in lesson four. Of course, I settled on this one. The topic in question is that of location-based attention. The article makes the claim that our ability to pay attention to objects in our peripheral vision does not happen due to quick movements of the eye and can and does occur independently from it.

Upon seeing this, I did not even need an explanation to understand why it makes sense. A lot of experiments regarding location-based attention require that the individual(s) involved in the experiment maintain eye contact at a specific location, and then try and accurately describe the surroundings. This would not be possible if eye contact needed to be broken in order to achieve the objective given. The foundation of the experiment would crumble if this weren’t the case.

The experiment done had monkeys that were trained to be able to keep their eyes staring straight ahead while minding their peripheral vision. Then, the researchers would have these monkeys do just what they were trained to do while given a joystick that can go left or right. The researchers would flash a ring either left or right to cue a side. The monkey would then release the joystick when there was a color change on their cued side. While this was being carried out, the researchers had a high-resolution camera tracking the eye movements of the monkeys to check for microsaccades (quick movements of the eye to one location and back to gather additional information)

It was found that microsaccades occurred differently from monkey to monkey. Some monkeys had no microsaccades, some had microsaccades toward the cued side, others, away from the cued side. The monkeys always tended toward a response on the cued side regardless of eye movement. This experiment with monkeys showed that regardless of microsaccades, the result is the same on where their attention was focused.

There are many different types of ways that brain activity can be measured. Each different method has specificities that it looks for when measuring brain activity. For example, Electroencephalography, or EEG, measures the patterns of action potentials in the brain. For this post, I am going to be talking about my experience with an fMRI and MRI!

Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or MRI, measures how atoms in the brain align themselves when placed in the presence of a magnetic field. An fMRI detects differences in oxygenated and deoxygenated blood and blood flow throughout the brain. Lucky enough for me, I had to get an MRI and fMRI of my brain which is perfect to talk about for this class. I struggle with chronic migraines. For 8 months now, I have had a migraine that has not gone away. In order to rule everything else out my neurologist ordered that I get an MRI and fMRI done. Something I found interesting that my neurologist told me is that the brain does not have any pain receptors so the pain I am feeling from my migraine is not coming from my brain, rather there are specific arteries that cause pain. 

I was prescribed depressants to take before I went into the machine to get my MRI and fMRI. I had a similar experience with both procedures. Many people get claustrophobic being in a small tube. I felt claustrophobic, but I knew that the benefits of getting this done outweighed the hour of claustrophobia. The machine made a very very loud noise. I have gotten an MRI before on my feet, where I was not all the way in the machine so I was able to listen to music while the procedure happened. However this time, I was placed in a brace for my head. It was not comfortable and I could hear all of the noises the machine made. I was relieved once the procedures were finished. 

After being able to experience these procedures firsthand, I believe that they have many more pros than cons. I was able to find out that there was nothing wrong with my brain and the way it functioned due to these different ways of measuring the brain. 

Since their creation, video games have been associated with several negative concepts: juvenile delinquency, laziness, violence. Over time, however, psychologists have studied this form of entertainment and found that it can be a strong aid to our cognitive processes. Studies have shown that those who play video games even non-regularly often have improved perception, attention levels and reaction times than those who do not. Some of these improvements to cognitive processes are even believed to carry over into real-world tasks unrelated to the game (Boot et al., 2011).

Perception refers to our recognition and interpretation of sensory information. Video games would require a person to use their visual and auditory senses above others. In games where you have to defeat an enemy, the player would have to perceive a threat based on their visual appearance or an auditory cue. Bottom-up processing would occur when our receptors turn the environmental energy into action potential through transduction. The brain would then receive the action potential and we’d react by identifying the enemy in the game. If we’re playing a new game or face an unfamiliar enemy, top-down processing may be involved and we’d rely on our past information and experience to interpret a threat as such. This is a very common scenario in video games and going through it numerous times could certainly improve our perception.

Attention is our ability to control what information we focus on among all that is available in our environment. Just like the real world, video games tend to throw a ton of information at the player at once. Some games require the player to focus on one specific target and even manage several abilities or resources at once. Most video games have a very dynamic environment like this and therefore, I’d say a player’s attention is object-based. They’d need to focus on a specific object among many across the screen. Those unfamiliar with the game could be overwhelmed by this but with experience, it becomes clear where our attention needs to be focused based on the given scenario. 

Psychologists have been using video games to study their effect on these cognitive processes since the 1980s. At that time, they created a video game known as Space Fortress with the purpose of measuring players’ attention, memory and task ability (Boot, 2015). More modern video games, like the ones I described, have expanded on these ideas and now challenge players to strategize while offering numerous paths to success. All games require some perception and attention to be efficient and these cognitive processes are believed to improve in those who play. Some researchers don’t actually believe there’s a large difference in regard to the amount of time a game is played and the effect it has on the player’s cognitive abilities (Boot et al., 2008). It seems even minimal time spent playing games could have a positive effect on a person’s mental abilities.

References

Boot, W. R. (2015). Video games as tools to achieve insight into cognitive processes. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00003

Boot, W. R., Blakely, D. P., Simons, D. J. (2011). Do action video games improve perception and cognition? Frontiers in Psychology, 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00226

Boot, W. R., Kramer, A. F., Simons, D. J., Fabiani, M., Gratton, G. (2008). The effects of video game playing on attention, memory, and executive control. Acta Psychologica, 129(3), 387–398. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2008.09.005

Over the past year, you may have seen what seems like a significant increase in talks in the media about artificial intelligence (AI). So, although we may not have an acknowledged field called ‘the psychology of AI’ just yet, we can still make comparisons to what AI is capable of, how it works, and how it is beginning to blur the line between human and machine intelligence. Part of what we should evaluate regarding this comparison is how human brains perceive and subsequently ‘calculate’ our environment versus how a machine calculates its environment, digital or physical. With that theme in mind, we can clearly see how this topic, and possible issues that develop, relate directly to cognitive psychology. In other words, there can be no dialogue about AI without discussing cognition.

Based on what we can learn in Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, we know that the human mind perceives things in very functional ways so that our higher executive functions in the cortex can make accurate determinations and decisions. We have things such as localization of function that help our minds manage, and essentially specialize in, different types of elements to be perceived. From these individual efforts of the different parts of our brain, it all comes to gather, and rather quickly, so that we consciously (and likely sometimes unconsciously) know what is going on around us and even inside of us (Goldstein, 2019). This, of course, is a rather simplistic explanation of how the human mind perceives and processes things, but we then want to evaluate if this process of the human mind is anything like that of how a computer AI system works.

One article posted on Psychology Today details how humans have the ability to perceive things based on context of the environment but also with significant influence based on memory. As such, it would be difficult for a machine of any type to have this function as machines are not known to have memories like humans do, aside from what a programmer enters into the machine depending on the machine’s intended purpose (Louwerse, 2023). We could always enter into a philosophical debate about if a machine could ever truly be autonomous if humans are always the foundation of that AI, but we also need to consider if a human can program humanity into a machine if the human itself does not fully understand the mind and its workings.

Continuing with this idea of whether machines can know how humans perceive, based on the programmer’s understanding of human perception, we may also have to consider even if we do understand how perception works, we must then find ways to program those complicated processes into the machines. One example of this issue is with the ‘uncanny valley hypothesis’ which essentially dictates that the more perfect a human face appears to be, the less human, or more disturbing, it is perceived to be (Louwerse, 2022). If a programmer then programs a machine to exemplify beauty by making humans symmetrical and having a smooth, perfect face, how does the programmer then explain to the AI that there must also be imperfections in order for it to actually seem real?

Even though philosophy is going to be involved in how we understand artificial intelligence and whether it can ever be truly conscious, the field of psychology is going to be involved in this type of technology as well. Both AI and psychology are complex areas that are far from being completely understood, but we can already see that questions are going to come about regarding how humans interact with ‘intelligent’ machines and what this means for society and evolution as a whole. It may be impossible to predict how this will turn out, but this is what makes it both frightening and exciting.

References

Goldstein, E.B. (2019). Cognitive Psychology (5^th). Cengage Learning.

Louwerse, M. (2022). What makes a (virtual) face human?. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/keeping-those-words-in-mind/202212/what-makes-virtual-face-human

Louwerse, M. (2023). The psychology of artificial intelligence. Psychology Today.      https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/keeping-those-words-in-mind/202303/the-psychology-of-artificial-intelligence