cognition
clock | April 9, 2007It appears that scientists are not the only ones who do not grok framing. Jeffrey Feldman's book got blasted by some ninkompoop in NY Times yesterday. Jeff responds:
Indeed, when I read that passage I wondered if the reviewer had given up on reading my book just after glancing through the table of contents. It seems that, instead of writing about my book, Fairbanks popped in a DVD of "The Matrix," or maybe "A Clockwork Orange," and then churned out a piece of creative non-fiction reacting to those other works of sci-fi.
Update: More about the "fairbanksing" of Feldman here, here and here.
clock | April 6, 2007My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet just published an article in 'Science' (which, considering its topic is, ironically, behind the subscription wall, but you can check the short press release) about "Framing Science"
Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, Mike Dunford (also check the comments here), John Fleck, Larry Moran, Dietram Scheufele, Kristina Chew, Randy Olson, James Hrynyshyn, Paul Sunstone and Alan Boyle have, so far, responded and their responses (and the comment threads) are worth your time to read. Chris and Matt respond to some of them. Matt has more in-depth explanations here, here and…
clock | December 13, 2006Let me state up front that this is not a topic I know anything about, but I have always had a curiosity for it, so let me just throw some thoughts out into the Internets and see if commenters or other bloggers can enlighten me or point me to the most informative sources on the topic. This is really a smorgarsbord of seemingly disparate topics that I always felt had more in common with each other than just the fact that they have something or other to do with traffic. I am trying to put those things together and I hope you can help me (under the fold).
1. Models of Traffic Flow
There are two…
clock | October 31, 2006Humans do it, great apes do it, dolphins do it, now elephants (also here) have also been shown to do it - recognize themselves in the mirror, i.e., realize that the image in the mirror is the image of themselves and not a strange animal. That's a biggie in the world of cognitive science and the study of evolution of consciousness:
When the mirror was unveiled in their yard, they immediately walked over and began poking and prodding and inspecting and playing. They used their trunks to inspect it and then themselves. Two got on their hind legs to look on top of the mirror. One got on the…
clock | October 12, 2006You can read and LISTEN TO the 45th Edition of the Skeptic's Circle at The Inoculated Mind
clock | August 31, 2006Chimpanzees Can Transmit Cultural Behavior To Multiple 'Generations':
Transferring knowledge through a chain of generations is a behavior not exclusive to humans, according to new findings by researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. For the first time, researchers have shown chimpanzees exhibit generational learning behavior similar to that in humans. Unlike previous findings that indicated chimpanzees simply conform to the social norms of the group, this study shows behavior and traditions can be passed along…
clock | August 28, 2006Where does one start with debunking fallacies in this little article? Oy vey!
Dolphins and whales are dumber than goldfish and don't have the know-how to match a rat, new research from South Africa shows. For years, humans have assumed the large brains of dolphins meant the mammals were highly intelligent.
No, we knew dolphins were smart millenia before we ever looked at their brains. The ancient Chinese knew it. Aristotle knew it. And the idea that brain size has anything to do with intelligence is, like, sooo 19th century.
Paul Manger from Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand,…
clock | August 26, 2006Bumble Bees Can Estimate Time Intervals:
In a finding that broadens our understanding of time perception in the animal kingdom, researchers have discovered that an insect pollinator, the bumble bee, can estimate the duration of time intervals. Although many insects show daily and annual rhythms of behavior, the more sophisticated ability to estimate the duration of shorter time intervals had previously been known only in humans and other vertebrates.
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Bees and other insects make a variety of decisions that appear to require the ability to estimate elapsed…
clock | August 10, 2006 This - "Apart From Being An Idiot, Horowitz Is Also An Unwiped Anal Orifice With Hemorrhoids" - is the worst and nastiest blog-post title I ever used. But I was furious. See why.... (first posted here on March 05, 2005, then republished here on December 10, 2005):
Chris is so nice. Way too nice. And naive. He actually contacted David Horowitz and offered to do a study that has a potential to PROVE Horowitz's claim that conservatives are discriminated against in the Academia. Read the whole episode here.
As you can see, my title is just an euphemistic version of what Horowitz called Chris!…
clock | July 21, 2006Survey questions themselves may affect behavior:
Simply asking college students who are inclined to take drugs about their illegal-drug use in a survey may increase the behavior, according to a study that's making researchers understandably nervous.
"We ask people questions, and that does change behavior," study co-author Gavan Fitzsimons, a marketing professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, said Thursday. The provocative effect, he added, can be "much greater than most of us would like to believe."
Read the rest, it is quite interesting. My first thought - can frequent…
neurotopia | July 16, 2006Unfortunately I'm stuck with the press release on this one, my government-access VPN doesn't seem good enough to get me this article at home. Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, is a condition where a person is unable to recognize another person by their face and must rely on other features, such as gait, hair, voice, or other features.
Recognition of faces can be disrupted by damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe. Here, it seems the researchers have found a heritable genetic defect that leads to face blindness.
The 14 participants reported that they experienced uncertainty in…
neurotopia | July 12, 2006We seem to have a plethora of posts pertaining to Pure Pedantry's penchant for peroratory punditry. I found a recent press release that I fear will only encourage him.
Using magnetoenephalography, this group tracked how the brains of newborns, 6 month olds, and one year olds work when speaking. They specifically looked at cross-talk between Broca's Area, which is responsible for comprehending speech, areas responsible for audition in general, and other areas responsible for generating it.
The babies were exposed to three kinds of sounds through earphones -- pure tones that do not resemble…
clock | July 12, 2006
This post was a response to a decent (though not too exciting) study and the horrible media reporting on it. As the blogosphere focused on the press releases, I decided to look at the paper itself and see what it really says. It was first posted on August 09, 2005. Under the fold...
I saw this on Pandagon first - a response to an article on NeuroImage about gender-specific voice recognition. Actually, it was not a response to the article itself (behind the subscription wall), but to the MSM reporting about the article. Soon, other bloggers chimed in, notably Feministing, Blondesense,…
clock | June 26, 2006Bush Is Not Incompetent by George Lakoff:
Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush's plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush's "failures" and label him and his administration as incompetent. Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush's disasters -- Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit -- are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according…
clock | June 25, 2006The Synapse, new carnival of neuroscience - from molecules to cognition and everything in-between - is the first carnival that originated here on SEED scienceblogs.com. Today, the first edition saw the light of day, so you should go over to Pure Pedantry to check it out. The homepage of the carnival, with archives, instructions for submission, etc., can be found here.
In two weeks, on July 9th, 2006, the carnival will be held here, on A Blog Around The Clock. Please send your entries to me by July 8th at midnight (Eastern Time). You can send your entries to: the DOT synapse DOT carnival…
clock | June 20, 2006Yes, I know that I am supposed to be the resident expert on all things temporal (check the name of this blog, after all), and I am actually very interested in the topic of subjective perception of time (in humans, among others), but I did not say anything about the latest study on the Aymara language in which the space-time metaphors are reversed in comparison to most/all (is it not all or is it really all?) other known languages. SEED just released an article on the topic as well.
Blogosphere covered the story quite a lot, but I was waiting for the real experts on this to chime in, and they…
neurotopia | June 9, 2006...you might not know what to do
you might have to think of
how you got started
sittin' in your little room
--The White Stripes
Welcome to the second incarnation of Neurotopia! The old incarnation can be found here, although lately it has just been a collection of posts where I complain about how Blogger stinks. But no more! Now I'm here on this slick new platform! The SEED overlords pulled a mean trick on me: they set up the new blog launch mere hours before I'm supposed to hit the road and celebrate my 8th anniversary by accompanying Mrs. Evil Monkey to Fallingwater for the weekend.…