Cognitive Science
drorzel | October 24, 2010In yesterday's post about the experience of science, I mentioned that I had both a specific complaint about the article by Alexandra Jellicoe (which I explained in the post) and a general complaint about the class in which the article falls. I want to attempt to explain the latter problem, partly because I think it will be useful, but mostly because it's stuck in my head, and I need to at least type out the explanation before I can move on to other things.
The article in question doesn't contain all of the elements I'll mention below, but I think it clearly falls into a class of articles that…
razib | March 17, 2010The Evolution Of Symbolic Language by Terrence Deacon and Ursula Goodenough. Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain is a book I liked a great deal, though in hindsight I don't think I had the background to appreciate it in any depth (nor do I now).
razib | February 25, 2010Social Cognition in Dogs, or How did Fido get so smart?. This you know:
Domesticated dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to understand human communicative gestures. If you point to something the dog zeroes in on the object or location you're pointing to (whether it's a toy, or food, or to get his in-need-of-a-bath butt off your damn bed and back onto his damn bed). Put another way, if your attention is on something, or if your attention is directed to somewhere, dogs seem to be able to turn their attention onto that thing or location as well.
Amazingly, dogs seem to be better at this than…
razib | February 24, 2010Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable:
Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face…
razib | February 20, 2010Covers all the major angles. Nice that there's a newspaper which can support this sort of reporting (on the other hand). Not surprising that Amy Bishop seems to have some history of delusions of grandeur, she's claiming that both she and her husband have an I.Q. of 180. That's 5.3 standard deviations above the mean. Assuming a normal distribution that's a 1 in 20 million probability. Of course the tails of the distribution are fatter beyond 2 standard deviations than expectation for I.Q., but at these really high levels (above 160) I'm skeptical that most tests are measuring anything real.
razib | January 19, 2010Heritability of the Specific Cognitive Ability of Face Perception:
What makes one person socially insightful but mathematically challenged, and another musically gifted yet devoid of a sense of direction? Individual differences in general cognitive ability are thought to be mediated by "generalist genes" that affect many cognitive abilities similarly without specific genetic influences on particular cognitive abilities. In contrast, we present here evidence for cognitive "specialist genes": monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic twins in the specific cognitive ability of face…
razib | December 6, 2009Cardiovascular fitness is associated with cognition in young adulthood:
During early adulthood, a phase in which the central nervous system displays considerable plasticity and in which important cognitive traits are shaped, the effects of exercise on cognition remain poorly understood. We performed a cohort study of all Swedish men born in 1950 through 1976 who were enlisted for military service at age 18 (N = 1,221,727). Of these, 268,496 were full-sibling pairs, 3,147 twin pairs, and 1,432 monozygotic twin pairs. Physical fitness and intelligence performance data were collected during…
razib | October 9, 2009More Singularity stuff. I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid, says Eliezer Yudkowsky in response to my summary of his talk. The last line of his post says: "I'm here because I'm crazy," says the patient, "not because I'm stupid." So the issue is craziness, not stupidity in Eliezer's reading. The problem I would say is that stupid people have the "Not Even Crazy" problem. They often can't get beyond their basic cognitive biases because they don't have a good grasp of a rational toolkit, nor are they comfortable and fluent in analysis and abstraction. I can grant that many smart people are wrong or…
razib | October 8, 2009For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit:
Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard reported that for the first six months of this year, the volume of purchases on its debit cards increased 4.1 percent, to $160 billion, in the United States. Spending on credit and charge cards sank 14.8 percent, to $233 billion.
"Consumers are rational thinking individuals, and they're going to…
razib | August 16, 2009Recently I listened to the author of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene M. Heyman, interviewed on the Tom Ashbrook show. A lot of the discussion revolved around the term "disease", which I can't really comment on, but a great deal of Heyman's thesis is grounded in rather conventional behavior genetic insights. In short, a behavioral trait can have a host of inputs, and is often a combination of environment & genes developing over a lifetime. Alcoholism is not much of an issue among observant Mormons because of their environment, not their genes. Heyman points out that whereas some…
razib | July 21, 2009We know that dogs can read human faces, it turns out that babies can infer the meaning of different dog barks:
New research shows babies have a handle on the meaning of different dog barks - despite little or no previous exposure to dogs.
Infants just 6 months old can match the sounds of an angry snarl and a friendly yap to photos of dogs displaying threatening and welcoming body language.
razib | July 13, 2009Update: See Ed Yong.
Randall Parker points me to a new paper from Joshua Greene which describes the neurological responses of individuals when do, or don't, lie, when lying might be in their self-interest. From EurekaAlert:
The research was designed to test two theories about the nature of honesty - the "Will" theory, in which honesty results from the active resistance of temptation, and the "Grace" theory in which honesty is a product of lack of temptation. The results of this study suggest that the "Grace" theory is true, because the honest participants did not show any additional neural…
razib | June 29, 2009Arnold Kling highlights this section from a Scientific American article, The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts:
But behavioral economics experiments routinely show that despite similar outcomes, people (and other primates) hate a loss more than they desire a gain, an evolutionary hand-me-down that encourages organisms to preserve food supplies or to weigh a situation carefully before risking encounters with predators.
One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested…
razib | June 24, 2009Related to yesterday's post,The neural bases of empathic accuracy:
Theories of empathy suggest that an accurate understanding of another's emotions should depend on affective, motor, and/or higher cognitive brain regions, but until recently no experimental method has been available to directly test these possibilities. Here, we present a functional imaging paradigm that allowed us to address this issue. We found that empathically accurate, as compared with inaccurate, judgments depended on (i) structures within the human mirror neuron system thought to be involved in shared sensorimotor…
razib | May 25, 2009Why We Stare, Even When We Don't Want To:
"When a face is distorted, we have no pattern to match that," Rosenberg said. "All primates show this [staring] at something very different, something they have not evolved to see. They need to investigate further. 'Are they one of us or not?' In other species, when an animal looks very different, they get rejected."
And so, we stare. (An averted gaze is triggered in some people. This too can be overridden only with great difficulty.)
It doesn't take much of a facial anomaly to trigger a transfixed response; a normal human face upside down will do it…
razib | May 25, 2009The Neurocritic points me to a paper, The brain structural disposition to social interaction:
Social reward dependence (RD) in humans is a stable pattern of attitudes and behaviour hypothesized to represent a favourable disposition towards social relationships and attachment as a personality dimension. It has been theorized that this long-term disposition to openness is linked to the capacity to process primary reward. Using brain structure measures from magnetic resonance imaging, and a measure of RD from Cloninger's temperament and character inventory, a self-reported questionnaire, in 41…
razib | May 25, 2009Andrew Gelman has a post up titled Difficulties in trying to understand the views of others, responding to a Robin Hanson taxonomy outline the motivations of liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Gelman is skeptical of Hanson's glosses of each group.
The human ability to engage in Meta-Representation is one of the hallmarks of our species. We can analyze abstract ideas, take the positions of others, examine counter-factuals and what-if's. In terms of core competencies our Theory of Mind is a sharp knife, we are unparalleled at modeling social relations contingent upon the mental states of…
razib | May 2, 2009David Brooks has a column out where he mulls over the role of time invested in amplifying talent:
If you wanted to picture how a typical genius might develop, you'd take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability. It wouldn't have to be a big talent, just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction. Then you would want her to meet, say, a novelist, who coincidentally shared some similar biographical traits. Maybe the writer was from the same town, had the same ethnic background, or, shared the same birthday -- anything to create a sense of affinity.
...
The…
razib | April 28, 2009
I first encountered Dan Ariely on the radio show Marketplace, where he offers up little nuggets of research data from the new field of behavioral economics. Because of the individual scale of the research many of Ariely's findings have some personal finance implications. Consider the pain of paying. This is the finding that when people pay with credit as opposed to cash for dinner, they are willing to spend more. Why? Because credit cards decouple the psychic "pain" of payment from the specific act. The act of deferring reduces our pain at the damage done, and allows consumption with less…
razib | April 8, 2009David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab at the New Atheists was something of a throwaway line and I lean more toward John's position. I give Brooks credit for attempting to inject insights from the new cognitive sciences into contemporary political commentary. Politics is a phenomenon which manifests on a grand scale, but its ultimate roots are at least in part in individual human psychology. The empirical…