cognitive psychology
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 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 24, 2006OK, the initial response to my quesitons about the internet study was overwhelmingly positive, so I'm going to go ahead with it. I just need one more thing from you. Ordinarily with a study like this, I would run a pilot study to figure out exactly what concepts to include in the final version, but since this is my first time doing this web thing, I don't want to have a bunch of people spread the word, get a bunch of people who will do it once, and then only have the pilot data. So, I need to come up with a list of concepts related to current political issues. What I need is ten higher-level…
mixingmemory | October 23, 2006I'm working on writing up a lengthy description of an alternative to Lakoff's political theory, mostly because I feel guilty about doing little more than trashing it without offering anything positive to the discussion. My approach is based on, well, actual research, and unlike Lakoff's, it won't be designed to prove the superiority of one political party over any other. If it works, it would be equally useful to anyone of any political bent. Part of what my approach requires is actual empirical research on the structure of people's representations of the concepts involved in political…
mixingmemory | October 21, 2006Given the ubiquitousness of weight, obesity, and eating discussions these days, I thought I'd talk about some research that has, for some reason, stuck in my mind since I first heard about it a few years ago. It concerns the relationship between memory and eating. We all know that the desire to eat isn't just about the physiological condition of being hungry. Stress, depression, loneliness, and all sorts of other psychological states can make us want to eat more than we otherwise would. So it should come as no surprise that eating has "psychological" components. It may surprise you to learn,…
mixingmemory | October 14, 2006Note: This was originally posted at the old blog on August 14, 2005. Enjoy.
After I finally finished Language in Mind, about which I posted the other day, I went back and looked at some of the literature on linguistic relativity that I had read over the years, but had mostly forgotten. And since linguistic relativity has always been a favorite topic of mine, I thought I'd post a little more about it (it may not be a favorite topic of yours, but hey, this is my blog!). In the early days of cognitive science, the majority of the studies designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or other…
mixingmemory | October 13, 2006NoteI get a lot of questions in email about linguistic relativity, or the influence of language on thought. So instead of writing something new, I thought I'd repost two posts I wrote on the topic back on the old blog. Here's the first, originally posted on August 10, 2005. The second will be up tomorrow
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print--I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
"Gretchen.…
mixingmemory | October 7, 2006George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. I haven't read either of the new books (my New Year's resolution this year was to not read any more bullshit), but Steven Pinker has, and his review of Whose Freedom? in the New Republic (the review is behind a subscription wall, but you can read it in its entirety below the fold in this Gene Expression post) has sparked a reply from Lakoff, and…
mixingmemory | October 4, 2006Over at the Experimental Philosophy blog, Joshua Knobe has a post about a series of experiments that he has run with Jesse Prinz on people's intuitions about consciousness, and he includes a link to a draft of the paper they're writing on the experiments. The experiments were motivated by two hypotheses. The first says that people have a concept of "phenomenal consciousness," even if they don't know it. As a result of this concept, people will be willing to attribute phenomenal states to certain kinds of agents (you know, like people or animals), but not to others (like group agents, like…
mixingmemory | September 16, 2006Back on the old blog, I wrote a series of posts in which I detailed a revolution in moral psychology. Sparked largely by recent empirical and theoretical work by neuroscientists, psychologists studying moral judgment have transitioned from Kantian rationalism, that goes back as far as, well, Kant (and in psychology, the Kantian Jean Piaget), to a more Humean approach, that considers emotion and motivation to be central.
Some of the more interesting work utilizing this new approach has been done by Joshua Greene and his colleagues1 They have demonstrated that we use different processes to…
mixingmemory | September 14, 2006A little over a year ago, I reviewed David Buller's anti-Evolutionary Psychology book, Adapting Minds, arguing that, at least in the most important chapter, it fell far short of "demolishing" Evolutionary Psychology, as one philosopher claimed it had done. The problem, I noted, is that Buller didn't refer to the bulk of the relevant research, including research that directly addresses the arguments he makes. I charitably stated that he was probably ignorant of the literature, but in a new review of the book, Edouard Machery and Clark Barrett, who also point out the lack of references to the…
mixingmemory | July 20, 2006[First posted on 11/03/04 at the old blog.]
In the final installment of Mixing Memory's metaphor series (for now -- at some later date I'll get to novel vs. dead metaphors), I try to use the empirical data to distinguish between the categorization and structure mapping theories of metaphor. Before I start, I should make it clear that there is certainly not a consensus among researchers about which model is the correct one, though my feeling is that most are in the comparison camp, rather than the categorization camp, even if they don't fully buy the structure mapping account. Part of the…
mixingmemory | July 19, 2006[First published on 2/4/05 at the old blog.]
If you've read my two previous posts on Ramachandran's principles of art (here and here), you've probably got a good idea of what Ramachandran's concept of beauty is. While his 10 principles of art are concerned more with the production of art and the visual principles that apply to the viewing of art, and he therefore does not discuss beauty at length, there does seem to be a fairly clear conception of beauty contained within his explanation of the principles and why they work in art. Specifically, beauty is seen as the product of perceiving…
mixingmemory | July 18, 2006[First posted on 11/1/04 at the old blog.]
I have heard that there is an election today, and I've heard that it's going to be close and contentious, but I don't care. Here at Mixing Memory, we're only worried about metaphor for now (and soon, classical vs. connectionist architectures, and perhaps after that, idioms, and after that... the sky's the limit). In the first two metaphor posts, I talked about the history of cognitive theories of metaphor, and the structure mapping theory of metaphor. Now it's on to the other prominent view of metaphor, one that differs almost entirely in its…
mixingmemory | July 17, 2006[First published on 1/22/05 at the old blog.]
Recall V.S. Ramachandran's 10 principles of art.
Peak shift
Perceptual Grouping and Binding
Contrast
Isolation
Perceptual problem solving
Symmetry
Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint
Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
Balance
Metaphor
In the last post, I talked about the first three. In this post, I'll discuss 4, 5, 6, 7, and 10.
Isolation
Ramachandran's first three principles, peak shift, grouping, and contrast, may, after a little thought, seem fairly obvious. Art is generally not meant to be strictly representational, but instead to…
mixingmemory | July 16, 2006[First posted on 11/1/04 at the old blog.]
Onward we go to the first contemporary view of metaphor, structure mapping theory. Before I start, though, I want to clear something up. Perhaps no one has actually been confused, but I'm afraid that I haven't made something clear that should be made clear. For the most part, cognitive theories of metaphor -- cognitive linguistic accounts, which purport to be theories of all cognition and, if the cognitive linguists had their way, would also combine to serve as the Unified Field Theory, aside -- are intended to account for common, everyday uses of…
mixingmemory | July 15, 2006[First published on 1/20/05 at the old blog.]
As a starting point for the attempt to discover universals in art based on our knowledge of neuroscience, and visual neuroscience in particular, V.S. Ramachandran has proposed ten principles of art (eight of which come from the paper he wrote with William Hirstein, titled "The Science of Art") . The principles, in the order that Ramachandran discusses them, are:
Peak shift
Perceptual Grouping and Binding
Contrast
Isolation
Perceptual problem solving
Symmetry
Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint
Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
Balance…
mixingmemory | July 14, 2006[First posted on 10/31/04 at the old blog]
From Aristotle through speech act theories, metaphor had been viewed as a secondary type of language, built on literal speech which is, in turn, the true nature of language. However, since the 1970s, cognitive scientists have become increasingly convinced that metaphor is not only central to thought, something that Aristotle would admit, but that it is also a central aspect of language, and no less priveleged than literal language. Metaphors are processed as quickly as literal language, and as automatically. In addition, metaphors, while generally…
mixingmemory | July 13, 2006[First posted on 1/20/05 at the old blog]
With all the controversy surrounding the issues in my last few posts, I thought it would be refreshing to talk about something completely uncontroversial: the existence of universals in art based on neurological mechanisms. (That was a joke, people). I've been doing some research on the cognitive science of art and aesthetics for my own work, and have wanted to post on it for a while, but there's a lot to talk about, and I haven't really been able to develop a plan for how to discuss it in this forum. So, I've decided to do what I usually do with blog…