mixingmemory | May 28, 2008After my call for puns, I got some really bad ones, but I think I may have found the worst pun ever, and its a science pun too (via toothpastefordinner.com
Ouch!
mixingmemory | May 19, 2008Got your attention, right? That's the title of a paper by Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli in April's Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Well, the full title is "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds." Here's the abstract:
Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as "one of degree and not of kind" (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological…
mixingmemory | May 16, 2008Interesting (and short) video of a talk by Joshua Klein (via HENRY) on how smart crows are, and how we might use their intelligence:
mixingmemory | May 13, 2008I was asked to post this. Judging by the list of presenters and the topics, it sounds like an interesting conference.
Announcing the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology
June 26-29, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Registration is now open; deadline Thursday, June 5 -- 12:00pm EST
Note that early registration is suggested, as the reserved hotel block is likely to fill quickly. http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/spp/
The 2008 conference will feature presentations by:
George Ainslie, Michael L. Anderson, Louise Antony
Peter Carruthers, Louis Charland, Anjan…
mixingmemory | May 13, 2008There's a paper by Grabe, Ward, and Hyde in this month's issue of Psychological Bulletin that presents a meta-analysis of 77 studies (correlational and experimental) on the relationship between the media's presentation of (overly) thin women and women's body image issues (from the shrink rap). The studies used a host of measures of body image, including measures of things like perceived body shape, anoretic cognition, body dissatisfaction, thin-ideal internalization, restrained eating, "bulimic symptomatology," appearance self-esteem, etc. For the relationship between media presentations of…
mixingmemory | May 9, 2008Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it begins with Judges 12:5-6 as an epigraph. In that passage, group membership is determined by having individuals pronounce a word, and if they can't pronounce it properly, they're killed. Kinzler et al. then provide a host of examples of what we might call linguistic discrimination in their opening paragraph:
The biblical story of Shibboleth speaks of the…
mixingmemory | May 7, 2008More fluff while I grade papers...
While you're giving me your puns (see below), you should also give me your best (slightly) pejorative and (hopefully) funny descriptions of cognitive psychology/science. The two best I've heard, both from the same attention researcher, are:
"Cognitive psychology is just metaphysics with computers."
and
"Cognitive psychology is a bunch of monkeys jumping around trying to grab the high hanging fruit."
mixingmemory | May 7, 2008I'll get back to substantive posting in a bit, but as the semester wraps up, I wanted to ask for your help. Over the years, punning has become a more and more integral part of our lab meetings. It's reached the point, in fact, that our P.I. can barely utter a single non-pun sentence, even outside of the lab. On a recent plane trip, he tempted fate by punning with airport security when the refused to let him take his yogurt on the plane, yelling, "These people are discriminating against my culture!" We're also not entirely convinced that he isn't with his wife because she called her ex-husband…
mixingmemory | May 6, 2008
Like 99.8% of the people in psychology departments, I hate teaching statistics, in large part because it's boring as hell, for both the instructors and the students, but also because students have a hell of a time grasping it, and that makes for some really painful interactions. Part of the problem, I think, is that the way we talk about statistics wasn't designed to facilitate undergraduate instruction. And to see this, you need look no further than the concept of statistical significant.
First of all, whose idea was it to refer to it as significance? I mean, the first thing you tell…
mixingmemory | May 4, 2008Then listen to this set of lectures from the 2007 Advanced Neuroimaging Summer School at UCLA.
mixingmemory | April 30, 2008Via Dave, I just learned of vision scientist Arthur Shapiro's new blog, Illusion Sciences. Very cool stuff.
mixingmemory | April 19, 2008I can't seem to stop listening to Music from the Big Pink, so now you have to listen to it too:
mixingmemory | April 18, 2008There's a pretty good review of the literature on repression, a central concept in the pyschoanalytic tradition, and an important one in many court cases these days, in the current issue of The Review of General Psychology (via Mind Hacks). If you have a subscription, or access to a library with one, you can read the article here. Here's the abstract:
Does Repression Exist? Memory, Pathogenic, Unconscious and Clinical Evidence, Yacov Rofé
The current dispute regarding the existence of repression has mainly focused on whether people remember or forget trauma. Repression, however, is a…
mixingmemory | April 17, 2008Last 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 al's Figure 1, p. 352):
The image the participant is seeing is on the left, the numbers in the middle represent receptive fields, and the predicted brain activity is on the right. Just compare the predicted brain activity for each image to actual brain activity, and whichever matches the best is the image the person was viewing when they produced that brain activity. Simple, right?…
mixingmemory | April 14, 2008Zombies have invaded the philosophy blogosphere, and Brandon of Siris, in providing links to all the other stuff, made some pretty strong claims that I was hoping he'd expand upon. And fortunately he has, in a follow up post that's a must-read for those who are interested in this sort of thing. The post is here. Here's an excerpt:
The zombie argument gets its plausibility not from anything about the argument itself but from a variety of positions pre-argument that give it an antecedent probability. The best thing to do is not to play the zombie game at all; where argument is needed, attack…
mixingmemory | March 29, 2008You can see Josh Knobe, of Experimental Philosophy fame, and Paul Bloom, who doesn't have a blog but has one of them professorship things up at some podunk little school in New Haven, CT, talking about research in moral psychology here.
mixingmemory | March 25, 2008Just to show that there are no hard feelings between behaviorists and cognitive psychologists, we've created an R-W t-shirt:
Here's the back:
I don't know about you, but I think this t-shirt would be great for dates, parties, rock concerts, and weddings.
mixingmemory | March 24, 2008It would be a horrible cliché to begin a post about the reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory with a Proust quote, so instead I'll begin with something only slightly less cliché: beginning something about memory by talking about my own experience. You see, I'm southern, as anyone who's ever heard me pronounce the words "pen" and "pin" exactly the same, or refer to any soft drink as a "coke," can attest. In the south, it's not uncommon to find people sitting around a grill, or a kitchen table, or pretty much anything you can sit around, participating in what might be described as…
mixingmemory | March 21, 2008Recently, I saw a famous learning theorist -- perhaps one of the two most influential learning theorists in the last 40 or so years; if ΔV = αβ(λ - ΣV) means anything to you, you'll have narrowed it down to the two -- give a talk at the behavioral neuroscience area's weekly colloqium here. The talk, on extinction, was interesting I suppose, but what really caught my attention was the speaker's language. At some point, I had to look around to make sure I wasn't at a Watson talk, circa 1915, because he kept saying things that I'd thought, well, people didn't say anymore. For example, twice…