The Behavioral and Social Sciences Achievements and Opportunities (1988) / Chapter Skim
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1. Behavior, Mind, and Brain
1. Behavior, Mind, and Brain
Pages 5-46
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1 Behavior Mind and Brain
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1 Be Pavlov , Mind, and Brain From the beginnings of scientific inquiry, researchers have tried to understand the workings of the mind and its relationship to behavior. In modern terms, scientists seek to answer such questions as: How does an individual manage to see coherent objects in changing patches of multicolored light or to hear speech and music in bursts of sound varying in loudness and pitch?
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And it is clear these tasks can be done because the human brain does them, continuously and apparently effortlessly. One approach to studying how these tasks are carried out is to work with computers and sensing devices, without much regard for how the tasks are done in the brain.
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Understanding such abilities is the current focus of research on perception. This research includes innovative theoretical work and sophisticated experiments with animals, and it is increasingly able to use computers to develop theoretical models and simulate experimental tests.
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10 / The Behavioral and Social Sciences
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Precise quantitative models based on such analyzers can be explored by complex computer simulations and can now explain how the human eye and brain detect and identify low-contrast visual patterns, such as nighttime shadows. Some current work suggests that the brain may be able to rapidly select and regroup the analyzers, depending on what is being perceived.
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Researchers have discovered that some visual tasks are so complex that humans, some primates, and possibly many other animal species use specialpurpose brain areas to solve them efficiently. For example, the human ability to recognize and discriminate readily among a seemingly endless variety of faces is now known to make use of certain neural circuits in the right-posterior cerebral hemisphere.
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This kind of size-speed illusion is believed to be the underlying cause of many railroad-crossing accidents when motorists drastically underestimate the speed of an approaching train. These illusions, which are difficult and in some cases virtually impossible to study experimentally except with modern computer-graphic technology, imply that immense distortion in visual displays may be tolerated or even go unnoticed by both humans and animals.
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Much of the current focus of research on auditory perception, however, concerns complex patterns of sound stimuli varying in time, such as speech and music. Auditory signals can now be designed and stimulated quite precisely by a computer driving a digital-to-analog signal coverter, and these artificial sound patterns are used to study specific aspects of the hearing process.
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Behavioral studies in animals and humans are characterizing the categories and properties of learning and memory; research on human memory and the brain is identifying the neuronal systems that serve different categories of memory; memory trace circuits in the mammalian brain are being defined and localized in animal models; researchers are beginning to understand the neuronal, neurochemical, molecular, and biophysical substrates of memory in both invertebrates and vertebrates; and theoretical mathematical analysis of basic associative learning and of neuronal networks is proceeding rapidly. Better mathematical and computational modeling of elaborate memory pro
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But, these patients possess some relatively intact reaming and memory abilities: for example, on tasks such as manual-dexterity learning trials, they perform as well as healthy and uninjured people, even though they may have no conscious memory of having performed the task before. This evidence that some kinds of reaming can proceed normally even when the brain structures that mediate conscious remembering are damaged supports the general proposition that there are distinct, dissociated types of memory.
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Brain Structure and Neurotransmitters Memory is under intense investigation at the neurobiological level as well as at the behavioral level. Recently developed techniques for inducing amnesia in nonhuman primates offer great promise for understanding the neural circuits underlying particular aspects of memory.
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One such complex network model, an approximation to visual cortex, was shown a few years ago to be computationally in agreement with a large number of experimental results. Recent, unexpectedly rapid progress has been made in identifying essential memory trace circuits that code, store, and retrieve associative memory in the brains of birds and mammals.
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Neuroscience data suggest that complex behavior and mental activity emerge from simultaneous and parallel contributions of many specialized component parts. One possibility is that the basic processing units are neurological "columns" or "modules," each containing 1,000 or fewer nerve cells; if this is true, then there are more than 10 million such functional units in the human brain.
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Early Cognitive Development and Learning Studies of early human development give some of the strongest examples of how new observational methods have led to new knowledge. The once-common belief that the experiential world of an infant is mostly sensory chaos has been displaced as evidence has accumulated showing that infants are especially sensitive to those subtle distinctions among oral sounds that are important in learning to speak, to cues of visual depth and distance, and to other precursors of complex perception.
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, computer simulations of change, and the investigation of social-environmental conditions that foster or interfere with self-motivated learning, knowledge transfer, and problem solving. (The case of language learning is discussed later in this chapter.)
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22 / The Behavioral and Social Sciences GLASS I \J MUG VASE BOWL CUP as- ~ ,
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Crucial components of knowledge are based on visual and auditory imagery and on patterns of motor activity. Research during the past IS years has made major advances in understanding the properties of spatial cognition and action and ways in which brain structures and processes are involved in cognitive functioning in different domains.
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Individuals can be good or bad at a given component of imagery ability independent of the other components. Research on imagery is leading toward an increased understanding of the cognitive deficits that can result from brain damage, as well as useful characterizations of intellectual differences that may be relevant to observed male-female differences in intellectual style, science and mathematics education, and other scientific and practical questions.
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Normative research has traditionally been guided by a theory based, in part, on the principles of mathematical probability and, in part, on calculation of trade-offs between the values of outcomes and the probabilities of their actual occurrences. The modern development of normative decision theory began in the 1940s with the introduction of an elegant mathematical theory of games and economic behavior that laid out a rational basis for making choices among actions whose outcomes are partially determined by chance events with known probabilities of occurring.
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Various studies are now in progress to expand and test several alternative theories of these framing effects, and research in the next several years is likely to bring major developments in this fundamental area of inquiry. A major line of work is focused on the fact that individuals often appear to rely on conventional biases, simplified concepts, and common rules of thumb in making decisions, rather than developing close probabilistic calculations or estimates.
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However, new formal models incorporating framing effects and decision-making heuristics are likely to have important new policy applications. For example, studies of framing effects may affect how ingredient or warning labels are written, how truth-in-lending laws are formulated, how unit prices are displayed in supermarkets, and how election ballots are designed.
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These ideas were incorporated into the design of early programs in artificial intelligence, in particular those for chess, for which the main goal was believed to be an ability to selectively consider many moves in advance. These ideas also underlie the design of contemporary computational "expert systems," most of which incorporate large collections of knowledge.
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These naturally occurring mental processes help uncover the laws of theory construction and concept reorganization that underlie the .
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Exciting and promising results have been facilitated by new optical, magnetic, ultrasonic, and x-ray technologies for transducing motion, for storing the massive amounts of data collected, and for analyzing these large data bases, sometimes using artificial intelligence methods. Researchers are addressing a wide variety of questions, such as: What aspects of movement does the nervous system control?
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This supports the traditional hierarchical model of speech production, but it has also led some researchers to posit a network model, in which activation spreads both "up" from the sensors and "down" from the control nodes of the network. Only a hierarchical model can thus far explain facts of slips of the tongue, and new methods of inducing speech errors under laboratory conditions have facilitated research of this topic.
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, is often not fully appreciated. Though the question of language acquisition and use has puzzled philosophers, educators, and scientists throughout modern history, answers to the puzzle have proven elusive until recent advances that rest, in part, on a sophisticated modular conception of language and its relationship to other cognitive faculties.
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Some patients with left-brain damage make many
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. Another important new line of research links language acquisition studies with theoretical work in cognitive science and arOhcial intelligence.
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show that the left cerebral hemisphere is just as dominant for sign language as for spoken language. This finding has been a definitive result in proving that the left-hemisphere specialization in the brain in language acquisition is not due to its capacity for fine auditory analysis, but for language analysis as such.
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Relating linguists' grammars to existing computer systems enables computer scientists to provide a new generation of interpreter programs that run much more efficiently than their predecessors. A new theory of the semantics of programming languages promises to unite two formerly separate analyses: the denotational meanings of terms in natural language and the functional meanings of instructions in a computer program.
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In recent decades, collaboration between linguists, communication engineers, and computer scientists has led to dramatic increases in knowledge and new methods for analyzing and synthesizing acoustic speech signals. The computer revolution has made it possible to acquire and analyze in hours or days, rather than months or years, the large phonetic data bases needed to study the sound structures of language.
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Knowledge from this research has led to educational strategies that result in improved reading skills in children. For example, in some projects, children who are poor readers have been taught particular cognitive strategies discovered in the skilled adult reader, such as how to identify and retain the most central information in a text.
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These differences between reading and speaking seem small, but for some dialects they may result in serious interference between the spoken language and comprehension of the written language. Such difficulties have been noted in some speakers of black English and some deaf children, for whom written English primers are virtually samples of a foreign dialect.
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40 / The Behavioral and Social Sciences Typical Colleg - Level Reader Flywheels are one of the oldest mechanical devices known to man. Every ~ ~ ~$ ~3 ~ ~ internal-combustion engine contains a small flywheel that converts the jerky motion of the pistons into the smooth flow of energy that powers the drive shaft.
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These readers spend extra time on each word and frequently retrack in order to reinterpret inaccurately perceived words. And even at their slower reading rates, dyslexic readers generally develop a much less accurate understanding of a written text than other readers a problem they do not necessarily have in interpreting spoken words.
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Pause duration is thus a gauge of processing load or difficulty at each point in a text. Since a reader is constructing a mental representation of a text while processing only a single phrase or sentence at a time, short-term memory limitations may play an important role in reading comprehension.
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OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS The results of research on basic processes linking the mind, the brain, and behavior have grown impressively in the recent past and show even more
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Increasingly, there is a call for greater access to powerful workstations and supercomputers. There is also a lively expectation that massively parallel computer architectures will be especially well suited to many behavioral and cognitive research problems.
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Cognitive and behavioral sciences support nevertheless has not kept up with the growth in scientific opportunities, such as the rapid shifts in technological capabilities that have resulted from the microprocessor revolution. A rapid increase in funds for investigator-initiated grants- by about $20 million annually is a high priority.
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This is only in small part a problem of curriculum: it is in large part a problem of funding, which is available more for teaching and clinical or applied work than for research apprenticeships. We therefore recommend that an additional $5 million annually be invested in research fellowships at the predoctoral and postdoctoral levels, with the majority share ($3 million)
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