There has been more and more research in the last couple of years on the subjective elements of consciousness, especially mindfulness and introspection, and the related issue of self-control. It's about time - even if the research is being done in the cognitive neuroscience field - there really is no field for subjective neuroscience (this is usually called phenomenological philosophy).
Here are three recent articles.
Can We Train Ourselves to Be More Introspective?
Steve Fleming answers.This is a great question that at the moment we don’t have a clear answer to. In our recent study, we showed that the structure of the anterior prefrontal cortex, right at the front of the brain, was correlated with an individual’s ability to know when he or she was wrong. We determined this ability by asking 32 individuals to make difficult visual judgments and rate their confidence they were correct. People have good introspective ability if they tend to be confident when they’re right, and less confident when they’re wrong. We’re not testing the tendency to introspect here—we’re just saying that when asked to introspect, some people are better at it than others.
We arranged the experiment so that the difficulty of the task remained stable for each person—if they were getting it right, the computer automatically made it harder; if they were getting it wrong, it was made easier. It would be very interesting to determine whether it’s possible to train people on knowing whether they’re right or wrong, despite their task performance remaining the same. In fact, Edward Titchener, one of the pioneers of experimental psychology around the turn of the 19th century, used to insist that students were trained for thousands of hours to attain unbiased assessments of their own mental states! We plan to carry out studies of how training affects introspective ability in the future, and it would be fascinating to determine whether the structure of the prefrontal cortex was also altered by such training. As to whether it’s possible, we already know that simply instructing people to use introspective strategies can have beneficial effects on their learning. And work being carried out at Janet Metcalfe’s lab at Columbia University is looking at whether metacognitive strategies can enhance children’s education.
Other studies have shown that the brain’s gray matter is remarkably “plastic”—for instance, after only a few weeks of learning to juggle, the gray matter associated with motor skills changes in shape and becomes larger. Whether this is also the case for higher cognitive skills, such as introspective ability, remains to be determined. But, in principle, there is no reason that it cannot be done.
Steve Fleming is a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
Could learning self-control be enjoyable?
September 20, 2010When it comes to self-control, consumers in the United States are in trouble. But a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says there's hope; we just need a little help to see self-regulation as fun.
More information: Juliano Laran and Chris Janiszewski. "Work or Fun? How Task Construal and Completion Influence Regulatory Behavior." Journal of Consumer Research: April 2011. A preprint of this article (to be officially published online soon) can be found at http://journals.uc … cago.edu/jcr"Self-control failures depend on whether people see activities involving self-control (e.g., eating in moderate quantities) as an obligation to work or an opportunity to have fun," write authors Juliano Laran (University of Miami) and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida, Gainesville).
According to the authors, approximately one in five U.S. citizens over the age of 12 admits to binge drinking at least once per month, and nearly 10 million people suffer from clinical eating disorders. These epidemics make it critical to examine what can be done to encourage people to regulate consumption.
In one study, the researchers asked participants to hold pieces of candy between their fingers, and put it in their mouths and then take it out. "The goal of this task was to let people perform tasks with the candy but not be able to actually eat the candy," the authors explain.
Once the participants completed the initial tasks they moved on to taking unrelated surveys. But the candy was left on their desks without instruction as to whether they could eat it or not. The researchers measured how much candy the participants consumed and measured how much self-control the participants usually exerted. "We found that participants who are usually high in self-control perceived the initial candy task—which involved touching, but not eating Skittles and M&Ms—as an opportunity to have fun (they were playing with candy)," the authors write. "Participants who are usually low in self-control, however, perceived the initial candy task as an obligation to work."
Both low and high self-control individuals showed self-control success in a similar study where the word "fun" was included in the instructions for the initial task. "These results show that low self-control people can be made to act like high self-control people and show regulatory success if tasks that involve exerting self-control are framed in a way that people will perceive it as fun and not work," the authors conclude.
Inner Voice Plays Role in Self Control
ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2010) — Talking to yourself might not be a bad thing, especially when it comes to exercising self control.
New research out of the University of Toronto Scarborough -- published in this month's edition of Acta Psychologica -- shows that using your inner voice plays an important role in controlling impulsive behaviour.
"We give ourselves messages all the time with the intent of controlling ourselves -- whether that's telling ourselves to keep running when we're tired, to stop eating even though we want one more slice of cake, or to refrain from blowing up on someone in an argument," says Alexa Tullett, PhD Candidate and lead author on the study. "We wanted to find out whether talking to ourselves in this 'inner voice' actually helps."
Tullett and Associate Psychology Professor Michael Inzlicht, both at UTSC, performed a series of self control tests on participants. In one example, participants performed a test on a computer. If they saw a particular symbol appear on the screen, they were told to press a button. If they saw a different symbol, they were told to refrain from pushing the button. The test measures self control because there are more "press" than "don't press" trials, making pressing the button an impulsive response.
The team then included measures to block participants from using their "inner voice" while performing the test, to see if it had an impact on their ability to perform. In order to block their "inner voice," participants were told to repeat one word over and over as they performed the test. This prevented them from talking to themselves while doing the test.
"Through a series of tests, we found that people acted more impulsively when they couldn't use their inner voice or talk themselves through the tasks," says Inzlicht. "Without being able to verbalize messages to themselves, they were not able to exercise the same amount of self control as when they could talk themselves through the process."
"It's always been known that people have internal dialogues with themselves, but until now, we've never known what an important function they serve," says Tullett. "This study shows that talking to ourselves in this 'inner voice' actually helps us exercise self control and prevents us from making impulsive decisions."
Tullett. The voice of self-control: Blocking the inner voice increases impulsive responding. Acta Psychologica, 2010 [link]
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment