Module: Cognition. Got 22 marks out of 23.

MENTAL ROTATION OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL OBJECTS

Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects. Science, 171(3972), 701-703. http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs1120-f09/ps/ps3/mental-rotation.pdf

Observable objects do not simply require only visual abilities from us to process their shapes and forms. Technically, three-dimensional objects are things that consist of length, width, and height. We can observe them roundly. A tricky part occurs when three-dimensional objects are replicated into twodimensional media. That is when mental rotation is essential to predict the unseen parts. Especially when it comes to comparison, people have to be able to imagine whole objects, in different angles if needed, out of partial presentations to get information as much as they can to make the determination. They progressively spent more time when objects had angular differences and did not spend significantly different amounts of time for rotations between a picture plane and depth, the report suggested.

Shepard and Metzler from the department of psychology, Stanford University, California, experimented on the time people were required to recognise if two three-dimensional objects portrayed in two-dimensional pictures are identical or not. The main objects they chose to project in pictures are made up of ten attached solid cubes with a structure of an arm that has three bent points. They conditioned the exercise into three sequences. Group A and B contained two identical objects in each group that were rotated in a picture plane and in depth, respectively. They categorised these two groups as “same” pairs. Group C contained two nonidentical three-dimensional objects. They categorised this latter group as “different” pair because the two objects cannot be matched by any rotating fashions. They also mirrored the objects in group C to avoid their distinctive features being exposed too easily. Mental rotation was compulsory for participants in every task.

For all 1,600 pairs of pictures, they were half divided into the “same” pairs, which consisted of “picture plane” and “depth” pairs, and the “different” pairs. In perspective projections, objects were turned around using a vertical axis for 20 degrees each time, from 0 to 180 degrees. The computer did the shuffle. Participants would receive a random set of presentations and be given 1 hour for a session. They were told to react as quickly as they could. After they heard a warning sound, the first pair of pictures and a timer appeared simultaneously. The moment participants reached a decision on whether the presented objects were identical or not, they would pull a lever on their right for matching objects and on their

left for non-matching objects. This action subsequently removed the display and stopped the timer. Participants’ reaction times were recorded.

The inspection right after the experiment disclosed the way participants dealt with personal mental rotation inside their heads. They knew the objects were identical when they successfully fit one object’s end into another object’s end. Otherwise, they discovered two objects were non-identical.

For the result, in the aspect of accuracy, most participants got the answers right and kept their errors to a minimum. In the aspect of time, reaction for “picture plane” and “depth” pairs had similar timing. Although in the larger angular differences, it was slightly quicker for rotation in “depth” than in “picture plane”. Participants who were experienced with the method of this test still were consistent in reaction time as inexperienced participants, both in a “pure” set of presentations, where they were familiar with a vertical axis and were able to guess the rotating direction of coming pictures, and “mixed” set of presentations, when they had no idea on picture projecting patterns.

The consistency of reaction time recorded in this report could be useful as an implication of mental rotation of three-dimensional object process, in a typical circumstance. People gradually spent longer processing time as objects were portrayed in angular varieties. Pictures rotating in the picture plane did not produce an outstanding difference in the timing than the ones in depth. ■

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WHY PEOPLE FAIL TO RECOGNIZE THEIR OWN INCOMPETENCE

Dunning,

D., Johnson, K., Ehrlinger, J., & Kruger, J. (2003). Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(3), 83-87. https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/kjohnson/Lab/Publications_ files/Dunning,%20Johnson,%20et%20al.%20%28200%230

Most people have difficulty realising and accepting themselves, especially of their incompetence. The question that follows this statement is that are they even well-aware of its existence in the first place? To know one’s deficiencies is also considered a skill, but does it come naturally for everyone? Skills need practice. People live their daily lives dealing and negotiating with problems and solutions all the time. Those experiences suppose to be a reflection on this regard for people to develop their self-perception and attain some idea of their limitations. However, researches suggested otherwise.

Recent research conducted in the department of psychology, Cornwell University, New York and the department of psychology, University of Illinois, Illinois, revealed that students with the poorest performance significantly overestimated their scores when being asked to rate their performance right after they finished the exam without knowing their actual scores at the time. A similar result also happened with the experiment by Kruger and Dunning in 1999 that allowed participants to estimate their performance in logical and grammatical tests and the ability to spot funny jokes. The bottomranked performers believed they had done remarkably better than they actually did. The list of experiments with matching outcomes goes on. In 2003, Ehrlinger et al tried offering $100 to participants who could give an accurate estimate of their performance. The result insisted that poor performers still overestimated themselves, which implied that showing self-misconception for a sake of reputation was not the case. Poor performers strictly had no idea about their incompetence.

What if the main problem here is not only the incompetence itself? Ignorance of it is the key. People with a lack of knowledge of what is right or wrong will never be able to be in control of their quality, left alone to have an abillity to judge other’s. These people fail to observe their own thought processes, or megacognition, which is the door to self-improvement.

In 1999, Kruger and Dunning conducted the test based on a hypothesis that after incompetent people are taught useful skills, they will no longer be unskilled. They will be competent to differentiate right or wrong. They divided participants. Some of them later received a practical on how to solve the specific logical problems. It was concluded that poor performers who had been

educated earlier would rate their performance more accurate, which means having more knowledge, less ignorance, produces more precise realisation because it provides a more realistic perception of one’s self.

For top-ranked performers, life is not perfect either. They had a deceived idea that everyone had higher performance than them. This resulted in having less confidence as opposed to people with low performance. This very recent research also showed a slight implication of this notion. The cure of this issue was to let them reviewed others’ test answers. It worked as reflection that allowed them to realise their true position. Although, this fashion did not work vice versa because unskilled incompetent people unsuccessfully recognised mistakes. People initially start rating their performance by using their broad idea on things they are good or bad at, then they would apply the impression into smaller exercises under those umbrella subjects. This way, their performance estimation in smaller exercises can be misguided by the perceptions of performance of their collective big picture rather than specific approaches. This can eventually cause crucial consequences in life decisions, such as education or career path. Ultimately, how can people hold accurate self-views? Incompetent people who remained unskilled and lack knowledge seemed to never reach the point of self-awareness. They might live with their deficiencies unconsciously in both intellectual and social domains forever. This recent research concluded that in order to self-improve, external elements and systematic methods were still required to work as a reflector. ■

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SOME EXPERIMENTS ON THE RECOGNITION OF SPEECH, WITH ONE AND WITH TWO EARS

Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 25, 975–979. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1907229

This experiment was developed into sections. The recognition in phrases, the highly likely errors and transposition, and the consistency of any initial grammatical errors were the key criterion focused in every sample. The result was reported progressively as the experiment went on.

How can people manage to concentrate on listening to someone speaking when there was another person speaking at the same time? In normal circumstances, environmental factors and manual solutions could contribute to achievement such as an uneven volume of speeches due to direction and distance differences or using visual ability in addition to read the speaker’s lips. However, in this experiment, all of those assists were filtered out. All speeches were recorded on tape and the subject listened to them via balanced headphones. Playbacks the record was permitted but jotting the messages down was not. The subject’s task was repeating one of two speeches after listening to them both being mixed in one record. He finally leaked some mistakes in transposition where it was likely. The subject was, to some extent, reportedly struggle with some specific phrases. He was later allowed to write down what he heard. He found the test was suddenly easier. This could be interpreted that long-term memory aid played a role in this situation.

This time, the researcher switched to using inseparable speeches generated by selected clichés found in newspapers then joined them with simple conjunctions. As the definition of the word cliché itself, it was familiar and resulted as an easier way for the subject to predict and recognise a full phrase. This was suggested that simply structured phrases with a small amount of unfamiliar lexicon could be readily constructed.

What about one speech to the right ear and another to the left? The researcher had done with mixed record presented to both ears. The subject was fed through headphones with two distinct speeches, one to his right ear and another to his left ear, wellbalanced. His task was to repeat either passage at the same time as the hearing. As a result, he could decide to listen to one speech over another and switched back and forth. He recognised all words. Although, he had tiny comprehension of the passage as a whole. It implicated that to be able to concentrate on one speech over another, one could attempt by turning towards the

source to have the passage dominantly only on one ear and lessen the sound quality on another one rather than receiving the passage evenly to both ears, which caused less opportunity to gain either.

Let’s deliberate on the speech that was left unfocused. Was the subject even aware of the quality of the rejected speech when all concentration was applied to the chosen one on another ear? Now, the subject listened to passages selected from newspapers on his right ear. On his left ear, he was fed with a different type of sounds, included human voices in from both genders normal and reversed ones, and meaningless oscillator sound. The result was the subject successfully recognised what kind of rejected sound he was hearing but failed to give specific details about them.

Now, the researcher escalated the task to the timing difference. Because of how the subject engaged two signals before making a decision about which signal to listen and which was to be rejected still left unexplored. Two identical speeches were fed to the subject’s both ears in a delay to each other. They started with a very long delay between them, which revealed the subject used the tuning in meaning, and the delay slowly became shorter, the tuning in sound applied, then finally overlapped in timing. Discovered that the subject was aware of the details of rejected speech when identical speeches were the case, as opposed to earlier tests that unidentical speeches were used. ■

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MUSIC ALTERS VISUAL PERCEPTION

Jolij J., Meurs M. (2011). Music Alters Visual Perception. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18861. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0018861

Top-down processing of visual output is the core theory of this observation. The key elements consist of contextual information, previous knowledge, and expectations. Once we receive the visual input, the brain renders the data using those main features to subjectively interpret what we see out there. The effect helps our lives easier as it retrieves our memory that has already been stored in the brain to support us in processing. Later in this experiment, the researchers discovered that there was another bit to be taken into the visual processing method. The current emotional state of the subjects could strongly affect the determination in what they think they see.

Sensory information in everyday life could be ambiguous and wide open for interpretation. Mood could affect the subjects’ perceptual process in either way by manipulating the focus of the subjects’ perception. Positive mood engaged with big-picture processing. Negative mood engaged with detailed processing. When the subjects were asked to summarise a story, ones holding positive mood would tell the plot, whereas ones holding negative mood would point out specifics. Without a particular mood, the subjects still possibly remained bias in perception towards things they considered negative. However, just a small dose of positive reinforcement could replace this negativity bias in short term. The subjects with negative mood quicker detected negative facial expression in morphing face scale as opposed to ones with positive mood. The subjects with positive mood tended to judge vague facial expressions more as positive. This suggestion also applied to body language interpretation.

Music as a stimulus could prove that cognitive and meta-cognitive processes were not the only influence on the subjects’ perception. Music influenced the subjects’ particular mood affected as a top-up of the top-down visual processing. The subjects were presented with emotional faces generated in noise and were asked to rate face emotion. The experiment was conducted in three conditions. The subjects performed the task without music and were induced by both happy and sad music of their choices, one by one, while they were doing the test. The Mood-congruency effect showed obvious presence. The subjects were better to detect faces that exhibited emotions that aligned with their particular mood which was influenced by the music they were listening to. The result among subjects revealed consistency.

There was also the case of false alarms. Not only music intensified the subjects’ sensitivity, but also urged their visual perception. The subjects later reported faces that exhibited emotions that aligned with their particular mood in absence of the actual visual stimuli. This implicated mood could create bias to illusory perception. The case was reported remarkably higher when the subjects were listening to happy music than sad music or no music. This event could be concluded as purely illusory percepts rather than a random prediction to ambiguous stimulus. The subjects’ perceptual decisions were strictly driven by their current state of mind.

Emotional state also strongly influences the process of perceptual input. So to speak, the top-down theory is not always predictive on its own. It should be considered as mood-dependent modulation. The reward value the subjects attached to each emotional face could represent as the action of their state of mind. There is a study about the brain working pattern as the mood congruency process is activated. Congruency switched on the superior temporal gyrus yet turned down the operation in the face-specific fusiform gyrus. The event conversely happened with incongruent musicface pairs. The study suggested a contradictory way of top-down implementation in visual processing between congruency and incongruency.

In conclusion, mood reflects visual awareness in biasing sensory input and creating illusory perception. Additionally, failure to carry out top-down visual processing may link to autism spectrum disorder as the process essentially involves activities that require social cognition such as emotional face recognition. ■

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