Category: Cognitive Development
Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it begins with Judges 12:5-6 as an epigraph. In that passage, group membership is determined by having individuals pronounce a word, and if they can't pronounce it properly, they're killed. Kinzler et al. then provide a host of examples of what we might call linguistic discrimination in their opening paragraph:
The biblical story of Shibboleth speaks of the ancient massacre of those who could not correctly pronounce a phrase, thereby revealing their out-group status. Modern-day Shibboleth is ubiquitous: United States history alone abounds with examples of linguistic discrimination, from the severing of the tongues of slaves who spoke no English, to the forbidding of the public speaking of German during World War II and the execution of Russian speakers after the Alaskan purchase (1). Recent world history provides examples of linguicide paired with genocide of the Kurds in Turkey (2) and of imposed language policies initiating anti- Apartheid riots in South Africa (3). Favor for one's native language group pervades contemporary politics in more subtle ways as well, for example, in recent debates concerning bilingual education, the politics of sign languages in deaf education, or proposals to make English the national language of the United States. (p. 12577)
The Biblical and historical examples lead them to hypothesize that linguistic differences may be at the root of in-group preferences and conflicts between social groups. And to provide evidence for this hypothesis, they conduct several studies with children under the age of five in which they pit native vs. non-native language speakers in social situations.
The first study, conducted with 5-6 month olds, involved showing the infants video of two adult English speakers, one of which was played forward (normal speech) and one of which was played backwards (reversed speech). After viewing the video, the infants were shown the two speakers next to each other, and their looking times were measured. This is a pretty common measure of infant preference: all things being equal, infants will look longer at the stuff they like the most, so you can measure relative preference by comparing how long an infant looks at two or more things. Kinzler et al.'s infants looked at the normal speech speaker 61% of the time, suggesting that, relative to the reversed speech speaker, they preferred the normal speaker. When the normal and reversed speech were paired with inanimate objects (in a separate experiment with different infants), the infants showed no preference for the object paired with normal speech. This suggests that the results of the first experiment did in fact have a social component: when people are involved, infants prefer people who speak a familiar language, or at least an actual language (reversed English only counts as a language on Black Sabbath albums). To make sure it was their native language, and not just actual language, that influenced infants' preferences, Kinzler et al. conducted a third study pitting English against Spanish with infants from English-speaking homes (5-6 month olds don't have a language, so calling it their native language is a bit misleading), and once again, they preferred their native language (61%).
Their fourth study placed infants in a more obviously social situation. In this case, ten-month olds from English-speaking or French-speaking homes watched videos of individuals speaking English or French. After the speaking videos, the infants saw a video of the two speakers handing them toys, after which the toys were placed on the table in front of the infants. Both the English-speaking and French-speaking infants picked the toy from the speaker who spoke their native language twice as often as they picked the toy from the other speaker.
Finally, Kinzler et al. showed five-year old native English or French-speaking children pairs of photos of other children. Each photo was first shown while a recording of either English or French was played. After they'd seen both photos paired with speech, the children were asked who they'd prefer to be friends with, and on average, both the English and French-speaking children chose the photos paired with their native language on seven out of eight trials.
This last study is unsurprising, of course. Children are unlikely to say they want to be friends with other children whose speech they can't understand, but the infant studies seem to me to be pretty powerful demonstrations of the power of language in distinguishing between individuals, and perhaps social groups, for infants as young as 5 months old. What's most striking about those results, perhaps, is that 5 month old infants don't speak at all, but they're still able to distinguish between "their" native language and other languages, and show a clear preference for people who speak it. Unlike in the case of the five year olds, then, this can't be due to a desire to be around people whom they can understand.
How does this scale up to in-group prejudices and conflict? It's hard to say, though it will be interesting to see further developmental research on the relationship between native language preferences and social preferences. For now, I suppose we'll just have to take this as one more piece of evidence that we should all speak Esperanto.
Read on »
Posted by Chris at 2:48 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
More fluff while I grade papers...
While you're giving me your puns (see below), you should also give me your best (slightly) pejorative and (hopefully) funny descriptions of cognitive psychology/science. The two best I've heard, both from the same attention researcher, are:
"Cognitive psychology is just metaphysics with computers."
and
"Cognitive psychology is a bunch of monkeys jumping around trying to grab the high hanging fruit."
Posted by Chris at 3:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
I'll get back to substantive posting in a bit, but as the semester wraps up, I wanted to ask for your help. Over the years, punning has become a more and more integral part of our lab meetings. It's reached the point, in fact, that our P.I. can barely utter a single non-pun sentence, even outside of the lab. On a recent plane trip, he tempted fate by punning with airport security when the refused to let him take his yogurt on the plane, yelling, "These people are discriminating against my culture!" We're also not entirely convinced that he isn't with his wife because she called her ex-husband a "faux-pa," in reference to his parenting.
Yeah, it's that bad.
So, with all these puns flying around, I've decided that it is imperative that we do a study on puns. I'm pretty sure we'll need to do some imaging, too. The thing is, we can't find a lot of actual research on puns (just a bit on cue competition, ambiguity resolution, and suppression, though only in a couple cases is it directly applied to puns). So, my request to you is, a.) do you know of any research outside of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics on puns, and b.) can you give me some puns of your own? Remember, it's all in the name of science, so don't be shy. Give me the worst puns you can possibly conjure.
Posted by Chris at 1:56 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
Like 99.8% of the people in psychology departments, I hate teaching statistics, in large part because it's boring as hell, for both the instructors and the students, but also because students have a hell of a time grasping it, and that makes for some really painful interactions. Part of the problem, I think, is that the way we talk about statistics wasn't designed to facilitate undergraduate instruction. And to see this, you need look no further than the concept of statistical significant.
First of all, whose idea was it to refer to it as significance? I mean, the first thing you tell students is that a statistically significant result doesn't mean that the result is significant in any meaningful sense (say, practically), but of course, they never get that, because it's confusing. And as a result, they constantly refer to null results as "insignificant." But they're not "insignificant," or at least, they aren't necessarily so. They might very well be significant -- a null result in a study seeking to find a connection between autism and vaccines, say, could be very significant, especially for those being sued by the families of autistic children. So I tell my students, over and over and over and over and over again, to refer to the results of statistical tests that don't achieve statistical significance as "non-significant." But "non-significant" is not a word anybody uses in any context, ever, except in statistics. So they say, "OK, non-significant not insignificant, got it," and then in every paper and every presentation, they write or say, "Our results were insignificant." Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! Sometimes, you can almost see their brains trying to convince their mouths to say, "non-significant," but their mouths refuse, and "insignificant" comes out. It's just plain frustrating.
Now, I'd be happy to do away with the concept of statistical significance altogether, but I'm not the one who makes these sorts of decisions, so if we have to keep it, and teach it, can we please call it something else? How 'bout, "statistically good enough for me to publish," "statistically better for us than if our p-value had been greater than .05/.01/.001," or "statistically gnarly?" 'Cause this "significance" shit ain't working.
Posted by Chris at 5:36 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category:
There's a pretty good review of the literature on repression, a central concept in the pyschoanalytic tradition, and an important one in many court cases these days, in the current issue of The Review of General Psychology (via Mind Hacks). If you have a subscription, or access to a library with one, you can read the article here. Here's the abstract:
Does Repression Exist? Memory, Pathogenic, Unconscious and Clinical Evidence, Yacov Rofé
The current dispute regarding the existence of repression has mainly focused on whether people remember or forget trauma. Repression, however, is a multidimensional construct, which, in addition to the memory aspect, consists of pathogenic effects on adjustment and the unconscious. Accordingly, in order to arrive at a more accurate decision regarding the existence of repression, studies relevant to all three areas are reviewed. Moreover, since psychoanalysis regards repression as a key factor in accounting for the development and treatment of neurotic disorders, relevant research from these two domains are also taken into account. This comprehensive evaluation reveals little empirical justification for maintaining the psychoanalytic concept of repression.
Posted by Chris at 9:49 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Cognitive Neuroscience
Last month, a paper was published in Nature, in which Kay et al(1) were able to guess which of their stimuli a person was seeing by looking at their fMRI scans. The model looked something like this (from Kay et al's Figure 1, p. 352):
The image the participant is seeing is on the left, the numbers in the middle represent receptive fields, and the predicted brain activity is on the right. Just compare the predicted brain activity for each image to actual brain activity, and whichever matches the best is the image the person was viewing when they produced that brain activity. Simple, right? Well, not really. To be honest, I understand about .01% of what's going on in their analysis (I see the phrase "Gabor wavelet pyramid," and my eyes glaze over), and apparently I'm not alone, because despite the fact that the ability to guess what someone's seeing from their brain activity is really, really cool, the paper got no love from the blogosphere. And I was really hoping someone would post about it, so they could explain it to me.
However, a paper by Soon et al. published just this week in Nature Neuroscience(2, which makes predictions about people's behavior from fMRI data is getting all sorts of attention, with an article in Wired and the Boston Globe, as well as in diverse areas of the blogosphere (e.g., here, here, here, and here). Now, I find the other paper more interesting, because it uses underlying theory about how the visual system works in order to predict patterns of activation from patterns of input, whereas this week's paper just attempts to correlate activity with behavior, but apparently that's just me. To see why people find this new paper so interesting, though, we should take a step back, all the way to February 2007.
Back then, when time's were simpler and the dollar was worth slightly more, Haynes et al. (Haynes is one of the authors of the Soon et al. paper) published a paper in Current Biology(3) that's basically the same as this week's Nature Neuroscience paper. They asked participants to choose between two tasks (either addition or subtraction), then to "covertly maintain their intention" (I guess that just means keep it in mind, in neuroscientist-speak) during a delay, after which they would be presented with two numbers and the two possible answers (one for addition and one for subtraction), from which the participants were to select the correct one given the decision they'd made.
Since this is an imaging study, participants were having pictures of their brains taken all along, using fMRI. After everything was done, Haynes et al. used pattern recognition techniques to look for, well, patterns in the fMRI data taken during the delay (while participants were covertly maintaining their choice), and then correlate those patterns with each of the decisions. They then used the results of the pattern recognition analysis to predict which of the two decisions a participant had made. Activity in several brain regions were able to predict participants' choices, including the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior medial prefrontal cortex, the left lateral frontopolar cortex, the left frontal sulcus, the right middle frontal gyrus, the left frontal operculum, all regions associated with memory, executive functioning (e.g., planning and resource allocation), and motor control. The medial prefrontal cortex had the highest prediction accuracy, correctly predicting participants' choices 71% of the time. When thinking about this, keep in mind that this activity occurred before people actually carried out their chosen activity, so this is all activation associated with the choice itself. Or so the logic goes.
The Soon et al. paper isn't much different from the Haynes et al. paper. Once again, they gave participants two options from which they could freely choose, though in this case the choice was which of two buttons to press. While participants were making their decision, letters were scrolling across the screen, and after making the choice, participants were told remember the letter that was present when they made the decision (i.e., when they first became consciously aware of having made a choice). Once again, fMRI pictures were being taken of their brain.
As in the previous study, Soon et al. used pattern recognition models to correlate brain activity with the two choices, but this time, there was a twist. Using the letters that participants indicated were present when they made their choice, Soon et al. could estimate (within a couple hundred milliseconds) when they became consciously aware of t heir choice, and could then look at brain activity in various regions at various time intervals prior to conscious awareness. They found that activity in the frontopolar cortex (executive functioning), signals occurring up to ten second before participants became consciously aware of their decision could predict which choice they'd made with accuracy greater than we'd expect by chance. Several areas within the parietal cortex were also accurate at predicting choice at above chance levels.
What does this mean? It means that prior to our becoming consciously aware of choosing something, at least in these simple tasks, our brains have worked out what we're going to choose below the level of awareness. In other words, the unconscious mind is doing all the work. Duh. This is not all that surprising, and the only truly impressive thing about it is that the choice seems to be set so long before we're aware of making it, even when the choice is so simple (it's not like there's anything riding on it). I'd have thought things worked a bit faster than that, though I suspect part of the reason they work so slow in this case is because there are no real time pressures.
From my perspective, there's not really anything to write home about here. Unlike the Kay et al. paper, Haynes et al. and Soon et al. aren't using any new techniques or models. They're just using correlations, and my son could do that, if he had the statistical software to analyze fMRI data that is. But from the very first sentence of the Soon et al. paper, it's clear why this study has drawn people's attention. They begin their paper with:
The impression that we are able to freely choose between different possible courses of action is fundamental to our mental life. However, it has been suggested that this subjective experience of freedom is no more than an illusion and that our actions are initiated by unconscious mental processes long before we become aware of our intention to act.
Aha! Free will! People love that shit, and that's how they're thinking about the paper, as evidenced by the headlines and post titles for articles about the study, such as "Free will? Not as much as you think," "Free will as illusion," "Letting go of free will," and just, "Free will?" It's clear that people, encouraged by the paper's authors, think this data calls into doubt the existence of free will, if it doesn't debunk it altogether. But does it?
The answer, for me at least, is no, it has absolutely nothing to do with free will. Putting aside for a moment the fact that I'm not really sure what free will looks like in a non-dualist metaphysics, it's pretty clear that Soon et al.'s data really only speaks to the existence of free will in a dualist metaphysical system in which consciousness is totally separate from the physical (and unconscious) mind. Or at least, you need to posit some sort of homuncular consciousness in order for it to say anything about free will. In other words, for this study to have any relevance to free will, there would have to be this conscious system (physical or not, it doesn't matter), separate from the unconscious one, that is sitting around getting input from the unconscious system and making its own decisions freely (whatever freely means in this context). You'd have to have a conscious mind that's watching the unconscious mind, and acting separately. If this is your model of how things work in the head, then you've got more problems than this data -- you've got a hundred years worth of data to contend with, along with some difficult logical and engineering problems. If, however, you treat the conscious and unconscious minds as part of the same system, then any decision made by the latter are as free as decisions made by the former. That is, there's no reason to treat decisions made unconsciously as less free than decisions made consciously. Unless there's some property of conscious awareness that gives freedom to choices, but I have no idea what that property would be, and I don't think anyone else does either.
In sum, then, the Kay et al. study is really cool, but I don't understand it, while the Haynes et al. and Soon et al. studies are mildly interesting, but have absolutely nothing to do with free will. I blame this confusion on our continued love-affair with consciousness, which leaves us blind to the fact that consciousness is doing very little of the work in our minds, while the under-appreciated unconscious mind is doing everything and getting none of the glory. I blame Homer.
Read on »
Posted by Chris at 5:40 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.
