cognitive psychology
mixingmemory | December 2, 2006Let's step into the wayback machine and talk about some research that even the psychologists among us might not be aware of (I certainly wasn't). It seems that at the turn of the 20th century, many psychologists and psychophysicists (including the father of psychophysics, Gustave Fechner) were interested in aesthetics. Out of this interest came the idea, inspired by the work of Helmholtz and others, that geometrical figures had a certain "energy," which influenced the subjective quality of their combinations. For some reason, this idea reminded one psychologist, E. Bullough1, of what he…
mixingmemory | December 1, 2006One of my near obsessions in cognitive science is the recovered memories debate. Not only has it been one of the most contentious debates in the field over the last 2 decades, but its practical implications are some of the most profound. There are people in jail right now largely as a result of recovered memory testimony, and some of them will be there for a long time. On the legal side, the important issue is how accurate recovered memories are, and to date, the best we can do is say that in some cases they probably are, while in others they probably aren't. We don't really have a good way…
mixingmemory | November 29, 2006Originally posted on the old blog on 3/8/2005, and reposted here out of laziness.
The Importance of Names
What's in a name, for a concept I mean? Cognitive psychologists studying concepts and categorization have, notby and large, treated concept names (often called "category labels") as just another kind of feature. I'm not sure there's really been any good reason to do this, other than the fact that the models of categorization that have been most prominent over the years haven't had straightforward ways for dealing with labels as anything other than features. Treating names as just another…
mixingmemory | November 28, 2006According to many theories of embodied cognition (particularly type 5), perception is designed to facilitate bodily action, and therefore perception and movement are deeply connected. Much of the evidence for this position comes from research on the relationship between attitudes and movements. For example, Cacioppo, Priester, and Berntson1 showed that if people were presented with objects while they moved their arm in a way that mimicked pulling something towards them (an approach movement), they liked them more than if those same objects were presented while they moved their arm as though…
mixingmemory | November 27, 2006Those of you interested in embodied cognition, and issues of knowledge representation, should find this paper interesting:
Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9(4), 625-636.
Abstract
The emerging viewpoint of embodied cognition holds that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interactions with the world. This position actually houses a number of distinct claims, some of which are more controversial than others. This paper distinguishes and evaluates the following six claims: (1) cognition is situated; (2) cognition is time-…
mixingmemory | November 24, 2006Originally posted on the old blog on 4/3/05.
Self-Perpetuating Paradigms: How Scientists Deal With Unexpected Results
Previously, I discussed Kevin Dunbar's research on the use of . However, Dunbar is better known in cognitive psychology for his in vivo work on scientific cognition. I'll get to the basics of that work, but first I want to say something about unexpected results and paradigms. The connections between all of these will be apparent in a moment.
Over at Universal Acid, Andrew reports on research findings desribed in Nature that are apparently irreconcilable with the "traditional…
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 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 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 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 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…
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 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 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:…