mixingmemory | November 23, 2006One 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. Schacter and Singer's famous study involved giving participants either epinephrine or a placebo, and telling them that they were getting vitamin injections (I'm a sucker for studies with deception). The participants were told that the purpose of the study was to measure the effects of the vitamins…
mixingmemory | November 22, 2006We 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 relate to the differences in neuroanatomy. Research on gender differences is often plagued by confounding variables such as sociological factors that are damn near impossible to control for. Jumping into the gender-differences game takes a lot of guts, or extreme naivete, then, because not only is…
mixingmemory | November 22, 2006Hello 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 received a lot of advice, so I'm just working to make sure I get it right. I could still use a little coding help, if you've got the will and the way.
mixingmemory | November 21, 2006Research 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 other things, that westerners tend to pay more attention to focal objects at the expense of context, while East Asians pay more attention to context1. It also means that, when attributing causes to events, westerners generally focus on a few causes directly related to the event, while East Asians…
mixingmemory | November 20, 2006The 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 Review paper that reviews much of this research. In his summary, Jeremy mentions a paper on emotion and vision that I'd meant to post on a while ago because it's really cool, but forgot all about. So I'll post about it now.
The paper, by Phelps, Ling, and Carrasco1, describes two studies that focus…
mixingmemory | November 19, 2006A 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 the blog world's short attention span. So with his permission, I'm giving his comment a post of its own. Here it is, in its entirety:
Hi Chris,
You wrote:
'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…
mixingmemory | November 18, 2006One 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 arm rests cushioned on a table, and mechanical square-wave tappers are placed at two or three locations along the arm, up to a foot apart. A series of taps in rhythm are delivered by the tappers, e.g., 5 at the wrist followed by 2 near the elbow and then 3 more on the upper arm. The taps are delivered…
mixingmemory | November 17, 2006Some 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 first paragraph, to whet your appetite:
The current debate over whether to teach Intelligent Design creationism in American public schools provides the rare opportunity to watch the interaction between scientific knowledge and intuitive beliefs play out in courts rather than cortex. Although it is…
mixingmemory | November 16, 2006There'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 I'll begin to answer, initially confident in my knowledge, only to discover that I'm entirely clueless. I'm then embarrassed by my ignorance of my own ignorance. This is the illusion of explanatory depth, and it's more common than you or I probably want to admit.
I'll get to reasons why it's common…
mixingmemory | November 14, 2006For 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 people have competed with computers in games like the prisoner's dilemma or the ultimatum game, their behavior has been different than when they played the same games with other humans. In the ultimatum game, for example, on player is given a sum of money and told to offer some of it to a second…
mixingmemory | November 13, 2006Originally 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. An interesting empirical question is whether children's views of the difference between the ability of humans and God to hold false beliefs is like adults, i.e., they recognize that humans can hold false beliefs, while God does not. There has been a great deal of research on children's ability to…
mixingmemory | November 13, 2006I'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 Mother, and Meddle). That means I'm also a huge Syd Barrett fan. Barrett's story, as I'm sure you know, is a pretty sad one. His musical career was cut short (Pink Floyd's first album was released in 1967, and he was, for all intents and purposes, out of the music industry by 1972) as a result of what…
mixingmemory | November 11, 2006The 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 Statistics at Harvard) in 1971 that allows one to convert multivariate data to cartoon faces, the features of which are controlled by the variable values.
Go read it.
mixingmemory | 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 sounds occur, like the moving mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy influencing where we perceive the voice to be coming from. In a typical setup for the ventriloquism effect, participants are exposed to a sound and asked to point to where they think the sound occurred. Participants are then exposed to…
mixingmemory | November 11, 2006Earlier 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 metaphorically structured through spatial experience and concepts, as I discussed the other day. In those experiments, the growth of a line and the length of a line influenced people's perception of temporal durations (see the link for a full description of the studies). I think this result might occur because…
mixingmemory | November 10, 2006Anytime 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. Then I got an alert from ScienceDirect earlier this week that contained a paper titled "Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions" by Wildschut et al.1, and I was immediately fascinated. And since I know you are all fascinated by the things that fascinate me, I thought I'd write about it a little.…
mixingmemory | November 10, 2006There'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 terms of the vote. The Democrats received 56% of the average district vote for the two parties in 2006, whereas the Republicans only averaged 51.6% in 1994.
The post also has some comments, and links to papers, discussing the fact that Democrats got a higher percentage of the vote (nationwide) than…
mixingmemory | November 9, 2006The 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 Casasanto and Lera Boroditsky that commenter Shane keeps mentioning.
If you haven't been following the the many posts on time-space metaphors on Mixing Memory, here are the basics. One of the examples of an abstract concept being structured by a more concrete one that Lakoff and Johnson use in their 1980…
mixingmemory | November 8, 2006It'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 had to do with some nastiness in an analogy-laden post on a conservative blog. I see no reason to rehash all that nonsense. So, without further ado, political analogies.
The Basics of Analogy
First the basics. I may have said all of this before in more detail, but I don't really expect people to go…