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.
February 28, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Here's a nominee for strangest psychology experiment ever, or at least spookiest. Yesterday I talked about the theory that religion, or at least supernatural agent concepts, serve to activate representational concerns, and thus increase prosocial behavior, or decrease selfish behavior....
Posted by Chris at 9:29 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 27, 2007
Category: Miscellaneous
For my aquarium: The picture's from CNN. The caption reads: The Antarctic ice fish is one of many species documented during a 10-week expedition exploring the Antarctic sea floor. Researchers examined marine life and uncovered potentially new species below the...
Posted by Chris at 3:08 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Cognition
If you were hanging around ScienceBlogs yesterday, you probably came across this post at Pharyngula. In it, Dr. Myers links to an article on a study by Bushman et al.1 purporting to show that people are more aggressive after reading...
Posted by Chris at 9:26 AM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 22, 2007
Category: Comparative Psychology
In a comment to the last post, "Korax" mentions a paper published online in Current Biology this week on chimpanzee tool use. The tool use described in this paper is, as far as I can tell, as or more complex...
Posted by Chris at 3:30 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 14, 2007
Category: Comparative Psychology
You've probably already come across this story, but just in case: Oldest chimp tools found in West Africa Apes could have passed down skills for thousands of years. In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools...
Posted by Chris at 9:55 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 9, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Here at Mixing Memory, Just Science week has turned into Mostly Wegner week. But the set of studies I'm going to talk about in this post has received so much attention that I just can't resist. You may have encountered...
Posted by Chris at 9:25 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 8, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Here's something I didn't know1: Approximately 6 in every 100 words are affected by disfluency, including repetitions, corrections, and hesitations such as the fillers um and er. Moreover, the distribution of disfluency is not arbitrary. For example, fillers tend to...
Posted by Chris at 9:24 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 7, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
A while back, I linked to a paper analogically comparing money to drugs. Judging by the comments, those of you who read the paper weren't particularly impressed by it. But if you thought the money-drug analogy was odd, I've got...
Posted by Chris at 8:36 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 6, 2007
Category: Blogs and Blogging
This isn't technically about science, but I wanted to remind everyone that the week of science challenge has begun (as of yesterday), and the Just Science webpage is aggregating the feeds of all the participating blogs. So if you're interested...
Posted by Chris at 1:38 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Have you ever had a meeting, or a brain storming session, that involved a lot of coffee and enthusiasm, with everyone throwing out ideas at a breakneck pace, and quickly becoming convinced of their brilliance? I had just such a...
Posted by Chris at 7:52 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 5, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
There's been a ton of research over the last decade or two on what is often called folk psychology or theory of mind (the latter is a bit theoretically loaded). That research concerns who has the ability to reason about...
Posted by Chris at 10:23 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 2, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my old posts on moral psychology (I'm too lazy to look them up and link them, right now, but if you really want to find them, I'll do...
Posted by Chris at 6:18 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogs and Blogging
Sorry I haven't been posting much lately, but I'm in the process of rolling out a couple new experiments, and the resulting headaches have left me with little time or energy. However, next week, there will be 7 science posts...
Posted by Chris at 1:25 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
