An.Exercise.In.Thought.
week.four.
This week is a little shorter thanks to a lovely monday holiday! I will tell you a little bit about this later on when I indulge in a lengthy personal update. Trust me though, you won't be disappointed. I will give you a hint: Firefoxes. That is all I'm saying for now. Enjoy!
computers.cut.down.trees. not.paper.usage.
Readings for the Week:
On Modeling Intentions for Propsective Memory Performance by Renee Elio
Cue-Focused and Reflexive-Associative Processes in Prospective Memory Retrieval by Mark A. McDaniel, Melissa J. Guynn, Gilles O. Einstein, and Jennifer Breneiser
The Activation of Unrelated and Canceled Intentions by Richard L. Marsh, Jason L. Hicks, and Eric S. Bryan
Representation of Intentions: Persisting Activation in Memory by Thomas Goschke and Julius Kuhl
So I'm a terrible person and cannot read papers without printing them off. I feel wretched for this, but I get a headache and I have this need to draw all over my papers with little notes or cartoons to remind me what I read about. You know I often used to wonder why no one borrowed my class notes ever, but I think the solution has made itself rather evident. This week was spent reading quite a few papers to try and catch up to Susan an Renee. Susan, as previously mentioned, was working on an independent studies grad class with Renee on cognitive science studies before she went on vacation and so she's read infinitely more than I have on the subject and so I've just been trying to figure out what all the papers she references were about.
Renee's paper was quite illuminating as I'd read an earlier draft before starting and felt utterly lost for a good portion of the time. This version was a great deal clearer and I felt I finally understood it, now that I've beefed up some of my own previous knowledge. Either way I think it's a good thing! Renee is currently really interested in handling intentions and so a good deal of the papers deal with that. Most of the paper's I read brought up the three common ideas for maintaining intentions in memory. Some people believe that to hold an intention has no effect on your subsequent behaviour, ie) by holding an intention you are no slower or less capable in your performance of future tasks. Other people believe that maintaining an intention requires constant maitenance, constantly reminding yourself of the intention and if it is currently time to execute that intention. There is a third who advocate for a combination of these two effects.
One thing which came up as a result of Renee's paper was the way she represented intention retrieval. Her models allowed for two styles of intention retrieval, "top down intention monitoring" and "bottom up intention cueing". The point of top down intention monitoring being that an intention was chosen, the details of the world elaborated to see if that intention was relevant, if it was not the intention was discardeda and a new intention was selected (each time a new intention is selected the selection set is cropped due to the increasing details about the environment which become known). In bottom up cueing, a person would be looking at the world and choose to update the status of the world and based on this update hopefully choose the correct intention. Of course modelling these two completely independently is impossible so the two sort of blend after a certain stage. However the point of debate at our meeting this week was if her representation of bottom up cueing was indeed fair. The results of her simulations seem to indicate that bottom up cueing is not feasible (as it is incapable of reproducing approximations of pervious experimental results) however upon further reflection she is wondering if another representation would be more "fair" to the bottom up cueing community. As a result I have been charged with the task of modifying her existing code to see if it changes the results.
The other papers are also very interested in intentions as well and the results are rather interesting. It's always interesting to see how someone can dedicate months to experiments and pages to discussing something that seems so intuitive, but that doesn't make these things trivial at all. In fact, despite your brain's methods appearing completely natural to you, it is exceedingly difficult to determain what assumptions can be made, where the steps your brain takes can be broken down and appropriately atomized for the computer to understand what you're doing. For example one paper discusses the phenomenon of how we choose to forget fulfilled or cancelled intentions. How is it you stop thinking about trying to get to the shoe store if you just bought a new pair or if someone cancels a lunch date, why don't you still show up? This seems pretty obvious and granted, with a bigger picture kind of holistic view of the world we seem to think with, this is only a natural way to behave, however how do you explain this impulse to supress intentions one they've been completed to a machine? What base instructions would carry this out? What base instructions are YOU carrying out up inside your brain?
Other important questions are raised as to how you remember things when you see "hints" or reminders. Why does seeing a grocery store remind you that you need to stop and get milk? How is an intention incoded and stored in your brain to allow for cues in the environment to increase the activation of a stored intention. These are questions I deliberate over, an activity I believe I should soon return to so I fear I must cut this short.
firefox.firefox.burning.bright
So I promised a story about firefox but I tricked you a bit I think! For those of you who assumed some discussion on the browser of choice among the geek elite (well perhaps not quite but I think it's a good browser) you are sadly mistaken becaue I mean none other than the infamous endangered Red Panda! So I guess this is entirely irrelevant but I took a trip down to the Calgary Zoo and visited with their Red Panda. Red panda's also go by the nickname of firefox which is why I thought it would be amusing to trick you, dear reader. I appologize for how entirely off topic this is and how certainly boring it must be for you, but I very much admire the red panda and as such thought I would share this love with you here today. Instead of the 189 page summary I could make of my weekend trip to Calgary and Banff, I think I must best sum it up with a photo from my trip! I hope you enjoy and had a great long weekend yourself! Cheers!
