mixingmemory
Posts by this author
May 4, 2008
Then listen to this set of lectures from the 2007 Advanced Neuroimaging Summer School at UCLA.
April 30, 2008
Via Dave, I just learned of vision scientist Arthur Shapiro's new blog, Illusion Sciences. Very cool stuff.
April 19, 2008
I can't seem to stop listening to Music from the Big Pink, so now you have to listen to it too:
April 18, 2008
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…
April 17, 2008
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…
April 14, 2008
Zombies have invaded the philosophy blogosphere, and Brandon of Siris, in providing links to all the other stuff, made some pretty strong claims that I was hoping he'd expand upon. And fortunately he has, in a follow up post that's a must-read for those who are interested in this sort of thing. The…
March 29, 2008
You can see Josh Knobe, of Experimental Philosophy fame, and Paul Bloom, who doesn't have a blog but has one of them professorship things up at some podunk little school in New Haven, CT, talking about research in moral psychology here.
March 25, 2008
Just to show that there are no hard feelings between behaviorists and cognitive psychologists, we've created an R-W t-shirt:
Here's the back:
I don't know about you, but I think this t-shirt would be great for dates, parties, rock concerts, and weddings.
March 24, 2008
It would be a horrible cliché to begin a post about the reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory with a Proust quote, so instead I'll begin with something only slightly less cliché: beginning something about memory by talking about my own experience. You see, I'm southern, as anyone who's…
March 21, 2008
Recently, I saw a famous learning theorist -- perhaps one of the two most influential learning theorists in the last 40 or so years; if ΔV = αβ(λ - ΣV) means anything to you, you'll have narrowed it down to the two -- give a talk at the behavioral neuroscience area's weekly colloqium here. The talk…
March 20, 2008
You know, just the other day, on this very blog, I swore I would never read another (cognitive) imaging paper again, but between then and now, I've read 5 of 6, so apparently my oath didn't take. It's sort of like my constantly telling myself, as I ride the bus to campus in the morning, that I'm…
March 16, 2008
That's it! I'm never reading another imaging paper again, ever. OK, I might read one or two, and I might even post about them, but for now I'm telling myself, for my own sanity, that I'm never, ever, under any circumstances, going to read another imaging study. If you read my last post, or have…
March 15, 2008
I really do love illusions of all sorts, in large part because they fit nicely into my narrative about the fallibility of human thought, but illusions are also great as windows into the ordinary working of our brains. For example, color afterimages provide direct evidence for opponent-processing…
March 13, 2008
Because some people seem to be misinterpreting what I was saying in the last post, and even arguing against it by suggesting that I should have taken the position that I did, in fact, take, let me summarize my points in a few sentences.
The main point is that because I don't feel like I can be…
March 11, 2008
Discussion of a paper titled "Respect and Religion," by Simon Blackburn, is making its way through the blogosphere, and sparking some interesting discussion (particularly over at Crooked Timber, but this is a good read too). The key quote from Blackburn's article is this:
We can respect, in the…
February 17, 2008
I've been hanging out with fellow atheists for a while now, and one of the more common discussions I've had when the topic of religion comes up is, why are people religious? The two most common answers I've heard from atheist friends and acquaintances are that religion is a fantasy designed to…
February 12, 2008
Looks like a couple of my fellow SBers have managed to get a date and location for their presidential debate on science, and have invited the candidates (Clinton, Obama, Huckabee, and McCain). I still think this is an absolutely terrible idea on so many levels, but I'm comforted by the thought that…
February 11, 2008
The January issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (the same journal that gave us the alien IAT) has some really interesting, and short, review articles. Unfortunately, they're only available with a subscription, but for those of you who are lucky enough to have access to a…
February 4, 2008
One of the criticisms of most false memory research is that it lacks ecological validity. For example, in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, a common method for inducing false memories in the lab, involves giving participants a bunch of words (e.g., bed, rest, nap, snore, etc.) that are…
February 3, 2008
Sorry for not posting lately. Some of you may remember the experiment I asked for help with a while back (here). Well, we've got good data now, and we spent the last week or so rushing to put it together to submit to a conference (the deadline for which was Friday). We've also been frantically…
January 16, 2008
In case you haven't seen it already, there's an article on the embodied cognition "revolution" in the Boston Globe.
This, I think, is the best point to take away from it:
"I think these findings are really fantastic and it's clear that there's a lot of connection between mind and body," says Arthur…
January 8, 2008
There's a paper in the December 2007 issue of Psychological Science titled "Google and the Mind: Predicting Fluency With PageRank." Here's the abstract:
Griffiths, T.L., Steyvers, M., & Firl, A. (2007). Google and the mind: Predicting fluency with PageRank. Psychological Science, 18(12), 1069-…
January 7, 2008
In case you haven't heard from other bloggers, Just Science, in which bloggers choose to post about, well, just science for a week (5 days, this time) is back. The details are here, and you can sign up here. Everyone who signs up is added to the feed, so even if you don't sign up, you can read all…
January 1, 2008
I've been posting about moral cognition anytime a new and interesting result pops up for a while now, and every time I think I've said before, though it bears repeating, that every time I read another article on moral cognition, I'm more confused than I was before reading it. Part of the problem, I…
December 30, 2007
I hope everyone's having a nice holiday season. I'll be back to blogging next year.
December 19, 2007
As I believe I've said before, if anything good has come from the Larry Summers debacle of a few years ago, it's that it inspired some really interesting research on gender differences in math. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've probably guessed that one of my favorite topics in…
December 13, 2007
I've blogged about some great papers in the past, but today I'm blogging about the best... paper... ever. It's by Arina K. Bones, of the University of Darache in Monte Carlo, and Navin R. Johnson of Opti Corp, was published in the December issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science (with a…
December 11, 2007
Sorry to bring this up again, as I'm sure most of you couldn't care less, but something about the idea of a presidential debate on science-related issues really bugs me, and I've been trying to figure out exactly what that is. Plus, part of me is hoping that someone will come along and explain to…
December 10, 2007
If you haven't heard, fellow ScienceBloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum of The Intersection have launched a movement called Sciencedebate 2008, in which they demand that the presidential candidates have a debate entirely on science and science-related issues. They've received the backing…