mixingmemory | March 20, 2008You 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 like my constantly telling myself, as I ride the bus to campus in the morning, that I'm going to stop drinking coffee. As soon as I get off the bus, I walk 30 or so feet to the little coffee stand where they have my 16 oz. coffee waiting for me, 'cause they know as well as I do that I ain't quittin'. Cognitive neuroscience is like coffee.
Anyway, one of the imaging papers I've read since…
mixingmemory | March 16, 2008That's it! I'm never reading another imaging paper again, ever. OK, I might read one or two, and I might even post about them, but for now I'm telling myself, for my own sanity, that I'm never, ever, under any circumstances, going to read another imaging study. If you read my last post, or have been hanging around here for a while, you may have realized that I'm not a big fan of cognitive neuroscience. More often than not (I'd argue, always), you can learn the same thing and more by doing behavioral studies, and in most cases it'll cost you several hundred dollars less per participant. For…
mixingmemory | March 15, 2008I 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, color afterimages provide direct evidence for opponent-processing theories of color vision, and when we find aftereffects for a particular class of stimuli, we can be pretty certain that class of stimuli has particular neurons or populations of neurons that encode it. And speaking of aftereffects, there's a really cool paper in the March issue of the journal…
mixingmemory | March 13, 2008Because some people seem to be misinterpreting what I was saying in the last post, and even arguing against it by suggesting that I should have taken the position that I did, in fact, take, let me summarize my points in a few sentences.
The main point is that because I don't feel like I can be objectively certain about things about which there is so much more that we don't know than that we do, and which are incredibly complex even in their simplest forms, like religion, truth and falsity seem like poor measures of belief in assigning respect to them or their holders. What's more important,…
mixingmemory | March 11, 2008Discussion of a paper titled "Respect and Religion," by Simon Blackburn, is making its way through the blogosphere, and sparking some interesting discussion (particularly over at Crooked Timber, but this is a good read too). The key quote from Blackburn's article is this:
We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false beliefs.
We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change them, and in a
liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them. But once we are
convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational, we cannot…
mixingmemory | March 11, 2008At least I got the number of passes right. See it here, via Mind Hacks.
mixingmemory | February 17, 2008I've been hanging out with fellow atheists for a while now, and one of the more common discussions I've had when the topic of religion comes up is, why are people religious? The two most common answers I've heard from atheist friends and acquaintances are that religion is a fantasy designed to explain the mysterious and otherwise unexplainable, and that religion is a fantasy designed to make people feel less alone in the universe. As those of you who've been reading Mixing Memory for a while may have noticed, these discussions have led me to be somewhat obsessed with understanding the…
mixingmemory | February 12, 2008Looks like a couple of my fellow SBers have managed to get a date and location for their presidential debate on science, and have invited the candidates (Clinton, Obama, Huckabee, and McCain). I still think this is an absolutely terrible idea on so many levels, but I'm comforted by the thought that it's extremely unlikely that McCain would risk offending the conservative base that he's trying so hard to court by debating an avowed creationist on scientific topics when he's already got the nomination wrapped up, and equally unlikely that the Democrats would choose to debate on a single topic…
mixingmemory | February 11, 2008The January issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (the same journal that gave us the alien IAT) has some really interesting, and short, review articles. Unfortunately, they're only available with a subscription, but for those of you who are lucky enough to have access to a university library, I thought I'd point you to them in case you're interested.
The most interesting of the articles, I think, is by Roy Baumeister, and is titled "Free Will in Scientific Psychology." Here's the abstract:
ABSTRACT--Some actions are freer than others, and the difference is palpably…
mixingmemory | February 4, 2008One 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., bed, rest, nap, snore, etc.) that are all associated with another word that's not presented (e.g., sleep). During recall, if you ask participants if they saw the word "sleep" after seeing a list of its associates, they're pretty likely to tell you that they did. But it's difficult to know how to generalize the DRM to real-world…
mixingmemory | February 3, 2008Sorry for not posting lately. Some of you may remember the experiment I asked for help with a while back (here). Well, we've got good data now, and we spent the last week or so rushing to put it together to submit to a conference (the deadline for which was Friday). We've also been frantically collecting data for another really cool experiment, and are now trying to figure out what that data is telling us. So I've been busy as hell. But it's time for Just Science, so I'll be trying to post every day this week. Hopefully some stuff you'll find interesting.
mixingmemory | January 16, 2008In 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 clear that there's a lot of connection between mind and body," says Arthur Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. He remains skeptical, though, that the roots of higher cognition will be found in something as basic as the way we walk or move our eyes or arms.
"Any time there's a fad in science there's a tendency to say, 'It's all because of this…
mixingmemory | January 8, 2008There'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 Science, 18(12), 1069-1076.
Abstract
Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank…
mixingmemory | January 7, 2008In case you haven't heard from other bloggers, Just Science, in which bloggers choose to post about, well, just science for a week (5 days, this time) is back. The details are here, and you can sign up here. Everyone who signs up is added to the feed, so even if you don't sign up, you can read all of the Just Science posts by signing up for the feed here. The dates for this year's version are February 4-8, but you can sign up any time before then.
mixingmemory | January 1, 2008I'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, I'm more confused than I was before reading it. Part of the problem, I think, stems from a tendency towards theoretical extremes. For a long time, in fact for most of the history of moral psychology, empirical or otherwise, some form of "rationalism" dominated. That is the view that there are ethical rules in our heads, and that moral judgment involve applying those…
mixingmemory | December 30, 2007I hope everyone's having a nice holiday season. I'll be back to blogging next year.
mixingmemory | December 19, 2007As I believe I've said before, if anything good has come from the Larry Summers debacle of a few years ago, it's that it inspired some really interesting research on gender differences in math. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've probably guessed that one of my favorite topics in that research is stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is, according to Claude Steele(1, "the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype," and there's now a pretty substantial literature showing that…
mixingmemory | December 13, 2007I've blogged about some great papers in the past, but today I'm blogging about the best... paper... ever. It's by Arina K. Bones, of the University of Darache in Monte Carlo, and Navin R. Johnson of Opti Corp, was published in the December issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science (with a subscription, you can read it here, and if you don't have a subscription, you're missing out), and is titled "Measuring the Immeasurable: Or 'Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test?'" Not to give anything away, but it turns out the answer to that question is a resoundingly tentative "…
mixingmemory | December 11, 2007Sorry to bring this up again, as I'm sure most of you couldn't care less, but something about the idea of a presidential debate on science-related issues really bugs me, and I've been trying to figure out exactly what that is. Plus, part of me is hoping that someone will come along and explain to me why this is a good idea.
So far, though, there seem to be two main justifications for having this debate. The first, expressed in the quote from the Sciencedebate 2008 website (and elsewhere) is that we are utterly dependent on science and technology in virtually every aspect of our lives. This…
mixingmemory | December 10, 2007If you haven't heard, fellow ScienceBloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum of The Intersection have launched a movement called Sciencedebate 2008, in which they demand that the presidential candidates have a debate entirely on science and science-related issues. They've received the backing of Nobel laureates, editors and journalists, prominent business people for this statement:
Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role…