Laboratory Investigation of Human Cognition. Name. Reg. no. Date of submission

Transcription

1 Laboratory Investigation of Human Cognition Name Reg. no Date of submission

2 Abstract Human mind, at its most basic, is structured in such a way that it permits successful navigation of various challenges that are related to reproduction and survival, including emotions. According to Strack and Duetsch (2004), the mind of modern man usually has a wide array of preoccupation, including philosophy, science, entertainment, among others, and these have little direct relationship to reproduction and survival. The relatively rich cognitive capabilities of human beings borrow a lot from humans extreme social nature. In this laboratory experiment, responses to stimuli concerning various factors was investigated. This was carried out by running a lexical decision task where people responded word or non-word to various stimuli. Furthermore, the experiment employs some critical words during the investigation. The words are vital and are categorized into three groups. That is; Positive words (love), negative words (hate), and neutral words (dime). It is worth noting that the same principle was also implemented in developing the non-critical words However, the difference being that some letters were added as e.g., hatel, lovel, dimel (Taft et al., 2017). The result revealed that there different factors under investigation resulted in different response to stimuli. Consequently, all the three hypotheses were rejected.

3 1.0 Introduction Human mind, at its most basic, is structured in such a way that it permits successful navigation of various challenges that are related to reproduction and survival, including emotions. Generally, the minds of early man might have been concerned primarily with acts of recognizing substances which are edible as well as identification of dangerous predators. On the other hand, the mind of modern man usually has a wide array of preoccupation, including philosophy, science, entertainment, among others, and these have little direct relationship to reproduction and survival (Strack & Deutsch, 2004). The relatively rich cognitive capabilities of human beings borrow a lot from humans extreme social nature. Such a social nature has helped man in understanding the mind of fellow human such as their intentions (whether to compete or cooperate), to learn what others know (as to where opportunities and threats lie), and to manipulate their beliefs. According to Tomasello et al. (2005), such cognitive skills are fundamental in setting humans from other animals. Brewer (2004) stated that in order to know the mind of others, there is the need to attend to and perceive different cues that are available, either verbal or non-verbal. The study of the process of a person s perception led to the emergence of social cognition, focussing on the ability of the perceiver to discern the states (such as emotions) and traits of others. According to Brewer (2004), it has been generally assumed that cognitive representation of individuals and the context of their behaviour indicate the response of such behaviour to social world. Such representations attribute meaning onto the received sensory input in addition to potentiating the corresponding responses. The contextual stimuli of the external environment as well as the social target create signals such as visual, auditory, among others. When these signals are sensed, the receiver perceives and converts them into

4 psychological representations which are meaningful and consequently defining the receiver s inner experience of the world. Both sensory input and imposition of meaning govern the process of perception. Both have their basis on the meaning template which match as well as other recognizable pattern processes which make it possible to structure and interpret the input. The achieved meaningful percept serves as input to higher-order cognition, and this includes assumptions about goals of the target as well as the intention. Furthermore, the response of the perceiver is guided by this interpretation of target input. The social cognitive theory has been adopted in this experiment to help in the analysis of response to stimuli. This is because the social cognitive theory is founded on the model of causation and is thus helpful in the analysis of development of various human response to stimuli. Furthermore, social cognitive theory is biased towards a model of causation that involve triadic reciprocal determinism such as cognition, behaviour, and other personal factors as well as environmental factors. In this laboratory experiment, responses to stimuli concerning various factors were investigated. This was carried out by running a lexical decision task where people responded word or non-word to various stimuli. Furthermore, various critical words were employed in the investigation and they were categorized into three recognizable groups including: Positive words (love), negative words (hate), and neutral words (dime). However, the same principle was adopted in constructing critical non-words, the difference being that some latters were added as e.g., hatel, lovel, dimel (Taft et al., 2017). 1.1 Aim

5 The aim of this laboratory experiment was to investigate responses to stimuli concerning various factors by running a lexical decision task where people responded word or nonword to various stimuli. 1.2 Research question Is there difference in response to stimuli caused by positive, negative or neutral words? Is there difference in response to stimuli caused by positive, negative or neutral nonwords? 1.3 Hypotheses 1. There is no difference in the stimuli caused by positive/negative words and the neutral words 2. There is no difference in the stimuli caused by positive/negative non-words and the neutral non-words 3. There is no difference in the stimuli caused by difference in positive/negative words and difference in positive/negative non-words 1.4 Justification The social cognition theory adopted in this investigation will ensure that the response to stimuli will be sufficiently tested with respect to the positive, negative and neutral words and non-words. 2.0 Results

6 The results of the investigation was summarized as shown in the graph in figure 1 below. The correlation between the factors under consideration and the stimuli was also tested and presented in table 1. Figure 1: The graph comparing means of the study variables Figure 1 above shows the comparison of the mean of each of the items under consideration. The result revealed that negative word (hate) had the highest mean of It was followed closely by negative non-word (represent by hatel). Thus, both negative word and negative non-word had stimuli which were significantly higher compared to other measures under consideration. The figure also revealed that anxiety (STOI) and happiness (OHI) had the least means of and respectively. This was due to the fact that the values of the means were in z-score scales. Table 1: s hatel lovel spoonel hate love spoon skoonel

7 hatel **.691 **.730 **.611 **.584 **.86 Sig. (2-tailed) lovel.915 ** **.713 **.561 **.548 **.84 Sig. (2-tailed) spoonel.691 **.678 ** **.646 **.596 **.82 Sig. (2-tailed) hate.730 **.713 **.916 ** **.649 **.81 Sig. (2-tailed) love.611 **.561 **.646 **.706 ** **.62 Sig. (2-tailed) spoon.584 **.548 **.596 **.649 **.925 ** 1.61

8 Sig. (2-tailed) skoonel.869 **.848 **.823 **.819 **.628 **.612 ** Sig. (2-tailed) STAI Sig. (2-tailed) OHI Sig. (2-tailed) DifNegNWv NeuNW.407 **.316 ** ** * Sig. (2-tailed) DifPosNWv NeuNW.310 **.434 ** ** * Sig. (2-tailed)

9 DifNegWvNe **.418 ** * **.24 uw Sig. (2-tailed) DifPosWvNe uw ** -.0 Sig. (2-tailed) **. is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). *. is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed). Table 1 above shows the correlations between various measures of stimuli. The correlation of interest involved the OHI and STAI and the difference scores between negative/neutral and the negative/positive words and non-words (achieved by subtracting the reaction times of positive and neutral stimuli from the negative ones). The result revealed that there was significant positive correlation between STAI and negative neutral non-negative words (r=.287, p <.001). The other positive correlation were also found between each of positive neutral non-word and positive neutral word with STAI (r=.128, p <.005) and (r=.088, p <.005) respectively. However, there was negative correlation between negative neutral word and STAI (r=-.020, p <.001). Negative correlation were recorded between OHI and both negative neutral non-negative words and positive neutral non-word (r=-.096, p <.001) and (r=-.105, p <.001) respectively. On the other hand, positive correlation were recorded OHI and both negative neutral word and positive neutral word (r=.030, p <.001) and (r=.223, p <.005) respectively.

10 3.0 Discussion The result revealed that negative word had a significant response to the stimuli. Negative non-word also had significant response to the stimuli, albeit less than that of negative word. The other measures also had significant response o stimuli, although less than that of both negative word and negative non-word. The result revealed that there was significant positive correlation between anxiety and negative neutral non-negative words, positive neutral non-word and positive neutral word. However, anxiety and negative neutral non-negative words had a negative correlation. These findings showed that, in general, anxiety was the stimuli resulting from negative neutral nonnegative words, positive neutral non-word and positive neutral word. On the other hand, there was negative correlation between happiness and both negative neutral non-negative words and positive neutral non-word but positive correlation between happiness and both negative neutral word and positive neutral word. Thus, a happy response is most likely to result from both negative neutral word and positive neutral word whereas unhappy response is the most likely stimuli in cases of negative neutral non-negative words and positive neutral non-word. Consequently, we reject the first hypothesis which stated that there is no difference in the stimuli caused by positive/negative words and the neutral words. This is because the result revealed that there is actually difference in the stimuli caused by positive/negative words and the neutral words as far as anxiety and happiness are concerned. We also reject the second hypothesis which stated that there is no difference in the stimuli caused by positive/negative non-words and the neutral non-words. This is because the results revealed that there actually was difference in the stimuli caused by positive/negative non-words and

11 the neutral non-words as far as both anxiety and happiness were concerned. We also reject the third hypothesis which stated that there is no difference in the stimuli caused by difference in positive/negative words and difference in positive/negative non-words. This was because the results revealed that there is actually significant difference in the stimuli caused by difference in positive/negative words and difference in positive/negative non-words as far as both anxiety and happiness were concerned. These results are consistent with other earlier findings and literature as discussed in the introduction (Brewer, 2004; Taft et al., 2017; Tomasello et al., 2005). Conclusion The mind may be a set of psychological features together with consciousness, perception, thinking, judgment, and memory. The mind is the combination of an individual s being's reasoning and thoughts. It holds the ability of imagination, recognition, and appreciation, and is accountable for process feelings and emotions, leading to attitudes and actions. Different individuals have different response to stimuli. The response will be dependent on different factors. However, according to the study, different factors under consideration in this study such as positive, negative and neutral words and positive, negative and neutral non-words result in different responses to stimuli.

12 References Hills, P., & Argyle, M. (2002). The Oxford happiness questionnaire: A compact scale for the measurement of psychological well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, Spielberger, C. D., Gorsuch, R. L., Lushene, R., Vagg, P. R., & Jacobs, G. A. (1983). Manual for the state-trait anxiety inventory. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists press.

13 Taft, M., Xu, J., and Li, S. (2017). Letter coding in visual word recognition: The impact of embedded words. Journal of Memory and Language, 92, Brewer, M. B. (2004). Taking the social origins of human nature seriously: Toward a more imperialist social psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, Strack, F., & Deutsch, R. (2004). Reflective and impulsive determinants of behaviour. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8,

14 Appendix ANOVA Sum of Squares df Mean Square F Sig. hatel Between Groups

15 Within Groups Total lovel Between Groups Within Groups Total spoonel Between Groups Within Groups Total hate Between Groups Within Groups Total love Between Groups Within Groups Total spoon Between Groups Within Groups Total skoonel Between Groups Within Groups Total STAI Between Groups

16 Within Groups Total OHI Between Groups Within Groups Total DifNegNWvNeuN Between Groups W Within Groups Total DifPosNWvNeuN W Between Groups Within Groups Total DifNegWvNeuW Between Groups Within Groups Total