We do not notice how much we do not notice

Psychologist Dr. Doping talks about the cognitive sciences, the great illusion of consciousness, and short-term memory.

- What is cognitive science in general?

- The word "cognitive" means only "related to knowledge", ie the acquisition, storage, conversion, using knowledge, and how living systems, and artificial. Accordingly, cognitive psychology studies how to acquire and use knowledge of a person. And this knowledge we need very many places. For example, as soon as the computer scientists were able to program the computer to force it to do something, they immediately asked the question: how to get it to solve the problems that people decide?

Naturally, immediately arose the next question: how, in fact, the man solves these problems? Psychologists attempt to describe human knowledge, should take into account that it is provided by the brain. This raises many questions. As knowledge is represented in the brain? As our perception, memory, thinking ensured brain structures? Psychologists refer to these issues to the physiologists.

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Linguists, which describe the regularities of language, you need to understand how people use language, he understands the language addressed to him saying how he builds them. And linguists have to go to the psychology and physiology.

And psychologists and physiologists, and programmers, and linguists are interested in the question of how the knowledge about the brain that we have can be used to explain the mechanisms of our knowledge, our subjective experience. Here come to the aid of the philosophers, who are trying to establish the possibility of transition from talking about physical systems (material) to talk about the spiritual system associated with human consciousness, that is, our subjective experiences and perceptions about themselves. And these ultimate questions - whether on the basis of knowledge of the brain to understand the human mind, is it possible to construct a synthetic system that will have a subjective experience, and so on - these are questions to the philosophers.

What we learn about the human knowledge, thinking, memory - are universal laws, or they depend on the culture to which belongs to this or that person? It's all rush to the anthropologists, who are able to carry out cross-cultural research, study representatives from both developed and primitive cultures, and comparing what they learn about, understand, that knowledge is universal, and that is determined by culture. That is cognitive research - an attempt to understand the patterns of human knowledge and use them in the construction of artificial systems forces immediately sets of Sciences.

- So there is a great company of various scholars, united by the theme of cognitive?

- Most united those questions to which they are trying to answer. Initially there were six disciplines: experimental knowledge of psychology, physiology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, dealing with the problem of artificial intelligence, and cultural anthropology (in the West it is sometimes called cognitive anthropology). Now disciplines is becoming more. In particular, actively develops cognitive economy, which deals with problems of economic decision-making: why people make decisions unfavorable, why is wrong when making decisions, or in logical reasoning.

The first cognitive psychologist who became a Nobel laureate in economics - is Daniel Kahneman, who was involved in errors in economic decision-making, together with his colleague Amos Tversky, who, unfortunately, did not live up to Nobel Prize.

There are now and cognitive geography, which deals with the peculiarities of subjective ideas about areas of all sizes. There are cognitive aesthetics dealing with the laws of perception of beauty, both psychological mechanisms, and brain. That is a lot of subjects, but they are all grouped around a single issue: how do we get knowledge about the world, how we use it, and so on.

• -For how long have interest in such knowledge originated in academic circles?

- As an interdisciplinary it originated in the mid 50-ies of XX century. At that time psychology, at least in America, it is mainly engaged in the study of behavior. There reigned direction called "behaviorism", which was convinced that the psyche - is biased, so no need to study it, and we can study only what is observed externally, ie behavior. As the fundamental direction of behaviorism to the 50 th year came to nothing. Largely because people have realized: to explain the behavior we need to understand what is going on in my head.

We began intensive development of computer science and computer practice. Humanity construct a computer and realized that it is possible to force to solve the problems that solves people and can organize its interaction with the person in a natural language. But then it became clear that psychology is not well understood how a person solves the problem, but linguistics did not find a clear answer to the question of how we understand and produce speech.

In September 1956, MIT hosted the famous to the cognitive symposium on information processing. The second day of the symposium is considered the birthday of cognitive science itself. They made the psychologist George Miller, who proposed a model of the human working memory: a memory in which we hold the information in a short time, and the information that we need now. For example, a phone number where we need to make a call before we write it. There linguist Noam Chomsky spoke with his tongue model. There were political scientist Herbert Simon and Allen Newell programmer, who presented the participants of the symposium, the first working model of artificial intelligence called "Logic theorist" who knew how to prove theorems of formal logic. One theory has proved even more elegant than the famous Bertrand Russell, from whose book undertook these theorems, but an article from the "logic theorist" in the number of co-authors in the "wrapped" scientific journal.

So, at this symposium all understand that they are doing the same problems and are ready to work on together. Harvard Just four years later came the first Center for Cognitive Studies. For the 80 th year in the United States began large-scale funding for Cognitive Studies, began to appear the first master's programs, the first graduate. And cognitive science as a field of interdisciplinary research at the interface between psychology and neuroscience, between linguistics and computer science has become quite actively developed. By the early 2000s, it has come down to us.

- We have it now also actively blooms?

- It's in there pretty funny mode, because in general, our scientists only recently tasted "interdisciplinarity", made several attempts to organize joint projects with each other to agree. The first conference, which was called "Russian Conference on Cognitive Science," was held in 2004. In 2014, respectively, will be the sixth. It continues to take place every two years. And people, in general, find each other and instigate collaborations.

Recently there was a big center at the Kurchatov Institute, Laboratory for Cognitive Studies appear in different places. The first MA in cognitive science has been created in the Russian State Humanitarian University on the psychological faculty, this year offers a Master at the Higher School of Economics. I would say that some of the studies that can be called cognitive in the Western sense of the word, we have also carried out in full.

- What does the cognitive psychologist?

- He has been the experimental study of human knowledge, that is, the processes that allow us to obtain information from the outside world - is primarily a sensation and perception (visual, auditory, tactile, and so on). Processes that allow this information to select and hold - are processes of attention, and the processes associated with its storage and subsequent use - is memory. Processes that are related to its transformation, with new information that is not available to us directly - this thinking processes. And the fact that due to the mental transformation of images, the construction of which we have never seen or heard - it is a process of imagination, which is closely associated with the work. That is, in the six (sensation, perception, thinking, memory, attention and imagination), the first three trials give us knowledge of the world, and the second three-process, in fact, define the psychological arrow of time - psychological past (experience), the present (true processes information) and the future (anticipation, the construction of which is not). Such a classification of cognitive processes proposed in due time psychologist Lev Vekker. All this and more speech, which, among other things, helps us to control the operation of all our cognitive system, and has an area of activity of a cognitive psychologist.

- Does it have some practical value?

- Sure it does. And cognitive psychology and cognitive science is widely applicable in practice, which is why in America at the time they started so well funded. For example, to learn how to learn, we need to understand how knowledge is best absorbed. In order to restore the perception, memory or attention of the person with local brain lesions, we must understand how the system is organized. In order to be effective advertising, so that information is easy to read from the site, we need to understand how to organize our perception and attention, how do we choose the information that is necessary, that prevents us from where we look first of all, when we get to the site or hold in our hands leaflet, which we probably will not see. If we place the company's advertisements in places where, according to a study from the registration of eye movements, no look, a penny the price of such advertising. And this is cognitive psychology.

- What are the cognitive psychologists know about visual attention right now?

- Because this subject for cognitive research - one of the most fundamental, we know quite a lot. Speaking of things that are directly related to the practice, we know little about the mechanisms that are behind the errors of our visual attention. Why do we often do not notice what is happening right before our eyes, why is it so difficult to find the changes in the visual scene, to the point that we can not notice the change of our communication partner. Why did not we notice some repetition, whether in image, text and so on. All these phenomena conventionally called "inattention blindness phenomenon." As soon as the possibility of a broadcast over the Internet in just a few years, we learned about the famous study of Chicago psychologist Daniel Simons and his colleagues Christopher Chabrier with an invisible gorilla. They were very bright experiments that actually reproduce the experiments of 30 years ago another famous cognitivist Ulric Neisser. Two players on the team throws the ball to each other. Man instructing to monitor, count the number of gears in one of the teams, he honestly said, has 14 assists, sometimes wrong. And absolutely do not notice how across the room held a man in a gorilla suit stops in the middle of the room, beats his chest and moves on. Somehow, it is outside of our attention, though, it would seem very bright stimuli, perhaps even vital importance - still not the safest gorilla animal.

- Why we do not notice?

- The matter limitations of our attention, in that it is tied to the specific tasks that we solve. Roughly speaking, we collect the information for which we have in mind at the moment activated anticipating schema corresponding to the task. This explanation is also requested to Neisser. Here we follow the command of the players in white shirts that convey balls. And in the transmission scheme of balls between them, we absorb information and information outside of this scheme we lose, but sometimes it turns out to be very important. To improve attention we need to drink Cytamine Cerebramin brain bioregulator or Semax and Noopept.

Another striking phenomenon is the same - the so-called "blind to the change" when we do not notice the appearance, disappearance, discoloration or any other characteristics of one of the objects in the visual scene. The main thing that at the moment of changing the presentation of the scene something interrupted as the cyclical film is broken, because, for example, if we face the red ball immediately becomes white, we even in the peripheral retina has motion detectors that make this change, we note . However, if the ball turns white at the moment when we blink, we can not help but notice that he changed color.

The same Daniel Simons spent wonderful experiments in the university campus, modeled the film breakdown in a real environment. To the person on campus on the road approaching the other person with the card and ask how to get there and then. The naive subject began to explain to him, and then sneaking in between the builders of the door - that's you tear film. This is one of the pillars of the door has changed places with the experimenter and the subject went on to explain the road, not noticing the change of interlocutor. We decided that this is not significant, because everyone is looking at the map, and the situation changed: the assistant experimenter asked to take his picture on the background of the university sights. Should a person directly in the frame, the test aiming the camera at him, bear the door, people are reversed, the subjects do not notice it.

Q: I do not look back and do not look at it? Important question. That is, either we did not choose the place in space, and our focus is not to the point where there is a change, or we do not notice what the object has changed. Psychologists helped a bit to answer this question physiologists using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Knowing which areas of the brain associated with spatial redirection of attention, and what with the processing of information about specific objects and their identification, the researchers were able to show that these two situations (when we do not notice the change and when we notice them) in the brain differ activation zone related to the processing of spatial information, of which it is considered that it is carried out not realized. It turns a small paradox. Unconscious processes spatial redirect attention are vital in order to observe and understand the changes. In any case, what kind of answer we got.

And the question is actually very important, because it also has great practical significance. It is this blindness to changes - a blind driver, who does not notice a pedestrian or cyclist, came at a time when the glass hit the mud spray from oncoming truck, or perhaps when the driver blinked or looked, because when we looked , we can not in a short period of time of about half a second to gather visual information, so the mechanism is arranged. And they themselves do not notice, because the information that was available before the flashing is held in the buffer in our visual system. If we learn to control the driver's attention and create some artificial system of attracting attention to the objects that the camcorder can record, because she has no attention to restrictions, it will be very great.

- Now we have a huge number of sources of information that pours from all sides, including social networks, the Internet, radio, television. What happens to our attention in this regard?

- We do not notice how much we do not notice - I have formulated since. Of course, we gain some new skills by working with the information, but we lose a lot. Recently I had the opportunity to sit in a panel of experts at a lecture by an American psychologist, after which we conducted an experiment - we have people to solve puzzles. One man to solve puzzles in a dialogue with the other person, and the third test to solve puzzles in a dialogue with the computer. Objectives were like "What? Where? When?". And I was quite shocked to see what in the past 20 years engaged in science. The young lady, found on the Internet response to a question, he did not notice the corny. He was on the screen, we have all seen it. It just did not look where he was, because I quickly thumbed through page, scroll down and answer the question, could not, while two people are engaged in a dialogue with each other, the question could be answered. In fact, the loss in the dialogue with the computer there was simply due to the fact that a person has lost, did not notice on the screen the information you need. And very often we do not notice that it had lost. We think that we can see more than it actually is. In recent years, studies in cognitive philosophers, psychologists and physiologists have even coined the term "grand illusion of consciousness." It seems that in the minds of everyone there, but in fact very little - something that we currently pay attention. And what we do not pay, sometimes irretrievably lost.

- What are the prospects have cognitive research in cognitive psychology?

- The area is moving forward by leaps and bounds. This is due not only to the natural movement of science, but also with the fantastic development of techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, the impact on the brain using magnetic fields, methods associated with decoding and reencoding of brain activity. Neuroscience gradually absorbs all other areas of cognitive science, ranging from psychology and linguistics and ending with even philosophy. But prospects, including the application, it opens up stunning. This communication with patients in a vegetative state, that is unconscious. This is an opportunity for people deprived of their ability to move and control the external devices, just thinking about what they want to make a motion, introducing this motion, to implement it, for example, typing on a screen placed in front of them. These perspectives are, of course, very tempting and make the scientists more and more immersed in this area.

If we look at a normal adult, we can see that the world, in general, it is given not so much to feel. We do not see red, brilliant, bright, and so on - we are seeing things. We see tables, chairs, cups, home, car and so on. That is, in fact, for us, the feeling is not leading the process. A leading process becomes a process for us, which gives us a holistic images of objects of the world. Actually, the image - this is the second form of reflection that gives us knowledge of the world, and the process of constructing the image will be referred to in psychology as a process of perception. That is the perception and define - as a process of building an image as a result of the impact on the senses of physical energy that is reflected or emitted by objects of the external world.

Thus, we see that, in fact, we have two axes for the organization of human cognitive processes. On the one hand, it is the axis of concrete or abstract reflection of the surrounding world. Sensation and perception give us specific information. Thinking allows you to extract the abstract, categorize objects, form concepts, summarize. And on the other hand, it is the psychological arrow of time, which will be organized along the memory, attention and imagination. And obviously, all these processes are somehow interact with each other. That is difficult to study memory without attention, it is difficult to study without attention to the analysis of perception, thinking without memory. Therefore, modern cognitive psychology seeks to analyze not only the specific processes, but also ideas about the structure of the knowledge of the general, that is, as our cognitive architecture, which gives us knowledge of the world might look like.