User:Lovearobot

For now this is mostly just a sandbox for drafts and scraps.

I've been doing some reading on neuroticism for a project I am working in in school. I recently came upon a very interesting theory that may explain the content of neurotics' ruminations - from a cognitive perspective. I have since added this to the Neuroticism section on Wikipedia.

Selective visual attention was my first addition to Wikipedia. I gathered these sources and this information during a class project in the Winter term of 2010. This was for a "mock" proposal I was developing to test the speed at which visual attention adjusts in size. I'm fairly happy with how this turned out and pending ethics approval I will run this study later this year. As it turns out, this information fit right into a gap in Wikipedia's attention article.

Mental Noise Hypothesis
Studies have found that the mean reaction times (RTs) will not differ between individuals high in neuroticism and those low in neuroticism, but that there is considerably more trial-to-trial variability in performance reflected in RT standard deviations. In other words, on some trials neurotic individuals are faster than average, and on others they are slower than average. It has been suggested that this variability reflects noise in the individual's information processing systems or instability of basic cognitive operations (such as regulation processes), and further that this noise originates from two sources: mental preoccupations and reactivity processes.

Flehmig et. al (2007) studied mental noise in terms of everyday behaviours using the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire which is a self-report measure of the frequency of slips and lapses of attention. This scale was correlated with two well-known measures of neuroticism (the BIS/BAS scale and the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire). Results indicated that the CFQ-UA subscale was most strongly correlated with neuroticism (r = .40) and explained the most variance (16%) compared to overall CFQ scores which only explained 7%. The authors interpret these findings as suggesting that mental noise is "highly specific in nature" as it is related most strongly to attention slips triggered endogenously by associative memory. In other words, this may suggest that most mental noise is mostly task-irrelevant cognitions such as worries and preoccupations.

Cognitive models of selective visual attention


In cognitive psychology there are at least two models which describe how visual attention operates. These models may be considered loosely as metaphors which are used to describe internal processes and to generate hypotheses that are falsifiable. Generally speaking, visual attention is thought to operate as a two-stage process. In the first stage, attention is distributed uniformly over the external visual scene and processing of information is performed in parallel. In the second stage, attention is concentrated to a specific area of the visual scene (i.e. it is focused), and processing is performed in a serial fashion.

The first of these models to appear in the literature is the spotlight model. The term "spotlight" was first used by David LaBerge, and was inspired by the work of William James who described attention as having a focus, a margin, and a fringe. The focus is an area that extracts information from the visual scene with a high-resolution, the geometric center of which being where visual attention is directed. Surrounding the focus is the fringe of attention which extracts information in a much more crude fashion (i.e. low-resolution). This fringe extends out to a specified area and this cut-off is called the margin.

The second model is called the zoom-lens model, and was first introduced in 1983. This model inherits all properties of the spotlight model (i.e. the focus, the fringe, and the margin) but has the added property of changing in size. This size-change mechanism was inspired by the zoom lens you might find on a camera, and any change in size can be described by a trade-off in the efficiency of processing. The zoom-lens of attention can be described in terms of an inverse trade-off between the size of focus and the efficiency of processing: because attentional resources are assumed to be fixed, then it follows that the larger the focus is, the slower processing will be of that region of the visual scene since this fixed resource will be distributed over a larger area. It is thought that the focus of attention can subtend a minimum of 1° of visual angle, however the maximum size has yet to be determined.

Fooling genes
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins describes an approach to life-extension that involves "fooling genes" into thinking the body is young. Dawkins attributes inspiration for this idea to Peter Medawar. The basic idea is that our bodies are composed of genes that activate throughout our lifetimes, some when we are young, and others when we are older. Presumably, these genes are activated by environmental factors (this is known as epigenetics), and the changes caused by these genes activating can be lethal. It is a statistical certainty that we possess more lethal genes that activate in later life than in early life. Therefore, to extend life we should be able to prevent these genes from switching on, and we should be able to do so by "identifying changes in the internal chemical environment of a body that take place during aging... and by simulating the superficial chemical properties of a young body".