Notes in response to required weekly reading materials
REQUIRED READING 1: Visual Salience
Salience is a specific word we use to describe a perceptual/cognitive/attentional mechanism that takes place in our mind when we can identify and distinguish the most important or relevant between two entities. Our ability to distinguish and understand what is pertinent (to us), through sensory data available, becomes salient (to us). The term 'Salience' is frequently used in the study of perception and cognition, and refers to any stimuli that, for any reason, stand out from their surroundings or environment.
How do we detect salience? How do we understand what's relevant or pertinent?
Salience occurs when we can distinguish and identify contrasting elements or properties or sensorial aspects that characterise objects, people, environments, emotions, noises, materials etc...For example, cognitive salience that attracts our attention can be triggered by:
intense or sudden motion (flickering, speed, jumps...)
colour (high luminance, which we perceive as high brightness, sometimes even disturbing to the eyes)
sudden loud noises in a quiet environment
shape (huge or disproportionate dimensions stand out compared to small surroundings)
It's interesting to understand how our salience detection mechanisms work in our mind, so that we can use them to shape multisensory experiences. For example, our visual system uses salience to understand what' important, what's changing around us, what could be a threat or a menace. This visual hierarchy of qualities (as listed below) indicates the importance we give to those visual characteristics and what we are usually most likely to detect first:
Movement
Size
Colour
Sound
Shape
This hierarchy of stimuli can be very useful to design better visual experiences, products and works.
Training Salience
Salience can be trained as well, or be a result of social and cultural constructs. Our ability to read and write is based, amongst other cognitive processes, on trained visual salience. We recognise letters, words and sentences because we have been trained through the years to consider and recognise certain visual signs (numbers, letters, words) as having a certain meaning, or as being important, or salient. Although salience may be triggered by physical factors such as intensity, clarity, movement or size, sometimes it is the result of emotional, motivational or cognitive factors as well as memories.
Salience Bias
Salience bias (perceptual salience) is a cognitive bias that predisposes individuals to focus on or pay attention to any stimuli that are more prominent, visible, or emotionally striking. Salience bias can therefore even influence our perception of our surroundings, as well as heavily impacting our decision making abilities and problem solving skills. This is why salience can be a a meaningful factor in social behaviour language skills, psychological disorders (attention disorders), visual and interaction design (product accessibility, human-computer interactions, graphic and interface design etc.) as well as influencing other cognitive processes like perception, attention and memory.
Example of visual salience: at first sight, we detect the red dot as being different from its surroundings. This triggers salience in our mind.
REQUIRED READING 2: Priming
'Priming' refers to the sequence of emotional effects that rise from one first, rapid reaction in response to an external stimuli. Priming Effect can be either positive or negative line of emotional reactions, and depending on those reactions, can be categorised as: perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Priming can be an instantaneous, yet very complex, chain of reactions that involves cognitive processes such as: word recognition, semantic processing, attention, unconscious processing, and many others. Visual priming is the most common, and occurs when we associate words with a similar semantic meaning, or anticipate the following word by analysing the meaning of the previous one (semantic priming). Priming can be activated by any stimulus in the environment, which in return activates one or more cognitive processes in our brain, including: memory, attention, emotions, sensation, behaviour change.
Example of semantic priming: brainstorming map of word association in response to a chain of reactions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)
REQUIRED READING 2: The Stroop Effect
The Stroop effect occurs when there is a mismatch between the name of a colour (written in words) and the colour being displayed to write or print out that word. A common expample is the word "red" being written in blue ink instead of red ink. Therefore there are two colour involved in this process, and when analysing it, it is harder for the viewer to understand and explain the difference between the colour intended by the word, and the colour displayed on paper. It usually takes longer to understand this difference, and it is easier to make mistakes when the colour of the ink does not match the name of the colour. This happens because when we receive information, we process at the same time both relevant and irrelevant information, and our brain needs to identify which one is which (race models theory). Sometimes, this natural process of understanding and processing visual stimuli, can be altered by "false" or misleading information, such as the trooping effect, that confuse our mind and the way it reads information. When the Stroop effect occurs, there are several cognitive process that can trick our brain and lead us to false or misleading conclusions:
processing speed: there is a lag between the recognition of the word (and its semantic meaning) and the colour used to write the word (some people who remember images first, recognise first the colour of the ink, then the colour meant by the word - the word's semantic meaning. Others might have the opposite reaction).
Selective Attention Theory: colour recognition, as opposed to reading a word and understanding its meaning, requires more attention. When reading about the Strooping effect online and seeing some examples, I actually realised it was easier for me to detect the colour of the ink first, rather than understanding the semantic meaning of the word (contrary to what this Selective Attention Theory suggests).
Automaticity: It suggests that since recognizing colours is not an automatic process for us, so we might be hesitant to respond; on the other hand, the brain automatically understands the meanings of words as a result of habitual reading. This idea is based on the premise that automatic reading does not need controlled attention, but still uses enough attentional resources to reduce the amount of those accessible for colour information processing, thus slowing down the process.
Emotional Stroop Effect
The emotional Stroop Effect serves as an information processing approach to emotions. In an emotional Stroop task, an individual is given negative emotional words like "grief", "violence", and "pain" mixed in with more neutral words like "clock", "door", and "shoe". Just like in the original Stroop task, the words are coloured and the individual is supposed to name the colour. Research has revealed that individuals that are depressed are more likely to say the colour of a negative word slower than the colour of a neutral word. While both the emotional Stroop and the classic Stroop involve the need to suppress irrelevant or distracting information, there are differences between the two. The emotional Stroop effect emphasizes the conflict between the emotional relevance to the individual and the word; whereas, the classic Stroop effect examines the conflict between the incongruent colour and word.
Reverse Stroop Effect Another variant of the classic Stroop effect is the reverse Stroop effect. It occurs during a pointing task. In a reverse Stroop task, individuals are shown a page with a black square with an incongruent coloured word in the middle—for instance, the word "red" written in the colour green—with four smaller coloured squares in the corners. One square would be coloured green, one square would be red, and the two remaining squares would be other colours. Studies show that if the individual is asked to point to the colour square of the written colour (in this case, red) they would present a delay. Thus, incongruently-coloured words significantly interfere with pointing to the appropriate square. However, some research has shown there is very little interference from incongruent colour words when the objective is to match the colour of the word
REQUIRED READING 4: Classical vs Operant Conditioning
Conditioning is a term used in behavioural science to describe and the ability of a subject to adapt to its environment. Classical conditioning can be explained as an involuntary, automatic or instinct reflex in response to a stimuli from the environment. Operant conditioning refers to the ability of control involuntary reflexes to adapt and take control over a situation.
Explanation of classical and operant conditioning https://www.verywellmind.com/classical-vs-operant-conditioning-2794861#:~:text=Classical%20conditioning%20involves%20associating%20an,voluntary%20behavior%20and%20a%20consequence
Classical conditioning can be used as a method of training, as it involves a natural instinct and a conditioning behavioural response that can be trained (as a consequence to that instinct) and become natural and involuntary through time. Both classical and operant conditioning behaviours involve a response to a stimuli. However, the difference is that classical conditioning behaviour includes an involuntary response to a stimuli, whereas operant conditioning needs a voluntary behaviour in response to a stimuli.
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