Cognitive Psychology:
Last month, a paper was published in Nature, in which Kay et al(1) were able to guess which of their stimuli a person was seeing by looking at their fMRI scans. The model looked something like this (from Kay et...
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Posted on April 17, 2008 5:40 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
You know, just the other day, on this very blog, I swore I would never read another (cognitive) imaging paper again, but between then and now, I've read 5 of 6, so apparently my oath didn't take. It's sort of...
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Posted on March 20, 2008 4:03 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
OK, so where did this myth that feminists not only believe that there are no differences, across the population, between men and women, but also actively suppress scientific research that inevitably discovers such differences, come from? I mean, has anyone...
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Posted on March 18, 2008 11:31 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I really do love illusions of all sorts, in large part because they fit nicely into my narrative about the fallibility of human thought, but illusions are also great as windows into the ordinary working of our brains. For example,...
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Posted on March 15, 2008 5:00 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the criticisms of most false memory research is that it lacks ecological validity. For example, in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, a common method for inducing false memories in the lab, involves giving participants a bunch of words (e.g.,...
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Posted on February 4, 2008 7:37 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In case you haven't seen it already, there's an article on the embodied cognition "revolution" in the Boston Globe. This, I think, is the best point to take away from it: "I think these findings are really fantastic and it's...
Posted on January 16, 2008 9:29 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a paper in the December 2007 issue of Psychological Science titled "Google and the Mind: Predicting Fluency With PageRank." Here's the abstract: Griffiths, T.L., Steyvers, M., & Firl, A. (2007). Google and the mind: Predicting fluency with PageRank. Psychological...
Posted on January 8, 2008 9:00 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've been posting about moral cognition anytime a new and interesting result pops up for a while now, and every time I think I've said before, though it bears repeating, that every time I read another article on moral cognition,...
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Posted on January 1, 2008 3:29 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a fair amount of evidence that spatial reasoning abilities and spatial attention are an important constituent of secondary math skills (basically everything after basic algebra)(1), and it stands to reason that secondary math skills are an important determinant of...
Posted on October 17, 2007 11:14 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at OmniBrain, Steve has a great summary of a recent article by Thomas and Lleras(1 on embodied cognition/perceptual symbol systems and problem solving. I recommend reading Steve's summary before going on with this post, but in case you're really...
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Posted on September 24, 2007 10:25 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why are so many people convinced that we only use 10% of our brains, or that Eskimos have n words for snow, where n is as high as you need it to be for the desired rhetorical effect? Or more...
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Posted on September 18, 2007 9:31 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Short answer, no. Duh. Long answer, man do I hate how psychology gets reported in the media. If you were surfing around news sites earlier this week, you might have come across something like this: A study in Current Biology...
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Posted on August 25, 2007 11:51 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a really interesting paper by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley in press at the journal Cognition on the subject of lay meta-ethics, and ethical objectivism specifically. That is, the paper explores the question, "How do lay individuals think about...
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Posted on August 16, 2007 8:54 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at one of her other blogospheric homes, Channel N, fellow ScienceBlogger has posted a link to a great talk on modeling qualitative physics by Ken Forbus. It was one of the earliest of the Cognitive Science Society's virtual colloquia,...
Posted on August 9, 2007 11:30 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Long, long ago, during my first summer as a grad student (technically, I wasn't even a student yet), in one of my first meetings with my graduate adviser, he suggested that I think about the problem of representing negation. The...
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Posted on July 4, 2007 10:05 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 on June 30, 2007 9:54 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on June 25, 2007 9:27 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on June 22, 2007 4:12 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 on June 12, 2007 1:04 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 on June 8, 2007 9:05 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A little over a year ago, I wrote a post describing some research showing that there are cognitive barriers to understanding evolution. There I listed three specific factors: Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences...
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Posted on May 28, 2007 9:30 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some of you who are interested in the history of psychology or philosophy of mind might find this paper interesting: Gentner, D., & Grudin, J. (1985). The evolution of mental metaphors in psychology: A 90-year retrospective. American Psychologist, 40(2), 181-192....
Posted on May 17, 2007 9:05 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
File this one in the annals of "huh?" There's been a lot of research over the last decade or so on what only be described as the bizarre implicit priming of social concepts. In a typical experiment, participants are given...
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Posted on May 11, 2007 10:12 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Cool video (via Bill Benzon over at The Valve: A bit more below the fold, but only after you watch the video....
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Posted on May 9, 2007 11:31 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
OK, this research is pretty silly, and quite frankly, I can't imagine what compelled the researchers to undertake it, but because it has to do with something I love, soccer, I feel compelled to blog about it. There this...
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Posted on April 20, 2007 2:34 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have to admit that I've been avoiding the "framing science" discussion that's been going on in the science blogosphere recently, mostly because I'd rather talk about what framing is and how it works than two author's rather vague ideas...
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Posted on April 19, 2007 9:16 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the recent dust up over "framing science," there's been more hand waving than any actual discussion of, you know, framing. However, I was struck by one point that fellow ScienceBlogger Matt Nisbet, one of the authors of the Science...
Posted on April 19, 2007 8:42 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some of you may find this book chapter interesting: Hauer, M.D., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (in press): Reviving Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions. In Moral Psychology and Biology....
Posted on March 27, 2007 12:18 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
When I was an undergrad, my intro psych professor mentioned research in industrial/organizational psychology indicating that the color red causes people to be happier and more productive, while blue makes people sadder and less productive. Later I was taught...
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Posted on March 26, 2007 8:37 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm sure you've all long forgotten about the framing project that I discussed on this blog late last year, but in case someone out there remembers it, I wanted to give you an update. I still want to collect the...
Posted on March 14, 2007 5:03 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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....
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Posted on February 28, 2007 9:29 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on February 9, 2007 9:25 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on February 8, 2007 9:24 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on February 7, 2007 8:36 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on February 6, 2007 7:52 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on February 5, 2007 10:23 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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 on February 2, 2007 6:18 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Last year, I wrote two really long, boring posts about V.S. Ramachandran's ten principles of art. Those principles, mostly drawn from research on vision, included things like peak shift, symmetry, and contrast. It turns out Ramachandran may have missed a...
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Posted on January 20, 2007 9:48 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Originally posted on the old blog on 3/12/2006 My contribution to Darwin Day was pretty weak for a staunch supporter of science. Sure, I think the name is a bad idea, and want to rename it "Evolution Day," or at...
Posted on January 13, 2007 8:25 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm traveling today, so I'm posting something I wrote along time ago instead of offering anything new. This one's from the blogs early days, so I really hadn't gotten used to this blogging thing when I wrote it. Also, in...
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Posted on December 21, 2006 9:51 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm going to be traveling tomorrow, so I'm spending today getting ready. Instead of a long post about research, I thought I'd link you to a paper Stephen E. G. Lea by in press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. For...
Posted on December 20, 2006 9:07 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the more sophisticated theories in embodied cognition is Lawrence Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory (which I've talked about before, here). Starting from the premise that cognition is for action, it argues that concepts are represented in the same...
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Posted on December 19, 2006 10:00 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A friend of mine and I were having a conversation today, and one of us (I don't remember who) brought up a poster that we'd seen at a conference a few years ago. Later, I wondered what had become of...
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Posted on December 18, 2006 9:16 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Congratulations to Pharyngula, winner of the 2006 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog. Congratulations to Bad Astronomy Blog for giving PZ a run for his money, too. I finished last, but given the fact that my traffic is much, much...
Posted on December 16, 2006 11:03 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Speaking of studies that make you go "wow," I recently read a very recent one that really surprised me, and thought I'd describe it here. Memory researchers are famous for coming up with different types of memory, sparking years of...
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Posted on December 16, 2006 9:31 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Yesterday, Steve of OmniBrain asked, "What is the coolest psychology experiment ever?" Feel free to provide your own answer in comments there and/or here. As for me, there are some that I think are really cool for theoretical reasons, but...
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Posted on December 14, 2006 9:09 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the paper I discussed the other day, Atran and Norenzayan argue that one of the most important factors in determining whether a religious narrative is successful is how memorable it is. Easily remembered narratives get passed on, while difficult...
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Posted on December 12, 2006 9:44 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at A Brood Comb, Tanasije Gjorgoski posts a quote from Hegel's Philosophy of Logic that is one of my favorites. I used to use part of it all the time in discussions with people (mostly scientists) who thought...
Posted on December 11, 2006 10:58 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A few days ago, there was an interesting discussion of swear words in the blogosphere (my contribution was a map of Louisiana... don't ask). Like any good cognitive psychologist with obsessive compulsive disorder, upon reading the swear words posts, I...
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Posted on December 9, 2006 9:18 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This was originally posted on the old blog on 1/5/05. I'm reposting it here, with a few editorial ommissions (contextual; references to things from back then that won't make sense here), because of our recent discussion of religion. Hopefully I'll...
Posted on December 8, 2006 8:51 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the more sophisticated theories in embodied cognition is Lawrence Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory. It is, in essence, an updated version of the "ideas as images" position of the British empiricists, and the mental imagery theories of the...
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Posted on December 6, 2006 9:30 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
At some point, terror management theorists are going to attempt to explain everything in the universe with their theory (I suspect we'll see a paper titled "Mortality Salience and the Bose-Einstein Condensate" in the next few years). Since I've already...
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Posted on December 4, 2006 9:02 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Get out your stop watches. Press start, and then answer this question: What day of the week was August 17, 1932? How long did it take you? Oh, the answer is Wednesday, by the way. I cheated, and used a...
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Posted on December 3, 2006 10:24 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Let's step into the wayback machine and talk about some research that even the psychologists among us might not be aware of (I certainly wasn't). It seems that at the turn of the 20th century, many psychologists and psychophysicists (including...
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Posted on December 2, 2006 9:30 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of my near obsessions in cognitive science is the recovered memories debate. Not only has it been one of the most contentious debates in the field over the last 2 decades, but its practical implications are some of the...
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Posted on December 1, 2006 9:00 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on November 29, 2006 8:52 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on November 28, 2006 9:09 AM • 9 Comments •
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.
