Over at OmniBrain, Steve has a great summary of a recent article by Thomas and Lleras(1 on embodied cognition/perceptual symbol systems and problem solving. I recommend reading Steve's summary before going on with this post, but in case you're really lazy, here's the abstract: Grant and Spivey (2003) proposed that eye movement trajectories can influence spatial reasoning by way of an implicit eye-movement-to-cognition link. We tested this proposal and investigated the nature of this link by continuously monitoring eye movements and asking participants to perform a problem-solving task under…
Everybody knows the Margaret Thatcher Illusion. If you've forgotten about it, here's the best example I've found (from Schwaninger et al.1) Both the top and bottom pairs are the same photos, but they look very different depending on whether they're upright or inverted. In the top pair (the inverted ones), the face on the left is normal, and the face on the right has inverted eyes and mouth. Since they're upside down, though, both look pretty normal. When you flip 'em over, though, the face with the inverted eyes and mouth looks, well, gross. Aside from being just plain cool, this illusion…
Why are so many people convinced that we only use 10% of our brains, or that Eskimos have n words for snow, where n is as high as you need it to be for the desired rhetorical effect? Or more seriously, why have some people, particularly Fox News viewers (no, really), persistently believed in Saddam Hussein's involvement in 9/11? Why does that used car salesman who waves at you as you drive by the dealership on the way to work every morning look so trustworthy, even though you know used car salespeople are never, ever, under any circumstances to be trusted? And why do you dig Henri Matisse's "…
Reading an article in the LA Times today, I learned something exciting: political differences in thought happen in the brain. At least that's what a new study published in Nature Neuroscience(1) purports to show, though I hear that the next issue of the journal will contain critical responses from Descartes, Malenbranche, and Eccles. Seriously though, the paper by Amodio et al. takes as its launching point the large body of evidence that political conservatives and liberals differ on personality dimensions related to openness to experience, tolerance of uncertainty, and cognitive complexity…
And am I the only one who thinks that's a funny question? Real posts to come when I have two spare moments.
First, Seed is hosting a 500,000th Comment Contest, with a trip to "the greatest science city in the world," which you can vote on here. So be sure to vote and then comment a lot, preferably here at Mixing Memory. Second, via Advances in the History of Psychology, I learned of an article in Teaching Psychology on "the 40 most well-known and commonly-cited classic studies would still be appropriate to include in a contemporary first course in psychology." Over at Advances, they list the top 10. I don't mean to brag, but #1 is a cognitive paper, as were 3 of the others in the top 10. Cognitive…
Short answer, no. Duh. Long answer, man do I hate how psychology gets reported in the media. If you were surfing around news sites earlier this week, you might have come across something like this: A study in Current Biology reports some of the first conclusive evidence in support of the long-held notion that men and women differ when it comes to their favorite colors. Indeed, the researchers found that women really do prefer pink--or at least a redder shade of blue--than men do. Which quickly turned into this: Girls Really Do Prefer Pink The attraction may owe to evolutionary influences,…
Macht makes a good point, in noting that pro-science bloggers, who are quick to jump on any religious or Republican affront to science, have for the most part ignored the Michael Bailey case, largely, I suspect, because most of the pro-science bloggers are more anti-religion and anti-Republican than they are pro-science (which is not to say that they aren't, in fact, pro-science). Another factor, I think, comes from a source that I believe Macht, or perhaps Brandon (I forget which) has mentioned before: many of the most vocal "pro-science" bloggers are biologists who seem to have gotten it in…
Crows are smart. Really smart. But just how smart are they? Studying non-human primates, particularly gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees, researchers have shown that they're capable of what's called meta-tool use, or using one tool with another tool (I've mostly seen it defined as using one tool to modify or improve another tool, but more on definitions in a bit), but it's not always something these primates do readily. Monkeys (macaques, e.g.) are much less likely to display meta-tool use. Meta-tool use is difficult because it requires behaving in a way that isn't directly linked to a…
There's a really interesting paper by Geoffrey Goodwin and John Darley in press at the journal Cognition on the subject of lay meta-ethics, and ethical objectivism specifically. That is, the paper explores the question, "How do lay individuals think about the objectivity of their ethical beliefs?" (from the abstract). The paper contains a ton of data, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in a blog post, but unfortunately, there's no free version online (if you have a subscription, you can read the paper here). So you'll have to do with my incomplete discussion of it. The paper is interesting…
A few months ago, I posted about a study showing implicit racial bias in NBA referees' calls. Now it's baseball's turn, because yesterday reports of study by Parsons et al.1 that shows analogous results for home plate umpires began popping up all over the media. The study is pretty straightforward, though the data analysis must have taken forever. I'll let Parson's et al. tell you what they did: There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball, with each team playing 162 games in each annual season. During a typical game each team's pitchers throw on average roughly 150 pitches, so that…
Does anyone around here know of a program or programs that can do the following things with text: Frequency counts for parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.). Sort or score words/phrases based on how abstract or concrete they are. UPDATE: Thank you everyone for the suggestions and tips. I'll try them out tomorrow when I get in the lab. Since I asked without giving you any details, let me give you a brief, though vague description of the project. A few years ago, another psychologist and I wrote a review/theory paper about a particular type of category that we thought sounded…
Over at his blog The Loom, Carl Zimmer asked people to send him photos of their science-related tattoos. So far, it appears that only one (here) is cog sci related. Anyone else out there have a cog sci-related tattoo?
Over at one of her other blogospheric homes, Channel N, fellow ScienceBlogger has posted a link to a great talk on modeling qualitative physics by Ken Forbus. It was one of the earliest of the Cognitive Science Society's virtual colloquia, a series that it has, for some reason, discontinued. "Qualitative physics" is a semi-fancy name for everyday qualitative reasoning, and Forbus focuses on things like spatial reasoning, causal reasoning, and motion, and reasoning about physical processes. It's cool stuff. When you're done with that, you might want to check out this paper, in which Forbus…
So mirror neurons have been back in the news recently, as the result of a paper in the July 2007 issue of PLoS one titled, "Do you see what I mean? Corticospinal excitability during observation of culture-specific gestures"(1). Sounds interesting in a geeky sort of way, right? The paper starts with the observation that At this stage we still know very little about how special classes of actions such as communicative hand gestures are understood. (p. 1) So the authors, Molnar--Szakacs et al., conducted an experiment in an attempt to rectify this. Let me tell you about it... But before I do,…
In my first month of blogging, way back in September of 2004, I posted a picture that my father (I think) had taken when he, my son, and I went to hang out in Centennial Park in Nashville while I was visiting home that summer. Here's the picture: I remarked in the post that Nashville is just about the last place you'd expect to find a life-sized replica of the Parthenon, complete with a giant statue of Athena inside (to learn a little about why it's there, go here). I said this as someone who was born in Nashville, grew up 20 minutes away, and has been to Centennial Park many, many times…
Taking a break from my mini-hiatus. I watched Barry Bonds hit his 755th tonight, live. It was a historic occasion, but judging by the fans' reaction, the commissioner's reaction (did he mouth "no" as the ball landed in the left field seats?), and his teammate's subdued congratulations, I wasn't alone in feeling sad and disappointed. I'm a Braves fan, a Hank Aaron fan, and most importantly, a baseball fan, and while Bonds should go down in history as a great hitter, the fact that he's a jerk, and that he almost certainly became a power hitter through the use of steroids (I say almost because…
I usually avoid linking to the continental philosophy blogs that I read because I'm well aware of the attitudes towards "pomo" stuff among many of the readers of this blog, but this post at Larval Subjects (a blog by a Deleuze scholar who, if I'm not mistaken, also practices some form of Lacanian psychoanalysis) got me thinking. I know that there have been movements within literary criticism to utilize and perhaps inform research and theory in cognitive science, and many if not most of these have been within the cognitive linguistics paradigm, broadly construed (not all of it is conceptual…
I've been out of town since Saturday, with no internet access. Thank goodness for tiny islands on the gulf coast of Florida. Unfortunately, I'm still sick, and I'm exhausted, so I'm going to have to hold off on posts that actually require work. Just to give you some previews, I'm working on some posts related to the negation stuff I talked about a while back, a post on conspiracy theories, some stuff on implicit and benevolent sexism, and, if I ever get around to actually putting the argument together, a fairly technical one in which I claim that metaphors don't exist (well, not quite, just…
"Connectionist Sticker Propaganda" by atomicity, some rights reserved. I may actually keep this picture up.