An entrée of Cognitive Science with an occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about.
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.
The lovely banners were created by Anton Oetll and Todd Hartman.
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
The Mixing Memory Reading Group is a place for experts and non-experts alike to discuss books and papers in cognitive science.
July 23, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
There are a few topics in cognitive science that are like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I find the very mention of them irritating, and the irritation can stick in my craw for days. At or near the top...
Posted by Chris at 1:43 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 21, 2006
Category: Philosophy
From what I know of Graham Priest, he's an interesting philosopher. I read his book on intentionality, Towards Non-Being a few months ago, and enjoyed it, and I read his Introduction to Non-Classical Logic a few years ago, and have...
Posted by Chris at 10:52 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Frame Analysis
Those of you interested in this whole frame analysis thing, or in George Lakoff's new cult of personality, might find his blog interview at Emboldened. I'm planning on writing a post about Lakoff when my computer access is more consistent,...
Posted by Chris at 9:41 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 20, 2006
Category: Blogs and Blogging
That's it for the republishing of the old posts, for now at least. If you read the posts on art and/or metaphor, I hope you enjoyed them, and maybe even learned something. For administrative purposes, I'm including links to all...
Posted by Chris at 4:10 PM • 0 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
[First posted on 11/03/04 at the old blog.] In the final installment of Mixing Memory's metaphor series (for now -- at some later date I'll get to novel vs. dead metaphors), I try to use the empirical data to distinguish...
Posted by Chris at 9:20 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 19, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
[First published on 2/4/05 at the old blog.] If you've read my two previous posts on Ramachandran's principles of art (here and here), you've probably got a good idea of what Ramachandran's concept of beauty is. While his 10 principles...
Posted by Chris at 8:29 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 18, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
[First posted on 11/1/04 at the old blog.] I have heard that there is an election today, and I've heard that it's going to be close and contentious, but I don't care. Here at Mixing Memory, we're only worried about...
Posted by Chris at 9:17 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 17, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
[First published on 1/22/05 at the old blog.] Recall V.S. Ramachandran's 10 principles of art. Peak shift Perceptual Grouping and Binding Contrast Isolation Perceptual problem solving Symmetry Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint Repetition, rhythm and orderliness Balance Metaphor In the last...
Posted by Chris at 9:21 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 16, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
[First posted on 11/1/04 at the old blog.] Onward we go to the first contemporary view of metaphor, structure mapping theory. Before I start, though, I want to clear something up. Perhaps no one has actually been confused, but I'm...
Posted by Chris at 10:42 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 15, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
[First published on 1/20/05 at the old blog.] As a starting point for the attempt to discover universals in art based on our knowledge of neuroscience, and visual neuroscience in particular, V.S. Ramachandran has proposed ten principles of art (eight...
Posted by Chris at 8:34 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 14, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
[First posted on 10/31/04 at the old blog] From Aristotle through speech act theories, metaphor had been viewed as a secondary type of language, built on literal speech which is, in turn, the true nature of language. However, since the...
Posted by Chris at 9:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 13, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
[First posted on 1/20/05 at the old blog] With all the controversy surrounding the issues in my last few posts, I thought it would be refreshing to talk about something completely uncontroversial: the existence of universals in art based on...
Posted by Chris at 10:00 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogs and Blogging
I'm going to have only sporadic computer access for the next several days, so I won't have time to do much new posting. So I'm going to just copy and paste some of the more popular posts from the old...
Posted by Chris at 8:06 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 12, 2006
Category: Social Cognition
A couple weeks ago, a couple Science Bloggers, sparked by Jessica of Feministing, discussed the potential dangers of discovering the biological causes of homosexuality. Jessica expressed a common attitude in her post, writing: And naturally the larger question with all...
Posted by Chris at 9:07 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 11, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Theory of mind, or how we think about what's going on in other people's heads, continues to be one of the hottest topics in cognitive science today. A debate continues to rage over whether we reason about other people's thoughts...
Posted by Chris at 7:47 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 10, 2006
Category: Social Cognition
It's been obvious to everyone who's written about politics since Aristotle that emotion plays an important role in political rhetoric and political judgment. With an increased focus on emotion in cognitive scientists, there has been a flourish of empirical work...
Posted by Chris at 8:29 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 9, 2006
Category: Link Posts
The second edition of The Synapse is up over at A Block Around the Clock. I especially liked "Are You Conscious of Your Precuneous" and Ethics at the Dawn of the Neurotechnological Age." Elsewhere, John Hawks tackles Aymara, "the future...
Posted by Chris at 5:15 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
Wow, what a really bad cup this year. I mean, I was rooting for Italy after the U.S. was eliminated, but ending on penalty kicks? That just sucks. Combine that with all the other games that either ended on penalty...
Posted by Chris at 5:05 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 8, 2006
Category: Visual Illusions
This week's visual illusion is related to Mach bands, and similar in some ways to the watercolor effect. It's called the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet effect (or just the Cornsweet effect)1. This is the best example I've ever seen (from here): What you...
Posted by Chris at 10:38 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 7, 2006
Category: Social Cognition
The Westen et al. study on the motivated reasoning of political partisons has made its way back into the blogosphere, first with Will Wilkerson, and now fellow Science Blogger Ed Brayton. I posted on the study, and hot cognition/motivated reasoning...
Posted by Chris at 8:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
If you're looking for a good way to waste some time, try this (via Bitch Ph.D.). Here is a piece created by my 8-year old Pollock (aka Darth Vader):...
Posted by Chris at 12:38 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 6, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
If you found yesterday's post on perceptual symbol systems and related theories interesting, you might like this paper by Edouard Machery that is in press at Cognition. The paper is titled "Concept Empiricism: A Methodological Critique." The critique is aimed...
Posted by Chris at 4:11 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 5, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Throughout the brief history of cognitive science, debates over the nature of knowledge representation have raged. In the 1970s, the debate was between those who thought that knowledge was represented as images -- modal, or sensory representations -- and those...
Posted by Chris at 9:01 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 4, 2006
Category: Social Cognition
It's not uncommon these days to hear someone on the right side of the political spectrum refer to people on the left side as "America haters." It's a nice way to dismiss any criticism of the United States' policies or...
Posted by Chris at 6:22 PM • 12 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
July 3, 2006
Category: Cognitive Science News
The first edition of the new neuroscience carnival Encephalon is now up at The Neurophilosopher's Blog, here. There are several good posts, and I actually learned a bit from some of them. I have to admit, though, that I'm particularly...
Posted by Chris at 5:20 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Back in May, a study by Mitchell, Macrae, and Banaji (of Implicit Association Test fame) was published in Neuron that made the following claim (from the abstract): We observed a double dissociation such that mentalizing about a similar other engaged...
Posted by Chris at 10:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Science News
Over at Gene Expression, "Darth Quixote's" (George Menard's rewriting of Cervantes? That's a bad joke, isn't it?) 10-question interview with Steven Pinker was posted today. You can read it here. The questions are pretty good, for the most part, and...
Posted by Chris at 2:46 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 2, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
It would be fair to say that I am obsessed with all things related to the first world war. I would be neglecting my own obsession, then, if I didn't mark the 90th anniversary of the start of the...
Posted by Chris at 5:49 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
July 1, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
OK, this is goofy, but I was tired and bored, so I started playing around with "The Advertising Slogan Generator" (via Pharyngula) You put a word or phrase in, and it sticks it in classic advertising slogans. I used "cognition,"...
Posted by Chris at 7:06 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Research & Theory
The literature on robot navigation is huge, and summarizing it would be difficult, if not impossible, but I thought I'd provide a few examples of papers you can read on robots that utilize ant-like navigational mechanisms. Franz, M.O., Schölkof, B.,...
Posted by Chris at 2:13 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Visual Illusions
Discovered in the 1860s by Ernst Mach (hence the name), Mach Bands are actually a set of interrelated phenomena. Take a look at this image: From here The individual bands should appear as gradients, and they may even appear to...
Posted by Chris at 8:20 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
