How do I know I am HERE

1
How do I know I am HERE?

• Neuropsychological processes
• Proprioception (sensing ones own body)
• embodiedness
• Perception of the environment as perception of
  oneself in time and space
• perception and action as a single navigational
  activity
• Self as a locative system (Benson, 2001)
• The word I is primarily a noun of position
  like this and here (William James)

2
Where did I come from?

• Newborn infant genetically predisposed to
  interact with parent
• imitation
• preference for faces
• Adult scaffolding of parent-child interaction
• Adult treats infant as if it were a person, and
  in so doing creates the possibility of it
  becoming one
• joint attention and Theory of Mind
• language acquisition and the socialisation of self

3
How do I know I am a Person?

• Autobiographical memory
• Neuropsychology
• effects of amnesia on personhood
• Narrative
• Re-membering myself as a person
• Social interactional origins
• talking about past experiences is a process by
  which our autobiographical memories are socially
  constructed (Pasupathi, 2001)

4
What Kind of Person am I?

• Personality traits
• actual phenomena or artefacts of measurement?
• or just ways we have of talking about people?
• Personality as conditioned behaviour
• actions and reactions
• Classical conditioning
• Operant conditioning
• beliefs, and other stories I tell myself (about
  me)
• Personality and the unconscious mind
• self-deception things Id rather not know or
  admit to
• Return of the repressed (Freud) projection,
  displacement, dreams, language, jokes, actions
  etc
• how many different kinds of people am I?
• transpersonal dimensions of the human mind?

5
Summary

• Need to view Psychology and Personhood in
  sociohistorical context
• i.e. as products of time and place
• Need for a developmental perspective
• i.e. how a person comes into being
• Need to integrate biology and culture
• brain organisation and basic processes of
  perception and learning
• language use and social interaction
• Need to take basic learning processes seriously
• conditioning offers a powerful, if uncomfortable,
  explanation of a lot of human behaviour and
  thinking

6
BUT

• Psychology can help us to know who we are by
  helping us to know who we are not
• Not everything that can be known can be said
  (an empirical question in search of a
  methodology!)

7
Ecological Perception(Gibson, 1966 1978)

• Ambient optic array
• A structured arrangement of ambient light at a
  point of observation.
• ambient array (as distinguished from ambient
  light) is assumed to contain stimulus information
  
• Layout
• Arrangement of surfaces in environment of
  perceiving organism
• Organisms have evolved detection of patterns of
  change in ambient optic array coextensive with
  movement through environment

8
Types of Amnesia
 

• Amnesia
• any partial or complete loss of memory. A number
  of specific forms of amnesia are recognised, each
  denoting a particular kind of deficit in memory

 
Injury causing onset of amnesia
Retrograde Amnesia loss of memory for events and
experiences occurring prior to the trauma
Anterograde Amnesia loss of memory for events and
experiences occurring subsequent to the trauma
Time
9
Classical Conditioning

• Higher order conditioning can be subtle, and its
  origins difficult to trace in everyday life
• cs1-cs2, cs2-cs3 pairings, etc
• Human emotional responses are highly susceptible
  to classical conditioning
• as are any thoughts or beliefs that occur along
  with them

10
Operant Conditioning

• Much human and animal behaviour can be accounted
  for in terms of its Antecedents, Behaviour, and
  Consequences (ABC)
• Behaviour (overt or covert) that is rewarded by
  its consequences is more likely to occur again
  under similar conditions
• Behaviour (overt or covert) that is punished by
  its consequences is less likely to occur again
  under similar conditions
• Technical terminology
• Antecedents discriminative stimuli
• Behaviour response
• Consequences ve / -ve reinforcement, schedule
  of reinforcement

11
Operant Conditioning

• Operant conditioning of behaviour can be very
  subtle and its origins difficult to trace
• Same behaviour can occur in apparently different
  situations due to pairing / generalisation of
  discriminative stimuli, and / or reinforcers
• Variable reinforcement schedules are the most
  effective at conditioning behaviour (e.g.
  gambling, superstitious beliefs)
• Original behaviour may often be accidental and
  unnoticed

12
Measuring Personality

• Psychometrics in sociohistorical context
• Psychologists become professionals big
  science and big business
• Testing vs everyday sense-making as cultural and
  linguistic practices
• Psychometric scales and statistics
• What is being measured?
• Inventing types and traits
• How are the statistics interpreted?
• Making sense of factors and dimensions

13
The Big Five Traits

• Openness to experience
• Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual
  ideas imagination and curiosity (vs
  conservatism).
• Conscientiousness
• A tendency to show self-discipline, act
  dutifully, and aim for achievement
  (spontaneousness vs planned behaviour).
• Extraversion
• Energy, surgency, and the tendency to seek
  stimulation and the company of others.
• Agreeableness
• A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative
  rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards
  others (individualism vs cooperative solutions).
• Neuroticism
• A tendency to easily experience unpleasant
  emotions such as anger, anxiety, depression, or
  vulnerability (emotional stability to stimuli).

14
Problems with Personality Measurement

• Do types or traits really explain anything, or
  tell us anything that everyday language does not
  do already?
• Circularity problem statistics (factor analysis)
  show that certain descriptors cluster together,
  but their interpretation (like the descriptors)
  is grounded in folk wisdom
• Language construes a shared reality, it does not
  describe an objective reality
• Word meaning as reference vs word meaning as
  context-bound
• Language games and forms of life (Wittgenstein)

15
Sociocultural Psychology(e.g.Vygotsky, 1966,
1978 Wertsch, 1986 Rogoff, 1992)

• Basic Principle
• Participation in interpersonal activity leads to
  its appropriation as intrapersonal activity
• mediation by spoken language, and / or textual
  / graphical sign systems
• Social speech private speech inner speech
• Other-regulation / other-communication
  self-regulation / self-communication
• mediation by technology
• Toys, picture books, computers . any cultural
  artifacts used in participatory activity
• Basic implication
• Mind and its organisation (including
  what-it-is-to-be a person, if relevant) are
  fundamentally social in origin, and shaped by
  cultural and historical context
• modularity vs modularisation of the brain
• dialogicality of thought

16
The Social Construction of Personhood

• Interacting with others
• Joint attention (9 months) mutual coordination
  of attention
• Following others gaze / head turn / pointing
• Showing objects to other
• Social referencing
• Adult education of infants attention
• Conversation and accountability
• turn-taking, narratives, sense-making practices
  and presupposition
• names, pronouns, and discursive positions
• Awareness of others as persons
• Autism and mind-reading

17
Theory of Mind (ToM)

• Tendency to impute mental states to oneself and
  others (Premack and Woodruff, 1978)
• Aspects
• understanding and predicting intentions
• false beliefs and deception
• distinction between thought and external reality
• Example a child sees another child rummaging in
  a toybox - how would s/he account for the
  behaviour?

18
ToM

• Modularity theory
• Basic psychological concepts innate (Fodor,1992)
• Understanding others possible via maturation of
  innately specified ToM mindreading module
  (Baron-Cohen, 1995 Leslie, 1995)
• e.g. watching someone do x leads to automatic
  'computation' of that person's intention
• Sociocultural theory
• Understanding of self/others develops via
  appropriation of cultures mental state concepts
  (cultural differences?)
• Adult-child interaction attributions of
  intention, use of mental state language,
  pronouns, etc