cognitive psychology
mixingmemory | February 7, 2007A while back, I linked to a paper analogically comparing money to drugs. Judging by the comments, those of you who read the paper weren't particularly impressed by it. But if you thought the money-drug analogy was odd, I've got a better one for you.
If you recall, the money as a drug paper by Stephen E. G. Lea argues against a purely instrumental, "tool" theory of the subjective value of money. From the money as a drug perspective, money doesn't serve purely practical purposes. Instead, people actually seek out money because it gives them some pleasure, like a drug. Apparently, a similar…
mixingmemory | February 6, 2007Have you ever had a meeting, or a brain storming session, that involved a lot of coffee and enthusiasm, with everyone throwing out ideas at a breakneck pace, and quickly becoming convinced of their brilliance? I had just such a meeting one morning not too long ago. Everything moved really, really fast, and we were convinced that we'd hit upon a really good idea. Later that evening, everything about the idea that we'd come up with began to fall apart. The next morning, I woke up to an email from one of the meeting's participants with the subject heading, "Maybe this is why we thought it was…
mixingmemory | February 5, 2007There's been a ton of research over the last decade or two on what is often called folk psychology or theory of mind (the latter is a bit theoretically loaded). That research concerns who has the ability to reason about other minds -- do young children? autistic children? chimpanzees? dolphins? elephants? -- and what that ability looks like. In most research on the subject, what people consider minds to be, and who they consider to have minds, has largely been taken for granted. While that doesn't mean we haven't learned anything about theory of mind, it does mean we may have missed some…
mixingmemory | February 2, 2007If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember my old posts on moral psychology (I'm too lazy to look them up and link them, right now, but if you really want to find them, I'll do it). Well, after I discussed that research with a couple other psychologists who, it turns out, are as dissatisfied with it as I am, we decided to throw our hats into the moral psychology ring. Now, as people who study representation for a living, we all agree that the important part of moral decision making is in how people represent moral situations, so that's how we're approaching it. We've got…
mixingmemory | January 20, 2007Last year, I wrote two really long, boring posts about V.S. Ramachandran's ten principles of art. Those principles, mostly drawn from research on vision, included things like peak shift, symmetry, and contrast. It turns out Ramachandran may have missed a much simpler principle: people dig curves. At least, they prefer them to sharp angles.
Why curves? Well, Moshe Bar and Maital Neta1 hypothesize that "sharp transitions in a contour might convey a sense of threat, on either a conscious or a nonconscious level, and thus trigger a negative bias" (p. 645). This preference, they argue, should show…
mixingmemory | January 13, 2007Originally posted on the old blog on 3/12/2006
My contribution to Darwin Day was pretty weak for a staunch supporter of science. Sure, I think the name is a bad idea, and want to rename it "Evolution Day," or at least something other than Darwin Day (I thought about maybe suggesting "Variation Appreciation Day," or "Hug a Mutation Day"). But objections to the name aside, I felt kind of guilty about making such a substanceless contribution to a day with what I believe are noble purposes, especially after reading (via Clark) that 53% of Americans reject evolution entirely. So I'm going to try…
mixingmemory | December 21, 2006I'm traveling today, so I'm posting something I wrote along time ago instead of offering anything new. This one's from the blogs early days, so I really hadn't gotten used to this blogging thing when I wrote it. Also, in the time between its original posting and now, I've learned a bit more about the study of humor in cognitive science. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll write a new post on the topic. For now, though, here's the post, originally from 11/27/04.
Cognitive Science of Humor
Much like creativity in general, the cognitive aspects of humor haven't been widely studied. While…
mixingmemory | December 20, 2006I'm going to be traveling tomorrow, so I'm spending today getting ready. Instead of a long post about research, I thought I'd link you to a paper Stephen E. G. Lea by in press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. For those of you who don't know, Behavioral and Brain Sciences has a target article (the linked paper is a target article), followed by peer commentaries on that article, and then the target article's author's response to those commentaries. The discussion of this paper should be pretty interesting. Here's the abstract:
Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong…
mixingmemory | December 19, 2006One of the more sophisticated theories in embodied cognition is Lawrence Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory (which I've talked about before, here). Starting from the premise that cognition is for action, it argues that concepts are represented in the same brain systems that directly serve perception and action. In the realm of memory, Arthur Glenberg put it this way1:
Suppose that memory and conceptualization work in the service of perception and action. In this case, conceptualization is the encoding of patterns of possible physical interaction with a three- dimensional world. These…
mixingmemory | December 18, 2006A friend of mine and I were having a conversation today, and one of us (I don't remember who) brought up a poster that we'd seen at a conference a few years ago. Later, I wondered what had become of the work in the poster (it's about negative numbers being represented on a mental number line). Apparently, nothing. But in the process of looking for more information, I came across another paper that might be even more interesting.
The poster was inspired by work showing that we may represent positive numbers on a "mental number line." In one experiment testing the mental number line hypothesis…
mixingmemory | December 16, 2006Congratulations to Pharyngula, winner of the 2006 Weblog Award for Best Science Blog. Congratulations to Bad Astronomy Blog for giving PZ a run for his money, too. I finished last, but given the fact that my traffic is much, much smaller than all of the other finalists, that's not so bad. Thanks to everyone who voted for me.
mixingmemory | December 16, 2006Speaking of studies that make you go "wow," I recently read a very recent one that really surprised me, and thought I'd describe it here.
Memory researchers are famous for coming up with different types of memory, sparking years of research and debate just trying to determine whether two particular types of memory are really different. One such debate has been over the implicit-explicit distinction. Implicit memory is, to quote the classic paper from which I stole the title of this post, "the nonconscious influence of previous experiences on the performance of tasks that do not require…
mixingmemory | December 14, 2006Yesterday, Steve of OmniBrain asked, "What is the coolest psychology experiment ever?" Feel free to provide your own answer in comments there and/or here. As for me, there are some that I think are really cool for theoretical reasons, but the coolest ever just for the sheer implausibility of the results has to be Daniel Simons and Daniel Levins' "real-world interaction" change blindness experiment. It simply boggles the mind. First, a little bit about change blindness.
Check out this scene, and see how long it takes you to figure out what changes when the scene flashes. I'll give you a moment…
mixingmemory | December 12, 2006In the paper I discussed the other day, Atran and Norenzayan argue that one of the most important factors in determining whether a religious narrative is successful is how memorable it is. Easily remembered narratives get passed on, while difficult to remember narratives are forgotten. Thus, successful religious narratives will likely exhibit features that make them memorable. Norenzayan and Atran hypothesize that the feature shared by successful religious narratives (and cultural narratives in general) is that "they correspond to a minimally counterintuitive (MCI) cognitive template that…
mixingmemory | December 11, 2006
Over at A Brood Comb, Tanasije Gjorgoski posts a quote from Hegel's Philosophy of Logic that is one of my favorites. I used to use part of it all the time in discussions with people (mostly scientists) who thought that all metaphysics was nonsense to be avoided at all cost.
The Atomic philosophy forms a vital stage in the historical evolution of the Idea. The principle of that system may be described as Being-for-itself in the shape of the Many. At present, students of nature who are anxious to avoid metaphysics turn a favourable ear to Atomism. But it is not possible to escape metaphysics…
mixingmemory | December 9, 2006A few days ago, there was an interesting discussion of swear words in the blogosphere (my contribution was a map of Louisiana... don't ask). Like any good cognitive psychologist with obsessive compulsive disorder, upon reading the swear words posts, I thought to myself, "What have I read in the literature about swear words?"
The answer is, not much. In fact, the only studies that I can recall well enough to write about without having to do any actual work other than pressing keys on a keyboard weren't actually about swear words, but about words with a negative emotional valence. Kensinger…
mixingmemory | December 8, 2006This was originally posted on the old blog on 1/5/05. I'm reposting it here, with a few editorial ommissions (contextual; references to things from back then that won't make sense here), because of our recent discussion of religion. Hopefully I'll be able to post about some of the empirical work over the next few days, including a study on memory and religion published by the authors of the theory described in this post and their colleagues.
A Comprehensive Theory of Religious Cognition
The cognitive science and neuroscience of religion have become hot areas of research over the last several…
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 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, 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,…