#term project

I'm doing a term project on native language prediction! I plan for the data to be fanfiction written in English by ESL authors.

For this, I need two things:

author; author's native language

Hello and welcome back! This is going to be a very easy and simple week as we just reviewed the previous lecture (see module 11) and we had a few things to kinda “play” with. So lets dive in!

First things first we reviewed our previous lecture and then we moved on to play with the BioMotion Moving Point Light Display. Now what this is a moving light we can adjust the sliders on and see the difference between the way people walk, such as a nervous woman or a happy man. It was interesting to me because you get an idea of how people walk depending on different sliders. For examples:

From this we got to watch the Biology in Motion with Nikolaus Troje published to the QueensUCanada YouTube Page. Where it is the creator of the moving light display describing it and explaining how it works. 

From there we read an article called Point-light biological motion perception activates human premotor cortex written by Ayse Pinar Saygin, Stephen M. Wilson, Donald J. Hagler Jr, Elizabeth Bates and Martin I. Sereno. With this article we got to see how the moving light display activates the human premotor cortex. This is because observation of others actions is known to also evoke activity in motor and premotor areas in the frontal cortex.

Other than a discussion post that is all we had for this week, as always I will share our review sheet and I will see you for module 13!

Hello and welcome back this week was yet another easy week of just a video lecture and review sheet. This week was just on motor cognition so I will highlight what I feel is important and share the review sheet!

Motor Cognition

We started with the importance of the motor system in human behavior. Basically motor cognition allows humans to play instruments, crochet, build and more!

But, motor cognition is processing in which the motor system draws on stored information to: -plan and produce our own actions -to anticipate, predict, and interpret the actions of others -used to perform some types of reasoning and problem solving -often involves mental imagery to run “mental scenarios” that allow you to “see what would happen if...”

According to my professor, the solutions could be: 1. the brain starts to learn the structure of the world 2. the brain learns to unconsciously predict the world 3. the brain’s predictions are corrected by the world 4. the brain learned from its mistakes (to make better predictions)

We then revisit the two processing pathways and predictive coding theory.

We then have a motor hierarchy in our brains.

(Images from the PowerPoint lecture directly)

From here we go to motor intentions, there are three types of probabilistic belief 1. Likeihood belief = based on incoming sensory information 2. Prior belief = based on previously learned information 3. Posterior belief = combines these to make a “best guest” prediction

That was basically it for module 11, as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for module 12!

Hello and welcome back! This was a slightly long module and I hope you’ll stick around with me as I explain things terribly, so lets dive in!

Assignment 1:

We started with another lecture by the professor and we discussed the different types of memory. I found this section to be interesting because my memory is honestly really bad already so I was curious to see what I may possibly find out from this. There are two kinds of long-term memory including declarative memory and non-declarative memory. We also went over several types of memory loss including, retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. 

That was it for assignment 1 so onto assignment 2!

Assignment 2:

From there we did a two day self administered memory test. This was done with a list of numbers 1-40 and a automated PowerPoint that walked us through word association. So the first time I did it was at night, and it takes you though to see what the associations are going to be and then they ask you to remember and write down the other half. First time I got 17 out of 40 right so not a good sign. The next time we did it was the morning after and that day was 22 correct. So I did slightly better this time but I am sure others would do a lot better than I would. From there we entered our scores on a ‘quiz’ and we had an article to read.

The article we read was called  Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity Predict Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation written by Kimberly M Fenn and David Z Hambrick. Here we learned a little bit about working memory capacity and long term memory. One of the more important thing I learned from this is that there is strong evidence to suggest that our working memory capacity reflects our ability to retain attention during online ask performances. Which I could totally see because I do not have a great working memory and I have trouble retaining attention during online things.

From here we had a discussion post and then we moved onto assignment 3!

Assignment 3:

From here we have another video lecture this one was on encoding and retrieval. It was really short so not much to cover on it.

Other than a brief discussion post that was it for assignment 3 and that was the end of module 7, as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for module 8!

Hello, and welcome back, this week we had three assignments all together and as always more things to do within them so lets dive in!

Assignment 1:

This week we started with a video lecture by the professor during this, we discussed perception, and what the problems of perception are and what the two processing pathways are as well. So with that, the two problems of perception are that there can be too much input for us to process and understand and there is more information in the world than we can even possibly hope to perceive. I also feel like this goes back to the fact that we are not easily able to multitask so if we attempt to take in too much information we may miss some important information. As previously mentioned as well there are two processing pathways as well. These are the bottom up processes and the top down processes as well. The bottom up process is driven by sensory information from the physical world while the top down process is active in seeking and extraction of sensory information by our knowledge, beliefs, expectations and goals.

Next, we watched another lecture from a different professor who was teaching under grads at MIT and this video was filmed in the spring of 2018. The video in general is called 1.2 - How Can We Study the Human Mind and Brain? Marr’s Level’s of Analysis and it was published by MITCBMM. Overall I felt the video was interesting and obviously the professor is really knowledgeable on the subject she is speaking on I just unfortunately did not take any notes on her lecture I just listened but I quite enjoyed her presentation and I am sure you will too.

That was it for our first assignment of course of the discussion post we did for this one that I usually do not share, but next is assignment 2!

Assignment 2:

This assignment was fairly easy, we had a few articles to read and our discussion post to answer. So it wasn’t too bad so lets dive in.

First article is called How do our brains reconstruct the visual world? written by Alex Burmester. The article itself was very interesting, it explains how our eyes works and how it pairs with the brain to give us our vison. I found it to be very interesting and informational. I was also lucky enough to learn a bit more about this in another class I am in as well! The author also included an interesting graphic as well which if you don’t want to read the article, I will share it below!

Next we moved on to read ‘Noisy’ neurons put a limit on visual perception, which was written by Adam Hadhazy. This article was also quite interesting and informational and I am sure you will enjoy it, so feel free to read it yourself!

We then moved on to the final article of this assignment which was called  Brain’s limits lead to unconscious choices in what we see and remember written by Melissa Healy. This article ended up explaining how our brains limit could also limit what we see and remember. But, with the brain doing this it’s all from an unconscious perspective, so its not anything we can truly control.

That is it for assignment 2 and now on to assignment 3!

Assignment 3:

We started off by reading Cognitive bias cheat sheet written by Buster Benson. This article goes through and explains what cognitive biases are and problems of biases and what could be possible solutions for them as well. One thing I loved about this article is the small comic it starts with because it is so true and it is what so many of us do! 

Source of the comic

Then we ended up looking at the cognitive bias codex, it starts with a basic bias and then goes into a more specific bias and then you get the answer of what the bias could be, not necessarily what it is.

Overall it is a very detailed wheel and a bit hard to read but it was definitely very interesting to look over especially since you tend to recognize some of the biases on there.

Overall that was it for this module, as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for the next one!

This week we had another fairly easy week, but this week we had three video lectures taught by the professor, which is typically rare for us!

The first video was primarily on emotion and learning. This involved in learning, the two pathways for sensory processing. Such as in fear conditioning stimulus leads to fear. So in order to feel fear there needs to be a stimulus that we see to cause the fear reaction. While the amygdala is not the true fear center it has connections to the cortical regions of our brain! We also learned about Edward Claparede’s patient which was interesting as well.

Next video was primarily on emotion and memory. This mentions that there are embodied theories of emotion and that cognition and emotion share overlapping biological systems. We even got to learn about our Professor’s theory of interaction. We also talked about the role of facial feedback in emotion, essentially what we talked about a few modules back and how botulinum toxin or botox prevents muscle feedback.

The next video was on Emotion and Decision making. We talked about frontal lobe, and pre-frontal lobe damage. It was also mentioned within the video how autonomic neuro-system activity guides our decision making. This brought up Phineus Gage, who is one of the most important people in the history of psychology. He did not feel grief, and had a bilateral frontal brain tumor.

There of course was a little more covered in each power point but that is going to be it for this module, feel free to check out the review sheet down below and I will see y’all for the next one!