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Peisaj [5]
I was three or four years old. My ‘baba’ (papa) was a military chief at Mardin Nusaybin (Syria border, southeast Turkey). Our Home was the only one built with cement in Nusaybin. It was located outside the village at the top of a small hill. Nusaybin did not have electricity at that time. My mother was a little bit nervous because of my father’s duties. My ‘baba’ had to go out to catch smugglers at nights. A deep darkness would sink over our Home those times… Sometimes would burials take place in the cemetery at distance right in front of our Home… Night burials, according to the local customs. I used to watch them secretly my hair rising… The groups walking in the darkness, candle lights, the dead being carried lying over ladders… Not really understanding what was going on…
Six months later my mother’s efforts succeeded. My father gave up his carrier. He applied for his well deserved retirement. We bought a new house at one of the then suburps of Istanbul. Our new Home had a large garden. We used to have nice evenings at the front-garden in hot summer nights. I remember, every now and then, my father used to send me to the back-garden to fetch some stuff during these night leisures. I was ‘damn’ afraid of going to the back-garden in darkness. Everybody would burst out into laughter and make fun of the situation rather than me and we would have a sweet time in the family about a small secret that belonged to us all.
Although the fear of darkness in my childhood decreased gradually, it followed me for many years. It transformed into a sensitivity and sense of prudence through time. I wonder, if I had not lived the experiences in Nusaybin at the ages of three to four, would I have a fear of darkness? I do not think so. I would not… Nevertheless, many people get nervous about darkness or fear from it. For many justifiable reasons.
OK then, what is the thing that makes darkness such a source of fear? Why is darkness fearsome? Is darkness the fearsome thing itself or is it something in ourselves that makes us afraid?
Is this secret thing located there in the darkness or is it somewhere else? Really, why do we think that something we can not see is located in the darkness, rather than somewhere else for example under the street lamp?
The reason that makes us nervous about darkness is it is not something we could hold in our hands, it is not an absolute object. Just like time… Difficult to understand… Specially difficult for people younger than age 16, who has not developed a concept about abstraction, yet. Darkness is not an object like a door, a table or a wall. Maybe it is rather something like tiredness or sadness…
Its opposite enlightenedness (aydınlık, tr) is rather like happiness, joy… In short is darkness a situation and a mood rather than an object.
Darkness is both a phsical situation and our perception of it. If sunlight falls on the furniture in our house our Home is ‘enlightened(aydınlık, tr)’. The sun light beams that are reflected from the furniture reach our eyes with enough intensity. But in the evening, the intensity of the sun light decreases. First, some colors begin to lose their liveliness and begin to appear as a shade of grey. Then, they become grey in semi-darkness and disappear in the darkness.
Our interaction with darkness in our modern lives is not the same as in the nature. We move from darkness to light and vice versa suddenly during our daily lives for many times. For example, when the child wishes ‘good night’ and goes to her room she has to go into darkness first and then open the light suddenly and then close it again… Or, when you are driving at night, the cars approaching from the other side of the road dazzle your eyes frequently.
Car, airplane or any vehicle drivers abide the night vision priciples. Airplane pilots’ night flying techniques include a different vision technique. “In daylight you have to look directly at the target object. At night, you have to look at slightly one side of the target object. Scanning the target by moving your eye permits “off-center” viewing. You should not look directly at the target object at night unless there is a special reason.”
“The explanation for this lies in the DUAL STRUCTURE OF OUR EYE’[4]. The cones work in day light and the rods at night. The rods are located on the periphary of a circle around the cones.
The cones need a greater intensity of light to function, and stop working in semidarkness.
The rods can function in 1 / 5000 th of light intensity. The cones are 100000 times sensitive in dark as they are in light. So, they work at night.”
The problem is; what do the rods do in the day light? The rods provide a grey scale view, while cones provide coloured… Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to light. This means less sensitivity is used only for percieving objects in the peripheral view…
In short, seeing is not as simple as we naturally presume. Our ability to see changes at different levels of light intensity… We can not see with the same quality in all conditions. Our ability to see in darkness is much less than in sun light. If explored, we can easily find that our seeing ability is not limited by only the availability of the sunlight. We have other limits also… The views of fast moving seperate things appear to us as if belonging to a single thing moving continuously, for example.
Seeing is not limited with the functions of the eye of course… Our brain first percieves then understands the things that our eyes see. We also have some limits in our brain’s visual perception naturally… We can not percieve the second event if two events happen too quick sequentially… They call this perceptional blink sometimes…
Our seeing abilities, given by the Creator, require a period of adaptation when the conditions of the environment change, the environment that we are temporarily in. When we move into darkness
suddenly, the rod cells in our eyes need some time to get activated. At these instances, give yourself sometime for your brain to get healthy-correct information from your eyes.
During the flow of times, we all experience sudden changes of things we are used to. The problem is not only the change in the conditions that we are accustomed to but also the fact that we, ouselves change. Whether we notice it or not, the way our body and mind work, changes according to the conditions that we are in. A small kid gets red spots on his skin suddenly, a software engineer approaches the end of his project, a pilot lands with his co-pilot in bad climate conditions, or an air traffic controller whose job is to keep airplanes apart from each other loses his radar system which enables him to see the skies…
When you fall into sudden darkness, I believe, there may be a few tricks that you may learn and borrow from an air traffic controller who has lost the view of airplanes on his radar. He at least has strips of papers in his hand that shows the locations and directions of his resumed airplanes... If the lights go off when you are on the stairway, you should have kept certain reference points in your mind beforehand, such as the location of the handrail, your relative position in the current floor stairs…
Darkness is not an object to be afraid of, it is a sitaution, a mental mood. To cope with darkness, you should have reference points that You have created before. We can not control everything in our lives but ‘knowing ourselves’ could make us stronger against the difficulties, at least.
Ali Riza SARALNote: The inspirational bases of this article lie in:
1. NIGHT VISION: A PEDAGOGICAL METAPHOR FOR AVIATION
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2008/01/night-vision-pedagogical-metaphor-for.html
2. Chip HEATH and Dan HEATH, MADE TO STICK – “the curse of knowledge”
3. HOW TO BE A DAMN SEXY MAN– “let the kids turn the page”
http://kristenbrookebeck.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-be-damn-sexy-man.html
4. AVIATION MEDICINE, Night Flight, http://www.pilotfriend.com/aeromed/medical/night_vision.htmHelicopter Flight, http://meanwhile.com/?domain=helicfi.com5. Bogdan GAVRUS, Peisaj, http://gavrusphoto.blogspot.com/
Vizual [0]
‘Autokinesis’ is a special visual hazard of night flying. When you look constantly at a small point in a dark night, you feel as if the light is moving, after a while. Otherwise, you may feel as if yourself is moving.
‘Autokinesis’ is only one of the discrepancies that we carry everyday without ever being aware of. Our discrepancies may appear not only at the edges of our abilities, such as night vision, but also in our routine daily activities. The sooner we get aware of them, the better the quality and fulfillment of our lives.
Unfortunately, we are created not to improve our abilities but primarily, to survive with them.
In any form of life comes improvement after survival. Our bodies, namely the embodiment of ourselves [1] is designed so that even if we loss some part of us we should survive.
Even if we lose an arm, after feeling the immediate shock, we should be able to continue our lives, together with a prosthetic device, and even feel as if we still have the lost arm in our minds as in some cases[2]…
I believe, a mental, behavioural discrepancy can and may become a part of ourselves, and our mental embodiment similar to a prosthestic device… A discrepancy may become part of our ‘subjective’ mental body till something happens and brings our attention to it, thus this discrepancy becomes our ‘objective’ mental body.
The problem is that, the transition from the subjective mental body to the objective one may cause pain and also damage the complex relations of choices a person has made to build his/her personality.
“In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "prices are rising"). “ [4] Using metaphors in psychological training of air traffic controllers, engineers and other aviation personnel, could be an effective pedagogical approach. Rather than doing not much while waiting for who is going to fall down…
If we return back to the night vision; ‘night flying requires a different visual technique than day flying’ [5]. In daylight you have to look directly at the target object. At night, you have to look at slightly one side of the target object. Scanning the target by moving your eye permits “off-center” viewing. You should not look directly at the target object at night unless there is a special reason.
‘The explanation for this lies in the DUAL STRUCTURE OF OUR EYE’[5]. The cones work in day light and the rods at night. The rods are located on the periphary of a circle around the cones.
The cones need a greater intensity of light to function, and stop working in semidarkness.
The rods can function in 1 / 5000 th of light intensity. The rods are 100000 times sensitive in dark as they are in light. So, they work at night.
The problem is; what do the rods do in the day light? The rods provide a grey scale view, while cones provide coloured… Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to light. This means less sensitivity is used only for percieving objects in the peripheral view…
My point is, the night vision metaphor may be used for teaching Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) awareness for aviators. OCD is a common problem among people working with risk.
It may be just a behavioural nuisance that can not be noticed or an increasing mental risk towards more serious situations. You have to be aware of what the people around you are doing, in order to warn them and not get affected by them.
Henry Szechtman and Erik Woody ‘s article “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Disturbance of Security Motivation” describes OCD as:
“We hypothesize that the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), despite their apparent non-rationality, have what might be termed an “epistemic” origin – that is, they stem from an inability to generate the normal “feeling of knowing” that would otherwise signal task completion and terminate the expression of a security motivational system.[7]”
Similar to the Night Vision mechanism of the eye, Security Motivation System is ‘hardwired’. It is highly tuned to certain kinds of input like the cones and rods working on different light intensities.
Probably much more complex than eye’s night vision mechanism, is the Security Motivation System also “automatic and autonomous, and “encapsulated,” or relatively isolated from information developed by other systems.”
The Night Vision metaphor provides a good example for teaching:
1. There are seperate resources in our mind and brain for different tasks.
2. There has to be an activation and stopping mechanism (homeostatic) for any resource.
3. There may be a switching mechanism which manages the processes related to different and competing tasks.
Moods, emotions, thinking speed in different situations may effect the switching mechanism and activation – deactivation mechanism of our minds and brains[8]. Selecting the right mood and time frame helps the team make the right decisions with the right mental resources.
Ali Riza SARAL
[1] “Phenomenological theorists distinguish between the subjective body(as lived and experienced) and the objective body (as observed and scientifically investigated). My lived body is an EMBODIED CONSCIOUSNESS which fluidly and pre-reflectively engages the world. As we engage in our daily activities, we tend not to be conscious of our bodies and we take them granted – body that is passed-by-in-silence (Jean-Paul SARTRE, 1943, Being and Nothingness)”.
[2] “Prothestic devices stretch the boundaries of the body. They create a continuity beyond the limits of the skin”(Carolien HERMANS, 2002, Embodiment: the flesh and bones of my body). “A body schema works on a subconscious level. It registers shape and posture of the body(without coming to awareness). It makes a record of the momentary relative disposition of one’s own body parts”. “Prothestic devices can be absorbed in the body schema. Just as a hammer in the carpenter’s hand is incorporated into his body schema, any virtual body part or interface(keyboard, mouse, joystick) can become part of the schema in a temporary or longlasting way…”
[3] For further reading: Embodiment and Man-Machine Interaction
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/07/embodiment-and-man-machine-interaction.html
[4] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor[5] “Night flying requires a different visual technique than day flying. You can see an object best during daylight by looking directly at it. At night, however, a scanning procedure is more effective - to permit "off center" viewing of the target. In other the words, you will find after some practice that you can see things more clearly and definitely at night by looking slightly to one side of them, rather than straight at them.
The explanation for this lies in the dual structure of your eye. There are two kinds of light-sensitive nerve endings at the back of your eye: (1) the cones, which distinguish colour and require considerable light to function, and (2) the rods, which detect objects only in shades of grey but can operate in very dim light.
The cones, because they need greater intensity of light to function, are used in day vision. In fact, the cones stop working altogether in semi darkness. Millions of these tiny structures are clustered at the back of the eyeball, directly behind the pupil. Not only do they distinguish colours, they pick up distant objects.
The rods are concentrated in a ring around the cones. Being colour-blind, they see only in greys and are used in peripheral vision during the day - that is, to perceive objects in motion out of the corner of the eye. Because the rods can still function in light of 1/5,000 the intensity at which the cones cease to function, they are used for night vision. These structures are 100,000 times as sensitive in the dark as they are in sunlight. However, they do need more time to adjust to darkness than the cones do to bright light. Your eyes become adapted to sunlight in 10 seconds, whereas they need 30 minutes to fully adjust to a dark night.
The fact that the rods are distributed in a band around the cones, and, therefore, do not lie directly behind the pupils, makes "off centre" viewing important to the pilot during night flight. If, in your attempts to practice the scanning procedures mentioned previously, you find that your eyes have a tendency to swing directly toward the target, force them to swing just past it so that the rods on the opposite side of the eyeball pick up the object.
Rods lose their sensitivity after short exposure to a light source, but regain it quickly after a moment of "rest." Consequently, a prolonged blink may be enough to renew the effectiveness of your vision if you are simply using the "off centre" technique, without scanning. Remember, too, that rods do not perceive objects while your eyes are in motion, only during the pauses.”
AVIATION MEDICINE, Night Flight, http://www.pilotfriend.com/aeromed/medical/night_vision.htmHelicopter Flight, http://meanwhile.com/?domain=helicfi.com
[6] Ali Riza SARAL,
Kapanmayışlar, http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/01/kapanmayilar.htmlKapanışlar, http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2006/11/kapanilar.html
[7] “The psychological experience of compulsion is not well defined (Reed, 1985, p. 119), but nevertheless one can conceive of two broad mechanisms that would produce the intrusiveness and urgency characteristic of OCD symptoms. One is a pathological intensity of excitation of the particular thoughts, ideas or actions. The other is a relative failure of the systems that normally terminate such thoughts, ideas or actions.”
“Security Motivation System - … Such modular systems are innately specified and hardwired, highly tuned to certain kinds of input, comparatively automatic and autonomous, and “encapsulated,” or relatively isolated from information developed by other systems.“
“2. The system is readily activated, responding to even a slight chance of danger, and once activated, it has a long half-life, being slow to deactivate despite changes in the environment that feed into the appraisal process (Curio, 1993; Marks & Nesse, 1994; Masterson & Crawford, 1982). This easy-to-turn-on, hard-to-turn-off quality makes sense evolutionarily, because repeated false alarms are much less costly than even a single failure to prepare for upcoming danger.”
“Similarly, we hypothesize that an internally generated feeling of knowing provides not only a
phenomenological sign of goal-attainment but is also the physiological mechanism that actually
shuts-down security motivation.”
“An internally generated “feeling of knowing” (termed “yedasentience”) provides a phenomenological sign of goal-attainment and has as its consequence the termination of thoughts, ideas or actions motivated by concerns of harm to self or others. Failure to generate or experience this feeling produces symptoms characteristic of OCD.”
“Instead, according to the present model, the underlying problem is lack of closure -- the inability to turn off security motivation, which drives security-related thoughts, through the normal route of performing specific security-related behaviors.”
Henry Szechtman, McMaster University, Erik Woody, University of Waterloo, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Disturbance of Security Motivation, http://inabis98.mcmaster.ca/reprints/MS02-082.pdf
[8] “The mechanics of the thinking process is affected by our emotions. Switching from one context to another, the rate of changing subjects, the amount of concentration, the depth of thinking through different abstraction levels, getting obsessed to solve the problem, thinking speed are dramatically affected by the affective situation we are in while thinking… “The various glands of the endocrine system release hormones into the bloodstream that have effects on specific sites in the brain, including those involved in emotion” says Cornelius [5] . A careful observer can notice that there are different working speeds of thinking in our brains. Our brains work in a slow mode when we are doing something related with safety or security(but not related to emergency) where as our ideas fly when we are doing something sentimental or dreaming… Thinking speed helps us to switch from one processor to another in our multiprocessor brain. Feelings and selecting the right mood help us to choose the right processor (or combination of processors) to do the ‘thinking’.”
Ali Riza SARAL, “Do Computers Feel?”,
http://largesystems-atc.blogspot.com/2007/12/do-computers-feel-1500words.html
[9] Gavrus BOGDAN, Vizual, http://gavrusphoto.blogspot.com
To Dr. David B. Williams,ORAT, Illinois State University
Does computer feel? Does computer have emotions? Does computer feel joy, love, anger, fear, and others? Is the effect of the feelings of computer on its behaviour “pleasent or unpleasent, mild or intense, transient or long-lasting, and as interfering with or enhancing” [1] ? Do computers ‘experience emotions’? Do they react toward things in the environment that have such emotional qualities as frightening, cheering and saddening?
Schachter states “an emotional state may be considered a function of a state of physiological arousal and of a cognition appropriate to this state of arousal. The cognition, in a sense, exerts a steering function. Cognitions arising from the immediate situation as interpreted by past experience provide the framework within which one understands and labels his feelings. It is the cognition which determines whether the state of physiological arousal will be labelled as “anger”, “joy”, “fear”, or whatever. [4] ” Many more definitions of emotions have been made through the history beginning with 2nd cty BC, Aristotle. Descartes, Hume[3] , James, Cannon, Dewey[2], Freud, and many others.
Do computers have an ‘inner’ sentimental world? Too difficult to answer quickly… May be we should change the question a bit… Does any being except the human have feelings? Maybe the better: Do animals have feelings? Darwin writes about “most of the expressions and gestures involuntarily used by man and lower animals, under the influence of various emotions and sensations. [5]”
None of the animals can say “I feel sad.” Nevertheless, when a cat approaches a person sitting at a garden caffee, it bends its head to the ground and imitates as if it eats something. A careful observer may understand the animal needs food. Animals can communicate their needs. The problem is, most of us do not percieve the messages they are able to give. We should not judge neither animals nor computers as insensitive because they can not express themselves with the same emotional vocabulary as us the human-beings
Does this situation provide enough validity to the claim that ‘Computers do not feel’? Is there something wrong here ethically? Do we loss anything because of this silent assumption in our relations with computers? Are the Human Computer Interaction classes in many universities well equipped or even down-played as not technical enough? Why do many engineers and large system operators suffer from long duration high concentration jobs in front of their computers?
Indeed, computer does not have a face. A face like a human or even a mammal. It does not have eyes, ears, a skin, a head or a body… Wait a minute… Are you sure that computers can not see, hear or touch? What about scanner, microphone, keyboard? Computers do have many interaction functionalities similar to those that basic human senses provide.
The crux of the issue of ‘Do computers feel?’ is: Is it possible to think without feeling? Can cognition exist without emotions? Can you think even mathematics without feelings? Even if we assume that you really did not feel anything while solving a problem, you would still need to discharge the unused mental energy in some way. You might experience pride or humility depending on your success.
Even if you have the professional power to control everything, you must experience feelings when you are working in a cognitive job, like programming or air traffic control (ATC)… You can not avoid the pleasure from simple matching [6] . Otherwise, you may be working against the nature of thinking and you may hurt yourself mentally. In fact Winkielman [8] states “affective responses may also result from the dynamics of information processing itself.” ,[7], “ High fluency elicits positive affective reaction. [9] ”
The mechanics of the thinking process is affected by our emotions. Switching from one context to another, the rate of changing subjects, the amount of concentration, the depth of thinking through different abstraction levels, getting obsessed to solve the problem, thinking speed are dramatically affected by the affective situation we are in while thinking… “The various glands of the endocrine system release hormones into the bloodstream that have effects on specific sites in the brain, including those involved in emotion” says Cornelius [5] . There are different speed modes of thinking in our brains. Our brains work in a slow mode when we are doing something related with safety (not emergency) where as our ideas fly when we are doing something sentimental or dreaming… Thinking speed helps us to switch from one processor to another in our multiprocessor brain. Feelings and selecting the right mood help us to choose the right processor combination to do the ‘thinking’.
Freud states “ideas are cathexes-basically of memory traces- whilst affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are percieved as feelings. [11] “ Hinde asks “Is it an intervening variable or a hypothetical construct? [12] ” and argues that “emotion is best defined in terms of chains or loops with emotion and cognition closely linked. [12] ” I believe, to reach a a conclusion on the question of “Do computers feel?” we shall have a look at the LINUX operating system books…
“An interrupt [13] is usually defined as an event that alters the sequence of instructions executed by a processor. Such events correspond to electrical signals generated by hardware circuits both inside and outside of the CPU chip.” “interrupt signals provide a way to divert the processor to code outside the normal flow of control. When an interrupt signal arrives, the CPU must stop what it's currently doing and switch to a new activity;”
If we make an analogy between Dewey’s emotion definition and work on the example of a touch to the keyboard; (1) the “feel“’s name is keyboard interrupt (2)purposeful behaviour is the interrupt handler program of Operating System (3) an object that has an emotional quality is the person who touches, namely the user. Dewey’s “Calm and Violent emotions” is analoguous to soft and hardware interrupts… The basis of the similarity between the human emotional system and the computer interrupt system arises from the very nature of cognition. Cognition can not exist without some sort of interaction with living matter.
Interrupt subsytem of computers is similar to the human physiology: “Both the hippocampus and amygdala are complexly interconnected with inputs from both the sensory organs and the viscera. … They, and perhaps other structures of the lymbic system, appear to integrate sensory information with information from the various organs of the viscera as well as feedback from the ANS to control the “output” of emotional expression in the ANS and other parts of the nervous system (LeDoux, 1986 Neurobiology of Emotion). [14]”
The nature of interaction requires the existence of a mechanism which processes “the inputs from the sensory organs [14]” When you touch the keyboard or click the mouse, press the Esc button, put a CD in the driver etc. the hardware connections, Interrupt Request Lines that carry this “sensory signal” instinctively work and trigger the interrupt controller, analogous to the amygdala…
The interrupt controller trigs the operating system very similar to the senses trigging emotions. The normal cognitive processing comes to a halt and the operating system runs the related interrupt service routine, which has a label analogous to Weyle’s “feel”… When the interrupt service routine does the task, for example writing to the disk, then returns back information about its success…
By the way, when the computer writes to the disk some trembling and noise indicate a similar situation to human “arousal”…
Aesop’s fable says; the fox tries to reach the grapes on the wine, but it can not. He says “They are sour anyway.” Sartre suggests “in emotion it is the body which, directed by consciousness, changes its relations with the world in order that the world may change its qualities. [15] ” When the computer meets a situation that it can not healthily handle, for example a division by 0, it issues a division exception and diverts the program execution to the related interrupt handler rather than abnormally ending…
Our initial question was “Do computers feel?” My answer is ‘no’ because they can not express their feelings with the same “feels” as humans, such as anger, fear. On the other hand, computers do have an embedded interrupt and exception system in soft and harware which is analogous to the human emotional system…
Then if my answer is ‘no’, why did I write this article with such an ambition? Because, the question “Do computers feel?” is wrong … A not so bad question chould be “Why don’t computers have emotions like us?” After all, it is us who have created computers with the knowledge and wisdom passed down from the distant past… Many man-years have been spent to create operating systems but relatively less on the effects of it on its users.
Large and complex systems such as ATC systems demand long duration high concentration working from engineers and controllers. I wish “Computers could feel” so that their users do not lose their feelings working with them…
Ali Rıza SARAL is an Electronics Engineer(ITU), composer(ISU) and a former civil servant of EUROCONTROL (European Agency for the Safety of Air Navigation) Software Team Karlsruhe. He has cured 24 documented Operational Deficiencies of the German KUIR airspace which includes Frankfurt.
REFERENCES:
[1] Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 1.
[2] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.152, Dewey, The Theory of Emotion.
[3] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.97, Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.
[4] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.174, Schachter and Singer, Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinans of Emotional State.
[5] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 23.
[6] Brian Bayly, The Brain’s Internal Reward from Matching, p. 1.
[7] Pronin, Wegner, Manic Thinking, Independent Effects of Thought Speed and Thought Content on Mood.
[8] Winkielman et al., The Hedonic Marking of Processing Fluency: Implications for Evaluative Judgment, p. 191.
[9] Winkielman et al., Affect and Processing Dynamics, Emotional Cognition, from Brain to Behaviour, p. 120.
[10] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 224.
[11] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p. 192, Freud, The Unconscious.
[12] Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 3.
[13] Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati, Understanding the Linux Kernel, Interrupts and Exceptions, p. 96.
[14] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 226.
[15] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.247, Sartre, The Emotions: A Sketch of a Theory.
My Address:
Ali Riza SARAL
Barbaros Mah. Sedef Sk. 13/13
Uskudar / ISTANBUL
TURKEY
Tel: 0090 (216) 474-8818
e-mail: arsaral(at)yahoo.com
To Dr. David Williams of ORAT-ISU
Does computer feel? Does computer have emotions? Does computer feel joy, love, anger, fear, happiness, guilt, sadness, embarressment, hope and many other emotions? Is the effect of the feelings of computer on its behaviour “pleasent or unpleasent, mild or intense, transient or long-lasting, and as interfering with or enhancing” [1] ? Do computers ‘experience emotions’? Do they react toward things in the environment that have such emotional qualities as frightening, cheering and saddening?
Dewey [2] defines emotion as a composition of (1) a “feel“ (the feeling of fear, pride, humility, etc.), (2)purposeful behaviour (3) an object that has an emotional quality. He describes the so-called
expressions of emotions as ‘the reduction of movements and stimulations originally useful into attitudes”. These reductions are grouped as “servicable associated habits”, “analogous stimuli”, “antithesis”, and “direct nervous discharge”.
Hume [3] states “pride and humility, tho’ directly contrary, have yet the same object. This object is self, or that succession of related ideas and impressions, of which we have an intimate memory and consciousness”. “the passions either take place alternately; or if they encounter, the one annihilates the other, as far as its strength goes, and the remainder only of that, which is superior, continues to operate upon the mind”. “we find, that a beatiful house, belonging to ourselves, produces pride.” “a quality I discover in these passions is their sensations, or the peculiar emotions they excite in the soul, and which constitute their very being and essence. Thus pride is a pleasent sensation, and humility a painful; and upon the removal of the pleasure and pain, there is in reality no pride nor humility.”
Schachter [4] states “an emotional state may be considered a function of a state of physiological arousal and of a cognition appropriate to this state of arousal. The cognition, in a sense, exerts a steering function. Cognitions arising from the immediate situation as interpreted by past experience provide the framework within which one understands and labels his feelings. It is the cognition which determines whether the state of physiological arousal will be labelled as “anger”, “joy”, “fear”, or whatever.”
Many more definitions of emotions have been made through the history beginning with 2nd century BC, Aristotle. Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Darwin, James, Cannon, Dewey, Schachter, Singer, Freud, Brentano, Scheler, Heidegger, Sarte and many others… Hoping to have enticed you to a wonderful journey in these precious people’s works I would like to repeat my initial question once more...
Do computers have an ‘inner’ sentimental world? Too difficult to answer quickly… May be we should change the question a bit… Does any being except the human have feelings? Maybe the better: Do animals have feelings? In his ‘The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,’ Darwin writes “most of the expressions and gestures involuntarily used by man and lower animals, under the influence of various emotions and sensations.” You can find “Some of Darwin’s illustrations of familiar emotional expressions in animals [5] ” in Cornelius’s book ‘The Science of Emotions’.
None of the animals can speak like us. Neither can they say “I feel sad.” Nevertheless, when a cat or a bird approaches a person sitting at a garden caffee, it bends its head to the ground and imitates as if it eats something. A careful observer or a tender person with compassion understands or feels that the animal needs food. Animals can communicate their needs. The problem is, most of us do not percieve the messages they are able to give. We do not get nervous in front of a loud speaker playing music but many get afraid when a dog says simply a’hello’ just using his very limited vocabulary and powerful vocal tract.
We should not judge neither animals nor computers as insensitive because they can not express themselves with the same emotional vocabulary as us the human-beings. In order to percieve whether computer has feelings or not its emotions have to be easily percievable by us, namely we should share more or less the same ‘feels’ with computers as in animals. We can not percieve the emotional expressions of computers easily.
Does this situation provide enough validity to the claim that ‘Computers do not feel’? Is there something wrong here ethically? Do we loss anything because of this silent assumption in our relations with computers? Are the Human Computer Interaction classes in many universities well equipped or even down-played as not technical enough? Why do many engineers and large system operators suffer from long duration high concentration jobs in front of their computers?
Indeed, computer does not have a face. A face like a human or even a mammal. It does not have eyes, ears, a skin, a head or a body… Wait a minute… Are you sure? Are you sure that computers can not see, hear or touch? What about scanners, microphones, keyboard, power-on button? Don’t they provide the similar functionality as eyes, ears, skin… Computers do have many functionalities that basic human senses provide.
Computer has a head, that you can look into its face, namely the monitor, or a body that supports its being, namely the case or box that contains the mainboard. The problem is that they do not appear to our eyes as we are conditioned to see as a head or a body… Microsoft has invented a solution to this problem… They have a sweet doggy appearing at the side of the directory search. The doggy itches the ground or searches something in a book… It can express curiosity because it has a face… Microsoft uses the dog image to express the emotions of the computer during directory search. It has a healing effect on the user… It makes the user smile and lose concentration for a short while…
* * *
The crux of the issue of ‘Do computers feel?’ is: Is it possible to think without feeling? Can cognition exist without emotions? The pith of the matter is this. Can you think even mathematics without feelings? Can you study mathematics without feeling anything? Even if we assume that you really did not feel anything while solving a problem, but after that you will need to discharge the unused mental energy in some way. Besides, you will experience pride or humility depending on your success.
Even if you have become a great ‘professional’ who has the power to control everything, you must experience feelings when you are working in a cognitive job, like programming or air traffic control… [6] “ A spasm of pleasure can arise without any external stimulus, purely by operations within one’s own brain. For example, a person who has just woken from sleep may have an insight and experience a spasm of pleasure arising from it. The insight is cognitive, with neural correlates largely in the cortex, whereas the spasm of pleasure, physiologically quite separate, is largely subcortical.” As a finite human being you can not avoid the pleasure from simple matching [6] . Otherwise, you may be working against the nature of thinking and you may hurt yourself mentally.
In fact, even the thinking process itself creates emotions without any external inputs and it does so independent from the things you think [7] . Winkielman [8] et al. states “affective responses may also result from the dynamics of information processing itself.” “Fluency with which one can extract information from the presented stimulus is hedenocially marked. High fluency elicits positive affective reaction.” “ease of processing is consistently associated with more positive evaluations. [9] ”
Our feelings about our thinking process helps us to complete missing data or speed up our thinking process. “the fluency signal may be connected to affect by indicating the state of the ongoing processing operations. Thus, high fluency may indicate progress toward successful recognition and trigger positive affect due to the reinforcing value of maintaininfg the current, successful cognitive strategy and the ability to free resources for other tasks. [9] ” The link between the metacognitive system and the affect system is further supported by neuroimaging and elektropysiological data [9] .
It has been proved that brain’s parts related to metacognitive regulation and emotion processes or emotional control are the same [9].
The mechanics of the thinking process is affected by our emotions. Switching from one context to another, the rate of changing subjects, the amount of concentration, the depth of thinking through different abstraction levels, getting obsessed to solve the problem, thinking speed are dramatically affected by the affective situation we are in while thinking… “The various glands of the endocrine system release hormones into the bloodstream that have effects on specific sites in the brain, including those involved in emotion” says Cornelius [5] . A careful observer can notice that there are different working speeds of thinking in our brains. Our brains work in a slow mode when we are doing something related with safety or security(but not related to emergency) where as our ideas fly when we are doing something sentimental or dreaming… Thinking speed helps us to switch from one processor to another in our multiprocessor brain. Feelings and selecting the right mood help us to choose the right processor (or combination of processors) to do the ‘thinking’.
Let’s ask another question from the other side… Are feelings only a by-product of the thinking process, cognition? No. If you please read Schachter’s definition at the beginning of this article once more, you will notice that ‘physiological arousal’, trembling, increase in the blood temperature, heart rate etc. are also part of emotions. Also the instincts play a vital role besides the cognition element.
By observing human behaviour we can only notice that there is an intimate relation between emotion and cognition. We can go further by enhancing our sometimes ampirical experiments with today’s advanced neurological imaging techniques…
* * *
The main problem is to define ‘What is cognition?’ and ‘What is emotion?’ inorder to understand the character of the relation between them… Freud states “ideas are cathexes-basically of memory traces- whilst affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are percieved as feelings. [11] ” He also adds “Even within the limits of normal life we can recognize that a constant struggle for primacy over affectivity goes on between the two systems Conscious and Unconscious, that certain spheres of influence are marked of from one another and that intermixtures between the operative forces occur. [11 ”
Hinde asks “the common view of emotion as a state has many attendant problems. Is it a motive or a trait? Is it an intervening variable or a hypothetical construct? [12] ” and argues that “emotion is best defined in terms of chains or loops with emotion and cognition closely linked. [12] ”
Strongman states “Emotions has sometimes been analysed as an intervening variable, anchored to observable stimuli and responses.”
I believe, any person who has studied data structures and computer architecture, can come to a similar conclusion after reading this article upto this point and maybe reading the references the better… Namely, a conclusion on the question of “Do computers feel?” Let’s have a look at the LINUX operating system books…
“An interrupt [13] is usually defined as an event that alters the sequence of instructions executed by a processor. Such events correspond to electrical signals generated by hardware circuits both inside and outside of the CPU chip.” “As the name suggests, interrupt signals provide a way to divert the processor to code outside the normal flow of control. When an interrupt signal arrives, the CPU must stop what it's currently doing and switch to a new activity;” “Each hardware device controller capable of issuing interrupt requests has an output line designated as an IRQ (Interrupt ReQuest). All existing IRQ lines are connected to the input pins of a hardware circuit called the Interrupt Controller, ”
“The Intel 80x86 microprocessors issue roughly 20 different exceptions. The kernel must provide a dedicated exception handler for each exception type. For some exceptions, the CPU control unit also generates a hardware error code and pushes it in the Kernel Mode stack before starting the exception handler.”
If we make an analogy between Dewey’s definition of emotion and work on the example of a touch to the keyboard; (1) the “feel“ (the feeling of fear, pride, humility)’s name is keyboard interrupt
(2)purposeful behaviour is the interrupt handler program of the LINUX Operating System (3) an object that has an emotional quality is the person who touches, namely the user. Freud states “certain spheres of influence are marked of from one another” in my above quotation from his article ‘Unconscious’. Which is analogous to “As the name suggests, interrupt signals provide a way to divert the processor to code outside the normal flow of control.” in my quotations from LINUX manuals. Dewey’s classifications of emotions have many similarities to interrupts and exceptions which also have different types. Dewey’s “Calm and Violent emotions” vs. soft and hardware interrupts… It is impossible to tell all the similarities between the interrupt processing subsystem of the computer operating system including the hardware architecture and the human emotion processing.
The basis of the similarity between the human emotional system and the computer interrupt system arises from the very nature of cognition. Cognition can not exist without some sort of interaction with living matter. The ideas in this article can not exist without being written on some sort of interaction media, may be a newspaper the better. By that, the journey of emotions begin, the reader holds the newspaper, maybe smells it, reads it and likes or even loves an article and binds to the newspaper with devotion…
Cornelius [14] outlines the results of recent neurophysiology research in his book “The Science of Emotion” in 10 pages. His book could outline the rest of all the past studies in 210 pages…
So if you want to have the answer of our question with his style in terms of physiology: “Both the hippocampus and amygdala are complexly interconnected with inputs from both the sensory organs and the viscera. They also serve as the origin of projections that connect them with Autonomic Nerve System as well as higher cortical areas. They, and perhaps other structures of the lymbic system, appear to integrate sensory information with information from the various organs of the viscera as well as feedback from the ANS to control the “output” of emotional expression in the ANS and other parts of the nervous system (LeDoux, 1986 Neurobiology of Emotion).”
The nature of interaction requires the existence of a mechanism which processes “the inputs from both the sensory organs. [14]” When you touch the keyboard or click the mouse, press the Esc button, put a CD in the driver etc. the hardware connections, Interrupt Request Lines carry this “sensory signal” instinctively work and trigger the interrupt controller, analogous to the amygdala…
The interrupt controller trigs the operating system very similar to the senses trigging emotions. The normal cognitive processing comes to a halt and the operating system runs the related interrupt service routine, which has a label analogous to Weyle’s “feel”… When the interrupt service routine does the task, for example writing to the disk, then returns back information about its success…
By the way, when the computer writes to the disk some trembling and noise indicate a similar situation to human “arousal”…
Aesop had told once upon a time a fable about the fox and the grapes; the fox tries to reach the grapes on the wine, but it can not. He says “They are sour anyway.” Sartre suggests “In short, in emotion it is the body which, directed by consciousness, changes its relations with the world in order that the world may change its qualities. [15] ” Isn’t it the same with computers? When the computer meets a situation that it can not healthily handle, for example a division by 0, it issues an exception of Divide error and diverts the program execution to the related interrupt handler rather than abruptly stopping…
Our initial question was “Do computers feel?” My answer is no because they can not express their feelings with the same “feels” as humans, such as joy, love, anger, fear, happiness, guilt, sadness, embarressment, hope usw. On the other hand, computers do have an embedded interrupt and exception system in both soft and harware which is analogous to the human limbic system…
Then if my answer is no, why did I write this article with such an ambition? Because, “Do computers feel?” is a wrong question… The right question should be “Why don’t computers have emotions like us?” It is us who have created computers together with the knowledge and wisdom passed to us from the distant past… We are the human-being who spend many man-years to create the operating systems but think very little on the effects of it on its users.
Large and complex systems, air traffic control systems and similar jobs demand long duration high concentration working from today’s engineers and system operators. Not to mention, the new growing engineers, toddlers who spend many hours on their computer games everyday… Have you noticed every soldier killed on the computer game, has to die convincingly, thus takes some time so that the kid’s concentration relaxes a bit in the mean time…
On the Christmas of 2008, I wish “Computers could feel” so that their users do not lose their feelings working with high concentration for long hours…
Ali Rıza SARAL is an Electronics Engineer(ITU) and a former civil servant of EUROCONTROL Software Team Karlsruhe. He has cured 24 Operational Deficiencies of the German KUIR airspace which includes Frankfurt.
REFERENCES:
[1] Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 1.
[2] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.152, Dewey, The Theory of Emotion.
[3] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.97, Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.
[4] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.174, Schachter and Singer, Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinans of Emotional State.
[5] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 23.
[6] Brian Bayly, The Brain’s Internal Reward from Matching, p. 1.
[7] Pronin, Wegner, Manic Thinking, Independent Effects of Thought Speed and Thought Content on Mood.
[8] Winkielman et al., The Hedonic Marking of Processing Fluency: Implications for Evaluative Judgment, p. 191.
[9] Winkielman et al., Affect and Processing Dynamics, Emotional Cognition, from Brain to Behaviour, p. 120.
[10] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 224.
[11] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p. 192, Freud, The Unconscious.
[12] Strongman, The Psychology of Emotion, p. 3.
[13] Daniel P. Bovet, Marco Cesati, Understanding the Linux Kernel, Interrupts and Exceptions, p. 96.
[14] Cornelius, ‘The Science of Emotion’, p. 226.
[15] Calhoun, Solomon, What is an Emotion, p.247, Sartre, The Emotions: A Sketch of a Theory.
HOW TO PREDICT AIR MISSES
by Ali R+ SARAL
ABSTRACT : A method to predict the number of air-misses in a certain time duration and region based on performance, reliability, complexity and weather factors of an Air Traffic Control system.
KEYWORDS : ATC, air traffic control, vertigo, metrics, airmiss
ADDRESS: Ali R. SARAL
Barbaros Mah. Sedef Sok. Onur Sit. 13/13
Uskudar ISTANBUL
TURKEY-(TURKIYE)
MAIL ADDRESS: arsara(at)yahoo.com
TELEPHONE: 0090-(216)-474 8818
It is fatally important to ponder on the issues of Air Traffic Control (ATC) where the development pace of the available technologies may have overcome the development of the systems available and the belief in the unity of support to the people in the air is incidentally hurt in the wake of the recent air traffic accidents. I believe it is critically important to have the scientific communities' support and wide contribution in order to overcome the challenges that are coming ahead, the difficulties in the cooperation of Short Term Conflict Alert displays this alone.
This article proposes a prediction method to find the number of air misses in a given duration of time in a certain region. If it is applied concurrently and coherently it may point at where the first accident lying ahead is likely to happen. It depends on the fair and precise measurement of the controllers', ATC centers', airlines', technical support and systems' performance factors and the weather factors. The details of these metric values may be the subject of another article.
Air traffic control (ATC) system is a dynamic system. ATC system's behaviour changes through time according to the changes in the input and system parameters. In fact, 'the evolution of ATC system in time depends on the complex interactions of the timing of various discrete events' (1), such as the entry of many aircrafts in a certain period of time into a certain control region and the exit flowing rate of these aircrafts and how the ATC system reacts to this traffic both psychologically on the control team basis and the availability of the technical infra-structure of the system as a whole.
A mathematical model of an ATC system is given in equation [1]. This equation provides a metrical method, which may help to overcome the 'vertigo effect' of ATC, namely 'the false sense of safety'. Similar to any metrical value this equation may help to indicate the direction if not the value of the change of safety in the air provided that it is applied with vigorous consistency.
a*c
amiss = [ 1 - K * p * r * (1 - e * w ] * trd * dur (1)
amiss # of air misses for dur
trd average # of flights per day for the controlled duration and region [real num / day ]
dur total flight duration
p performance factor
r reliability factor
c complexity factor
w weather factor
K is a constant determined by the complex interaction of p, r, c, w. It reflects the composite effect of these factors. K can be determined and improved by using legal recording and other data.
a is a constant that determines the sensitivity of the traffic problem domain to the complexity of the ATC system. It may be determined heuristically in the beginning.
p,r,c,w are assumed constant for dur
0 < p =" 0," p =" 1," r =" 0," r =" 1," c =" 0," c =" 1," w =" 0," w =" 1" s =" amiss" safety =" number" s =" [" f =" amiss" size="1">NOTES
1- p(t) indicates performance factor which is calculated from the daily measurement of the control center, airlines and the airport performances.
2 - r(t) indicates the reliability of the ATC center availability or some of its facilities, the reliability of the airlines and the airports.
3 - c(t) indicates operational complexity such as route complexity, operational complexity and the technical system soft-hardware and support-development complexity.
4- w(t) indicates the risk affect of repeated or random weather difficulties in the controlled region.
REFERENCES
(1) Yu-chi Ho, "Performance Evaluation and Perturbation Analysis of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems", Transaction on Automatic Control, Vol. AC-32, No.7, July 1987
(2) Paul M. Frank, "Introduction to System Sensitivity Theory", Academic Press, New York, ISBN 0-12-265650-4
(3) Deutsche Flug Sicherung Presseinformation, Offenbach, 2 July 1996
(4) Rules for the Air and Air Traffic Services (Doc 4444 inter alia)
(5) The Karlsruhe Operating Data System EUROCONTROL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ali R+ SARAL holds a M.Sc. (1985) degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, TURKEY and a second M.M. degree (1992)in Music Theory and Composition from Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, USA. He has worked as a systems programmer in major banks and holdings in Istanbul and has served 5 years to the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL) as a senior analyst programmer. The Operational Deficiencies he has fixed in concurrence with his colleaques' other works have contributed to the safety of people in Germany inter alia. Currently, he teaches at Yeditepe University, Istanbul.
You may wonder what relation do emotions have with engineering… Engineering is considered mostly in relation with mathematics and other positive sciences. This misconception arises from the wrong systems definition that we use to make. A system may roughly be defined as a structure that produces certain outputs for certain inputs outcome of which may be affected by some distortions from the environment. Although there exists a user in the real life which is excluded in this definition…
The inclusion of the user to the definition of the system may become a necessity in some cases. The complexity or largeness of the systems that are used requires the inclusion of the user to the system design. For ex. the safety and security of an airplane depends largely on the flight crew.
Thus the design of the system is designed according to this phenomenon.
An Air Traffic Control system, a nuclear reactor or even a traditional electric reactor, any system of which safety or security is vital depends on a single main human feeling: TRUST.
The pilots have to trust the air traffic controllers, the controllers have to TRUST the control devices and the engineers who develop and maintain them. The difficulty is not in assembling an electronic device box or running an assembler program but to BUILD THE TRUST of the users to this box or program.
Indeed, if you think a little bit, you may share the idea that, even though it is never expressed explicitly, from requirements to delivery and, from the calculation of costs to long term maintenance and enhancement, all over the project lies small and large, many conditions, suggestions and advises related to TRUST.
A good and successful engineer is one that you can easily trust, one that works like worshipping, one whose word is always true and when it is not, one who makes all the sacrifices to make his word come true with dignity, one who has no lies, no tricks, no guiles, one that can never be bribed, one does everything in his hand not to bribe and when he is obliged to do so one who knows very well that bribing hurts his very own efforts. Bribery and other kinds of social decay hurts first of all the feeling of TRUST in LARGE SYSTEMS and the projects that develop them.
When inspected closer, it can be easily seen that emotions such as fear and compassion may play secondary but important roles in some of the engineering projects… These effects can be observed in the behaviour of the teams at the end of the big projects or in the behavioural patterns of people performing jobs that may affect the lives of many people… The management of a project is not the application of some patterns such as MIL498, ISO12207 in a ‘military style’ without understanding their spirit.
The ability to control the motivation of a team and to lead it successfully through an engineering project lies in managing the emotions of that team. If you suggest otherwise, I would like to pose this question to you: The job is exciting, the payments are satisfying, then why do some of the engineers commit suicide?
You can find the name of a vitally important article related to this subject below at the end of my article. You may not only find the basis of some of my opinions above, but also health problems related to concentrating too much for too long durations, etc. which are related to the affective fundementals of large systems psychology. I will be concentrating on affections – affective disorders etc. subjects related to emotions in engineering in the near future.
Of course, belongs the last word to CONSCIENCE… European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation(EUROCONTROL)’s civil servant evaluation form which is filled every two years, has 12 items. One of these 12 items is ‘professional conscience’. May the forthcoming LARGE SYSTEMS companies of our ountry not forget the ‘professional conscience’ in their personnel evaluations. May our country not ‘give herself up’ to the European Union just for realizing this kind of simple things…
Ali R+ SARAL
Note: Please continue to Brian Bayly’s The Brain’s Internal Reward from Matching which you can find on the Internet. I have done a Turkish translation and editing of this article also. You may find it in the same blog. It resides here in the Turkish version.
To Mr. Ahmet ARZIK,
Brain is one of our organs which does not have the ability to move. Think of the brain’s functional development during the process in which a new born grows up to become an adult. Our brains develop from the cognitive level of a little ‘snail’ which moves with its nutrition instinct, to a chess master who challenges a supercomputer…
What surprises us is not solely the impressive amount of change that our cognitive abilities undergo in our personal development process… This organ of ours which can not even move by itself, can deviate itself in a matter of a season, a couple of days or a few seconds because of the changing environment or its own inner conditions. According to our mood may this organ remember what it likes or forget what it does not, namely it deviates our remembering ability depending on the subject, it certainly does not work very well in hot summer days, on the other hand ina state of emergency, your brain orders your body to make the correct move in a much shorter time than you can consciously decide...
If we look in our cognitive activities closely, we can notice a complexity rising from variety and adjustability. This complexity increases because of the variety and uniqueness of each adult person’s individual solution in comparison to many others… ‘No two fingers of a single hand are the same’. On the other hand, ‘Every person is different but not different from all’…
The fact that our brains have many different abilities, gives us the possibility of creating our cognitive functions one by one through different combinations of these abilities. For example, a not very well educated person can still make quick and correct decisions with his/her feelings and instinct. University language preperatory school English teachers can at least handle ‘sharp’ students who have got much higher grades in the university entrance exam than them, with their teaching experience and knowledge. Our cognitive abilities can not only change depending on the mental, social and physical conditions but they also vary from person to person. The effect of his/her family’s child upbringing, the individual’s knowledge and experience reservoir, the point he/she stands in life, creates variety between individuals and how they survive in the competition to be successful.
Society and individuals reduce the difficulty of problems they meet by converting them to easily percievable models. Even to a single symbol or figure... In this process our brain is sometimes reduced to a small black box by the model makers. Society has the tendency to group everything related to cognitive ability under the title of ‘intellect’… Also, if a person is ‘sharp’ he/she is frequently considered to be so always and under all conditions whatsoever…
Everyone of us takes an important exam at one stage of his or her life. We all remember the level of ‘intellectual sharpness’ or acuteness we have reached during our preparations. On the other hand, there may be moments you may have difficulty to utter even a single word after you wake up in a hot summer morning. Then, which of these two people is you, yourself? The ‘sharp’ or the ‘moron’? The answer is ‘None of them solely’. Then what is wrong about the question? The mistake is in the way we look at the cognitive abilities of human-beings… We should never forget that, even though our brain can not move an inch by itself our mind does not have a static and frozen architecture or capacity. Our brain manages to cope with changing situations not by changing its location but by deviating its own self.
A person’s mental abilities change according to its age, the situation he is in, the current subjects he deals with and many similar factors. If an experiment were made, even the sharpest person on earth might not be able to make the right decision if he were being interrogated as a prisoner of war or if his airplane lose one of its motors at 10000m’s altitude, given that he does not have the necessary training and experience… Moreover, even if he had the knowledge and experience to do so, he might still not be able to make the right decision in some cases, because the professional human brain can not stay as constant as it were when it took the qualification exam…
When the architecture of the human mind is inspected, an anatomical and biological wealth can be observed underneath its functional variety. It is not a wonder such a complex living architecture can create personalities with extraordinary abilities… The most wonderful is the fact that brain is able to provide the human-being everything needed to cope for its complex social and individual challenges.
The complexity of our brains is reflected in the way we percieve and interact with things and other people. Designing tools and systems to be used by humans requires to handle this complexity in a simplified way. Faced with any complexity, we tend to make abstractions. Abstractions not only reduce the number of the things we are concerned but also limits the domains of their items. This also applies to our approaches to the complexity of our brains.
Wickens Information Model is developed to calculate how long it will take for the user to respond to an input. The below given depiction has got so much popular that it has gained a function similar to the model that describes to primary school kids the creation of seasons based on the so called ellipse shaped path of earth around the sun.
The Wickens Information Processing Model was created to provide a convenient method to calculate the response time of the user to a signal from a system.
………………….Attention Resources
Perception……………………Cognition…………Motor
(transfer to ……………….(math,decide,…………Response
working memory)………...memory transfer)
Short term sensory store……Long term memory
Visual Image Store………….Dltm=infinity
Dvis=1500[900-3500]msec…Mltm=infinity
Mvis=5[4.4-5.2]letters………Kltm=semantic
Kvis=Physical
Auditory Image Store…….. Working Memory
Daud=200[70-1000]msec….Dwm=3[2.5-4.1] chunks
Maud=17[7-17]items………Dwm(1chunk)=7[5-9]chunks
Kaud=Physical……………..Dwm(3chunks)=7[5-226]sec
……………………………...Mwm(1chunk)=73[73-226]sec
………………………………Mwm(3chunks)=7[5-34]sec
………………………………Kwm=Acoustic or visual
Transfer durations:
(Perception)--->100msec(cognition)-->70msec(motor)->70msec
- Attention resources are used in all three stages..
- D = decay, M= residing duration in memory, K= representation format of the information
(EBERTS, Prentice Hall, User Interface Design, sayfa 166).
An other name of this model is Discrete Stages Model. The contributions of the Wickens Model may be outlined as:
1. Perception does not happen in a single moment. On the contrary, human processes the inputs and a functional transformation (for ex. from visual to semantical) happens.
2. Processing information requires time. The time that passes between the moment input comes and human responses is called the reaction time.
3. The mental timing of events that happen in a single response process. The nomenclature of the stages, durations and the definition of operations or transformations done in each stage.
4. Transformations related to the presentation of information.
5. Limits that do exist in the time and quantity domains.
6. The unit of information. Miller’s seven plus/minus two rule is alluded above in the working memory. This also points at the effect of the gained experience on the size of chunks and thus determines the perception speed.
Today, all sorts of references to this model, are not limited to engineering books as it should. Many other psychology related books refer to this model or at least have similar approaches although this model is created primarily for guessing the response time of the human to certain systems.
In this model, there are visual and auditory image stores in the short term perception memory. When we think of memory we tend to imagine a single area or even a single organ. In fact, our brain is composed of many sub-structures and sub-functions, or sub-processors as in the computer nomenclature. The visual store should be located somewhere related to the visual part of the brain and auditory memory likewise…
Wickens model states that any information written into the longterm memory is never erased.
This does not mean that, that information is accessible. Commonly established belief is ‘our memory works linearly’. On the contrary, experiments have shown that we can remember some parts of the past better than others. For example, we may remember 30-40 year old events better than closer events in the past. Our memories do not work linearly on the time basis.
Our memories have an addressing mechanism which is triggered by content. Human memory is a marvel on one hand and an enigma on the other because of its non-linearity… The complexity of social events may be explained by the complexity of the minds of people who create them and the way their minds work… Writing to the memory and access to it is determined not only by content but also the environment, the mood, etc. Our memories’ refreshing mechanism is also not linear… It is a scientificly proven fact that a person who remembers a bad event in the past tends to remember bad things after this… An other example for the content triggered addressing mechanism is the fact that we can remember things related to ourselves better than other things…
The basic speciality of the Wickens model is the transformation of the information’s presentation format. For example, a figure percieved by the eye is stored in the visual image store in the physical format but transformed to the visual format when passed to the working memory…
It is the most reasonable approach to assume that these physically percieved information are accessed in the working memory through some buffer zones. This also implies that the working memory does not have a homogenous function as commonly assumed. The saying that people working under heavy mental load ‘can not see or think anything else than their work’ has a piece of truth in it. The increased mental load causes temporary changes in the memory usage. These people become forgetful or get easily distracted when doing even simple daily things. The reduction of perception abilities of people working under heavy mental load can be attributed to the reduction of input buffer space by the working memory to increase space for logical etc. cognitive tasks.
A common misunderstanding in the society that is fostered by the Wickens model is that human memory is a uniform single structure. For example the episodic bellek which is located in the frontal part of our brain is a special memory that helps to form the sense of time and reality. Episodic memory keeps track of events and provides information about sequence, duration, reality to the general use of our brain. People who work under heavy mental load frequently forget what they have done. They first take a book from the table and put it on the bookshelf, then a few moments later they forget what they have done and try to put the book on the shelf again, thus they can not find it on the table. While working at EUROCONTROL Software Team Karlsruhe, Chritian PETIT who was working on a difficult task in a terrible political climate had told me ‘This is a natural situation, I can not remember the color of the traffic light after I pass them while driving’ as an answer to my similar complaints.
If we study this example closely, with the assumption that the episodic memory has a buffer;
the events that have happened should have been written to the buffer in their happening sequence… If the working memory is overloaded during the events, the memory allocated to the episodic memory buffer is deallocated and put in the service of general purpose or other working memory. As a result of this the working memory allocated to the episodic memory buffers is cancelled or dramatically reduced. In this case, the mentally overloaded person can not remember an event which has happened a few moments ago, because the episodic memory input buffer related to that event has been erased and used for some other purpose.
An other example to the case of mental overload reducing the perception is: a person driving an automobile, airplane or any system loses control of command due to the increase in his reaction time caused by mental overload(mostly talking). A special case related to this situation is air traffic controllers making mistakes while working with divided attention (Investigating Controller Blindspots, Dr. Barry Kirwan, HINDSIGHT 5 – July 2007 ). When dealing with a difficult situation with a relatively calm background , the controllers have to focus on the high priority troublesome situation but after fixing this problem they should remember the cases in the background. Unfortunately in some cases it has been observed that after the primary problem is solved, some of the secondary problems related to the general situation have been completely forgotten and thus they have caused other important problems. The problem is the same as in the example of Ray EBERTS’s, User Interface Design book of a driver not hearing the radio when the traffic gets dense… I believe, the problem is not inability to percieve but the insufficiency of working memory resources(input buffers) which enables the resolution of the perception process in the consciousness.
Let’s study the hypothesis of mentally loaded person’s perception deficiency reversely. A person whose perception is heavily loaded should have reduced or weakened cognitive(logical, decision making etc) functions… Let’s imagine a commando soldier in a commando exercise as a person whose perception is heavily loaded. Fast moving targets appear suddenly or move in front of him during the exercise. The soldier is expected to fire and hit the targets with his reflexes rather than think and make decisions cognitively. Balthazar GRACIAN alludes to an old addage in his ‘The Art of Worldly Wisdom’… ‘It is difficult to make decisions when driving a horse’. The more the percieved things, the more buffers for different inputs… If you continue to increase the inputs even more, wrong actions produced by making decisions based only on reflexes rather than judgement appear. We end up with incidents such as the 1992 incident when an American pilot fired at an helicopter which carried American and Turkish officers.
An other aspect of this subject is how much should the system user be loaded when designing complex screens such as radar displays. Displaying every information spatially makes the access to them easy but the designers’ general tendency is to abuse this principle. The requirements creep also fosters this tendency… The output of these wrong tendencies is visually overloaded screens. The overloaded screens is developing at the expense of losing and leaving the judgement ability of the large systems or air traffic controller out of function… The large system controller is turning out to be a simple sensor that reacts rather than judges and decides…
Contrary to this phenomenon, Situation Awareness should depend on human mind’s variable thinking depth, variable thinking speed and ability to think with things it does not know or remember, its multi-processor pseudo-god control ability which directs its conscious-subconscious balance.
I tried to drive your attention to the common misbeliefs about the human mind. Besides this, I outlined the popular Wickens Model and noted some misunderstandings about it which reduces the system user to a simple sensor. I hope to be pondering on thinking speed vs thinking depth, the balance between conscious and subconscious and mental control vs automatic processes in my future articles.
An antique Hellenic philosopher has said ‘Know yourself’. A weak point of this adage is that the person or anonym persons who used this adage have at least a single self. The Anatolian-Eastern tolerance of Mevlana, although not that old, reflected in the adage ‘There is a self in myself’ would perhaps say ‘My son, be aware of yourself from time to time without any intention to do so and do not forget to feel your poor body once in a while’.
‘May your mind be fresh and be all the rest nice’.
Ali R+ SARAL
Note: Besides serving the benefit of the general public, has this article been written to be used in the education of air traffic controllers, large system operators and the engineers.
Peisaj [5]
