Dr. Daniel M. Bernstein Lifespan Cognition Lab Interview

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Lifespan Cognition Lab (Tier 2 Canada Research Chair Psychology Lab)

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/08/21

What’s your family story?

My grandparents were born in New York, in the United States – at least 3 out of 4 of them. My father’s father was born in Poland. My great grandparents were all European: German, Ukrainian, and Polish.

My parents were childhood sweethearts. They married in their early 20s. My brother was born early in the marriage at age 23. After my brother was born, they moved to California. My sister was born two years after my brother. I was born two years after my sister.

My father was an accountant and business manager. My mother was a speech pathologist and instructor at Pepperdine University.

What’s your story?

I was born in North Hollywood, California. My parents were from the Bronx, New York. I am the youngest of 3 children. Uneventful childhood, I moved to the beach from North Hollywood to Malibu at age 5. I spent my formative years at the beach.

However, I was interested in school too. I was a serious student since grade 4. I went to Beverly Hills High School for grades 10-12, but I never fit. I went to UC Berkley for undergraduate. I fit there; not only in the university, but living in the city.

After I finished the BA, I moved to Hawaii as an early retirement. I had the physical ability to enjoy Hawaii. That was a childhood dream of mine. I didn’t know what I’d do after the undergraduate degree.

I did an honors degree. I designed my own major in sleep and dream studies with the help of my advisor, Arnie Leiman. He was very influential in my career. As an undergraduate student, I wasn’t interested in graduate school, wasn’t sure about it.

While in Hawaii, I mountain biked, surfed, and worked as a baker. I pondered my future. I decided what I was doing wasn’t the future for me. So, I applied to graduate school. I went to the mainland. I lived in Santa Cruz, California for a bit.

I didn’t get into graduate school the first application. I applied to four schools the following year. I re-took the Graduate Record Examination. I needed to increase my GRE scores to get into graduate school.

I was admitted to a terminal master’s program at Brock University in Ontario. I knew little about the school. There were several people on a small faculty studying sleep and dreams. So, I went to Brock for two years, did my masters in Psychology, and had an amazing time.

We were the first graduate students in their new graduate program. We were very, very well treated. We had tons of opportunities. I found that to be an amazing educational experience. After the masters, I applied to PhD programs. I headed out to Vancouver.

I got into Simon Fraser University. That’s where I did my PhD. I worked with someone called Vito Modigliani, who was near the end of his career, and then switched over to Bruce Whittlesea.

I finished my PhD in 2001 and headed to the University of Washington to do a Postdoc with Beth and Geoff Loftus and Andrew Meltzoff. Beth Loftus subsequently moved to UC Irvine, but we continued to work together for the duration of the Postdoc. I was at the University of Washington for 4 years. In 2005 I got a job at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, which is where I am now!

What was the original interest in psychology? What are your current interests in psychology?

Lifespan cognition, that comes from my Postdoc work with Andy Meltzoff and Geoff Loftus. Andy Meltzoff is a developmental psychologist. He was influential in my current interest.

He was interested in cognition through adults, but most of his research was on infants and preschoolers. I broadened the scope to include older adults.

Along the way, I became interested in lifespan cognition. For my PhD I did a dissertation on memory. All young adults, convenience samples from the university population. Lifespan cognition was a real change for me.

My PhD supervisor, Bruce Whittlesea, told me, “I am not interested in individual differences.” Lifespan cognition is about individual difference. How do different ages perform on different tasks?

He said, “The field of Cognitive Psychology has no real use for individual differences research. Even though some people do it, it is not of interest to most Cognitive Psychologists.”

I have come to conclude the opposite. To understand cognition, we have to study it developmentally with as large a lifespan as we can test. So, that’s one main focus of my current research.

My other focus is on memory. It continues work started during my PhD and Postdoc. In particular, false memory with Beth Loftus. I am still doing work on false memory and on memory illusions/cognitive illusions.

Broadly construed, most of the work I do now is on cognitive biases and illusions, or how we make systematic errors in our thinking.

You earned the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Lifespan Cognition. You are an instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. What tasks and responsibilities come with this position?

The administrative reporting requirements of this position aren’t too heavy, but they’re regular. I have to keep the Canadian government informed on what I’m doing and the progress I’m making. Additionally, the research is on lifespan cognition.

The Canada Research Chair supports that work. That means running a lab, making sure the projects are running smoothly, and getting people into the lab/recruitment. Recruitment is difficult for this work.

Also, I need to keep on top of things any given day/week: subject recruitment, data entry, data analysis, tested populations that find the task onerous, and so on. This does not include all of the background/pilot work we did before the main research.

What is the importance of mentoring and mentorship?

Critical. The more I do it, the more I realize it’s probably the most important thing that I do. It’s the area where I can have the biggest impact.

I strive to ensure that students get the training they deserve and want, and help them achieve the goals that they’ve set for themselves.

I’ve just returned from a 3-month trip to Europe. I was teaching and doing research at the University of Mannheim for two of those months. Most of the work was in class teaching once a week. The rest of the time was meeting with students, Postdocs and fellow faculty to discuss research.

I loved these meetings. I do this at Kwantlen as well. I meet with students regularly. I supervise several students simultaneously. I meet with students individually and in groups. I find these research meetings to be the most rewarding part of my job.

Where do you hope your research will go into the future?

I don’t know. I won’t know that until I see the results of our current work. The current project for the Canada Research Chair–also funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada–is a 4-year longitudinal study of lifespan cognition.

The project focuses on perspective taking, executive function, and decision-making from preschool to old age. Because it is longitudinal, we have people return once a year for four years.

I don’t know the results yet. I hope to find some interesting things that spur further questions for me and others to explore.

Often, my work is a function of what I am finding at any particular time in my research. Because the current project is a 4-year longitudinal study, I won’t know the next step until I finish the study.

As for my research on memory and cognitive illusions, I would like to see more unification of these cognitive illusions over time. I’d like to see someone develop a unified explanation of the different ways in which the human mind errs in its thinking.

I don’t know if I have the mind to develop this unified explanation, but maybe I’ll try. I am excited, though, wherever my research takes me.

What do you consider the single greatest finding in cognitive science?

Wow – I don’t know. I’m tempted to say work linking individual neurons. It goes back to Hubel and Wiesel. They won the Nobel Prize for work on the striate cortex in cats, where particular neurons respond to particular visual features in the world.

That’s been shown in other sensory domains as well. There’s some very cool work linking the individual firing of neurons to perception. What’s most striking about this work is that you can create and even override perception by manually stimulating neurons, that’s incredibly cool.

What is consciousness?

A really, really hard problem. (Laughs)

(Laughs)

Awareness of one’s surroundings, of one’s thoughts. That’s meta-awareness. It’s a very hard problem. I don’t even want to try and define it. Every time I try, my definitions are unsatisfactory.

What are qualia?

To me, the sensations or the perceptions, either the physical sensations that one experiences or the perceptions that one has about those sensations. I link qualia to sensation and perception.

What is free will?

In a simple sense, it is being able to choose the direction of your path in the world rather than being controlled or determined by the physical laws of the universe. Ultimately, as when you asked me about the most interesting discovery in cognitive science, what I mentioned is determinism in a nutshell: neurons firing determine our sensation and perception. We can override perception by stimulating neurons. Imagine the following experiment.

The simplest version is to show an array of arrows that point in different directions, say 45-degress to the right pointing upward, and 45-degress to the right pointing downward. The task is to respond when more than 50% of the arrows in the display point in one direction.

The subject’s task is to look in the direction where the majority of arrows point. You can be trained on this. The original work was done on rhesus monkeys. It takes lots and lots of training, but the monkeys can learn the task well-enough to be able to discern about 51% of a display pointing in one direction.

Assume that 51% of the arrows point upward and to the right, and the remaining 49% of the arrows point downward and to the right. You’ve trained the monkey to look upward and to the right on this trial because that’s the direction where the majority (50% or more) of arrows are pointing.

The monkey looks up and right. You are recording from neurons that respond to arrows pointing in a particular direction. You map the cortex to determine which neurons respond to a particular line orientation.

You present the display where 51% of the arrows are pointing upward and to the right. The monkey is supposed to look upward right. However, you’re manually stimulating the neurons that respond to arrows pointing downward and to the right. The monkey, in this case, will look downward and to the right.

You can override the actual sensory information by stimulating the neurons that respond to arrows pointing in another direction. The monkey will look down-right rather than up-right. To me, that is deterministic.

The neurons firing will determine perception and our experience. It’s spooky, but it’s incredibly cool. So, free will in a sense is being able to choose for yourself. Given what I’ve told you, it’s hard to reconcile being able to choose for yourself with the physical evidence mentioned before.

You can stimulate neurons and get individuals (yes, even humans) to respond in a particular way. You can dictate the perception and the experience, and the consciousness (ultimately), by stimulating neurons in a particular way. That sounds deterministic, not-so ‘free willy’.

What do you consider the single greatest achievement in your professional life/career?

Hopefully I haven’t had it yet. It’s got to be coming. I haven’t felt it yet. Maybe the attainment of the Canada Research Chair. That was a milestone for me. Election to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars was also very important to me.

Mentorship is a big deal to me, too. It’s helping students along their path, helping them get to where they want to go.

What about in personal life?

Marriage to my wife Dagmar, and step-fathering three lovely girls and not having any of them hate me. That’s a major achievement.

Any advice for young people interested in psychology?

Get involved in research early. Find some aspect of research that turns you on.

Thank you for your time, Dr. Bernstein.

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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightjournal.com.

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