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.
June 30, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Ah, yes, a real game (kidding, Scrabble people). If you've watched many baseball games or baseball movies, you know that one of the things that makes for a successful hitter is the ability to predict what the next pitch will...
Posted by Chris at 9:54 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 29, 2007
Category: Politics
I know I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. Anyone who reads the fundamentalist atheist blogs (you know, like the biggest blog on ScienceBlogs) knows that these people have a lot of passion and energy. They...
Posted by Chris at 6:15 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Statistics
So here's the first post on statistics. If you know the basics, and I suspect most of you do, then you can just ignore these posts (unless you want to check to make sure I'm getting it right). If you...
Posted by Chris at 10:44 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 28, 2007
I kid you not: Halpern, D.F., & Wai, J. (2007). The world of competitive Scrabble: Novice and expert differences in visuospatial and verbal vbilities. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(2), 79-94. Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr...
Posted by Chris at 3:56 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogs and Blogging
So the other day, I was talking to someone about one of the studies I was planning on posting about. I mentioned one of the results, and he said he'd really like to see the means and standard deviations. I...
Posted by Chris at 2:07 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2007
Category: Cognitive Development
It's now clear that by age 3, children have a pretty sophisticated theory of mind, which includes an understanding of the limits of the causal powers of thought. They know that thoughts cause behaviors and other thoughts, but they're also...
Posted by Chris at 9:03 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 25, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
Picture in your head one person throwing a ball to another. How were the two people oriented spatially? Was one on the left, and the other on the right? If so, which one was on the left, and which on...
Posted by Chris at 9:27 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 24, 2007
Category: Miscellaneous
Jonathan Rowe, over at Positive Liberty, posted a link to Ophelia from The Last Waltz. Because I've been a fan of The Band since I was a little kid, I'm upping the ante, with "Carivan" with Van, the Man, who...
Posted by Chris at 3:00 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2007
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
All of you are probably familiar with color opponency, but just in case, I'll give you a quick refresher. I'll even start with the history. In the 19th century, there were two competing theories of color vision. The first was...
Posted by Chris at 4:12 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 18, 2007
Category: Cognitive Linguistics
In his comment to my post on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), reposted here, Dr. Gibbs writes: The topic of why conceptual metaphor theory arouses such vehemence is one that greatly interests me and is again the subject of my in...
Posted by Chris at 5:11 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Linguistics
In the previous entry, I made some disparaging remarks about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), and George Lakoff specifically. I also noted that, in my experience,, the psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs, Jr. is the only one in the cognitive linguistics who seriously...
Posted by Chris at 3:59 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 17, 2007
Category: Cognitive Linguistics
In case you haven't heard about it, there's a relatively new blog in the cognitive science section of the blog world called Cognitive Approaches to Literature. They don't post very often over there, but if they ever start doing so,...
Posted by Chris at 7:11 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 16, 2007
Category: Philosophy
First, an obituary by his friend, Jürgen Habermas. It begins with a story of Rorty making light of the illness that ultimately killed him: After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have...
Posted by Chris at 10:53 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 12, 2007
Those of you who are interested in Michael Tomasello's work as a follow up to his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition may be interested in his new paper with Malinda Carpenter and Ulf Liszkowski, "A New Look at...
Posted by Chris at 1:04 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 9, 2007
Category: Philosophy
I just learned that Richard Rorty died Friday. I was a big fan of his work as an undergrad, and at that time both Consequences of Pragmatism and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity had a big influence on my thinking....
Posted by Chris at 11:59 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 8, 2007
Category: Cognitive Psychology
About a year ago, there was an article in Seed Magazine titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain," in which Paul Bloom argued that people are too easily seduced by neuroscience, believing that it made for good science,...
Posted by Chris at 9:05 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 6, 2007
Category: Social Cognition
Originally posted on the old blog on 4/5/06, and reposted here and now out of laziness. It's easy to see why research on motivated political reasoning/cognition has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosophere lately. It fits nicely with...
Posted by Chris at 9:11 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 5, 2007
Category: Comparative Psychology
Over the last couple decades there's been a pretty heated debate about which, if any, nonhuman animals possess a "theory of mind," that is, the ability to think about what others are thinking. Much of the research bearing on...
Posted by Chris at 8:41 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 4, 2007
Category: Miscellaneous
I've always really liked this song, but I've never understood a single word of it. Fortunately, some guy figured them all out for me: These are apparently the actual lyrics, but how would you know?...
Posted by Chris at 2:29 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
