May 13, 2008
Category:
I was asked to post this. Judging by the list of presenters and the topics, it sounds like an interesting conference.
Announcing the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology
June 26-29, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Registration is now open; deadline Thursday, June 5 -- 12:00pm EST
Note that early registration is suggested, as the reserved hotel block is likely to fill quickly. http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/spp/
The 2008 conference will feature presentations by:
George Ainslie, Michael L. Anderson, Louise Antony
Peter Carruthers, Louis Charland, Anjan Chatterjee
David Danks, Felipe De Brigard, Michael Devitt
Marthah Farah, Evelina Fedorenko, Owen Flanagan,
Jerry Fodor, Kenneth R. Foster, Lila R. Gleitman (President of SPP)
George Graham, Bryce Huebner, Bertram F. Malle,
Barbara Malt, Christopher Meacham, Dominic P. Murphy
Thomas Nadelhoffer, Kenneth Norman, Mike Oaksford
Erik Parens, Nancy Petry, Jeffrey Poland
Zenon Pylyshyn, Sarah Robins, Paul Rozin,
Laurie R. Santos (the 2008 Stanton Prize winner)
Michael Strevens, Justin Sytsma, Kelly Trogdon
Charles Wallis, Deena Weisberg, Daniel Weiskopf
Fei Xu, Carlos Zednik. . . among many others
On topics including:
-Addiction and Responsibility
-Concepts and Categorization
-Consciousness
-Bayesian Inference and Rationality
-Foundational Issues in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
-Language & Mental Representation
-Moral Psychology
-Neuroethics
-Theory of Mind
Note that this year the conference will be preceded June 25-26 by a workshop on experimental philosophy http://www.socphilpsych.org/workshop.html
More information on both the 2008 SPP conference and the Experimental Philosophy Workshop can be found on the website http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/spp/
Posted by Chris at 1:52 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category:
There's a paper by Grabe, Ward, and Hyde in this month's issue of Psychological Bulletin that presents a meta-analysis of 77 studies (correlational and experimental) on the relationship between the media's presentation of (overly) thin women and women's body image issues (from the shrink rap). The studies used a host of measures of body image, including measures of things like perceived body shape, anoretic cognition, body dissatisfaction, thin-ideal internalization, restrained eating, "bulimic symptomatology," appearance self-esteem, etc. For the relationship between media presentations of thin women and these various constructs, the average effect sizes ranged from -.28 to -.39, indicating small to moderate relationships.
If you have a subscription, you can read the paper here. Unfortunately, I can't find a free version of the paper anywhere, but if you really want to read it (remember, meta-analyses are boring as hell), send me an email.
Posted by Chris at 12:34 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 9, 2008
Category: Cognitive Development
Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it begins with Judges 12:5-6 as an epigraph. In that passage, group membership is determined by having individuals pronounce a word, and if they can't pronounce it properly, they're killed. Kinzler et al. then provide a host of examples of what we might call linguistic discrimination in their opening paragraph:
The biblical story of Shibboleth speaks of the ancient massacre of those who could not correctly pronounce a phrase, thereby revealing their out-group status. Modern-day Shibboleth is ubiquitous: United States history alone abounds with examples of linguistic discrimination, from the severing of the tongues of slaves who spoke no English, to the forbidding of the public speaking of German during World War II and the execution of Russian speakers after the Alaskan purchase (1). Recent world history provides examples of linguicide paired with genocide of the Kurds in Turkey (2) and of imposed language policies initiating anti- Apartheid riots in South Africa (3). Favor for one's native language group pervades contemporary politics in more subtle ways as well, for example, in recent debates concerning bilingual education, the politics of sign languages in deaf education, or proposals to make English the national language of the United States. (p. 12577)
The Biblical and historical examples lead them to hypothesize that linguistic differences may be at the root of in-group preferences and conflicts between social groups. And to provide evidence for this hypothesis, they conduct several studies with children under the age of five in which they pit native vs. non-native language speakers in social situations.
The first study, conducted with 5-6 month olds, involved showing the infants video of two adult English speakers, one of which was played forward (normal speech) and one of which was played backwards (reversed speech). After viewing the video, the infants were shown the two speakers next to each other, and their looking times were measured. This is a pretty common measure of infant preference: all things being equal, infants will look longer at the stuff they like the most, so you can measure relative preference by comparing how long an infant looks at two or more things. Kinzler et al.'s infants looked at the normal speech speaker 61% of the time, suggesting that, relative to the reversed speech speaker, they preferred the normal speaker. When the normal and reversed speech were paired with inanimate objects (in a separate experiment with different infants), the infants showed no preference for the object paired with normal speech. This suggests that the results of the first experiment did in fact have a social component: when people are involved, infants prefer people who speak a familiar language, or at least an actual language (reversed English only counts as a language on Black Sabbath albums). To make sure it was their native language, and not just actual language, that influenced infants' preferences, Kinzler et al. conducted a third study pitting English against Spanish with infants from English-speaking homes (5-6 month olds don't have a language, so calling it their native language is a bit misleading), and once again, they preferred their native language (61%).
Their fourth study placed infants in a more obviously social situation. In this case, ten-month olds from English-speaking or French-speaking homes watched videos of individuals speaking English or French. After the speaking videos, the infants saw a video of the two speakers handing them toys, after which the toys were placed on the table in front of the infants. Both the English-speaking and French-speaking infants picked the toy from the speaker who spoke their native language twice as often as they picked the toy from the other speaker.
Finally, Kinzler et al. showed five-year old native English or French-speaking children pairs of photos of other children. Each photo was first shown while a recording of either English or French was played. After they'd seen both photos paired with speech, the children were asked who they'd prefer to be friends with, and on average, both the English and French-speaking children chose the photos paired with their native language on seven out of eight trials.
This last study is unsurprising, of course. Children are unlikely to say they want to be friends with other children whose speech they can't understand, but the infant studies seem to me to be pretty powerful demonstrations of the power of language in distinguishing between individuals, and perhaps social groups, for infants as young as 5 months old. What's most striking about those results, perhaps, is that 5 month old infants don't speak at all, but they're still able to distinguish between "their" native language and other languages, and show a clear preference for people who speak it. Unlike in the case of the five year olds, then, this can't be due to a desire to be around people whom they can understand.
How does this scale up to in-group prejudices and conflict? It's hard to say, though it will be interesting to see further developmental research on the relationship between native language preferences and social preferences. For now, I suppose we'll just have to take this as one more piece of evidence that we should all speak Esperanto.
Read on »
Posted by Chris at 2:48 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 7, 2008
Category: Miscellaneous
More fluff while I grade papers...
While you're giving me your puns (see below), you should also give me your best (slightly) pejorative and (hopefully) funny descriptions of cognitive psychology/science. The two best I've heard, both from the same attention researcher, are:
"Cognitive psychology is just metaphysics with computers."
and
"Cognitive psychology is a bunch of monkeys jumping around trying to grab the high hanging fruit."
Posted by Chris at 3:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
I'll get back to substantive posting in a bit, but as the semester wraps up, I wanted to ask for your help. Over the years, punning has become a more and more integral part of our lab meetings. It's reached the point, in fact, that our P.I. can barely utter a single non-pun sentence, even outside of the lab. On a recent plane trip, he tempted fate by punning with airport security when the refused to let him take his yogurt on the plane, yelling, "These people are discriminating against my culture!" We're also not entirely convinced that he isn't with his wife because she called her ex-husband a "faux-pa," in reference to his parenting.
Yeah, it's that bad.
So, with all these puns flying around, I've decided that it is imperative that we do a study on puns. I'm pretty sure we'll need to do some imaging, too. The thing is, we can't find a lot of actual research on puns (just a bit on cue competition, ambiguity resolution, and suppression, though only in a couple cases is it directly applied to puns). So, my request to you is, a.) do you know of any research outside of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics on puns, and b.) can you give me some puns of your own? Remember, it's all in the name of science, so don't be shy. Give me the worst puns you can possibly conjure.
Posted by Chris at 1:56 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 6, 2008
Category: Miscellaneous
Like 99.8% of the people in psychology departments, I hate teaching statistics, in large part because it's boring as hell, for both the instructors and the students, but also because students have a hell of a time grasping it, and that makes for some really painful interactions. Part of the problem, I think, is that the way we talk about statistics wasn't designed to facilitate undergraduate instruction. And to see this, you need look no further than the concept of statistical significant.
First of all, whose idea was it to refer to it as significance? I mean, the first thing you tell students is that a statistically significant result doesn't mean that the result is significant in any meaningful sense (say, practically), but of course, they never get that, because it's confusing. And as a result, they constantly refer to null results as "insignificant." But they're not "insignificant," or at least, they aren't necessarily so. They might very well be significant -- a null result in a study seeking to find a connection between autism and vaccines, say, could be very significant, especially for those being sued by the families of autistic children. So I tell my students, over and over and over and over and over again, to refer to the results of statistical tests that don't achieve statistical significance as "non-significant." But "non-significant" is not a word anybody uses in any context, ever, except in statistics. So they say, "OK, non-significant not insignificant, got it," and then in every paper and every presentation, they write or say, "Our results were insignificant." Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! Sometimes, you can almost see their brains trying to convince their mouths to say, "non-significant," but their mouths refuse, and "insignificant" comes out. It's just plain frustrating.
Now, I'd be happy to do away with the concept of statistical significance altogether, but I'm not the one who makes these sorts of decisions, so if we have to keep it, and teach it, can we please call it something else? How 'bout, "statistically good enough for me to publish," "statistically better for us than if our p-value had been greater than .05/.01/.001," or "statistically gnarly?" 'Cause this "significance" shit ain't working.
Posted by Chris at 5:36 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 4, 2008
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Then listen to this set of lectures from the 2007 Advanced Neuroimaging Summer School at UCLA.
Posted by Chris at 1:41 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 30, 2008
Category: Blogs and Blogging
Via Dave, I just learned of vision scientist Arthur Shapiro's new blog, Illusion Sciences. Very cool stuff.
Posted by Chris at 11:38 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 19, 2008
April 18, 2008
Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.
