mixingmemory | November 7, 2006By 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 no surprise. Researchers have been testing elephants on measures of self-awareness for a while, because they seemed like a good candidate. Still, the conclusion, stated in the title of the paper, is probably a bit premature. To understand why, though, it's important to understand the methods used…
mixingmemory | November 7, 2006As 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 theory, is structured primarily through spatial metaphors. In English, there are two dominant spatial metaphors: the ego-moving metaphor, in which we are moving toward the future (e.g., "I'm coming up on my 30th birthday"), and the time-moving metaphor, in which we are stationary while time moves…
mixingmemory | November 6, 2006You 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 denounced as a heretic by Chomsky, and who's devoted the bulk of his adult life to anti-Chomskyan linguistics, an "admirer of Chomsky," or a "Chomsky protege." I mean, some guy wrote a book about how much these linguists dislike each other.
mixingmemory | November 5, 2006Over 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 religion, but it primarily focuses on methodological issues (operational definitions of religion, subject selection, imaging techniques, etc.), so it may not be interesting to everyone. If you want to read it, you can do so here. Anyway, the reason I bring this stuff up (other than to link to the…
mixingmemory | November 4, 2006Last 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 (unfortunately, I can't show you this illusion)1. Participants were placed in front of a computer screen, on which they observed a small dot flash for 10 ms. At the same time, they received either no taps, one tap, or two taps (spaced 60 ms from each other) from all 8 pins of a Braille cell on their left index…
mixingmemory | November 3, 2006Well, 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 there are neural differences between adult musicians and adult nonmusicians (duh), so the authors of the study wanted to see if these might be innate or the product of musical training. In the study, Norton et al. subjected 39 five to seven-year olds who were beginning piano or violin lessons, and 31…
mixingmemory | November 3, 2006I 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 roots. Kidding, of course. Polysemy refers to a single word having multiple related meanings or senses. "Bank" is a good example of a polysemous word, especially since using it will help later in the post. Bank can mean the banking company, like Fifth Third Bank (that name has always cracked me up), it…
mixingmemory | November 2, 2006Raymond 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: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding is a must read for anyone interested in cognitive linguistics. Among psychologists, Dr. Gibbs has done more, emprically and theoretically, to support conceptual metaphor theory than anyone else I know (Arthur Glenberg might compete, but his work is more…
mixingmemory | November 2, 2006What 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 the least. If there's one thing psychology has taught me, it's that definitions aren't worth a whole hell of a lot anyway. And given how few times the issue has come up, despite the fact that I've been surrounded by psychologists for the entirety of my adult life, I never really thought it bothered…
mixingmemory | November 1, 2006I 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.H. Bradley and the British Hegelians, and it's quite clear that Blanshard was as well. However, I don't really know anything about Blanshard outside of these two volumes, or really anything that was going on in American philosophy at the time outside of pragmatism and positivism, neither of which…
mixingmemory | November 1, 2006Sometimes I forget that not everyone who happens upon this blog today has been reading it from day one (I mean come on, why haven't you?). It surprises me, then, when people tell me they've seen no evidence that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory is, well, wrong. I guess I think that since I've been posting about such evidence for two years, and I remember those posts, everyone else must as well. Once I realize that not all of you have been reading Mixing Memory from day 1, I think, "I should write some more posts on the evidence," but then I remember something else:…
mixingmemory | October 31, 2006OK, so apparently there's a blogging scholarship, and it just so happens that someone who comments here at Mixing Memory, Jennifer Wong of Cyberspace Rendezvous, is a finalist, as is fellow Science Blogger Shelley Batts. You should go vote for one of those two here. I'm going to endorse Jennifer, not only because she comments here (which automatically makes me like you, even if your comments are critical), and I'm loyal like that, but because she's a big Soul Coughing fan, and anyone who thinks Ruby Vroom was a great album deserves a scholarship. Good luck to both Jennifer and Shelley, though…
mixingmemory | October 31, 2006Via Amy Perfors at the Harvard statistics blog, Social Science Statistics Blog, I learned of the Jeffrey-Lindley Paradox in statistics. The paradox is that if you have a sample large enough, you can get p-values that are very close to zero, even though the null hypothesis is true. You can read a very in depth explanation of the paradox here.
I don't find this either surprising or worrisome, as Perfors does. While I'd never heard of the paradox before (it's really pretty cool, if you're into statistics or Bayesian reasoning), everyone who's taken a statistics course understands the perils of…
mixingmemory | October 30, 2006As I said yesterday, I love research that challenges the common sense view that perception, especially visual perception, represents the world as it "is." The paper I talked about there showed cognitive influences (memory) on relatively low-level visual processes (color perception occurs pretty early). Minutes (like 2!) after I finished writing that post, ScienceDirect sent me an email alert with the contents of the October issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which there is a paper by Emily Balcetis and David Dunning1 describing research that demonstrates an…
mixingmemory | October 29, 2006One of the things that I love the most about cognitive science is that it's always challenging our intuitions about the world and how we perceive it. Think, for example, of all the classic Gestalt illusions, such as my all time favorite, the Kanizsa Triangle. What these illusions, and many other findings over the history of the study of visual perception show is that perception doesn't simply represent the world "as it is." Instead, perception is a fundamentally creative process, relying on inference, subtraction, and all sorts of other alterations of incoming sensory data. Spend a little…
mixingmemory | October 28, 2006You may have seen this illusion in a post from earlier in the week over at Cognitive Daily, but I thought I'd say a little bit more about it, and talk about a related illusion. First, click play (from Sham's demo site)
If the illusion is working -- Dave at Cognitive Daily had a bit of trouble getting it to work for his readers -- you should see the dot flash on the screen twice. However, the dot only flashes once. If you don't believe me, go to Sham's page and watch the single beep movie. It's the same movie, but with one beep instead of two. The illusion is pretty strong for me, but as Dave…
mixingmemory | October 27, 2006There's a really interesting post by Alberto over at Alpha Psy titled "Methodological Materialism" that I thought I'd point you to, in case you hadn't read it already. Here's an excerpt:
As I see things, there is no deeper epistemological concern in recognizing that methods from natural sciences are increasingly being applied to social sciences than in recognizing that (say) it is snowing more than we had forecasted.
The mistake that both Descombes and Sperber make in celebrating a false major philosophical event is their implicit commitment to the doctrine of "methodological essentialism":…
mixingmemory | October 27, 2006By now you've probably heard about the Dar-Nimrod and Heine study on stereotype threat and math performance in women. If you're interested in learning more about that study, check out Hugo's post at Alpha Psy. Since Hugo did such a nice job describing the study, and since I'm lazy, I'm not going to say anything about it for now. Instead, I'm going to give you a little background on stereotype threat and math performance by reposting something I wrote on the topic over at the old blog in the aftermath of the whole Larry Summers fiasco. Here it is in its entirety, from 7/19/2005.
Gender, Math,…
mixingmemory | October 26, 2006Just to let you know where things stand, I'm in the process of setting up the study. Some of the coding is a bit over my head, because I've never done this sort of thing on the web before. Fellow Science Blogger Razib has been helping me a great deal, but if you have knowledge of how these web page thingamajigs work, and you'd like to help, feel free to send me an email. The coding should be really simple, but I'm web design illiterate. Razib suggested that I save the data using MySQL, which should make it easier for others to access and analyze the data however they please. Below the fold, I…
mixingmemory | October 25, 2006Everyone's heard that losing a particular sensory modality causes the sensitivity of the other modalities to be heightened. Blind people are supposed to hear and smell really, really well, for example. While this is something that's been talked about for ages, there are actual neuroscinetific reasons for thinking that it might be true. When an area of the brain that is designed for one function or set of functions goes unused, or is underused, that area can be co-opted by other functions. But testing to see whether people with sensory deficits (blindness, deafness, etc.) actually have…