mixingmemory
Posts by this author
December 6, 2007
Recently, several social psychologists have posited a "Whodunit" system in the brain that's always looking to assign authorship -- either our own or somebody else's -- to actions. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to tell when we've done something, because we have all sorts of signals coming from…
December 5, 2007
The reading group has been showing signs of activity, if not real activity, over the last few days, and I've also gotten a few emails recently suggesting that I start it back up again. So I thought I'd toss the idea out there, and see how many people might be interested.
If we decide to do it,…
November 30, 2007
I've been busy as hell, so I haven't had much time or energy to post anything lately. But I had an idea today that I thought I'd try out. There are a bunch of experiments that I really like for various reasons, and because I really like them and have described them so many times, I can write ten…
November 19, 2007
I frequently hear people imply, if they don't state directly, that two working eyes are required for depth perception. This is surprising because with a moment's reflection, it's easy to see that there are depth cues that don't require both eyes. In fact, out of the many, many cues to depth that…
November 12, 2007
Oh Dear God! See the The Neurocritic, or Thomas at BRAINETHICS, or better still, look away and pretend this never happened.
November 9, 2007
Cool Stuff:
And right now, I'm doing some stuff with motion aftereffects, so I've been looking for them all over. This one rocks (it's even better if you watch it in full screen mode):
November 4, 2007
So there's a Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper in press on the cognitive differences between human and nonhuman animals that is related, in some ways, to my own work (it even cites me twice... yay, the citation count for that paper just jumped to, like, 4). The paper is sure to be controversial…
October 21, 2007
Belief in Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says.
(Cartoon from here. And yes, French was spoken in the EEA.)
In related news, a new study has determined that "cognitive linguistics" is just a metaphor for the way the mind actually works.
October 20, 2007
From Anstis & Casco, 2006, Movie 1, p. 1088
OK, here's a really, really cool illusion published last year, and that I learned about only recently. To see it, go to Stuart Anstis' page here, watch the first movie only, and then come back here.
You should have seen two flies moving in circles…
October 17, 2007
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 success in math-heavy…
Women in Math, Science, and Engineering: Is It About the Numbers (And Not the Ones You Might Think)?
October 15, 2007
The uproar surrounding Larry Summers' remarks on women in science and engineering, made almost three years ago (man, I'm getting old!) has died down, but the literature on social/environmental factors responsible, at least in part, for the large gender disparities in math-heavy fields continues to…
October 15, 2007
Offered without comment (and sorry, only available with subscription; maybe I'll say something more about it later), except to say, why the hell am I not doing stuff with video games?
Bartlett, C.P., Harrisa, R.J., & Brueya, C. (In Press). The effect of the amount of blood in a violent video…
October 7, 2007
At some point recently (I'm not sure exactly when, but in the last 2 weeks), Mixing Memory received its 500,000th visit. That's, like, a lot. A whole lot. I don't think I imagined getting even 5,000 when I started this thing, much less half a million. All I can say is thank you, for visiting,…
October 6, 2007
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that I'm fascinated by findings that show just how little we know about ourselves. Most of what's going on in our heads occurs below the level of awareness, and behind the often impenetrable barrier of the unconscious. Often when we're…
October 3, 2007
I am deathly afraid of brown recluses like the one in the picture, the nasty little bugger. I never put on a pair of jeans without shaking them first, 'cause they like warm, dark places (and I know someone who was bitten by one hiding in her jeans), and when I recently found one in my medicine…
October 2, 2007
These pictures aren't my own, but they're of the weird things I've seen lately.
Coal Skink
White Grackle
This one was hanging out with about 5,000 (I shit you not) grackles of the normal black variety, so it stuck out like a sore thumb. And having been around grackles all my life, I'd never…
October 1, 2007
Go over to OmniBrain, read about Donors Choose, and if you like what they're doing, give 'em some money.
September 29, 2007
I know there are a few psychologists out there lurking around. This post is for you. I thought it might be interesting for some of you (all of you? any of you? hello, is this thing on?) to write a little bit about what you do as psychologists. That is, what you're researching, how you study it,…
September 28, 2007
This video is too cool not to post. Every commenter who knows why this happens, and can explain it, gets a cookie*.
If no one chimes in, and you're curious about how this works, let me know and I'll explain it in a future post.
UPDATE: Man, you folks are smart. You all get cookies. Well, all of…
September 24, 2007
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 lazy, here's the abstract:
Grant and Spivey (…
September 19, 2007
Everybody knows the Margaret Thatcher Illusion. If you've forgotten about it, here's the best example I've found (from Schwaninger et al.1)
Both the top and bottom pairs are the same photos, but they look very different depending on whether they're upright or inverted. In the top pair (the…
September 18, 2007
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 seriously, why have some people, particularly Fox News viewers (no, really), persistently believed in Saddam…
September 10, 2007
Reading an article in the LA Times today, I learned something exciting: political differences in thought happen in the brain. At least that's what a new study published in Nature Neuroscience(1) purports to show, though I hear that the next issue of the journal will contain critical responses from…
August 31, 2007
And am I the only one who thinks that's a funny question?
Real posts to come when I have two spare moments.
August 25, 2007
First, Seed is hosting a 500,000th Comment Contest, with a trip to "the greatest science city in the world," which you can vote on here. So be sure to vote and then comment a lot, preferably here at Mixing Memory.
Second, via Advances in the History of Psychology, I learned of an article in…
August 25, 2007
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 reports some of the first conclusive evidence in support of the long-held…
August 23, 2007
Macht makes a good point, in noting that pro-science bloggers, who are quick to jump on any religious or Republican affront to science, have for the most part ignored the Michael Bailey case, largely, I suspect, because most of the pro-science bloggers are more anti-religion and anti-Republican…
August 17, 2007
Crows are smart. Really smart. But just how smart are they? Studying non-human primates, particularly gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees, researchers have shown that they're capable of what's called meta-tool use, or using one tool with another tool (I've mostly seen it defined as using one tool…
August 16, 2007
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 the objectivity of their ethical beliefs…