mixingmemory

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November 23, 2006
One of the more popular theories of emotion during the 60s and 70s was Schachter and Singer's two-factor theory1. The theory is pretty simple. As the name suggests, it states that emotions have two components: arousal and a cognitive component that involves "labeling" the emotion based on context.…
November 22, 2006
We all know that there are gender differences in neuroanatomy, as well as in some cognitive tasks (females tend to do better on memory and verbal tasks, men on spatial tasks) and both cognitive and emotional development, though it's not clear how the cognitive/behavioral/developmental differences…
November 22, 2006
Hello everyone. Since the traffic's been up lately, meaning there are probably a lot of new people around, I thought I'd ask for any suggestions or requests you might have. Also, if you're wondering about the framing project, it's still in the works. I've talked to some others about it, and…
November 21, 2006
Coolest toy ever: Via the Social Science Statistics Blog.
November 21, 2006
Research on cultural differences between East Asians (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese in most studies) and Western Europeans/Americans (mostly Americans) have shown, among other things, that westerners tend to reason analytically, while East Asians tend to reason more holistically. This means, among…
November 20, 2006
The study of the influence of emotion on cognition and perception has really taken off over the last decade or so, which is a good thing, because cognitive psychologists pretty much ignored emotion for a long time, so we have some catching up to do. Over at PsyBlog, Jeremy Dean summarizes an Annual…
November 19, 2006
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post on the unification of psychology, in which I addressed (rather critically) a paper by Gregg Henriques. Dr. Henriques was kind of enough to reply in comments, and because it's a two-week old post, I didn't want his comment to languish in obscurity as a result of…
November 18, 2006
One of my favorite perceptual illusions isn't actually visual. It's often called the "cutaneous rabbit" illusion1, for reasons that will be apparent in a moment. I stumbled across it when reading a paper by Dennett and Kinsbourne2. Here's their description of the illusion (p. 188): The subject's…
November 17, 2006
Some of you might be interested in this short article from the February 2006 issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Lombrozo, T., Shtulman, A., & Weisberg, M. (2006) The Intelligent Design controversy: lessons from psychology and education. Trends in Cognitive Science, 10(2), 56-57. Here's the…
November 16, 2006
There's nothing like having a curious child to make you aware of just how little you actually know about the world. Often (more often than I'd like to admit), my son (Darth Vader over there on the left) will ask me a question about how something works, or why something happens the way it does, and…
November 14, 2006
For several years, researchers have been contrasting human-human and human-computer interactions in order go gain more insight into theory of mind. The assumption is that people don't treat computers like, well, people. It's not a totally unfounded assumption, either. In several studies in which…
November 13, 2006
Originally posted on the old blog on 1/4/2005. Reposted here out of laziness. Do Children Attribute False Beliefs to God? Humans are fallible. This is a fact that most adults understand. God, on the other hand, is not, by definition This is also a fact that most adults, in most cultures, recognize…
November 13, 2006
I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan. I still look upon the time I saw them live in 1994 as a religious experience. Unlike many Floyd fans my age, though, I prefer their early albums to their later ones (up to and including Obscured by Clouds, but especially A Saucer Full of Secrets, Ummagumma, Atom Heart…
November 11, 2006
The stuff in this post at the Social Science Statistics Blog is seriously cool. Data representation in faces (in the post, the data represented is baseball stats -- go Braves!). From the post: Chernoff faces are a method introduced by Herman Chernoff (Prof Emeritus of Applied Math at MIT and of…
November 11, 2006
In keeping with the theme of illusions that result from crossmodal interactions, this week's illusion is the ventriloquism effect, first reported by Howard and Tempelton in 1966. As you can probably tell from the name, the ventriloquism effect involves visual information influencing where we think…
November 11, 2006
Earlier today I posted about the spatial and temporal ventriloquism aftereffects. One of the reasons I find those effects fascinating because I think they might hint at a counterargument to recent studies by Daniel Casasanto and Lera Boroditsky that seem to provide evidence that time is…
November 10, 2006
Anytime I hear songs from when I was in high school or college, I get very nostalgic. I remember people I knew, places I went, good times I had. It's a powerful and complex feeling, with all sorts of interesting psychological aspects, but for some reason, I'd never really thought about studying it…
November 10, 2006
There's an interesting statistical comparison between the 1994 Republican victory and the 2006 Democratic victory at the Columbia stats blog. From the post: The Democrats' victory in the 2006 election has been compared to the Republicans' in 2004. But the Democrats actually did a lot better in…
November 9, 2006
The last post on time-space metaphor research has sparked a really interesting discussion in the comments (go check it out), so I thought I'd talk about some more research to see if we can't get even more people talking. If you've been following that discussion, this is the research by Daniel…
November 8, 2006
It's time for another reposting of something I wrote on the old blog. Laziness reigns again. This is a post on research on political analogies, originally posted on March 29, 2005. If it looks like it's starting in the middle, that's because it is. I left out the beginning of the post because it…
November 7, 2006
By now you've probably all heard about the paper published by Plotnik, de Waal, and Reiss in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late October titled "Self-recognition in an Asian elephant." I suspect that for people who study elephants, the results described in that paper come as…
November 7, 2006
As I've said before, the primary (if not the only) real experimental evidence for conceptual metaphor theory -- the theory that abstract concepts are structured by more concrete (i.e., closer to sensory/perceptual) concepts -- comes from one domain: time. Time, according to conceptual metaphor…
November 6, 2006
You know things have taken a turn for the surreal when George Lakoff is described as "an admirer of Noam Chomsky." I may dislike his linguistics and his political theory, but I have to pat him on the back for striking such a nerve with the wingnuts that they are willing to call a man who was once…
November 5, 2006
Over at The Neurocritic, there's a great post on an imaging study that contrasted singing and speaking in tongues in five religious women. That reminded me of a paper I had read a couple months ago by one of the authors of the speaking in tongues study. It's a paper on the neuroscientific study of…
November 4, 2006
Last week, I talked about the sound-induced flash illusion, in which presenting a single flash with two or more auditory beeps caused people to see two or more flashes. This week, a study showing that the same effect can be obtained by replacing the beeps with touches. Here's the setup (…
November 3, 2006
Well, not exactly, but I'll get to that in a minute. I read this paper last night, and afterwards, when I was looking around one of the author's pages, I came across a neuroimaging study designed to look for "pre-existing neural, cognitive, or motoric markers for musical ability" 1. Apparently…
November 3, 2006
I promised some further posts on the topic of metaphor, and on the conventionalization of metaphor in particular, but in order to get to that, we need to get some things out of the way first. Let's start with polysemy. If you don't know what polysemy is, then you need to study up on your Greek…
November 2, 2006
Raymond Gibbs Jr., psycholinguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the principle adherents of cognitive linguistics and conceptual metaphor theory, was kind enough to leave a comment at the post "Idioms, Metaphors, and Lakoff, Oh My!." Dr. Gibbs' book, The Poetics of Mind:…
November 2, 2006
What is psychology? If you were asked to define it, could you? In the 12 years that I've been studying psychology, I've been asked no more than 5 times what psychology is, and each time, I struggled and ultimately failed to come up with a definition. To be honest, though, that doesn't bother me in…
November 1, 2006
I had a birthday recently, and my parents went shopping in an antique and rare book store, and got me the two volumes of Brand Blanshard's The Nature of Thought. I immediately read through the first book on perception, and was seriously impressed, perhaps because I've always been a closet fan of F.…