mixingmemory | October 24, 2006OK, the initial response to my quesitons about the internet study was overwhelmingly positive, so I'm going to go ahead with it. I just need one more thing from you. Ordinarily with a study like this, I would run a pilot study to figure out exactly what concepts to include in the final version, but since this is my first time doing this web thing, I don't want to have a bunch of people spread the word, get a bunch of people who will do it once, and then only have the pilot data. So, I need to come up with a list of concepts related to current political issues. What I need is ten higher-level…
mixingmemory | October 23, 2006If you're not reading the Columbia University stats blog, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, you're missing a lot of great stuff. For example, today's post by Andrew Gelman discusses the paper "Forecasting House Seats from Generic Congressional Polls" by Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezian. From the paper:
This paper is intended to provide some guidance for translating the results of generic congressional polls into the election outcome.1 Via computer simulation based on statistical analysis of historical data, we show how generic vote polls can be used to forecast the…
mixingmemory | October 23, 2006I'm working on writing up a lengthy description of an alternative to Lakoff's political theory, mostly because I feel guilty about doing little more than trashing it without offering anything positive to the discussion. My approach is based on, well, actual research, and unlike Lakoff's, it won't be designed to prove the superiority of one political party over any other. If it works, it would be equally useful to anyone of any political bent. Part of what my approach requires is actual empirical research on the structure of people's representations of the concepts involved in political…
mixingmemory | October 23, 2006Psychologists are now fairly confident that humans have an agency-detection mechanism, and an itchy agency-detection trigger finger. This is because the consequences of not detecting agency are often greater than those of agency-detection false positives. As Atran and Norenzayan put it:
From an evolutionary perspective, it's better to be safe than sorry regarding the detection of agency under conditions of uncertainty.
When it looks like there's a shape moving in the tall grass, it's better to infer agency and run away than end up being eaten by a lion when it jumps out of the grass. Thus,…
mixingmemory | October 21, 2006Everyone else who's answered this question has been very decisive, but I really can't choose an particular science TV series. I've always loved Nova, Nature, National Geographic, and I remember watching and loving Marty Stouffer's Wild America on Sunday mornings when I was a kid. But I think my favorite science show episode of all time was the 1991 National Geographic special, "Eternal Enemies: Lions and Hyenas". It was amazing to watch those two powerful species go at it. Here's a part of the special:
mixingmemory | October 21, 2006Given the ubiquitousness of weight, obesity, and eating discussions these days, I thought I'd talk about some research that has, for some reason, stuck in my mind since I first heard about it a few years ago. It concerns the relationship between memory and eating. We all know that the desire to eat isn't just about the physiological condition of being hungry. Stress, depression, loneliness, and all sorts of other psychological states can make us want to eat more than we otherwise would. So it should come as no surprise that eating has "psychological" components. It may surprise you to learn,…
mixingmemory | October 20, 2006Over the next few months, several cognitive science books will be coming out that look really interesting. I thought I'd list a few of them, in case you're interested in checking them out once they're published.
The Prehistory of Cognitive Science - Andrew Brook, Editor
Description
Featuring contributions from leading figures such as Noam Chomsky, Don Ross, Andrew Brook and Patricia Kitcher, this book traces the philosophical roots behind contemporary understandings of cognition, forming both a convincing case for the centrality of philosophy to the history of neuroscience and cognitive…
mixingmemory | October 19, 2006Since I posted on a really bad study that's outside of my area of expertise the other day, I thought I should make it up to you by posting on what I think is a good study by Gelman et al. that's also outside of my area of expertise today. Plus, with a title like "Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: What's the matter with Connecticut?" (via the Columbia University stats blog, where Gelman is a contributor) it has to be blogged (the entire study can be read at that link). I mostly read it to learn about the methodology (interesting use of regression, if you're interested in that sort…
mixingmemory | October 19, 2006I know you're probably not looking for movie recommendations from an anonymous cognitive psychologist, but if you haven't seen
mixingmemory | October 16, 2006Every once in a while I run across a paper that I have no idea what to make of. That happened earlier today, when I read a paper titled "Does television cause autism?" by Waldman, Nicholson, and Adilov (you can read the entire paper at that link). Television causes autism? If you'd asked me this morning, I'd have told you that was crazy talk, but this as of yet unpublished (and unsubmitted, apparently, which means unreviewed) paper takes the idea very seriously. Well, they don't really set out to show that television is the cause of autism, but that it's part of a causal chain that begins…
mixingmemory | October 14, 2006Note: This was originally posted at the old blog on August 14, 2005. Enjoy.
After I finally finished Language in Mind, about which I posted the other day, I went back and looked at some of the literature on linguistic relativity that I had read over the years, but had mostly forgotten. And since linguistic relativity has always been a favorite topic of mine, I thought I'd post a little more about it (it may not be a favorite topic of yours, but hey, this is my blog!). In the early days of cognitive science, the majority of the studies designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or other…
mixingmemory | October 13, 2006NoteI get a lot of questions in email about linguistic relativity, or the influence of language on thought. So instead of writing something new, I thought I'd repost two posts I wrote on the topic back on the old blog. Here's the first, originally posted on August 10, 2005. The second will be up tomorrow
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print--I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
"Gretchen.…
mixingmemory | October 10, 2006This is just funny. In case you don't remember, in this year's World Cup finals, French star Zinedine Zidane, who was playing in his last World Cup game, headbutted Italian defender Marco Materazzi in extra time. He was promptly red carded, and thus removed from the game. There was a lot of speculation about what Materazzi might have said to Zidane to make him do such a foolish thing, so Materazzi has written a book about it. From the article:
In a book titled "What I actually told Zidane," Materazzi lists 249 possible phrases he could have uttered, including his real words, the ANSA news…
mixingmemory | October 10, 2006Sometime yesterday, the 200,000th unique visitor dropped by Mixing Memory (combining the old and new incarnations). That's a hell of a lot of people. Hopefuly, somebody got something out of it. Thanks for visiting everyone. As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or requests, feel free to email them to me.
mixingmemory | October 7, 2006George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. I haven't read either of the new books (my New Year's resolution this year was to not read any more bullshit), but Steven Pinker has, and his review of Whose Freedom? in the New Republic (the review is behind a subscription wall, but you can read it in its entirety below the fold in this Gene Expression post) has sparked a reply from Lakoff, and…
mixingmemory | October 5, 2006OK, time for a few links.
First up, there's a very good new blog by cognitive anthropologists called Alpha Psy. I disagreed pretty strongly with some of the points in their post on terror management theory, but overall I've really enjoyed the blog so far. I strongly recommend the post on majority rule, "Long Live the Majority," and the primers in their "Rough Guide to Naturalism."
Also, I just added two social science statistics blogs to the blogroll. They're both really good, but a bit specialized, so they're not for everyone. The first is Social Science Statistics Blog, which has a really…
mixingmemory | October 4, 2006Over at the Experimental Philosophy blog, Joshua Knobe has a post about a series of experiments that he has run with Jesse Prinz on people's intuitions about consciousness, and he includes a link to a draft of the paper they're writing on the experiments. The experiments were motivated by two hypotheses. The first says that people have a concept of "phenomenal consciousness," even if they don't know it. As a result of this concept, people will be willing to attribute phenomenal states to certain kinds of agents (you know, like people or animals), but not to others (like group agents, like…
mixingmemory | October 4, 2006Is it wrong that I like this? I'd like to see the Nietzschean Dilbert, too.
And I had to include a second one, because this is one of my favorite quotes from Zarathustra:
mixingmemory | October 2, 2006Of all the mirror neurons discovered in monkeys, auditory mirror neurons may be the coolest. These cells respond when a monkey performs an action, and when that monkey hears the sounds of that action being performed by another. Until recently, there was limited evidence of a corresponding auditory mirror neuron system in humans. In one study, for example, researchers contrasted the brain activity of expert pianists and nonmusicians1. In one condition, both groups of participants listened to piano music, and in another, they pressed random keys on a piano keyboard that was rigged so that it…
mixingmemory | October 1, 2006We interrupt this weekend of mirror neurons (I know, I'm slow getting the posts out -- the weekend may extend into the week) to bring you this public service announcement. Well, not so much an announcement as a begging for advice and discussion.
Since I started writing about cognitive science almost exclusively on this blog, I've been getting links from course websites, faculty pages, etc., and it has made me think about how I, and other bloggers, can better facilitate science education. As I've said before, I think one purpose of academic blogs should be to educate people who will never take…