mixingmemory | December 6, 2007Recently, 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 the body, along with the brain's awareness of the signal's it's sending. But in some cases, particularly when bodily signals are ambiguous or absent, the "Whodunit" system can be tricked into thinking that someone else caused an action that was really of our own doing, or that we caused an action…
mixingmemory | December 5, 2007The 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, there are a few secondary decisions to make. The first is, what do we read? My impression is that the average level of cog sci knowledge among Mixing Memory readers has gone up a bit since the last time we did this, which makes picking a book a bit more difficult. Then there's the issue of format. Also…
mixingmemory | November 30, 2007I'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 pages about them in my sleep (and given the fact that I'm so tired, I may well be doing that by the end of this post). So I'm going to try to post on one of these every now and then until things slow down a bit here over the break. I'll try to give a bit of context and explain why I like the studies…
mixingmemory | November 19, 2007I 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 our visual system uses, only a couple -- convergence, or the relative position of the two eyes, and disparity (though there are two or three different kinds of disparity, depending on who you ask) -- require both eyes. The rest are all monocular.
The most obvious monocular depth cues are size (…
mixingmemory | November 12, 2007Oh Dear God! See the The Neurocritic, or Thomas at BRAINETHICS, or better still, look away and pretend this never happened.
mixingmemory | November 9, 2007Cool 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):
mixingmemory | 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 for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the title, but I'm fairly convinced by its arguments. But I'm not really writing this post to talk about the article. When it's published, with all its peer commentaries (BBS publishes target articles and then a bunch of peer commentaries, along…
mixingmemory | 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.
mixingmemory | 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 with the same radius. The flies' rotations are offset so that one is at 6 o'clock when the other is at 12, but otherwise, the circles they're tracing are identical. Now go back and watch the second movie.
As the caption notes, the two flies are still moving on identical circles, except that they're…
mixingmemory | October 17, 2007There'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 careers. There's also a pretty large body of evidence that, on average, females perform worse than males on spatial reasoning and spatial attention tasks (e.g., the classic mental rotation task), and this difference is often taken to be one of the major factors in sex differences in math ability(2). It'…
Women in Math, Science, and Engineering: Is It About the Numbers (And Not the Ones You Might Think)?
mixingmemory | October 15, 2007The 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 grow at a steady pace, continually putting to lie many of his claims. This month's issue of Psychological Science contains two additions to that literature, one looking at the effect of experience on individual, and more importantly, gender differences in spatial attention, which is thought to be a…
mixingmemory | October 15, 2007Offered 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 game on aggression, hostility, and arousa. Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Abstract
The current study utilized the General Aggression Model, with an emphasis on aggression-related priming, to explore the different effects on hostility, physiological arousal, and state aggression in those who…
mixingmemory | October 7, 2007At 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, discussing, linking, writing me, and for just being cool cog sci fans. You people rock.
mixingmemory | October 6, 2007If 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 asked to make judgments, explain our actions, or assess our current motivational or emotional states, we're pretty much just guessing, and using what, from a third-person perspective, often seems like the least relevant information to do so.
One great illustration of this came in a classic…
mixingmemory | October 3, 2007I 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 cabinet, I strongly considered moving. Other spiders? Who cares? Some of them are even kind of cute. But if you want to see me jump, show me a brown recluse in a jar (if you want to see me run, open the jar).
I tell you this to assure you of my deep, visceral appreciation of the need for an innate…
mixingmemory | October 2, 2007These 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 seen a white one before. It's an omen, I'm sure. Prepare for the apocalypse.
mixingmemory | October 1, 2007Go over to OmniBrain, read about Donors Choose, and if you like what they're doing, give 'em some money.
mixingmemory | September 29, 2007I 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, perhaps your general perspective on cognition, why you got into cognition and your specific area(s) of research in particular, etc. It wouldn't have to be long (though it can be as long as you like), just a summary that, when combined with those from other psychologists, would give people a sense of…
mixingmemory | September 28, 2007This 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 you except mmf, whose dogs get the cookies.
*Said cookie will be made entirely by yourself at your own expense, but you still get it.