Link Posts
developingintelligence | August 13, 2010There are a few fascinating papers to come out recently that I won't have time to cover in detail, but which people may find interesting. References and abstracts after the jump:
Watson & Strayer (2010). Supertaskers: Profiles in extraordinary multitasking ability. Psychon Bull Rev.
Abstract: Theory suggests that driving should be impaired for any motorist who is concurrently talking on a cell phone. But is everybody impaired by this dual-task combination? We tested 200 participants in a high-fidelity driving simulator in both single- and dual-task conditions. The dual task involved…
developingintelligence | July 15, 2010Swarming Quadrocopters?
Nanomagnetic remote control of animal behavior.
Blogs are data-mined for personality research.
Vote for method of the year! (My vote is for induced pluripotency)
If you think that the less competent you are, the more competent you think you are, then you are incompetent.Confusion on the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Time on task effects in fMRI research: why you should care.
Spontaneous Eyeblink Rate as an Index of Creativity.
The advantage of being helpless: infants can outperform adults in some ways.
Career Considerations: Center Grants and P-mechanisms from the NIH
Get up…
developingintelligence | September 2, 2009I've been busy writing up a new paper, and expect the reviews back on another soon, so ... sorry for the lack of posts. But this should be of interest:
The Dana Foundation has just posted an interview with Terrence Sejnowki about his recent Science paper, "Foundations for a New Science of Learning" (with coauthors Meltzoff, Kuhl & Movellan). Sejnowski is a kind of legendary figure in computational neuroscience, having founded the journal Neural Computation, developed the primary algorithm in independent components analysis (infomax), contrastive hebbian learning, and played an early…
developingintelligence | June 26, 2009An interesting video interview with the author of (the excellent) Mind Wars.
Here are direct links to the videos.
developingintelligence | January 23, 2009Refining the Turing Test: If it looks like a human, plays like a human, fights like a human, it's probably a ....
Using your own child in developmental research: An ethical issue?
Mice, math and drugs: On science without understanding. How much will new data mining techniques subvert the scientific method?
Distortions in Introspection: Do our intuitive assessments of our own abilities actually only reflect our mood?
Clandestine Manufacture of MDMA (see comments section). The take-home for me: detached analysis of MDMA's therapeutic potential is complicated by the schism between the overly-…
developingintelligence | January 31, 2008Phil Stearns has constructed a 45 "neuron" network of electronic parts which responds to lights and tones with a (rather cute) squealing sound. A picture of the components for this strange device:
Each "neuron" consisted of analog electronics corresponding to each of 6 functions: Input, Summing, Threshold, "Offset," "Output," and "Structure" (not sure about those latter three). The connectivity was determined by hand.
Phil states that the sculpture is not intelligent, but rather "some kind of squid baby."
Neural networks have great potential for contributing to the arts. For example, JP…
developingintelligence | January 11, 2008Josh Hartshorne, coauthor of a the Hartshorne & Ullman study I've discussed before, has a new blog that's already filled with interesting posts.
What is to blame for psychology's awful PR?
Does workforce diversity improve productivity?
Why languages can't be learned (though my own "careful reflection" leads me to a different belief, as discussed here).
developingintelligence | January 8, 2008Mick Grierson has created a real-time EEG-based brain-computer interface for music synthesis. You can watch a video here.
We've been designing experiments to test how classic ERPs (P300/600, N400, etc) may emerge from user interactions with this system, given previous demonstrations that those waveforms are sensitive to the "grammar" and "meaning" of musical harmonies, respectively.
What waveforms would you look for in this system?
Related Posts:
Meaning From Melody: Music as Language
Harmony in Grammar: Music as Language
Dynamic Gating in Long-Term Memory (and the N400)
The Attentional…
developingintelligence | January 4, 2008A downright amazing post on cognitive dissonance at Mind Hacks.
Gesturing unlocks children's math skills.
An entertaining review of new work on inner speech.
A new case of simultagnosia (the inability to see more than one object at a time).
Repressed memories: a "culture-bound" syndrome?
Tabloid language in Nature Neuroscience?
Frontal Cortex discusses a new book on electroconvulsive therapy (but I disagree this is a contrarian perspective - ECT has always been known to be highly effective).
PsychCentral discusses the collected videos of a guy who's documenting his ongoing…
developingintelligence | November 30, 2007A lot of good brain blogging lately; some beautiful drawings from the era of phrenology, some crazy kids high on scopolamine, James Flynn's current thoughts on intelligence, and more...
Who has better graphics? It's a close call between the phrenology of old and today's fMRI.
Beware the No2 Pencil - even low levels of lead exposure can lead to cognitive decline.
Getting high on scopolamine is not a good idea, but videos of it are pretty entertaining.
Mind, the time-machine: video proof (at the bottom) that hippocampus travels to places you haven't been yet.
The speed of thought in memory…
developingintelligence | November 4, 2007A first-hand report of caloric vestibular stimulation - to treat Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which patients often desire to have large parts of their bodies amputated.
Ambien, a sleep drug recently discovered to awaken some people from comas is also linked to strange behavior: one woman paints her frontdoor - in her sleep.
Altruism as an identifying characteristic of intelligence - "friendly intelligence," at least.
Isaac Asimov asks "What Is Intelligence Anyway?"
Brian Mingus asks if we'd recognize it if we saw it.
Can you extract the "ball" from each image based on motion cues…
developingintelligence | October 17, 2007Cortical Column is a new blog by computational modeler and volleyball freak Brian Mingus - check out the interesting posts on "The Simulation Argument" and Deep Pressure Stimulation, which is argued to simulate deep brain stimulation of intralaminar thalamic nuclei - noninvasively!
developingintelligence | September 19, 2007In the "motion standstill" illusion, a rapidly moving object is perceived as motionless, and yet not blurred. This means that color, depth, and shape are accurately processed while the motion system fails: in fact, subjects are no better at detecting the direction of motion than chance.
At slightly different frequencies than those which elicit standstill, subjects can even be below chance at guessing the direction of motion, indicating motion aliasing (also observed in the wagon wheel illusion).
One hypothesis about the mechanism driving this illusion is that the temporal frequency of…
developingintelligence | August 24, 2007A long story short...
My PhD advisor, a developmental psychologist, recently had her first baby - unfortunately, this baby was born with the long-segment form of Hirschsprung's Disease. This means that Max has only 25 cm of ganglionated intestine; to survive he needs to mainline fatty acids a couple times per day. Such complete IV nutrition is typically supplied in the form of Omega-6's, which are massively damaging to the liver.
This means nearly every baby with a short-gut is soon on a liver transplant list. (Needless to say, this treats the symptom, not the cause; intestinal transplants…
developingintelligence | August 16, 2007Steve Grand, author of "Creation: Life and How to Make It" as well as a principal designer behind the groundbreaking artificial life game "Creatures", was recently interviewed over at MLU.
It covers a smattering of topics: recent proposals for a completely synthetic lifeform; analog computation; advantages of embodiment (not what you think!); animal intelligence and imagination; future directions in computational neuroscience.
developingintelligence | August 13, 2007What are the effects of prolonged boredom, for example as experienced by 17 months of interplanetary travel? This is the question investigated by a new European Space Agency project in which 12 volunteers will be locked in an isolation tank for 500 days. (In the comments, A.R. points out that this is probably bad reporting by the BBC, as the project actually seems to involve an isolated living space rather than a true isolation tank).
An "isolation tank" is a dark, soundproof container of salt water heated to skin temperature which is intended to induce sensory deprivation - an absence of…
developingintelligence | August 7, 2007Having just returned from a 3 week vacation to purchase (and then move into) a new home, I am finally now able to get back to posting. Here's just a very small subset of the best in brain-blogging while I was away:
Fundamental limitations in predicting individual differences: the margin of error in predictive algorithms of individual behavior (as used, for example, by the UK Department of Health to determine whether an individual is fit for release from a psychiatric institution, and much more widely in marketing and finance) may be so high as to render some of these algorithms unusable.…
developingintelligence | July 11, 2007For fans of scientific eye candy, the Nikon Small World competition is hard to beat - and this year, they've opened up the voting process to the public. Vote on your favorites but be careful - you can't revise your vote on a picture once it's cast!
developingintelligence | July 9, 2007Researchers at Duke University have recently invented a technique for improving the spatial resolution of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by a factor of nearly 100,000x. Whereas routine clinical MRI scans contain 3-dimensional pixels ("voxels") approximately 1mm x 1mm x 1mm, this new technique allows for voxels as small as 21.5 thousandths of a milimeter on each side.
This is fortunate for many mice, who in the future might no longer need to be sacrificed - but rather merely sedated - for precise neuroanatomical analysis. It is also fortunate for neuroscientists, as older histological…
developingintelligence | July 3, 2007The Neurophilosophy blog recently migrated to scienceblogs.com and the first post is an excellent edition of Encephalon. Check it out.