Hal Pashler

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Hal Pashler is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at University of California, San Diego. An experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist, Pashler is best known for his studies of human attentional limitations (his analysis of the Psychological refractory period effect concluded that the brain has discrete "processing bottlenecks" associated with specific types of cognitive operations). [1] [2] [3] and for his work on visual attention [4] [5] He has also developed and tested new methods for enhancing learning and reducing forgetting, focusing on the temporal spacing of learning and retrieval practice. [6]

Contents

Pashler is also known for influential critiques of methodological and statistical practices in behavioral science. His critiques have focused on statistical and logical issues in neuroimaging research ("voodoo correlations"), [7] educational psychology (learning styles concept) [8] testing of mathematical models, [9] and the replicability of “behavioral priming” research in the field of social psychology. [10]

Education

Pashler was born in 1958 in New York. He received his BA in Logic and Philosophy of Science from Brown University in 1980 and his PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. He joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego in 1985.

Honors

Pashler was elected to membership in the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 2000. He is also an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society. [11] Pashler received the Troland Research Awards from the National Academy of Sciences in 1999; the academy cited his "many experimental breakthroughs in the study of spatial attention and executive control, and... his insightful analysis of human cognitive architecture." He also received the Chancellor's Associates Award for Research given by University of California, San Diego. [12]

Research career

In the 1980s, Pashler and several colleagues developed the Response Selection Bottleneck model of dual-task interference. The model, partly inspired by early work by Alan Welford, [13] makes many predictions about patterns of behavioral response times in the Psychological Refractory Period experiment. The model has been supported by mathematical analyses of behavioral response times [14] and studies of brain activity when people engage in multitasking. [15]

Response Selection Bottleneck Model of Dual-Task Interference Response Selection Bottleneck.png
Response Selection Bottleneck Model of Dual-Task Interference

In 1988, Pashler published the first demonstration of the perceptual phenomenon that later came to be called change blindness, using displays of letters that appeared, disappeared, and reappeared (sometimes with alterations). [16] He noted the contrast between observers' subjective sense of awareness of an entire display and their very limited ability to detect even large changes.

In 1992, Pashler (with Mark Carrier) showed that the testing effect (sometimes referred to as Retrieval Practice) directly strengthens associative learning, and does so more effectively than the same time spent re-studying the same associative links. [17] In 2007, Liqiang Huang and Pashler proposed the Boolean Map Theory of visual attention and awareness. The theory argues that a specific type of abstract data structure (the Boolean Map) characterizes the contents of human visual awareness at any given instant in time. [18]

Boolean Map Theory of Attention to Multidimensional Stimuli Boolean Map Theory.png
Boolean Map Theory of Attention to Multidimensional Stimuli

In 2008 (with Melody Wiseheart & other collaborators) Pashler carried out the most systematic and long-term studies of the effect of temporal spacing on human learning. Holding total time constant, the team found that when people study information on two occasions separated by a temporal gap G, and then are given a memory test after a further delay D, performance on the test is best when the G is about 10-20% as long as D.

[19]

Human Memory as a Joint Function of Inter-Study Gap and Test Delay as revealed in data from Cepeda, Pashler, & Colleagues Joint Effects of Inter-Study Gap and Test Delay on Human Memory.png
Human Memory as a Joint Function of Inter-Study Gap and Test Delay as revealed in data from Cepeda, Pashler, & Colleagues

(This implies, for example, that if one wishes to study information on two occasions with the goal of retaining it for 1 year, the best practice would be to separate the two study events by about 1 month, whereas if one wished to retain the information for a week, a 1-day gap would work better.) This research is relied upon by some software developers in building spaced-learning apps and websites to help people to retain information more efficiently [20] [21]

In 2006, US Department of Education commissioned Pashler to lead a review of cognitive science findings that could best help guide teachers in scientifically validated instructional practices. The resulting Practice Guide is distributed by the department and is available free of charge on the department's website. [22]

In 2008 (with Edward Vul) Pashler showed that the famous Wisdom of Crowds Effect first noted by Francis Galton could be elicited within a single individual. Averaging two estimates from the same person (their first-choice answer and a second answer elicited later) produced an improvement in accuracy equal to about 1/3 the benefit obtained by averaging estimates from two different people. [23] This discovery, termed the “Inner Crowd Effect” by The Economist [24] helped prompt follow-up research examining potential new methods of improving human judgment accuracy. [25] Pashler has also published several articles on varied topics in political psychology, including biases in perception of newsworthiness and attitudes to pro-liberty views. [26]

Controversies

In 2008, Pashler (along with Vul, Harris, and Winkielman) published a paper initially entitled “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience” arguing that many of the most prominent research articles in cognitive and social neuroscience had made statistical errors resulting in gross over-estimation of brain-behavior correlation values. The paper (published under the milder title "Puzzlingly Large Correlations...") [27] produced an intense controversy that was covered in popular media [7] as well as academic press. [28] [29] Some writers have pointed to this paper as having helped launch the current period of intensive methodological debate and controversy in behavioral science [30] [31] Statistical practices in brain imaging field appear to have changed in response to the paper [32] with increased use of cross-validation.

In 2009, Pashler chaired a review commissioned by the American Psychological Society examining the validity of the concept of learning styles [33] The review concluded that widely accepted ideas about learning styles lacked serious empirical support and recommended that educators should not base instructional practices on these notions. These conclusions have prompted extensive controversy in the education field. [34] [35] [36] Pashler has also been an outspoken proponent of efforts to increase replicability in psychological research, arguing that many very well-known findings in areas like social cognition and social psychology should not be believed due to statistical errors, publication bias, and other problems. [37] [38] Together with E. J. Wagenmakers, he edited the special issue of the Perspectives on Psychological Science which appears to have introduced the term ‘Replicability Crisis’ in reference to the current state of social and behavioral science. [39]

Related Research Articles

Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.

Psychophysiology is the branch of psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological processes. While psychophysiology was a general broad field of research in the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become quite specialized, based on methods, topic of studies and scientific traditions. Methods vary as combinations of electrophysiological methods, neuroimaging, and neurochemistry. Topics have branched into subspecializations such as social, sport, cognitive, cardiovascular, clinical and other branches of psychophysiology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Working memory</span> Cognitive system for temporarily holding information

Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. It is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information. Working memory is a theoretical concept central to cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive bias</span> Systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment

A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attention</span> Psychological focus, perception and prioritising discrete information

Attention or focus, is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is the selective concentration on discrete information, either subjectively or objectively. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in terms of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, less than 1% of the visual input data stream of 1MByte/sec can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness.

The interference theory is a theory regarding human memory. Interference occurs in learning. The notion is that memories encoded in long-term memory (LTM) are forgotten and cannot be retrieved into short-term memory (STM) because either memory could interfere with the other. There is an immense number of encoded memories within the storage of LTM. The challenge for memory retrieval is recalling the specific memory and working in the temporary workspace provided in STM. Retaining information regarding the relevant time of encoding memories into LTM influences interference strength. There are two types of interference effects: proactive and retroactive interference.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Testing effect</span> Memory effect in educational psychology

The testing effect suggests long-term memory is increased when part of the learning period is devoted to retrieving information from memory. It is different from the more general practice effect, defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as "any change or improvement that results from practice or repetition of task items or activities."

Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.

Affective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate within the field of affective neuroscience.

Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding the relationship between social experiences and biological systems. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather than solitary. As such, Homo sapiens create emergent organizations beyond the individual—structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and cultures. In this regard, studies indicate that various social influences, including life events, poverty, unemployment and loneliness can influence health related biomarkers. The term "social neuroscience" can be traced to a publication entitled "Social Neuroscience Bulletin" which was published quarterly between 1988 and 1994. The term was subsequently popularized in an article by John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson, published in the American Psychologist in 1992. Cacioppo and Berntson are considered as the legitimate fathers of social neuroscience. Still a young field, social neuroscience is closely related to personality neuroscience, affective neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, focusing on how the brain mediates social interactions. The biological underpinnings of social cognition are investigated in social cognitive neuroscience.

The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is a cognitive bias that, even when positive or neutral things of equal intensity occur, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human multitasking</span> Ability to perform activities simultaneously

Human multitasking is the concept that one can split their attention on more than one task or activity at the same time, such as speaking on the phone while driving a car.

The self-regulation of emotion or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. The self-regulation of emotion belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of other people's feelings.

Nelson Cowan is the Curators' Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri. He specializes in working memory, the small amount of information held in mind and used for language processing and various kinds of problem solving. To overcome conceptual difficulties that arise for models of information processing in which different functions occur in separate boxes, Cowan proposed a more organically organized "embedded processes" model. Within it, representations held in working memory comprise an activated subset of the representations held in long-term memory, with a smaller subset held in a more integrated form in the current focus of attention. Other work has been on the developmental growth of working memory capacity and the scientific method. His work, funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1984, has been cited over 41,000 times according to Google Scholar. The work has resulted in over 250 peer-reviewed articles, over 60 book chapters, 2 sole-authored books, and 4 edited volumes.

Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human's cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.

Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise. Examples of this may include reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, and knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor.

The Planning, Attention-Arousal, Simultaneous and Successive (P.A.S.S.) theory of intelligence, first proposed in 1975 by Das, Kirby and Jarman (1975), and later elaborated by Das, Naglieri & Kirby (1994) and Das, Kar & Parrilla (1996), challenges g-theory, on the grounds that the brain is made up of interdependent but separate functional systems. Neuroimaging studies and clinical studies of individuals with brain lesions make it clear that the brain is modularized; for example, damage to a particular area of the left temporal lobe will impair spoken and written language's production. Damage to an adjacent area will have the opposite impact, preserving the individual's ability to produce but not understand speech and text.

The term psychological refractory period (PRP) refers to the period of time during which the response to a second stimulus is significantly slowed because a first stimulus is still being processed. This delay in response time when one is required to divide attention can exhibit a negative effect that is evident in many fields of study. The PRP can be used to investigate many areas of research that study processes which require divided attention, such as reading aloud, language, or driving and talking on the phone. PRP effects related to personality, age, and level of alcohol or caffeine intake have also been investigated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attentional control</span> Individuals capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore

Attentional control, colloquially referred to as concentration, refers to an individual's capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. It is also known as endogenous attention or executive attention. In lay terms, attentional control can be described as an individual's ability to concentrate. Primarily mediated by the frontal areas of the brain including the anterior cingulate cortex, attentional control and attentional shifting are thought to be closely related to other executive functions such as working memory.

References

  1. ↑ Pashler, H. (September 1994). "Dual-task interference in simple tasks: data and theory". Psychological Bulletin. 116 (2): 220–44. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.324.4916 . doi:10.1037/0033-2909.116.2.220. PMID   7972591.
  2. ↑ Zimmer, C. (15 November 2010). "The Brain: The "Router" in Your Head—a Bottleneck of Processing". Discover Magazine.
  3. ↑ Bush, C. (8 April 2001). "HOW TO; Multitask". The New York Times.
  4. ↑ Moss, S. (1999). "How to saw the Concept of Attention in Half without Sacrificing the Subject: Review of the Psychology of Attention by Harold Pashler" (PDF). Psyche. 5 (13). CiteSeerX   10.1.1.518.665 .
  5. ↑ Huang, L.; Pashler, H. (2007). "A Boolean map theory of visual attention" (PDF). Psychological Review. 114 (3): 599–631. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.3.599. PMID   17638498.
  6. ↑ Rohrer, D.; Pashler, H. (2010). "Recent Research on Human Learning Challenges Conventional Instructional Strategies". Educational Researcher. 39 (5): 406–412. doi:10.3102/0013189X10374770. S2CID   2982177.
  7. 1 2 Begley, S. (20 January 2009). "Of Voodoo and the Brain". Newsweek.
  8. ↑ Cosh, C. (6 January 2010). "If you're an aural learner, read this aloud to yourself". MacLeans Magazine.
  9. ↑ Roberts, S.; Pashler, H. (2000). "How persuasive is a good fit? A comment on theory testing". Psychological Review. 107 (2): 358–67. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.358. PMID   10789200. S2CID   14741205.
  10. ↑ Bower, B. (19 May 2012). "The hot and cold of priming: Psychologists are divided on whether unnoticed cues can influence behavior". Science News. 181 (10): 26–29. doi:10.1002/scin.5591811025.
  11. ↑ "Fellows". The Society of Experimental Psychologists. Archived from the original on 2013-06-14. Retrieved 2016-11-30.
  12. ↑ "Chancellor's Associates Faculty Excellence Award Winners: 2005–06". UC San Diego.
  13. ↑ Welford, A. T. (1952). "The 'psychological Refractory Period' and the Timing of High-Speed Performance—a Review and a Theory". British Journal of Psychology. 43 (1): 2–19. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1952.tb00322.x.
  14. ↑ Sigman, M.; Dehaene, S. (2005). "Parsing a Cognitive Task: A Characterization of the Mind's Bottleneck". PLOS Biology. 3 (2): e37. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030037 . PMC   546328 . PMID   15719056.
  15. ↑ Marti, S.; Sigman, M.; Dehaene, S. (2012). "A shared cortical bottleneck underlying Attentional Blink and Psychological Refractory Period". NeuroImage. 59 (3): 2883–98. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.397.4239 . doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.09.063. hdl:11336/56976. PMID   21988891. S2CID   15024677.
  16. ↑ Pashler, H. (1988). "Familiarity and visual change detection". Perception & Psychophysics. 44 (4): 369–378. doi: 10.3758/BF03210419 . PMID   3226885. S2CID   17545490.
  17. ↑ Carrier, M.; Pashler, H. (1992). "The influence of retrieval on retention" (PDF). Memory & Cognition. 20 (6): 633–642. doi: 10.3758/BF03202713 . PMID   1435266. S2CID   15893469.
  18. ↑ Huang, L.; Pashler, H. (2007). "A Boolean map theory of visual attention". Psychological Review. 114 (3): 599–631. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.114.3.599. PMID   17638498.
  19. ↑ Cepeda, N. J.; Vul, E.; Rohrer, D.; Wixted, J. T.; Pashler, H. (2008). "Spacing effects in learning: a temporal ridgeline of optimal retention" (PDF). Psychological Science. 19 (11): 1095–102. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02209.x. PMID   19076480. S2CID   3163864.[ permanent dead link ]
  20. ↑ [ dead link ]
  21. ↑ "Courses - MyTools2Learn". Archived from the original on 2016-10-24. Retrieved 2016-11-30.
  22. ↑ Pashler, H.; Bain, P. M.; Bottge, B. A.; Graesser, A.; Koedinger, K.; McDaniel, M.; Metcalfe, J. (2007). Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning: A Practice Guide (PDF). National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education.
  23. ↑ Vul, E.; Pashler, H. (2008). "Measuring the Crowd Within". Psychological Science. 19 (7): 645–647. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.408.4760 . doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02136.x. PMID   18727777. S2CID   44718192.
  24. ↑ "The crowd within". The Economist. 26 June 2008.
  25. ↑ Soll, J. B.; Larrick, R. P. (2009). "Strategies for revising judgment: how (and how well) people use others' opinions". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 35 (3): 780–805. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.153.8244 . doi:10.1037/a0015145. PMID   19379049.
  26. ↑ Pashler, Hal: “U.S. Immigrants’ Attitudes Toward Libertarian Values” (2013). Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego.
  27. ↑ Vul, E.; Harris, C.; Winkielman, P.; Pashler, H. (2009). "Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition" (PDF). Perspectives on Psychological Science. 4 (3): 274–90. doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01125.x. PMID   26158964. S2CID   242553.
  28. ↑ Giles, J. (14 January 2009). "Doubts raised over brain scan findings". New Scientist.
  29. ↑ Abbott, A. (2009). "Brain imaging studies under fire". Nature. 457 (7227): 245. doi: 10.1038/457245a . PMID   19148065. S2CID   10076461.
  30. ↑ Gelman, A. (21 September 2016). "What has happened down here is the winds have changed". Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
  31. ↑ "Voodoo Correlations: Two Years Later". The Neurocritic.
  32. ↑ Vul, E.; Pashler, H. (2012). "Voodoo and circularity errors" (PDF). NeuroImage. 62 (2): 945–948. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.01.027. PMID   22270348. S2CID   18230380.
  33. ↑ Pashler, H.; McDaniel, M.; Rohrer, D.; Bjork, R. (December 2009). "Learning Styles" (PDF). Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 9 (3): 105–119. doi: 10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x . PMID   26162104. S2CID   2112166. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-10-19. Retrieved 2016-12-04.
  34. ↑ Ferro, S. (12 September 2013). "Everything you've ever been told about how you learn is a lie". Popular Science.
  35. ↑ Guteri, S. (20 September 2013). "Is teaching to student's learning stye a bogus idea". Scientific American.
  36. ↑ Glenn, D. (15 December 2009). "Matching teaching style to learning style may not help students". Chronicle of Higher Education.
  37. ↑ Abbott, A. (2013). "Disputed results a fresh blow for social psychology". Nature. 497 (7447): 16. Bibcode:2013Natur.497...16A. doi: 10.1038/497016a . PMID   23636371.
  38. ↑ Bower, B. (2012). "The hot and cold of priming: Psychologists are divided on whether unnoticed cues can influence behavior". Science News. 181 (10): 26–29. doi:10.1002/scin.5591811025.
  39. ↑ "Special Section on Replicability in Psychological Science: A Crisis of Confidence?". Perspectives on Psychological Science. 7 (6).
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