Self-organization of cognitive performance.
- 1 January 2003
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Vol. 132 (3), 331-350
- https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.132.3.331
Abstract
Background noise is the irregular variation across repeated measurements of human performance. Background noise remains after task and treatment effects are minimized. Background noise refers to intrinsic sources of variability, the intrinsic dynamics of mind and body, and the internal workings of a living being. Two experiments demonstrate 1/f scaling (pink noise) in simple reaction times and speeded word naming times, which round out a catalog of laboratory task demonstrations that background noise is pink noise. Ubiquitous pink noise suggests processes of mind and body that change each other's dynamics. Such interaction-dominant dynamics are found in systems that self-organize their behavior. Self-organization provides an unconventional perspective on cognition, but this perspective closely parallels a contemporary interdisciplinary view of living systems.Keywords
This publication has 84 references indexed in Scilit:
- Statistical Analysis of Timing ErrorsBrain and Cognition, 2002
- The Self-Organizing Dynamics of Intentions and ActionsPublished by University of Illinois Press ,2001
- Experimental evidence for a power law in electroencephalographic -wave dynamicsZeitschrift für Physik B Condensed Matter, 1999
- Parallel processing and initial phoneme criterion in naming words: Evidence from frequency effects on onset and rime duration.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1999
- What Swimming Says About Reading: Coordination, Context, and Homophone ErrorsEcological Psychology, 1999
- Long Memory Processes (Type) in Human CoordinationPhysical Review Letters, 1997
- What memory is forBehavioral and Brain Sciences, 1997
- Functional Neuroimages Fail to Discover Pieces of Mind in the Parts of the BrainPhilosophy of Science, 1997
- Unintentional word reading via the phonological route: The Stroop effect with cross-script homophones.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1996
- Mental Chronometry: Beyond Reaction TimePsychological Science, 1991