Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on exams http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic exams Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb The calm before the storm? Sun, 15 May 2005 18:25:13 +0100 Tomorrow afternoon I take my Cognitive Psychology 1 exam. I'm feeling quite calm about the idea which I think has more to do with floatation tanks than it does to comprehensive preparation and deep knowledge of my subject. One thing I will say is that I really didn't enjoy the course while I was doing it. I found it rather dull right up until the last lecture on reasoning and decision making. However, studying it since then, I've found the links between attention, memory, problem solving, and decision making have woven themselves into a very interesting pattern culminating, for me, in Anderson's Adaptive Control of Thought (ACT) theory. I've actually learned quite a lot especially from the problem solving research. When the exams are over I would like to go back and recover that and write up some of the the thinking i've done. Oh well, a couple of hurdles to get over first. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002606.html No stress yet Mon, 16 May 2005 12:11:27 +0100 Right, I'm off to do this exam. I'm still feeling calm and collected which still feels totally unnatural both for me, and for this situation. We'll see if I've managed to retain my cool come the end. One thing I would say is: If you are feeling a lot of stress in your life, I can recommend spending one hour in a floatation tank. I don't know how it works (yet!) but it seems to have some impact. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002611.html Not quite a disaster Mon, 16 May 2005 20:07:30 +0100 The exam wasn't a total disaster although it didn't go to plan. I expect to pass (hell the passmark is only 40% I'd be embarassed if I didn't) but don't think I'll do as well as last time and certainly won't improve on it which is disappointing. Oh well, best laid plans and all that. I'm still feeling pretty unruffled about it all although I do exhausted. Next exam is Biological Basis of Behaviour in 10 days. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002614.html Floating resolve Fri, 20 May 2005 22:47:24 +0100 Did the 3rd <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/floating.xml">float</a> of my trial tonight. I spent an hour happily floating, drifting, dreaming, and am now deeply relaxed. So much so that I don't want to spend time in front the computer in case it jangles it out of me as computers are won't to do. I have also been thinking about my exam next Thursday on the Biological Basis of Behaviour. I'm finding it hard to study and I've concluded that the temptation to check email & news and the need to post are continuous distractions that I can well do without right now. So I've decided to take an electronic holiday. I'm shutting down for a week. It'll be another form of sensory deprivation. Sorry if I don't respond to your email, comments, and so forth. Catch you in a week. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002641.html Error #11 -- system overload Sun, 29 May 2005 12:48:57 +0100 Some things about last week that I very much enjoyed (not the <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2005/05/20.html#a1847">exam</a>, although that went okay) were:<ul><li>not having to keep up with my mailing lists</li><li>not having to check, or reply to, email</li><li>not checking bloglines</li><li>not having to think about what to post</li></ul>For a few days I felt a pleasurable sense of disconnection. Now I am asking myself "Why?" My current line of thinking is that thought itself may be the problem. I am wondering if I have reached some kind of attentional boundary for concurrent, on-going, tasks. I have 3 major ones (as well as a raft of minor ones) which are:<ul><li>personal study projects around information management, topics, and sense making frameworks. These have lead me, in the previous 8 months, to learn Ruby, a bunch of new mathematics, AI algorithms, and so on</li><li>a growing role in my company requiring me to develop new knowledge and skills and to be better at communicating and persuading</li><li>a psychology course which is stretching me and leading me in many new directions</li></ul> Now I choose to take on all of these silver linings. All bring me pleasure and fulfillment of some kind. Yet, in the last few weeks, I have found myself at a point where my brain is giving me active resistance and making life difficult. Why? In cognitive psychology I learned about some models of attention which represent how the brain handles concurrent task processing. A central assumption of all the cognitive models is that useful resources are in limited supply. Common sense suggests this is a good assumption. Somewhat unsatisfyingly for my purposes though these models that I have studied deal only with simultaneous competition for resources, e.g. "How well can someone write from dictation while simultaneously reading a novel?" The answer is "surprisingly well" but it doesn't address background processing very directly. When I'm working on an identity fraud presentation I'm not directly trying to understand support vector machines or why humans don't reason with propositional logic. When I'm studying Baysian theory I'm not thinking about communicating technical proposals or how neurons communicate. Whilst learning Andersons ACT model of skill development I'm not thinking about data protection or clustering algorithms. And yet I feel that, somewhere in the background, I am doing all of these things. It seems to me that my mind is dealing, at some level, with more problems than the one which is my current focus of attention. For my purposes I require a model of attention that attempts to explain both focused attention and background attention. I have learned attentional models that describe the brain as having a kind of central executive function, a shared facility which plans tasks and shares available, modal, resources between them. Although it wasn't part of the syllabus for this semester some of my reading suggests that more current theories involve multiple executives. I think that background processing must also involve (to some degree) reasoning and access to memory. As an aside, I found it very unsatisfying in the cognitive psychology module I took that everything seemed disconnected. It wasn't until the very end, the last week before the exam really, that attention, memory, and reasoning all began to interweave for me. I think lesson #1 of a cognitive psychology course should eschew history (as much as I love William James) in favour of building the backbone which will support every other concept. So I'm looking for an attention & thinking model which handles not only focused attention but the way in which background tasks are processed. Is there anyone out there who is current in this field? Returning to my starting point I have recognized that I am facing some internal resistance, my stress levels have gradually risen, and I find it harder to concentrate. <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/topics/floating.xml">Floating</a> has been a boon, it deals effectively with the stress, but it's a band-aid solution. In the three months I have off from my course I aim to manage my stress levels downwards and to try and come up with a better solution which allows me to continue my interests along more managable lines. I'm certainly open to suggestions. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002643.html