cognitive psychology
mixingmemory | August 9, 2007Over at one of her other blogospheric homes, Channel N, fellow ScienceBlogger has posted a link to a great talk on modeling qualitative physics by Ken Forbus. It was one of the earliest of the Cognitive Science Society's virtual colloquia, a series that it has, for some reason, discontinued. "Qualitative physics" is a semi-fancy name for everyday qualitative reasoning, and Forbus focuses on things like spatial reasoning, causal reasoning, and motion, and reasoning about physical processes. It's cool stuff.
When you're done with that, you might want to check out this paper, in which Forbus…
mixingmemory | July 4, 2007Long, long ago, during my first summer as a grad student (technically, I wasn't even a student yet), in one of my first meetings with my graduate adviser, he suggested that I think about the problem of representing negation. The problem of representing negation? That seemed like an odd suggestion. I mean, I was looking for potential research projects, and negation, being so common in everyday speaking and thinking, seemed like an issue that would have been researched to death, so that there's little I could have done with it. But as the grad student saying goes, ours' is not to question why,…
mixingmemory | June 30, 2007Ah, yes, a real game (kidding, Scrabble people). If you've watched many baseball games or baseball movies, you know that one of the things that makes for a successful hitter is the ability to predict what the next pitch will be. Is it going to be inside or outside? Will it be a fastball or a breaking ball? If you're expecting a fastball and get a slow, breaking curveball, it's unlikely you'll get anywhere near it. So cognitive processing is an important part of being a good hitter. At least, that's what a hitting coach would tell you. And according to a 2002 paper by Rob Gray in Psychological…
mixingmemory | June 25, 2007Picture in your head one person throwing a ball to another. How were the two people oriented spatially? Was one on the left, and the other on the right? If so, which one was on the left, and which on the right? Chances are, the thrower was on the left, and the catcher was on the right. For some reason, that seems to be our default way of representing actions: with the actor on the right, the patient on the left, and the actions occurring from left to right(1), as in this beautifully drawn figure:
Why is that? Good question, but before we answer it, let's look at some research.
The most…
mixingmemory | June 22, 2007All of you are probably familiar with color opponency, but just in case, I'll give you a quick refresher. I'll even start with the history. In the 19th century, there were two competing theories of color vision. The first was the Young-Helmholtz theory (sometimes called the trichromatic theory), which argued that there were three types of photoreceptors: one for red, one for green, and one for blue. The second was Ewald Hering's color opponency theory, which argued that there were three color pairs: black-white, red-green, and blue-yellow. Each color in the pair canceled out, or inhibited the…
mixingmemory | June 11, 2007Those of you who are interested in Michael Tomasello's work as a follow up to his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition may be interested in his new paper with Malinda Carpenter and Ulf Liszkowski, "A New Look at Infant Pointing". The abstract:
We propose a new theory of infant pointing involving multiple layers of intentionality and shared intentionality. In the context of this theory, we argue and present evidence for a rich interpretation of prelinguistic communication, that is, one which posits that when 12-month-old infants point for an adult they are in some sense trying to…
mixingmemory | June 8, 2007About a year ago, there was an article in Seed Magazine titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain," in which Paul Bloom argued that people are too easily seduced by neuroscience, believing that it made for good science, even when it doesn't. At the end of the article, Bloom mentioned a then unpublished study in which participants were more impressed with bad scientific explanations if they contained a bit of irrelevant neuroscience. Well, now the study, which is by Weisberg and a bunch of other people (apparently to write a paper about neuroscience, you have to have as many…
mixingmemory | May 28, 2007A little over a year ago, I wrote a post describing some research showing that there are cognitive barriers to understanding evolution. There I listed three specific factors:
Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of uncertainty; intuitions that can be reinforced culturally to an extent that it may be almost impossible to overcome them by the time we reach adulthood.
Intuitive essentialism, which causes us to believe that biological kinds have hidden internal essences which determine what they are, how they will…
mixingmemory | May 17, 2007Some of you who are interested in the history of psychology or philosophy of mind might find this paper interesting:
Gentner, D., & Grudin, J. (1985). The evolution of mental metaphors in psychology: A 90-year retrospective. American Psychologist, 40(2), 181-192.
Abstract
It seems plausible that the conception of the mind has evolved over the first hundred years of psychology in America. In this research, we studied this evolution by tracing changes in the kinds of metaphors used by psychologists to describe mental phenomena . A corpus of metaphors from 1894 to the present was collected…
mixingmemory | May 11, 2007File this one in the annals of "huh?" There's been a lot of research over the last decade or so on what only be described as the bizarre implicit priming of social concepts. In a typical experiment, participants are given lists or scrambled sentences that contain words associated with a particular stereotype or attitude and people will subsequently behave in a way that's consistent with that stereotype/attitude. For example, Bargh et al.1 gave participants scrambled sentences with words associated with the elderly (e.g., worried, old, lonely, and Florida... no seriously, Florida), told them…
mixingmemory | May 9, 2007Cool video (via Bill Benzon over at The Valve:
A bit more below the fold, but only after you watch the video.
What a great example of change blindness, eh? I missed them all.
mixingmemory | April 20, 2007
OK, this research is pretty silly, and quite frankly, I can't imagine what compelled the researchers to undertake it, but because it has to do with something I love, soccer, I feel compelled to blog about it. There this short report in the March issue of Psychological Science that I just got around to reading on goalies' influence of the direction of penalty shots in professional soccer matches. Masters et al.1 start with the recognition that goalies stop only 18% of penalty kicks. Given that goals are at a premium in soccer, with games frequently won by one goal (often the only goal of the…
mixingmemory | April 19, 2007I have to admit that I've been avoiding the "framing science" discussion that's been going on in the science blogosphere recently, mostly because I'd rather talk about what framing is and how it works than two author's rather vague ideas about how to use framing in a particular area of discourse. And because the Science article has made framing a hot topic again, and because it is clear from much of the discussion that many are still very confused about what framing is (if I see someone describe framing as "spin," again, I'm going to throw something at them), I think it's important to talk…
mixingmemory | April 19, 2007In the recent dust up over "framing science," there's been more hand waving than any actual discussion of, you know, framing. However, I was struck by one point that fellow ScienceBlogger Matt Nisbet, one of the authors of the Science article that sparked this whole mess, made in comments to my post on the discussion. He wrote (emoticon removed, for your sanity):
In part what we have across the various disciplines studying framing is a classic "levels of analysis" problem. Some working at the micro and cognitive level, others working at the macro and sociological level.
My reaction that…
mixingmemory | March 27, 2007Some of you may find this book chapter interesting:
Hauer, M.D., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (in press): Reviving Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions. In Moral Psychology and Biology.
mixingmemory | March 26, 2007
When I was an undergrad, my intro psych professor mentioned research in industrial/organizational psychology indicating that the color red causes people to be happier and more productive, while blue makes people sadder and less productive. Later I was taught that the relationship between color and performance was actually more complex. Specifically, I was taught that colors with higher wave lengths (like red) cause arousal, while colors with smaller wavelengths are soothing. Until a couple years ago, though, I'd never actually read any research on the topic. My knowledge was all hearsay.…
mixingmemory | March 14, 2007I'm sure you've all long forgotten about the framing project that I discussed on this blog late last year, but in case someone out there remembers it, I wanted to give you an update. I still want to collect the category norms that I discussed. That is, I want to have people list features of political concepts like abortion, social security, war, etc., along with concepts related to Lakoff's framing analysis such as family, nation, and the like (if you'd like to help me write the code for this, let me know). However, not long after I discussed the project on this blog, my perspective changed…
mixingmemory | February 28, 2007Here's a nominee for strangest psychology experiment ever, or at least spookiest. Yesterday I talked about the theory that religion, or at least supernatural agent concepts, serve to activate representational concerns, and thus increase prosocial behavior, or decrease selfish behavior. The experiment I'm about to describe was designed to test part of that theory. But given how odd the experiment is, I don't really care what the theoretical motivations for it were. It's post-worthy simply by virtue of its bizzarness.
The experiment, conducted by Bering et al.1, involved a boring enough task.…
mixingmemory | February 9, 2007Here at Mixing Memory, Just Science week has turned into Mostly Wegner week. But the set of studies I'm going to talk about in this post has received so much attention that I just can't resist. You may have encountered it in the New York Times (you can read it here without a subscription). Unfortunately for me, in beating me to it, the NYT also stole my planned title, causing me to go with Barry Manilow over Lovin' Spoonful, but c'est la vie. Oh, I should probably say what this is all about at some point. It's about magic. Specifically, magical thinking. We've all experienced it (don't say…
mixingmemory | February 8, 2007Here's something I didn't know1:
Approximately 6 in every 100 words are affected by disfluency, including repetitions, corrections, and hesitations such as the fillers um and er. Moreover, the distribution of disfluency is not arbitrary. For example, fillers tend to occur before low frequency and unpredictable words, in circumstances where the speaker is faced with multiple semantic or syntactic possibilities, as well as in cases where other types of uncertainty occur. (p. 3)
Well, I knew that I hesitate in speech a lot (my son will often say to me, "Stop saying 'um!'"), but I didn't realize…