Abstracting

Inattentional & Change Blindness

Selective Attention Experiment:Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball.

M. L. J. Abercrombie, 1960

Look carefully at the center circles on both the left and right.Which circle is bigger?

Are you sure they aren't both the same size? 

This relative size illusion is called the Ebbinghaus illusion. 

It was discovered by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, in the early 1900s.

Is the blue side in the front or back of the cube?

How many legs does this elephant have?

The impossible elephant was drawn by American cognitive scientist Roger N. Shepard.

What do you see below?

A lady or a musician? See both?

An experimental study of the effect of language on the reproduction of visually perceived form.By Carmichael, L.; Hogan, H. P.; Walter, A. A.Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol 15(1), Feb 1932, 73-86.

AbstractRecall of visually perceived form is altered by the fact that a particular word is said immediately before the visual presentation of the form. A list of stimulus figures was presented, each figure being given after one of a pair of words. The words influence perception of figure. The list word, e.g., "eye glasses," is assumed to start certain processes in the organism which are possible because of the experience of the subject with "eye glasses" as word or as object. These physiological processes cause the figure of two visual circles connected by a line to be reproduced in a different manner. If the word "dumbbell" were spoken before this presentation, different processes would be initiated, hence a different reproduction or a new total process would result. The reproduction is a complex total and not either of its component processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Functional Steps in the Process of Abstracting *

* Robert P. Pula, 1979, 2000

1. Structurally determined selecting/filtering

2. Transducing

3. Integrating (pre-conscious)

4. Projecting

5. Self-Reflexive Processes

In humans, these non-verbal processes precede & underly an additional step:

6. Languaging (symbolizing, talking)

}Non-verbal, common to humans & animals

An Extensional Analysis of the Process of Abstracting

From Korzybski (1944, 1946, 1950), Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings

Neural Correlates of Consciousness by Mormann & Koch, http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness

“The Neuronal Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) are the minimal set of neural events and structures – here synchronized action potentials in neocortical pyramidal neurons – sufficient for a specific conscious percept or a conscious (explicit) memory. From Koch (2004) The Quest for Consciousness.”