COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Cognitive Psychology



Cognitive Psychology

Section 1)

Answer 1) Report on Stroop effect

Though anecdotal reports link certain speech disorders to increases in autonomic arousal, few studies have described the relationship between arousal and speech processes. Additionally, it is unclear how increases in arousal may interact with other cognitive-linguistic processes to affect speech motor control. In this experiment we examine potential interactions between autonomic arousal, linguistic processing, and speech motor coordination in adults and children.

Autonomic responses (heart rate, finger pulse volume, tonic skin conductance, and phasic skin conductance) were recorded simultaneously with upper and lower lip movements during speech. The lip aperture variability (LA variability index) across multiple repetitions of sentences that varied in length and syntactic complexity was calculated under low- and high-arousal conditions.

High arousal conditions were elicited by performance of the Stroop colour word task. Children had significantly higher lip aperture variability index values across all speaking tasks, indicating more variable speech motor coordination. Increases in syntactic complexity and utterance length were associated with increases in speech motor coordination variability in both speaker groups. There was a significant effect of Stroop task, which produced increases in autonomic arousal and increased speech motor variability in both adults and children. These results provide novel evidence that high arousal levels can influence speech motor control in both adults and children.

Answer 2)

In the context of the behavioural data reviewed above, it seems reasonable to ask how synesthesia might arise from coordinated brain activity. It is now more or less taken for granted that grapheme-colour synesthetes do not have any kind of recognized psychiatric or neurological illness. Moreover, despite the evidence for significant Stroop-like interference effects in laboratory studies, most synesthetes clearly lead completely normal—if slightly more colourful—lives. Early suggestions of a higher incidence of left-handedness have proven unfounded, and although some synesthetes report difficulties with tasks such as mathematical reasoning, others have been shown objectively to have superior abilities in areas such as new learning and recent memory (Conway, 2004, 66).

Any neural explanation for synesthesia must be able to account both for the unusual perceptual experiences and for the absence of concomitant abnormalities in the perceptual, cognitive, and affective domains. To date there have been two dominant accounts. One suggests that synesthesia arises as a consequence of disinhibited feedback from higher associative areas of the cortex to lower perceptual and sensory areas.

The computer-administered emotional Stroop task required the person to ignore the emotional valence (e.g. positive, neutral, negative) of words printed singularly on a monitor in favour of naming the colour ink used to print the word. A training session was administered to familiarize participants with task requirements and use of the computer. Twenty trials of either 'XXXX' or 'OOOO' stimuli were presented randomly in red, green, blue or purple with the constraint that each colour appeared five times. Performance during this session was analysed for accuracy in discriminating colours.

An additional six blocks were administered, each containing 12 words printed in capital letters (four affectively positive, four neutral and four affectively negative) ...