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.
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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.
November 29, 2006
Category: Philosophy
In a comment at the end of the Religion and Science post, Brandon of Siris mentions Peter King as a source for discussions of Anselm's ontological argument. If you're interested, here's a link to his encyclopedia entry on Anselm, and...
Posted by Chris at 3:22 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Originally posted on the old blog on 3/8/2005, and reposted here out of laziness. The Importance of Names What's in a name, for a concept I mean? Cognitive psychologists studying concepts and categorization have, notby and large, treated concept names...
Posted by Chris at 8:52 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 28, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
According to many theories of embodied cognition (particularly type 5), perception is designed to facilitate bodily action, and therefore perception and movement are deeply connected. Much of the evidence for this position comes from research on the relationship between attitudes...
Posted by Chris at 9:09 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 27, 2006
Category: Philosophy
One more short post before we return to your regularly scheduled long-winded cog sci stuff. Greece vs. Germany on the soccer field. Enjoy....
Posted by Chris at 9:41 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogs and Blogging
I stumbled upon a paper on using blogs in education, with a focus on small colleges, and I thought it might be of interest to some of you. Here's the blog post with a link to the paper....
Posted by Chris at 5:49 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Those of you interested in embodied cognition, and issues of knowledge representation, should find this paper interesting: Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9(4), 625-636. Abstract The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that...
Posted by Chris at 11:14 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves,...
Posted by Chris at 9:06 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 26, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
You've probably all heard about the Beyond Belief series, in which scientists give talks about the conflict between science and religion, as well as the science of religion. I've only watched the cognitive scientists (and Dawkins, for reasons I'll mention...
Posted by Chris at 9:12 AM • 60 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 24, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Originally posted on the old blog on 4/3/05. Self-Perpetuating Paradigms: How Scientists Deal With Unexpected Results Previously, I discussed Kevin Dunbar's research on the use of . However, Dunbar is better known in cognitive psychology for his in vivo work...
Posted by Chris at 9:58 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 23, 2006
Category: Social Cognition
One of the more popular theories of emotion during the 60s and 70s was Schachter and Singer's two-factor theory1. The theory is pretty simple. As the name suggests, it states that emotions have two components: arousal and a cognitive component...
Posted by Chris at 9:46 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 22, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
We all know that there are gender differences in neuroanatomy, as well as in some cognitive tasks (females tend to do better on memory and verbal tasks, men on spatial tasks) and both cognitive and emotional development, though it's not...
Posted by Chris at 9:33 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogs and Blogging
Hello everyone. Since the traffic's been up lately, meaning there are probably a lot of new people around, I thought I'd ask for any suggestions or requests you might have. Also, if you're wondering about the framing project, it's still...
Posted by Chris at 7:20 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 21, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
Coolest toy ever: Via the Social Science Statistics Blog....
Posted by Chris at 4:26 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Research on cultural differences between East Asians (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese in most studies) and Western Europeans/Americans (mostly Americans) have shown, among other things, that westerners tend to reason analytically, while East Asians tend to reason more holistically. This means,...
Posted by Chris at 9:55 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 20, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
The study of the influence of emotion on cognition and perception has really taken off over the last decade or so, which is a good thing, because cognitive psychologists pretty much ignored emotion for a long time, so we have...
Posted by Chris at 9:34 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 19, 2006
Category: Philosophy
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post on the unification of psychology, in which I addressed (rather critically) a paper by Gregg Henriques. Dr. Henriques was kind of enough to reply in comments, and because it's a two-week old...
Posted by Chris at 10:22 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 18, 2006
Category: Visual Illusions
One of my favorite perceptual illusions isn't actually visual. It's often called the "cutaneous rabbit" illusion1, for reasons that will be apparent in a moment. I stumbled across it when reading a paper by Dennett and Kinsbourne2. Here's their description...
Posted by Chris at 6:40 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Some of you might be interested in this short article from the February 2006 issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Lombrozo, T., Shtulman, A., & Weisberg, M. (2006) The Intelligent Design controversy: lessons from psychology and education. Trends in Cognitive...
Posted by Chris at 9:06 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 16, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
There's nothing like having a curious child to make you aware of just how little you actually know about the world. Often (more often than I'd like to admit), my son (Darth Vader over there on the left) will ask...
Posted by Chris at 9:59 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 14, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
For several years, researchers have been contrasting human-human and human-computer interactions in order go gain more insight into theory of mind. The assumption is that people don't treat computers like, well, people. It's not a totally unfounded assumption, either. In...
Posted by Chris at 9:25 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 13, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Originally posted on the old blog on 1/4/2005. Reposted here out of laziness. Do Children Attribute False Beliefs to God? Humans are fallible. This is a fact that most adults understand. God, on the other hand, is not, by definition...
Posted by Chris at 9:51 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan. I still look upon the time I saw them live in 1994 as a religious experience. Unlike many Floyd fans my age, though, I prefer their early albums to their later ones (up to...
Posted by Chris at 8:38 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 11, 2006
Category: Research & Theory
The stuff in this post at the Social Science Statistics Blog is seriously cool. Data representation in faces (in the post, the data represented is baseball stats -- go Braves!). From the post: Chernoff faces are a method introduced by...
Posted by Chris at 12:54 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Visual Illusions
In keeping with the theme of illusions that result from crossmodal interactions, this week's illusion is the ventriloquism effect, first reported by Howard and Tempelton in 1966. As you can probably tell from the name, the ventriloquism effect involves...
Posted by Chris at 9:30 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Earlier today I posted about the spatial and temporal ventriloquism aftereffects. One of the reasons I find those effects fascinating because I think they might hint at a counterargument to recent studies by Daniel Casasanto and Lera Boroditsky that seem...
Posted by Chris at 7:44 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 10, 2006
Category: Social Cognition
Anytime I hear songs from when I was in high school or college, I get very nostalgic. I remember people I knew, places I went, good times I had. It's a powerful and complex feeling, with all sorts of interesting...
Posted by Chris at 1:24 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
There's an interesting statistical comparison between the 1994 Republican victory and the 2006 Democratic victory at the Columbia stats blog. From the post: The Democrats' victory in the 2006 election has been compared to the Republicans' in 2004. But the...
Posted by Chris at 8:20 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 9, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
The last post on time-space metaphor research has sparked a really interesting discussion in the comments (go check it out), so I thought I'd talk about some more research to see if we can't get even more people talking. If...
Posted by Chris at 9:54 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 8, 2006
Category: Cognitive Psychology
It's time for another reposting of something I wrote on the old blog. Laziness reigns again. This is a post on research on political analogies, originally posted on March 29, 2005. If it looks like it's starting in the middle,...
Posted by Chris at 10:01 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 7, 2006
Category: Comparative Psychology
By now you've probably all heard about the paper published by Plotnik, de Waal, and Reiss in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late October titled "Self-recognition in an Asian elephant." I suspect that for people who...
Posted by Chris at 10:34 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
As I've said before, the primary (if not the only) real experimental evidence for conceptual metaphor theory -- the theory that abstract concepts are structured by more concrete (i.e., closer to sensory/perceptual) concepts -- comes from one domain: time. Time,...
Posted by Chris at 7:17 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 6, 2006
Category: Frame Analysis
You know things have taken a turn for the surreal when George Lakoff is described as "an admirer of Noam Chomsky." I may dislike his linguistics and his political theory, but I have to pat him on the back for...
Posted by Chris at 5:29 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 5, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Over at The Neurocritic, there's a great post on an imaging study that contrasted singing and speaking in tongues in five religious women. That reminded me of a paper I had read a couple months ago by one of the...
Posted by Chris at 10:10 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 4, 2006
Category: Visual Illusions
Last week, I talked about the sound-induced flash illusion, in which presenting a single flash with two or more auditory beeps caused people to see two or more flashes. This week, a study showing that the same effect can be...
Posted by Chris at 10:08 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2006
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Well, not exactly, but I'll get to that in a minute. I read this paper last night, and afterwards, when I was looking around one of the author's pages, I came across a neuroimaging study designed to look for "pre-existing...
Posted by Chris at 2:14 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
I promised some further posts on the topic of metaphor, and on the conventionalization of metaphor in particular, but in order to get to that, we need to get some things out of the way first. Let's start with polysemy....
Posted by Chris at 9:51 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 2, 2006
Category: Cognitive Linguistics
Raymond Gibbs Jr., psycholinguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the principle adherents of cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory, was kind enough to leave a comment at the post "Idioms, Metaphors, and Lakoff, Oh My!." Dr....
Posted by Chris at 6:02 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy
What is psychology? If you were asked to define it, could you? In the 12 years that I've been studying psychology, I've been asked no more than 5 times what psychology is, and each time, I struggled and ultimately failed...
Posted by Chris at 8:04 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 1, 2006
Category: Philosophy
I had a birthday recently, and my parents went shopping in an antique and rare book store, and got me the two volumes of Brand Blanshard's The Nature of Thought. I immediately read through the first book on perception, and...
Posted by Chris at 1:08 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Sometimes I forget that not everyone who happens upon this blog today has been reading it from day one (I mean come on, why haven't you?). It surprises me, then, when people tell me they've seen no evidence that George...
Posted by Chris at 10:04 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
