mixingmemory | September 30, 2006One of the top ten coolest experiments ever has to be Botvinick and Cohen's "rubber hand" experiment1. I'm going to let them describe the manipulation:
Each of ten subjects was seated with their left arm resting upon a small table. A standing screen was positioned beside the arm to hide it from the subject's view and a life-sized rubber model of a left hand and arm was placed on the table directly in front of the subject. The subject sat with eyes fixed on the artificial hand while we used two small paintbrushes to stroke the rubber hand and the subject's hidden hand, synchronising the…
mixingmemory | September 29, 2006The last couple weeks have seen a flurry of papers on mirror neurons, with three in last week's issue of Current Biology, and the paper on mirror neurons and sexual orientation in press at NeuroImage (is it just me, or will that journal publish anything?) that is fast becoming infamous (see posts on it by the Neurocritic, at the new cognitive anthropology blog Alpha Psy, and at ScienceBlog's own Frontal Cortex). So, I'm declaring this the weekend of mirror neurons. I should have the first post up sometime tomorrow.
Oh, and if you want more pornographic neuroscience, check out this old post.
mixingmemory | September 27, 2006OK, I learned of this site from Positive Liberty, and tried desperately to resist it, but ultimately was unable to. The result of my weakness:
And if you recognize the "slogan," the answer is yes, I am a big fan.
mixingmemory | September 27, 2006The other day, I talked about terror management theory (TMT) and modern art. That probably wasn't the best way to introduce TMT, because it's a bit of a stretch to turn TMT into an aesthetic theory. Instead, I should have started by looking at some studies on TMT and cultural values and beliefs, because that's where TMT got its start. Recall that TMT says, in essence, that in order to avoid the fear that comes with thoughts of our own mortality, we erect and cling to belief and value systems. Thus, when we encounter things that make us thing about death, we cling all the more tightly to those…
mixingmemory | September 24, 2006I just got an email about a new blog on music cognition, Sound and Mind. From the email:
The vision for Sound and Mind is to provide an interdisciplinary hub, a place for cognitive musicologists, scientists, and critical theorists to discuss and critique each other's work and to build professional relationships, potentially leading to collaborative projects.
Go check it out.
Coincidentally, I just got a copy of Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music, though I'm not sure when I'm going to get to it. It looks interesting, though.
mixingmemory | September 24, 2006Via Will Wilkerson, I learned of Richard Rorty's very good review of Marc Hauser's Moral Minds. He's very critical both of Hauser's moral nativism and of Hauser's more optimistic claims about the study of moral psychology. John McKhail, who is a moral nativist, and has done some interesting work on the topic (which I've cited on this blog), replies to Rorty's review here.
I've been talking about this subject for about a year now here on the blog, and have been interested in the literature (and thinking of ways to put my hat into the moral psychology ring) for a few years now, so I'm somewhat…
mixingmemory | September 23, 2006I was reminded of this illusion by the Seed Daily Zeitgeist yesterday. In order to get the full effect, I'll show you one set of photos here, and the rest of the post will be below the fold. The first are from Schwanginer et al. (2003)1:
They look pretty normal, right? Now look at these:
Gross, right? Those are the same two photos (the one on the right is now on the left, but rightside up this time. The distortions to the one face, which didn't look so bad when it was upside down, now look... grotesque. What's going on here? Well, in the inverted photo on the right (on the left when the…
mixingmemory | September 22, 2006Been a while, but I thought I'd start doing this again now and then. First, the serious link. If you haven't read about the doctor and five nurses who have been unjustly sentenced to death in Libya, you should. Unfortunately, I don't think any amount outcry in this country will change the verdict, but it can't hurt either.
On a less serious note, over at the Experimental Philosophy blog, there's a post about "experimental history of science." This is cool stuff (though I'm not entirely convinced it's all that useful; but I've never really been a pragmatist when it comes to nerdy stuff anyway…
mixingmemory | September 21, 2006A few days ago, the New York Mets clinched the National League East title, becoming the first team to win a division with the Atlanta Braves in it, other than the Braves, since 1990 (excluding the strike-shortened 1994 season, of course). This marked the end of the longest streak of consecutive division titles in professional sports. Strangely, as a devout Braves, I am somewhat relieved that the streak is over. I was 15 when the Braves won the first of their 14 straight titles, and the streak has lasted half of my lifetime. I have to say, it's been exhausting. I still have the scar on the top…
mixingmemory | September 21, 2006Earlier this month, Mixing Memory turned 2 years old. So, happy belated birthday, Mixing Memory, and thanks to everyone who's visited in the last two years, and especially to those who've left comments and feedback. If you haven't yet left comments or feedback, then... why the hell not? I mean, come on, blogs need validation just like you and I, especially when they feel like they're getting old (you know, like around their birthdays).
mixingmemory | September 20, 2006There's been some hubbub recently over a study by Gerber and Malhotra (you can get a copy in pdf here), which shows a couple things. First, political science journals don't publish many articles that report negative (null) results, but instead tend to publish those that report statistically significant results. Second, a large portion of those statistically significant results involve probabilities that are pretty damn close to .05 (the generally accepted cutoff for statistical significance). My first reactions were duh, and who cares?
Of course, I'm not a political scientist, so I can't…
mixingmemory | September 20, 2006I've never really hung out in a social psychology laboratory, but here is how I picture a typical day in one. There are some social psychologists sitting around, drinking some sort of exotic tea, and free associating. One psychologist will say the name of a random social psychological theory, and another will then throw out the first thing that comes into his or her head. They'll write each of these down, and the associations will then become the basis for their next several research projects. OK, so that's probably not really what's going on, and I suppose there's a more scientific method to…
mixingmemory | September 16, 2006Back on the old blog, I wrote a series of posts in which I detailed a revolution in moral psychology. Sparked largely by recent empirical and theoretical work by neuroscientists, psychologists studying moral judgment have transitioned from Kantian rationalism, that goes back as far as, well, Kant (and in psychology, the Kantian Jean Piaget), to a more Humean approach, that considers emotion and motivation to be central.
Some of the more interesting work utilizing this new approach has been done by Joshua Greene and his colleagues1 They have demonstrated that we use different processes to…
mixingmemory | September 14, 2006A little over a year ago, I reviewed David Buller's anti-Evolutionary Psychology book, Adapting Minds, arguing that, at least in the most important chapter, it fell far short of "demolishing" Evolutionary Psychology, as one philosopher claimed it had done. The problem, I noted, is that Buller didn't refer to the bulk of the relevant research, including research that directly addresses the arguments he makes. I charitably stated that he was probably ignorant of the literature, but in a new review of the book, Edouard Machery and Clark Barrett, who also point out the lack of references to the…
mixingmemory | September 13, 2006No, seriously. The paper in which Carrie Jenkins presents a conceptual analysis of flirting is here (via Online Papers in Philosophy). An except:
What is it to flirt? Do you have to intend to flirt with someone in order to count as doing so? Can such things as dressing a certain way count as flirting? Can one flirt with an AI character? With one's own long-term partner? With an idea?
The question of whether or not an act of flirtation has taken place is often highly significant in our practical decision-making. For example, one may want to know whether or not one's partner has been flirting…
mixingmemory | September 10, 2006OK, this has nothing to do with cognitive science, but today's quake felt throughout the southeast reminded me of a little history that some people may not be aware of. In Tennessee, there is only one large natural lake, Reelfoot Lake, in the far western part of the state just south of Kentucky, near the Mississippi River. It's an exceptionally beautiful place, with bald eagles and bald cypress trees (in the picture below), but what's really cool about it is how it was formed.
In 1811 and 1812, there were dozens of earthquakes, including 4 very large ones, in thea area around west Tennessee…
mixingmemory | September 9, 2006Over the years I'd heard that, lurking in the basements of psychology departments at various universities throughout the world, there are psychologists studying music cognition, but until the publication of a special issue of the journal Cognition, I hadn't really paid any attention to them. That issue (especially Ray Jackendoff's "The capacity for music: What is it, and what's special about it?") got me interested in the topic, though, not so much because it can tell us much about cognition in general, but because the experiments are usually pretty cool. So, I've been on the lookout for…
mixingmemory | August 31, 2006Hi, I just wanted to apologize for the lack of posting over the last month. I've had computer issues and traveling, which don't mix well together and have left me with few opportunities to blog. I'll be posting pretty much every day starting after the weekend.
mixingmemory | July 23, 2006There are a few topics in cognitive science that are like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I find the very mention of them irritating, and the irritation can stick in my craw for days. At or near the top of that list are mirror neurons. These little cells have been made so sexy, either by their sheer coolness or massive, overblown publicity (it's hard to tell which), that they seem to have become the solution to virtually every problem in the study of cognition and behavior in the minds of some researchers. Of course, the blogosphere has also jumped on the mirror neuron boat (I was…
mixingmemory | July 21, 2006From what I know of Graham Priest, he's an interesting philosopher. I read his book on intentionality, Towards Non-Being a few months ago, and enjoyed it, and I read his Introduction to Non-Classical Logic a few years ago, and have recommended it. So when I saw that he had written a paper titled "What is Philosophy?" in a recent issue of the journal Philosophy (sorry, it's not online anywhere, and Philosophy is woefuly slow in updating its website), I thought I'd check it out.
It was popular in the 20th century to write books with this title, or some variant thereof (I particularly like this…