My Recall of "War of Ghosts"

When I compared my immediate recall with the original story, there are certain things worth noticing. Due to the limited space in my immediate (working) memory (Ashcraft, 1989), I tended to capture only the main story line: a fight and death story. I omitted lots of the details, such as the description of the weather of “foggy and calm”; the conversation between five men from the canoe and the two young men; the “arrows”; the description of the ghost scenes and so on. Furthermore, I distorted some details of the original story, for example, I changed the “river” into the “sea”. I also made inferences to make my immediate recall to be more reasonable: “The ‘bold’ young man joined the people coming from the canoe to fight a war” and “This man seemed to have been killed”. Generally speaking I concentrated on the logical fight and death storyline by omitting the description of the ghosts. This seemed to be in line with Bartlett (1932)’s arguments that where the elements of the story failed to fit into readers’ schemata, these elements were omitted or transformed into more familiar forms during recollection of the story.

In terms of my recall of the original story four weeks after, I notice that the recall became shorter than the immediate recall. The certain things that were omitted in my immediate recall were also omitted this time. The distortion mentioned above was also shown. However, this time I seemed to reconstruct the story instead of only recalling the original story by writing down the following: “The man who went back home because of fear had a bad dream about the fight. He dreamed about some black smoke.” This was a distortion of the original storyline and a complete construction of myself. I added this to the story to make it non-supernatural. This is also consistent with Bartlett (1932)’s assumption that as time goes by, readers of this Indian story would add elements to it to make it less odd and more reasonable.

When I look into my recall of the original story seven weeks later, I notice that it is very similar to my recall of four weeks later. One thing worth noticing is that this time I mysteriously changed the “sea” back to the original description of the “river”. This time I also relied on my construction to recall the story by mentioning about the black smoke in one man’s dream instead of recalling the ghosts. I believe if I were given to chance to do the recall of this Indian story again some time later, I would probably stick to my reconstruction version (week 4 recall) of the original story.  

In general, I have noticed that although I omitted, distorted the information from the original story in my recalling process, such as the description of weather, place, conversation, weapon, ghost scenes, etc, I followed the basic sequence of the events in my recall. I added elements to my reconstruction of the story to make it more conventional, so the general outline of my recalls stays constant. Bartlett (1932) proposed that 'schema', an active organization of past reactions, or of past experiences, would influence our reactions and experiences, so this may explain why I tend to reconstruct the original story according to my non-supernatural thinking of a fight and death story in the recalling process. This was why my brain failed to process the illogical details of the man’s not feeling sick after being hit and the relevant description of ghost.

Reflection on Creating the Interactive Story of Snow White

Here is the PPT:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13344385/The%20Interactive%20Story%20of%20Snow%20White.pptx

When I added the non-linear elements to the story, I wanted to motivate the reader by providing them with different types of experiences. According to Adams (1999), interactivity which relies on the player for motive power is almost the opposite of narrative which flows under the direction of the author. As compared to linear storytelling, readers could immerse themselves in the interactive story by taking more control in the development of the plot.

When I adapted the well known story of Snow White by the Brothers Grimm, I was aiming at offering readers opportunities to make choices in the storyline. I mainly let the readers make choices on two situations: 1) Do you think the seven Dwarfs would let Snow White stay with them? 2) Do you think Snow White would eat the poisonous apple? Although readers may be very familiar with the original storyline, their curiosity and fantasy can be aroused if they believe their choices will influence the fate of Snow White this time.

Reference

Ernest Adams (1999). Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers. Retrived from: http://www.designersnotebook.com/Columns/026_Three_Problems/026_three_problems.htm

The Concept Map of “Film”

    I asked my subject to construct a concept map of the “film” in a generic way by using the building blocks of “general attributes” and “specific attributes”. The concept map drawn by my subject shows that she has the following knowledge about the concept of “film”: 1) She is aware that the concept of “film” includes a group of things (different genres): action, comedy, love, adventure and drama films. 2) She mentions about the critical attribute of the “film”: it is a story conveyed with moving images. She goes further to mention the three specific attributes of the film: sound, color and movement. 3) She mentions that a general attribute of the “film” is that it involves actors, actresses, directors, producers and so on. 4) She also points out a superordinate concept to the “film”—“entertainment” and a subordinate concept –“editing”. She shows “editing” contains story elements, dialogue, music, sound effect and so on. 

    Although my subject misses some attributes of the film, such as: film provides emotional experiences, contains structure and plot, relies on imagination/fiction and so on. Generally speaking, I think my subject has a quite good understanding of the concept of “film”.

Long-term Memory Test

The recalled items are the bolded ones displayed below.

Immediate Recall: Paper, Seat, Tire, Love, Beach, Analysis, conjunction, brush, chairman, accurate, woods, green, hunger, gift, keyboard, number, bottle, jogging, wheel, system.

Delayed Recall: One hour later
Paper, Seat, Tire, Love, Beach, Analysis, conjunction, brush, chairman, accurate, woods, green, hunger, gift, keyboard, number, bottle, jogging, wheel, system.

Delayed Recall: Three hours later
Paper, Seat, Tire, Love, Beach, Analysis, conjunction, brush, chairman, accurate, woods, green, hunger, gift, keyboard, number, bottle, jogging, wheel, system.

1. Relate this test to Ebbinghaus’ research on “forgetting”

In my test, I read a list of 20 words to my subject with a constant interval of 10 seconds between each word and then asked him to recall the words immediately, one hour later as well as three hours later. In the process I did not inform my subject that he would be tested again in an hour or in three hour time. Therefore this memory test is somewhat similar to Ebbinghaus’ relearning task, “in which a list is originally learned, set aside for some period of time, then later relearned to the same criterion of accuracy” (Ashcraft, 1989: 199). The difference between this memory test and Ebbinghaus’ experimental procedures is that Ebbinghaus insisted using “meaningless stimulus” whereas the words in this memory test are some words with meanings.

The test results are: the subject could recall 15 words immediately after learning the word list, however he could only recall 12 and 11 words one hour and three hours later respectively. Such result is also somewhat in line with Ebbinghaus’ research finding of the“forgetting curve”: the most dramatic forgetting happens in the early phase after original learning (Ashcraft, 1989), because my subject’s performance decreased faster immediately after original learning. The test results also showed the decay theory, because my subject’s “memory traces simply decay in strength with time” (Anderson, 2005: 209).

2. How did my subject try to memorize the words in this test?
I interviewed my subject after the test. As (Ashcraft, 1989) pointed out, subjects in the memory tests would actively employ all kinds of mnemonic devices spontaneously and actually my subject adopted strategies of rehearsal, organization and imagery to assist his storage of information.

Type II rehearsal:
My subject mentioned to me that he used the meanings of the words to construct sentences to help him store the information. For example, for the first five words, he memorized them in the sentence of “A tired (tire) man is sitting (seat) on the beach while reading a love story in the newspaper (paper)”.

Chunking and subjective organization:
My subject mentioned to me that he decided to divide the 20 words into four chunks when he was going to take this memory test. He also actively reorganized the words into chunks along the memory test. For example, he grouped “woods” and “green” together because he thought green is the characteristic of woods. He also grouped “analysis” and “system”, because his job is related to networked system analysis.

Imagery
My subject meanwhile used visual imagery in this test. He mentioned to me that he tried to memorize the last couple of words in the word list by visualizing them in the following picture: he is finding the street "number" of a gym. After entering the gym, he jogs ("jogging") on a treadmill and rides a bicycle("wheel").

Hypertext VS. Linear Text.

The differences I would expect to see between groups that study with the hypertext and groups that study with the linear text are as follows.

*Hypertext Group*

Learner-control:
Learners can navigate through the teaching content by clicking links and buttons so that they can quickly access to the information they need or they are interested in. There is high learner-control in the learning process.

Efficiency:
Learners can access to the relevant sections efficiently.

Comprehension:
Learners without specific goals or who are not familiar with the teaching content may be disoriented by the hyper-links. Comprehension problems may be caused as a result.

Cognitive overload:
Learners are more prone to cognitive overload because they are presented with multiple ways to studying the teaching content at any given time.

Attitude towards the visual appeal of teaching content:
Learns may find the teaching content with all the hierarchical structures and cross links more visually attractive.

*Linear Text Group*

Learner-control:
Learners do not have choices in navigating; instead, they have to follow the sequence of the teaching content. There is lower learner-control in the learning process.

Efficiency:
Basically learners need to study the linear texts from the beginning to the end.

Comprehension:
Teaching content is presented in a linear and coherent way to ensure comprehension.

Cognitive overload:
Learners are less prone to cognitive overload because they are only allowed the linear movement within the teaching content.

Attitude towards the visual appeal of teaching content:
Learners may find the teaching content with mere linear texts less attractive.

Memory Test results

The successfully recalled items from each list are shown as follows:

8 7 0 3 1 4
7 1 5 0 5 4 3 6
2 1 6 6 8 7 5 4 5
6 8 1 4 5 2 4 7 0
2 8 4 3 9 3 4 8 2 5
T S Y L Q P
C I M W O D X A
Q W E R T
K W U C R
L A B S O N
LEAF GIFT CAR FISH ROCK
PAPER SEAT TIRE HORSE FILM BRUSH
BAG BOOK WIRE WHELL BANANA BAR PAD BLACK RADIO BOY
LOVE EMOTION PLAN ATTEMP ANALYSIS SYSTEM PAYMENT
WHILE I WAS WALKING THROUGH THE WOODS A RABBIT RAN ACROSS MY PATH

The pattern I see from this memory test is that generally the subject can recall seven plus or minus two items within each list. The last list is an exception, because unlike the illogical items within other lists, this is a sentence which makes sense. I believe Ashcraft (1989) offered explanations to bear on such phenomenon. Human beings can hold large amounts of information in both sensory memories ad long-term memory system. However, the immediate memory, which is like a bridge linking the sensory and long-term memory, has a limited capacity of storage. “There is a rather severe limit on how much can be encoded, held, and reported immediately” by our immediate memory (p.141). Also as Miller cited in Ashcraft, human beings’ capacity for processing information is related to the magical number “seven”, plus or minus two. Therefore, this explains why my subject can recall about seven items in length within the lists read to him.

There are ways to improve the test results according to Ashcraft (1989). If we recode the information by grouping certain items into chunks, it will be possible for us to increase the amount of information our short-term memory can handle. By chunking individual items into groups, the informational bottleneck will be broken (Miller 1956, as cited in Ashcraft 1989). That’s why we find it much easier to remember telephone numbers, social security numbers or our PUIDs according to certain chunks.

Some Thoughts on the Turing Test

1. Is the Turing Test a sufficient test? That is, if a machine passes the test, would you agree it is intelligent?

In my opinion, the Turing Test is not a sufficient test, which means a machine is not necessarily intelligent even if it passes this test. The Turing test has several inborn defections. First of all, the standards or guidelines for asking questions to both the machine and the human interviewee are not clearly specified in the test. As a result, the questions asked are likely to be inscrutable to both parties or too easy/difficult to either of them. In this sense the fairness of the Turing Test becomes questionable. Second, the intellectual level of the two humans participating in the test, the interrogator and the interviewee in the test, is neglected. I believe this factor also largely influences the test results. In addition, this test merely focuses on the test results without displaying the genuine thinking of process of the participants. To this end, using Turing Test to prove a machine to be intelligent is unpersuasive.

I believe Searle’s “Chinese Room” stands as an excellent counter example to the Turing Test. According to such model, as long as we input a computer program of operating rules and procedures into a machine, it can complete some seemingly intelligent acts. Searle argued that programs like this are entirely syntactical but minds have semantics. As syntax differs from and by itself insufficient for semantics, programs are therefore not minds (Searle, 1997). Searle also noted that the computer program lacks intentionality, consciousness and other mental phenomena, which are caused by the physical-chemical properties of actual human brains (Pinker, 1997). Therefore I think even if a machine passes the Turing Test, it does not mean it is indeed intelligent, the test results only indicate that the machine successfully follows the appropriate programs input into it by its intelligent human creators.

2. Is the Turing Test a necessary test? That is, does a machine have to pass this test in order to be intelligent?

As far as I am concerned, the Turing Test is not a necessary test because a machine does not have intelligence. From the perspective of performance level, a machine is capable of completing more and more intelligent tasks that originally can only be done by human beings: playing chess, writing novels and melodies, proving a mathematical theorem, facilitating diagnosis, recognizing human voice and so on. However it is unarguable that the performance level of a machine is not on a par with that of human beings at all.

According to Pinker (1997), intelligence has certain characteristics: to make decisions rationally by sets of rules; to pursue something in the face of obstacles and to use rational rules to attain the goal in a variety of ways. A machine cannot make decisions or even think by itself. It just appears to make decisions according to the programs input into it by humans. It cannot keep pursuing the goal when a program fails, either. Nor can a machine discover or invent different ways to achieve the goal as human intelligence does. Furthermore, I believe a machine does not have emotions, which are considered as manifestations of intelligence. Accordingly I believe the Turing Test is unnecessary for judging the intelligence of a machine.

3. Will a machine ever pass the Turing Test? Why or why not?

Personally I think there is no way for a machine to pass the Turing Test. As mentioned in the first question, there are a number of the inborn drawbacks of the Turing Test. Consequently there would probably be very tricky questions for a machine. The first type of tricky questions is the illogical ones. For example, a question like “My mom tells me that she saw a giraffe is flying in the sky, how do you think about it?” makes no sense at all to a machine. Questions with cultural connotations must be difficult to a machine, too. How can a machine reacts to the question like “What do you think of the ‘super girl’ phenomenon in China?”(“Super Girl Singing Contest” is a similar TV show to American Idol and it is very popular among Chinese audiences). In addition, questions including puns are tricky for a machine, too, say, “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. How do you think about it?”

Millions of programs can be input into a machine to facilitate answering questions in the Turing Test, unfortunately, they would never be enough to tackle all the problems generated by human intelligence.

4. Will a machine ever be intelligent? Why or why not?

I am a pessimist that I think a machine can never be intelligent. Webster dictionary defines “intelligence” as “the faculty of acquiring and applying knowledge”. Human beings learn by trial and error. They are capable of constructing their knowledge by interacting with each other and with the environment. A machine, on the other hand, can take in the entire content of Encyclopedia Britannia with its huge memory, however it obviously lacks both the intention and ability to actively learn or apply knowledge to deal with the problems in contexts.

Moreover, one of the major formats of representation used by human brain is mentalese, “the language of thought in which our conceptual knowledge is couched” (Pinker, 1997: 90). I think a machine lacks this medium that it is unable to capture content or gist. This makes the abstract thinking and innovation impossible for a machine as compared to a human mind.

In addition, a machine does not have emotions, which are critical for the forming of intelligence. Emotions drive human being to learn, so if a machine is implanted with an artificial mind, it may begin to learn by communicating with the environment instead of copying the human brain passively. Unfortunately as far as I know, emotions are one of the most difficult research areas in the world. As a result, the research question like “how to transform emotions into a program that can be input into a machine?” becomes even trickier.

Reference
Pinker, S. (1997) How the Mind Works, W.W. Norton and Company: New York.
Searle, J. R. (1997) The Mystery of Consciousness, New York Review Books: New York.

My Theory of How the Mind Works

A mechanism similar to CPU

There is a certain mechanism exists in the biological structure of a human brain. It is vital to human beings as it makes our brain function properly. Without it, human beings will suffer from cognitive impairment such as cognitive overload or deficiency. This mechanism can be compared to the function of a central processing unit to a computer system. First, it makes our brain input sensory information. Then it filters the sensory information according to our attention and pattern recognition. Then it rehearses the information to make it stay longer in the brain. After that, if the information is very important to us, it encodes it to produce long term memory for us and later we can retrieve it from the brain.

The information processing of the “CPU” is like playing jigsaw puzzle games

The information processing of the “CPU” at each of the above mentioned step within a human’ mind is like playing jigsaw puzzle games. Each jigsaw puzzle piece is “schema”, which represents the knowledge of things under one general category. Since there is so much knowledge remains unknown to humans, the jigsaw puzzle is far from complete that there are many empty slots in it. When the mind receives new information, it would figure out whether the new information has anything to do with the schema pieces it already has in order to make the jigsaw puzzle a more complete one.

Adding to the existing schema pieces

These pieces that the mind already has represent humans’ “prior knowledge”. If the new information works out with the prior knowledge, the mind has one more schema piece and one less spot left in the jigsaw puzzle. This is when human beings absorb new knowledge. For example, when I learn French, I find the spellings of many French words are similar to English words that I make comparison between the two to memorize the French words instead of rotting, which saves me a lot of time and energy.

Rearrange the schema pieces

Of course, sometimes the mind works less efficiently or even makes mistakes that it has to rearrange a lot of the schema pieces in order to get the jigsaw puzzle right. This is when human beings feel puzzled or depressed. An example is “why love makes people blind”. I recall once I watched a BBC documentary discussing about the secrets of love. It mentions that scientists have been looking at love, with the aid of MRI machine. In an experiment some subjects who had been "madly in love" were recruited and were shown two photographs, one neutral, the other of their loved one. Scientists were fascinated by the consistent results that certain parts of the subjects’ brain lit up when they saw the photos of their loved ones. The rewards system in the brain of the subjects floods with feel good chemicals while another part of their brain, the area used for critical thinking, switches off. Thus when love turns sour, people often rearrange their schema of a relationship.

Consciously or unconsciously change the schema pieces

Sometimes the mind finds the schema pieces it has never fit in the picture, then it would change or even get rid of them. In this sense I believe it is definitely worth noticing that the mind can consciously change the schema. As human beings go through a stage of changing their lens on the world and then see things from a bit of a different perspective, the memory of how human beings thought things worked would change. For example, a Buddhist or Christian is likely to adjust his schema based on his religious belief.

A really disconcerting point here is that sometimes the mind seems to make some of these changes on its own, without really consulting with humans’ logic or consciousness. When I am writing about this point, my mind retrieves an example mentioned by a professor in another course. He asked us if we ever wonder why police write all of the information down that an eyewitness of an accident has to give. The reason to this is that the version that the eyewitness gives will often change over time. He would likely to start including things that weren't there and taking out important things that were there. Therefore the mind changes bits and pieces of the real story and it does this on a regular basis.