Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
Greta Munger is Professor of Psychology at Davidson College whose works include The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions. Dave Munger is co-founder and president of ResearchBlogging.org and a writer whose works include Researching Online. And yes, he is married to Greta.
The man behind the amazing Contrast Asynchrony illusion has started a blog! Arthur Shapiro tells me he has a backlog of literally thousands of illusions. He promises to offer a new illusion every week, along with an explanation of the science behind it. Here's a preview of this week's illusion:
For an explanation of how it works, you'll have to visit Shapiro's blog, Illusion Sciences. There are already three illusions posted, with plenty more to come.
Arthur Shapiro is a world-class illusion designer and psychologist whose illusions have won the most prestigious awards in the field. Two illusions from his lab are among this year's top ten illusions.
Thank you for "choosing" to read Encephalon #44 here at Cognitive Daily. Every two weeks, Encephalon "selects" the best psychology and neuroscience blog posts from around the blogosphere, giving readers the chance to "decide" which ones they'd like to investigate further.
Unfortunately for all those involved, those "decisions" very likely weren't carried out through the "deciders'" own volition, but instead were precipitated through the confluence of genetic inheritance and circumstance.
Consider this post from Neuroanthropology, for example, which dissects a forthcoming publication in Nature Neuroscience indicating that brain activity predicting a decision occurs prior to the actual decision. Do we decide, or do our brains decide for us? If your predetermined fate moves you to read this post, you will find out.
Suppose we don't have free will and in fact are controlled by our brains. Then if the Department of Defense designs brain-controlled weapons, then who's really going to war -- us or our brains? Those so fated can entertain this question at Mind Hacks.
But once we start to believe that we have no free will, won't that, too, affect our actions? If coincidence leads you to Cognitive Daily, you can find the answer.
I wasn't predestined to understand this post, but since it includes the word "determinism," I think it might also have something to do with the free-will/determinism issue. Perhaps your nature/nurture combo made you better-equipped to understand Jonathan Pratt's point. If so, I suggest you read the post.
Except to the extent that everything you do is a manifestation of your free will (or predetermined behavior), the remaining posts in this edition of Encephalon have nothing to do with the free will / determinism debate. Undaunted, I have collected them below:
CogDaily will be hosting Encephalon tomorrow. There's still time to make your submissions -- just send an email to encephalon.host -- @ -- gmail -- . -- com (remove dashes).
We should be able to include any submissions received before 9 a.m. tomorrow.
Try to spot the difference between fake smiles and real smiles! I got 17 out of 20. It helps to understand the research about authentic smiles.
Update: Now I'm curious. I wonder if our readers are really that good, or if people are only posting their scores when they do well, so -- I've added a poll, below the fold.
ScienceBlogs.de, our German counterpart, is featuring an English-language interview with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel:
Pertinent to Tuesday's post, he discusses free will, and also drug treatment for behavior disorders, the unification of the sciences, and Sigmund Freud.
ResearchBlogging.org began simply as a way for academic bloggers to identify serious and public posts in what can also be a frivolous and private environment. Then, once these items are identified -- many of them written by experts in a field -- effective indexing, archiving, and discovery becomes a realistic possibility. To date, hundreds of bloggers have signed up for the service, and hundreds of thousands of readers have viewed their posts.
But bloggers remain a notoriously difficult group to rein in. They use a variety of different platforms and most are unaware of metadata, standards and other means for cataloging their work. In this talk, Dave Munger and Eric Schnell discuss how they are attempting to identify and apply standards to the best blogging about peer-reviewed research without handcuffing the cavalier spirit that attracts so many to the medium of blogging. They then show how this project exemplifies many of the current challenges in information system design.
Take a look at this amazing video (via slashdot) showing how traffic jams can occur even when all the drivers are attempting to drive the identical speed.
As you can see, at first everything works fine -- the drivers have all been instructed to try to drive about 30 KPH. But almost inevitably everything goes horribly wrong. See this article for more details.
The Encephalon blog carnival is up and running at SharpBrains after a short hiatus. Check it out for the latest great posts in psychology and neuroscience.
I'm posting this live from my presentation at the Science Blogging conference. My session is entitled "How to build interactivity into your blog," and this post offers some links that I discuss in the presentation.
There's been a lot of discussion online lately about the relative importance of the position of an author name. Is it more impressive to be a first author on a report? If so, how much? John Lynch made a graph of Guillermo Gonzalez's publication record as a way of illustrating his argument that Gonzalez didn't deserve tenure. But there's a twist to the graph: it not only indicates articles on which Gonzales was an author, but also articles on which he was first author.
As the average number of authors in journal articles increases, does that mean that the contribution of individual authors is valued less? Brain in a Vat and Nautilus comment on a recent article by a team led by JD Wren, which found that for medical journals, the first and last author positions were both highly valued by department chairs, but for different reasons.
In general, they found that the last author is seen as having a supervisory role, while the first author is regarded as the one who did most of the work. The researchers were also careful to control for the position of the corresponding author. When the middle author of a five-author paper was listed as the corresponding author, then survey respondents rated the supervisory role of the last author lower, and the middle author's importance rose.
So what about all those other author positions--2 through 5 in a six-author paper? Are they seen as valuable at all? Here's how Brain in a Vat describes the situation:
I've reviewed Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee's recent book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own over at The Quarterly Conversation. So, is this the science book that should have made the New York Times' Notable Books list? (Several ScienceBloggers have complained that the list includes no science books).
As I point out in my review, the book does have some great highlights:
The Blakeslees ... describe some truly fascinating phenomena. You know about visual illusions, but did you realize there's also such a thing as a sensorimotor illusion? One of the most astounding is the "Pinocchio illusion," achieved by taping a small buzzer, like a personal massager, to the biceps tendon. Then you touch your index finger to your nose and close your eyes. The buzzer fools you into believing your arm is extending, and since your finger is still touching your nose, the only way to reconcile the two sensations is to perceive that your nose is growing! Like visual illusions, these illusions don't work for everyone, so before you use this as an excuse to make a purchase from your local massage-device supplier, make sure you check their returns policy.
There's also an engaging discussion of the golfer's disorder "the yips," which has caused professionals from Vijay Singh to Sam Snead to flail wildly at easy 3-foot tap-ins. The condition and other related conditions seem to appear in only the most accomplished athletes--and also artists, musicians, and others who have achieved exceptional skill controlling their muscles. Suddenly, and until recently inexplicably, this control is lost, often during the simplest and most basic exercise of their talents. Second basemen can't make the routine throw to first base. Painters can't hold their brushes still.
That's pretty interesting stuff, right? Unfortunately, the book has some big problems, too:
The way subliminal advertising is portrayed in movies and hyped in some media outlets, briefly and imperceptibly flashing a brand name during a TV show can turn people into mindless cyborgs who can't resist the urge to shop at a particular store or drink a certain brand of beer. Overhyped as these claims may be, there is a grain of truth in them -- as a recent post in Neuromarketing points out, subliminal images really can affect our preferences:
In Your Money and Your Brain, Philip Zweig describes a study conducted by psychologist Robert Zajonc almost forty years ago. Zajonc exposed a two groups of non-Chinese-speaking subjects to a series of five Chinese ideographs; one group received five exposures to the symbols, while the other group just got one. In all cases, the exposures lasted only five milliseconds or less, too fast to be processed consciously. Then, Zajonc showed the subjects a larger group of images which included the original set as well as new ideographs and other symbols. The subjects were allowed to view the images for a full second, more than enough time to be conscious of seeing them, and asked how much they liked each one.
The subjects who received five subliminal exposures to an ideograph liked it much better than the subjects who had seen it only once.
So if we're exposed to an unfamiliar image -- even unconsciouly -- we'll say we like it more than people who've had less exposure to the same image. And scientists have known about this phenomenon for over 40 years! Does that mean we've been secretly brainwashed all this time?
Here's an interesting article about the wisdom of crowds. It starts by discussing the surprising accuracy of Wikipedia.
The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are), is not due to the average quality of the edits (or mutations). Instead, it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought "I doubt I could improve this much," and chose not to try. Each of these can be considered a "selection event", and the number of such events vastly outnumbers the actual edits. Selection is the heart of what makes Wikipedia -- as well as Darwinian evolution -- work.
Several friends of mine dispute this. They say that while Wikipedia is fine for basic factual information you might find in a newspaper, when you get to the level of serious academic research, the information quality breaks down. A physicist friend says his students are constantly getting misinformation about physics from Wikipedia. Another friend, a historian specializing in the Middle East, says Wikipedia is rife with errors.
According to a report in the New York Times, frequently-used words evolve more slowly than rarely used ones:
Some words evolve rapidly, with a result that there are many different word forms, what linguists call cognates, for meanings across languages. "Bird," for example, takes many disparate forms across other Indo-European languages: oiseau in French, vogel in German and so on.
But other words, like the word for the number after one, have hardly evolved at all: two, deux (French) and dos (Spanish) are very similar, derived from the same ancestral sound.
Seems reasonable. In our travels across Europe, we found that "yes" and "no" were very similar in different languages -- until we got to Greece, where their word for yes was pronounced "neh," and the word for no was "ochi." But despite anomalies such as this, overall more frequently used words tend to be more similar across Indo-European languages. From the study abstract:
You don't have to go far to hear someone say something bad about gossip. People even gossip about gossip. One good thing about gossip: it may have had some role in the origin of human speech, as John Tierney reminds us:
Language, according to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, evolved because gossip is a more efficient version of the "social grooming" essential for animals to live in groups.
Speech enabled humans to bond with lots of people while going about their hunting and gathering. Instead of spending hours untangling hair, they could bond with friendly conversation ("Your hair looks so unmatted today!") or by picking apart someone else's behavior ("Yeah, he was supposed to share the wildebeest, but I heard he kept both haunches").
But Tierney goes on to discuss more recent research on the effects of gossip. In this new study, participants played an economic game using evidence about their trading partners -- and gossip:
The idea of a human falling in love with a creation made of steel and silicon seems rather far-fetched today -- even the most "realistic" robots seem more creepy than endearing. But people already do form attachments to their robots. People treat Roombas like pets, and soldiers form strong bonds with their minesweeping robots.
Men have purchased inflatable dolls as sex-toys for decades, and those toys are becoming increasingly realistic. Will artificial intelligence and animatronics actually make these dolls so appealing that people will want to marry them? An MSNBC report cites one scientist who thinks they will:
Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
