cognitive psychology
mixingmemory | July 12, 2006A couple weeks ago, a couple Science Bloggers, sparked by Jessica of Feministing, discussed the potential dangers of discovering the biological causes of homosexuality. Jessica expressed a common attitude in her post, writing:
And naturally the larger question with all these why-are-you-gay studies is why do we have to know? I'm terrified that once someone targets a "reason" they're just going to try and find a way to do away with it.
To which fellow Science Blogger Janet added:
Pinning homosexuality on something (abnormal) from genetics or development comes dangerously close to making it a…
mixingmemory | July 11, 2006Theory of mind, or how we think about what's going on in other people's heads, continues to be one of the hottest topics in cognitive science today. A debate continues to rage over whether we reason about other people's thoughts by means of theory-like propositional knowledge, or through simulation (i.e., putting yourself in their shoes... in your head). Since psychologists are unlikely to solve this debate by themselves, they've called in the artillery - cognitive neuroscientists. And those buggers have come up with some interesting ways to figure out where mentalizing (another name for…
mixingmemory | July 10, 2006It's been obvious to everyone who's written about politics since Aristotle that emotion plays an important role in political rhetoric and political judgment. With an increased focus on emotion in cognitive scientists, there has been a flourish of empirical work attempting to elucidate this role. I thought it might be interesting to say a little about this given the recent resurfacing of the Westen et al. study on motivated reasoning in politics. While the recent posts on the study have (unfortunately) described it in terms of confirmation bias, it would be more accurate to describe the study…
mixingmemory | July 5, 2006If you found yesterday's post on perceptual symbol systems and related theories interesting, you might like this paper by Edouard Machery that is in press at Cognition. The paper is titled "Concept Empiricism: A Methodological Critique." The critique is aimed at "neo-empiricism" in concept research, and uses Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory as its primary example. Here's the abstract:
Thanks to Barsalou's, Damasio's, Glenberg's, Prinz' and others' work, neo-empiricism is gaining a deserved recognition in the psychology and philosophy of concepts. I argue, however, that neo-…
mixingmemory | July 5, 2006Throughout the brief history of cognitive science, debates over the nature of knowledge representation have raged. In the 1970s, the debate was between those who thought that knowledge was represented as images -- modal, or sensory representations -- and those who thought that knowledge was represented propositionally. That particular debate ended in a stalemate, upon the realization that you could account for pretty much any data set from either perspective. If you can't distinguish between perspectives, you can't really debate them. Despite the stalemate, most cognitive scientists who've…
mixingmemory | June 23, 2006Psychological essentialism is the belief that kinds have an underlying, probably unseen essence that makes them what they are. We may, for example, believe that tigers have an underlying essence that gives them their stripes and makes them carnivores. We could represent that essence as a particular underlying feature of tigers, such as their genetic makeup, or we could believe that such an essence exists without having any ideas about what it might be. Whether we know what the essence of a particular kind might be doesn't matter. We are psychological essentialists about a particular kind if…
mixingmemory | June 14, 2006False memory research has been very popular over the last several years, in part because of its connection to one of the more contentious debates in cognitive science: the recovered memories debate. I remember attending a poster session at a conference a couple years ago, and an entire room was filled with posters on false memory experiments. The vast majority of the experiments on false memory aren't the least bit interesting, because they tell us very little about memory, or anything else for that matter, and they all use variants of the same two experimental paradigms. As you can probably…
mixingmemory | June 12, 2006Last time I asked for requests, a couple readers suggested that I write about the theory-theory. I always have mixed feelings about writing about theory-theory. On the one hand, I'm a big theory-theory fan, so I like to spread the good word, but on the other hand, theory-theory is notoriously difficult to describe, so I'm also a little reticent. So it's taken me a while to get to it. The theory-theory began as a theory of concepts, loosely (or at least opaquely) described in a paper by Greg Murphy and Doug Medin titled "The Role of Theories in Conceptual Coherence"1. Bot the gist of and…