Research

This project is inspired by research in various areas of cognitive psychology. Here is some of what I have put together on the topic. 

~Kyle

 

The Scientific Social Network

Abstract

                In forming opinions and making decisions, we scientifically minded individuals all seek to identify, critically evaluate, and apply observations that we feel are relevant. Whenever possible, we like to quantify dimensions and apply mathematical rigor to our definitions and assertions. Traditionally, official results are published in peer-reviewed journals, and for good reasons these are the writings that we consider reliable. We would be well served however, if we could somehow make more incremental, casual contributions to the scientific community, and have peer-reviewed results be more dynamically integrated. Currently, citations and discussion alone link official results together. The 3rdMind Project will utilize themes from discrete mathematics, semantic networking theory, and modern social media to create a peer-reviewed relational database that integrates casual speculation with evidence based claims. The network relies on a relational note-taking application that allows semantic information to be coded intuitively. This application utilizes a basic hierarchy to start getting concepts organized, but will allow for a wide range of relational inputs. Users have the ability to create, subdivide, combine, and share their own conceptual hierarchies, and then working with those structures define other ways in which concepts relate. In this way, concepts can be viewed as having an identity, which will be encouraged by the fact that the program treats them just like people. Each user will actually be a node on the server based 3rdMind which can be related to any other human or conceptual node. The most basic essential operation users perform with their 3rdMind is sending messages between nodes. When we make our ideas talk to each other is when we make the greatest leaps in furthering our understanding of the world, and to this effect we should have a tool that allows us to do so publicly.

 

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Collaborative Knowledge Distribution and Problem-Solving Networks

Abstract

With its exponentially increasing technological advances, the world we live in seems to get more complex every day. Many people feel helpless to address any of the huge systemic problems our societies face, since the solution most likely involves areas in which they have no expertise. Everyone has a stake in her country’s educational system for instance. However, no one is an expert in every field that is taught in addition to being an expert in the art of teaching. User-interfaces can be designed that would give expert teachers, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers an opportunity to aggregate their knowledge in one place, and formulate plans that could then be presented to politicians. Users would define variables, set relationships between those variables, and organize field data to support their claims. We design a theoretical application suite titled 3rdMind: The Scientific Social Network to outline how such a network could function, and how it could help. Using a mindmapping interface that allows users to send messages containing relations with mathematical properties between the nodes of a mindmap, to “make their thoughts talk to each other”, 3rdMind would seek to to dynamically integrate the way various experts understand their own specialized domains, pushing the limits of our collective, holistic understanding of the world. Everyone has valuable thoughts, but it would take a very friendly, intuitive system to get those thoughts out of most people and into a computer where anyone in the world can access them. Therein lies the challenge, but also the opportunity.

Some Powerful Motivation

An Application to Supplement Lasting Cognitive Health

By Kyle Zimmer, 2012

                As people age, they expect to find their body deteriorating. While this can be incredibly depressing, most learn to accept that it happens and are able to enjoy the time they have left despite the physical limitations. What many fear most of all however, is the mental deterioration.  It is known in particular that the memory impairing conditions of dementia and Alzheimer's disease are associated with significantly increased risks of suicide (Erlangsen 2008, Barak 2002).  According to neurobiological and cognitive research, depression and personality change are associated with cognitive and social isolation alongside brain atrophy and pathological aging, whereas successful aging is associated with cognitive compensation and plasticity in the brain, cognitive training programs and active involvement, all resulting in a neurologically defined positive emotional bias present in healthily aging older adult minds (Reuter-Lorenz & Lustig, 2005). Equipped with this dynamic model of successful vs. unsuccessful cognitive aging, we can attempt to build tools that will keep us and our elders going strong as we age.

                Studies done with Alzheimer’s patients seem to indicate that even the effects of this heavily pathological, genetically driven degenerative condition can be mitigated by physical exercise and a cognitively active lifestyle (Marx, 2005). An experimental study using professors from the University of California showed that cognitive abilities age differently in older adults who have maintained a high level of cognitively stimulating activity throughout their lives. In short, the study found that cognitive slowing seems to be present in all older adults, and thus in speed related tasks aging professors don’t retain their aptitude any better than normal aging adults. Unlike normal older adults however, the professors did perform at levels suggesting very little decline in their ability with respect to age when the task involved conceptual knowledge or reasoning (Shimamura et al, 1995). This is consistent with the findings of Reuter-Lorenz and Lustig, in which some older adults were shown to perform on par with much younger participants when over-activation across different areas of the brain were observed using an fMRI machine (Reuter-Lorenz, 2005). The data seem to suggest that we should be able to help people stay mentally fit for longer if we can somehow teach them how to stay cognitively active. To this end we turn to some of the most recent writing in developmental psychology.

                Building upon the constructivist theory of knowing developed by the great cognitive developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, we can attempt to connect what we know of cognitive development with age to what we are discovering about neural pathology and cognitive degeneration. Eva Kallio has proposed an intuitively labelled way to define the final, desirable stage of healthy cognitive development that follows Piaget's final, formal operational, stage of child development. Such a stage has been referred to as simply the post-formal stage, or more informatively a relativistic dialectic stage. Kallio argues for the use of a new term, integrative thinking, insisting that this term can incorporate modern models of wisdom and relativistic-dialectic thinking into a final cognitive stage. Individuals who have developed an aptitude for integrative thinking are capable of mentally organizing perceptual and conceptual data into a coherent system that holistically describes how they understand the world around themselves. They understand that uncertainty is an inherent aspect of knowledge, but are not nihilistic, accepting that contradictions exist and are often just as enlightening as consistent information. They are capable of approaching problems or situations from multiple angles, and understand the need to make decisions based on weighted uncertainties (Kallio, 2011). This ability to deal with uncertainty in a productive way and integrate conceptual knowledge with personal experience must have something to do with the way older adults who are accustomed to a cognitively active lifestyle retain the ability to perform cognitive tasks in spite of cognitive slowing and pathological cognitive aging.

                Most individuals who, like the college professors at the University of California, continue to function at a high level well into their senior years must have developed an aptitude for integrative thinking somewhere along their way to old age. The nature of integrative thinking makes it a highly personal and intuitively developed way to view the world. Yet there must be ways to help people reach it for themselves, to stack the deck in their favor. One such way would be to develop software that would allow people to record their thoughts in a dynamic, integrated fashion. This could help older adults who are beginning to have memory issues stay motivated and hopeful, as they could now record the same types of insights and creative thoughts that they had when they were younger but now have trouble retaining. Furthermore, using the application before old age starts to take effect could actually allow individuals who otherwise may not have developed the integrative thinking skills necessary to avoid cognitive decline to stay functioning at a high level as they age, perhaps even in spite of pathological declines.

                Where do we start with this application then? We know it should be utilizable as a note-taking application, so that people can record their thoughts. The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi wrote, among many other things relevant to our discussion of post-formal relativistic-dialectic thinking and integrative thinking, “As all life is one, what need have we for words? Yet I have just said all life is one, so I have already spoken, haven't I?”  (Palmer, 15). Our application needs to be based on language. Otherwise how would users interact with it? However, it cannot be based on just one language, and it can’t be based on denotative words defined individually. We are trying to teach integrative thinking. It is the connections between ideas that should define them more than an arbitrarily associated definition. We are looking for holistic semantic representations of ideas, and the best way to do this is to establish a consistent network of user defined terms within which to work.

                Users will be able to create as many such networks as they wish, share them, combine them, and subdivide them. We will call these networks Minds, and define them using discrete relations according to cognitive theories of semantic networks.  Associative theories of long-term memory are based on the notion that ideas are represented by nodes, and those nodes are all interconnected via associations. Essentially, a concept that isn’t explicitly associated with any other concepts is, if not meaningless, completely impossible to retrieve from memory (Reisberg, 2006). Thus our application will need to display a collection of nodes and associations between nodes. In order to keep things manageable for users we will want to use some kind of arbitrary structure within which to place nodes. Here we turn to the concept of semantic networks, a heavily studied construct in psycholinguistics and the study of memory. The simplest, most usable way to represent a semantic network is as a hierarchy.  A commonly used example refers to a robin. A robin is a bird, which is an animal, which is an organism, and attributes of robins, such as “has feathers”, and “has a red belly” are associated with robin, though some attributes, like “has feathers” are also associated with bird (Reisberg, 2006). As we develop the application further we may want to consider other discrete structures within which it can operate, but we will start with a specific type of partial order, the hierarchy. Thus a user of the 3rdMind application will start each Mind they create with only one node, their 3rdEye, which will function as a starting point, or root. From there the user will add nodes preceding the 3rdEye, and nodes preceding those.

                Now that we have an established structure within which users will interact with their 3rdMind, we need to determine how they will interact with it. Once nodes have been established, users can make them “talk to each other”, via a text messaging or email-like interface. A user simply clicks one node, say 3rdEye>Academia>Current Courses>Discrete Mathematics, then clicks another node, say 3rdEye>Projects>3rdMind>Semantic Structures, and types a message from one to the other, for example: “We could complicate the hierarchy structure by allowing the same node to appear under multiple nodes. ‘Attributes’, for example could appear under several nodes and serve to keep information more organized.” This message would be stored in the outbox of the Discrete Mathematics node as well as in the inbox of the Semantic Structures node. In this way students can take notes for one class but have information about and reminders of other information or understandings they have already acquired readily available. Anyone using the 3rdMind will have the ability to record connections between new and old information, making associations in their brain that will help them retain their understanding of the world even as they age and their brain is subjected to pathological degeneration.

                The power to record accurate semantic information comfortably and reliably would certainly benefit the cognitive health of aging individuals, but what if we also had the power to share that semantic information efficiently with others? All it would take would be to turn 3rdMind into a server-based social network. Once hierarchical Minds are created they could be shared, edited, and groups of educated individuals could force themselves to agree on systems of terminology.  Google Drive would probably be the ideal medium through which to manage the files associated with individual nodes as well as files that track the associations between nodes. To explain the utility of association tracking files we turn again to cognitive theories of long-term memory and semantic networks. The latest development in said fields is referred to as connectionism, or parallel distributed processing. This model states that ideas are represented not by a single node, but by distributions of nodes. It is a more biologically plausible theory, as it allows for ideas to be broken down into very simple components (Reisberg, 2006). We are not trying to recreate a human brain here however, so we are only going to take part of the idea; we still want our nodes labeled with meaningful semantic names. However, if there are definite quantitatively measurable associations between nodes, we want to be able to record those. To this effect we borrow the idea of connection weights from the concept of a connectionist network. In this way scientists could effectively build upon quantitative data within their own discipline, and even across disciplines.

                There remains one final aspect of the 3rdMind concept that is relevant to the cognitive aging of older adults: the integration of different languages into the application. Numerous studies have shown that bilingual individuals have distinct cognitive advantages related to executive processing, an attentional advantage in selectivity and inhibition (Bialystok & Fergus, 2010; Santiago, 1994; Reuter-Lorenz, 2005). Some have even shown the onset of dementia to be delayed in bilinguals (Bialystok, 2010; Reuter-Lorenz, 2005). This makes perfect sense, because if we think about brain plasticity and cognitive reserve as discussed by Reuter-Lorenz and Fergus, alongside Kallio’s discussion of integrative thinking we can easily see how bilinguals will have certain cognitive advantages. They automatically have extra ways of thinking about concepts, because they can think in more than one language.  As anyone who has studied a foreign language can tell you, translation is far from a direct science. One often needs to use a totally different arrangement of words to express the same idea in another language. Replacing each word with a “translation” simply doesn’t work, and thus bilinguals have an advantage. If individuals from different cultures, speaking different languages were able to collaborate on one Mind, we would be giving ourselves a huge influx of diverse thoughts to consider. Thus the language feature of 3rdMind must be developed.

                Languages need to form special kinds of node structures, such that those structures can be related to analogous structures constructed in an entirely different language. Thus bilinguals can help others learn language by drawing symmetries between semantic structures. For example, one node in Mandarin Chinese may function the same way as a certain set of nodes in English, and visa-versa. In this way any given user-defined Mind can be edited independently in several languages, and connections between the different language branches of the Mind could be drawn from there.

                Now in developing the concept of the application we have been referring to as 3rdMind, we have diverged somewhat from talking about the cognitive health of older adults. However, it was necessary to give a complete picture of the application as far as the concept has been developed in order to avoid confusion. We have looked at several advantages of developing such software, but here return to state its primary purpose: to promote healthy cognitive development in people of all ages, regardless of cultural or linguistic heritage. It was originally conceived as a teaching-learning tool, and remains true to that purpose, hopefully to the great benefit of aging individuals who would otherwise struggle with maintaining their cognitive health.

 

Works Cited

Bialystok, E. & Fergus, I. M. (2010). Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 19-23.

Kallio, E. (2011). Integrative thinking is the key: An evaluation of current research into the development of adult thinking.  Theory & Psychology, 21, 785-801.

Marx, J. (2005).  Preventing Alzheimer’s: A lifelong commitment?  Science, 309, 864-866.

Reuter-Lorenz, P. A., & Lusting, C. (2005).  Brain aging: reorganizing discoveries about the aging mind.  Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15, 245-251.

 

Shimamura, A. P., Berry, J. M., Mangels, J. A., Rusting, C. L., & Jurica, P. J. (1995).  Memory and cognitive abilities in university professors: Evidence for successful aging.  Psychological Science, 6, 271-277.

 

Zhuangzi. (1996). “The Inner Chapters”. The Book of Chuang Tzu. (M. Palmer, Trans.)London, England: Arkana.

 

Reisberg, D. (2007). Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind. New York, NY. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

 

Santiago, R. L. (1994). The interdependence between linguistic performance, cognitive performance and the home language environment among bilingual preschoolers. 55(6), 1510A.

 

Erlangsen, A., PhD., Zarit, S. H., PhD., & Conwell, Y., M.D. (2008). Hospital-diagnosed dementia and suicide: A longitudinal study using prospective, nationwide register data. The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 16(3), 220-8.

Barak, Y., & Aizenberg, D. (2002). Suicide amongst alzheimer's disease patients: A 10-year survey. Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, 14(2), 101-3. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.gvsu.edu/docview/232497283?accountid=39473

 

 

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