mixingmemory | December 6, 2006One 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 seventies1. The basics of the theory are really quite simple. Here's a short description from the abstract of the paper linked above:
During perceptual experience, association areas in the brain capture bottom-up patterns of activation in sensory-motor areas. Later, in a top-down manner, association areas partially reactivate sensory-motor…
mixingmemory | December 5, 2006It seems that Mixing Memory is a finalist for best science blog in the 2006 Weblog Awards. I'm not sure how they decide on finalists (whoever gets nominated, I guess), but it's cool anyway. Several other ScienceBlogs were nominated as well, including Pharyngula (i.e., the winner), Deltoid, and Good Math, Bad Math, along with Respectful Insolence and The Cheerful Oncologist in the best medical/health issues blog category. In the science category, non-SBers, but Mixing Memory favorites John Hawks and RealClimate were also nominated. I'm torn between voting for RealClimate and Hawks, because…
mixingmemory | December 5, 2006I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who's participated in the discussion in the previous post, and to anyone who adds to that discussion. I may disagree with you, and you with me, and we may even do so pretty vehemently, but I've been impressed with the level of the discussion (a rarity, in the blogosphere, especially on a topic as heated as religion), and I'm grateful for all of the insightful points people have made (even those on the other side).
mixingmemory | December 5, 2006PZ Myers on religion in general, and not just fundamentalism. I think this will be my last post on the topic for a while (I can hear your cheers), because Dr. Myers has shown the ignorance and bias in the "Churchill" position so well that I don't need to add anything else.
"Nuance"? Sweet jebus, where is the nuance in religion and superstition and piety that we're supposed to defend?
I keep hearing these claims that religion is really far more nuanced and sophisticated and clever than we give it credit for, but seriously, every time I turn around and look at the actual practice of the silly…
mixingmemory | December 5, 2006I posted these long ago on the old blog, but I was reading Studies in Pessimism, and when I came across them, I decided to post them again. The parables are all from the last chapter of the book. At the end is one of his "Psychological Observations," which is from the fifth chapter.
A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered…
mixingmemory | December 4, 2006It seems some people are having trouble wrapping their minds around what it means to be a Neville Chamberlain atheist, while other people are just making up any definition they can to make anyone who's not a hyper-scientistic Dawkinsian look bad. Recall that I think the Chamberlain-Churchill distinction is b.s., but since fundamentalists of any sort, including fundamentalist atheists, have a tendency to see things as "either-or," with the eithers and the ors defined by the fundamentalists themselves, it doesn't look like the Chamberlain label is going away anytime soon. So I thought I'd write…
mixingmemory | December 4, 2006At 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 talked about terror management theory work on religion, politics, and aesthetics (here and here), I suppose the next place to go is obvious: sex. And while we're at it, we might as well throw in women, children, and the body.
If you're new to the terror management discussion, terror management theory (TMT from now on) is quite simple. It says…
mixingmemory | December 3, 2006Since there's a discussion of profanity out there in the blogosophere, I feel justified in asking the following question:
Is it just me, or does Louisiana look like it's giving the bird to the Caribbean?
Maybe Plaquemines is the Cajun way of saying "va te faire foutre."
Oh, I should connect this to cognitive science. Umm... is my tendency to see obscene gestures in geography related to other people's tendency to see religious icons in, say, pastries?
mixingmemory | December 3, 2006Get 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 calculator, because I'm not very good at calendrical calculations, but some people, usually of relatively low overall intelligence, can calculate the day of the week for any date from the 20th or 21st century in fewer than three seconds (dates from other centuries take longer, with times increasing with distance from the present, especially for dates in the future)1. Over the last few years,…
mixingmemory | December 2, 2006Let'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 the father of psychophysics, Gustave Fechner) were interested in aesthetics. Out of this interest came the idea, inspired by the work of Helmholtz and others, that geometrical figures had a certain "energy," which influenced the subjective quality of their combinations. For some reason, this idea reminded one psychologist, E. Bullough1, of what he…
mixingmemory | December 1, 2006One 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 most profound. There are people in jail right now largely as a result of recovered memory testimony, and some of them will be there for a long time. On the legal side, the important issue is how accurate recovered memories are, and to date, the best we can do is say that in some cases they probably are, while in others they probably aren't. We don't really have a good way…
mixingmemory | November 29, 2006In a comment at the end of the Religion and Science post, Brandon of Siris mentions Peter King as a source for discussions of Anselm's ontological argument. If you're interested, here's a link to his encyclopedia entry on Anselm, and this paper discusses the logic of the argument in more detail.
Readers of this blog might find some other papers by King more interesting, though. He's written pretty extensively on medieval philosophy of mind and language. Since we've already mentioned Anselm, you can start with his paper "Anselm's Philosophy of Language." After that, you should check out "…
mixingmemory | November 29, 2006Originally 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 (often called "category labels") as just another kind of feature. I'm not sure there's really been any good reason to do this, other than the fact that the models of categorization that have been most prominent over the years haven't had straightforward ways for dealing with labels as anything other than features. Treating names as just another…
mixingmemory | November 28, 2006According 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 and movements. For example, Cacioppo, Priester, and Berntson1 showed that if people were presented with objects while they moved their arm in a way that mimicked pulling something towards them (an approach movement), they liked them more than if those same objects were presented while they moved their arm as though…
mixingmemory | November 27, 2006One more short post before we return to your regularly scheduled long-winded cog sci stuff. Greece vs. Germany on the soccer field. Enjoy.
mixingmemory | November 27, 2006I stumbled upon a paper on using blogs in education, with a focus on small colleges, and I thought it might be of interest to some of you. Here's the blog post with a link to the paper.
mixingmemory | November 27, 2006Those of you interested in embodied cognition, and issues of knowledge representation, should find this paper interesting:
Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9(4), 625-636.
Abstract
The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: (1) cognition is situated; (2) cognition is time-…
mixingmemory | November 27, 2006I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great…
mixingmemory | November 26, 2006You've probably all heard about the Beyond Belief series, in which scientists give talks about the conflict between science and religion, as well as the science of religion. I've only watched the cognitive scientists (and Dawkins, for reasons I'll mention below), so far, and that's probably all I'll watch. If you're looking for them, V.S. Ramachandran is in Session 4, Patricia Churchland is in Session 5, Elizabeth Loftus is in Session 6, Mahzarin Banaji and Scott Atran are in Session 7, Atran is in Session 8, Paul Churchland participates in the discussion in Session 9, and Ramachandran is in…
mixingmemory | November 24, 2006Originally posted on the old blog on 4/3/05.
Self-Perpetuating Paradigms: How Scientists Deal With Unexpected Results
Previously, I discussed Kevin Dunbar's research on the use of . However, Dunbar is better known in cognitive psychology for his in vivo work on scientific cognition. I'll get to the basics of that work, but first I want to say something about unexpected results and paradigms. The connections between all of these will be apparent in a moment.
Over at Universal Acid, Andrew reports on research findings desribed in Nature that are apparently irreconcilable with the "traditional…