mixingmemory | July 5, 2006Throughout the brief history of cognitive science, debates over the nature of knowledge representation have raged. In the 1970s, the debate was between those who thought that knowledge was represented as images -- modal, or sensory representations -- and those who thought that knowledge was represented propositionally. That particular debate ended in a stalemate, upon the realization that you could account for pretty much any data set from either perspective. If you can't distinguish between perspectives, you can't really debate them. Despite the stalemate, most cognitive scientists who've…
mixingmemory | July 4, 2006It's not uncommon these days to hear someone on the right side of the political spectrum refer to people on the left side as "America haters." It's a nice way to dismiss any criticism of the United States' policies or behaviors, and current administration in particular, because instead of addressing the criticism, one simply has to say, "They're just saying that because the hate America." Still, I think some people have come to genuinely believe that people on the left hate America, and aren't using the label as a rhetorical device designed to disarm one's opponent. To these people, the…
mixingmemory | July 3, 2006The first edition of the new neuroscience carnival Encephalon is now up at The Neurophilosopher's Blog, here. There are several good posts, and I actually learned a bit from some of them.
I have to admit, though, that I'm particularly partial to this post from BrainTechSci. A sample:
It is hard not to notice the fact that an unusually high percentage of Nobel laureates, from Gerald Edelman to Francis Crick turn their attention to the problem of consciousness and formulate embarrassingly ridiculous theories of consciousness. Why is that?
Then there are people who are completely outside the…
mixingmemory | July 3, 2006Back in May, a study by Mitchell, Macrae, and Banaji (of Implicit Association Test fame) was published in Neuron that made the following claim (from the abstract):
We observed a double dissociation such that mentalizing about a similar other engaged a region of ventral mPFC linked to self-referential thought, whereas mentalizing about a dissimilar other engaged a more dorsal subregion of mPFC. The overlap between judgments of self and similar others suggests the plausibility of "'simulation'' accounts of social cognition, which posit that perceivers can use knowledge about themselves to infer…
mixingmemory | July 2, 2006Over at Gene Expression, "Darth Quixote's" (George Menard's rewriting of Cervantes? That's a bad joke, isn't it?) 10-question interview with Steven Pinker was posted today. You can read it here. The questions are pretty good, for the most part, and Pinker's answers are interesting. I agree with Pinker on the issue of politics getting in the way of science, whether the politics are right-wing or left. I have no problem with research on potentially innate differences between populations, in part because I think the political implications of the results will be dictated by pre-existing biases,…
mixingmemory | July 2, 2006
It would be fair to say that I am obsessed with all things related to the first world war. I would be neglecting my own obsession, then, if I didn't mark the 90th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme. For those of you who don't know, The Battle of the Somme began with a British offensive designed to capture areas around the River of the Somme that had been held by German forces since 1914. In preparation for the battle, British forces had dug tunnels under the German trenches and laid huge mines there. After a prolonged artillery barage, the mines were detonated at 7:30 am,…
mixingmemory | July 1, 2006OK, this is goofy, but I was tired and bored, so I started playing around with "The Advertising Slogan Generator" (via Pharyngula) You put a word or phrase in, and it sticks it in classic advertising slogans. I used "cognition," and this is what I got:
Try Cognition, You'll Like It.
The Cognition Goes Straight to your Head.
Little. Yellow. Different. Cognition.
Only Cognition Has The Answer.
Cognition Keeps Going and Going.
Nobody Better Lay a Finger on my Cognition.
The Cognition of your Life.
The Cognition of Champions.
Go On, Get Your Cognition Out.
Got Cognition?
Fill It To The Rim With…
mixingmemory | July 1, 2006The literature on robot navigation is huge, and summarizing it would be difficult, if not impossible, but I thought I'd provide a few examples of papers you can read on robots that utilize ant-like navigational mechanisms.
Franz, M.O., Schölkof, B., Mallot, H.A., & Bülthoff, H.H. (1998). Learning view graphs for robot navigation. Autonomous Robots, 5, 111-125.
Abstract: We present a purely vision-based scheme for learning a topological representation of an open environment. The system represents selected places by local views of the surrounding scene, and finds traversable paths between…
mixingmemory | July 1, 2006Discovered in the 1860s by Ernst Mach (hence the name), Mach Bands are actually a set of interrelated phenomena. Take a look at this image:
From here
The individual bands should appear as gradients, and they may even appear to be curved. In fact, they are all solid colors. Now look at this one:
From here
If you look closely at the area above the center two arrows, you should see a thin bright line (left-middle arrow) and a thin dark line (right-middle arrow). Once again, this is despite the fact that each of the three areas (dark, light, and in between) are solid colors.
This figure (from…
mixingmemory | June 30, 2006 I'm going to play biologist for a moment, and talk about a species other than humans or nonhuman primates. First, imagine that you're about 10 mm long, a couple mm high, and you're stuck in the middle of the Sahara desert. Eventually you've got to find food, so you leave the comfort of your burrow to forage for food that could be many meters away. When you find food, you then have to find your way back home. And all you have to do this is a brain that weighs 0.1 mg (see the image below). If you're a member of the genus Cataglyphis, you do this on a daily basis, and you do it so well that you…
mixingmemory | June 28, 2006Jonah, over at Frontal Cortex, has a post titled "Neglected Psychologists," in which he asks:
What other great scientists of mind are modern neuroscientists neglecting?
The same could be asked of all cognitive scientists. Jonah gives two names: William James and John Dewey. If you've been reading this blog for long, you know that I'm a huge James fan, and Dewey is an excellent choice as well. In coments, I added Frederic Bartlett, whose book Remembering should be read by anyone interested in cognitive or social psychology, and Kurt Lewin, who has already been profoundly influential, but who…
mixingmemory | June 27, 2006In a response to my defense of Freud, Jonah Lehrer states that, with Harold Bloom (ewww!), he sees Freud as "one of the great artists of the 20th century." In my view, how we read Freud today -- as literature, philosophy, or science -- is largely a matter of choice, as is the case for most early psychologists. We don't even need to pick just one. I myself tend to see his work as both philosophy and science, though not as literature. In this post, I'm going to briefly make the case for my own perception of him, as a way of extending my defense of his work as relevant to psychology today.
Two…
mixingmemory | June 27, 2006Dave over at Cognitive Daily beat me to this (curse you, Dave!), but I wanted to point everyone to an article in Seed Magazine by Paul Bloom, titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain." If you can't tell from the title, the article is on the lure of imaging studies, and the sense that many have that simply taking a picture of the brain makes any experiment more scientific. (The title reminded me, specifically, of one reporter looking at pretty colored brain scan pictures and noting that the people in the study "didn't even fire up the thinking parts of their brains.")
If you've…
mixingmemory | June 27, 2006In the past, I've often wondered how journalists pick which studies to write about. The obvious answer is that they pick studies that will get readers or viewers, but given how little their stories correspond with the research they're writing about, it seems to me like they could pick any study and make it sellable. So the question remains, how do they pick the studies they write about? I read an article this weekend that provides an answer: they write about a study when they can get the author to say stupid shit. But before I get to the article, let me tell you a little bit about the study…
mixingmemory | June 26, 2006The first edition of The Synapse, one of two new neuroscience carnivals, is here. Especially interesting are the mating robots and the post on neurotheology.
mixingmemory | June 25, 2006Well, not on blogs exactly, but internet communication in general. What he says definitely applies to blogs, though. The quote is in a footnote in this speech that Habermas gave at the 2006 annual convention of the International Communication Association.
Allow me in passing a remark on the Internet which counterbalances the seeming deficits that stem from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting by reintroducing deliberative elements in electronic communication. The Internet has certainly reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public of writers and readers. However,…
mixingmemory | June 25, 2006This week's "Ask a Science Blogger" question is, "What makes a good science teacher?" I don't know how to answer that. I've had many science teachers, some of whom were very good, some of whom were very bad, and most of whom fell somewhere in between. And they were all different. The only thing I can think of that the good ones had was a knowledge of the material and the ability to communicate it effectively, but that's pretty much the definition of a good science teacher (or a good teacher in general), so giving that as an answer for what makes a good science teacher would be pretty…
mixingmemory | June 24, 2006Mark Liberman has two great posts over at Language Log debunking first a claim made by David Brooks in this article on the gender gap in education, and then Leonard Sax's poor use of science that inspired Brooks' claim. This is what Brooks wrote:
There are a couple of reasons why the two lists might diverge so starkly. It could be men are insensitive dolts who don't appreciate subtle human connections and good literature. Or, it could be that the part of the brain where men experience negative emotion, the amygdala, is not well connected to the part of the brain where verbal processing…
mixingmemory | June 24, 2006Here is an illusion that was discovered relatively recently. Take a look at this (from here):
You should see two figures with a purple outter border and an orange inner border. What color is the interior of the figure? It probably looks like it's orange, though a lighter shade of orange than the inner border. It's actually white, though. Don't believe me? Take a look at these two figures:
These are the same two figures as the ones above, except that I've removed the orange inner border from the figure on the left. Now you can clearly see that the interior is white.
This is called the "…
mixingmemory | June 23, 2006A couple Science Bloggers have been giving Freud a hard time lately. In a post on Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex wrote:
So why was Blink less than satisfying for me? Becase Gladwell ended up lumping together all sorts of research, from Damasio's Iowa Gambling Task to Ekman's cartography of facial muscles to brain scans of autistic people, that, at least from a neurological perspective, were totally unrelated. They all involved different brain regions that are activated by different stimuli. Gladwell got around this slight problem by never discussing the actual…