[222000330010] |<title>Free will</title>
[222000330020] |In “Self is Magic,” a chapter from Psychology and the Free Will, which is unfortunately not yet out, Daniel Wegner presents some fascinating data showing how easy it is to trick ourselves into believing we are in control of events when in fact we are not.
[222000330030] |Most of us are in some sense familiar with this illusion.
[222000330040] |Perhaps we believe our favorite team won partly because we were watching the game (or, if we’re pessimists, because we weren’t). 
[222000330050] |In one of the many experiments he describes, “the participant was attired in a robe and positioned in front of a mirror such that the arms of a second person standing behind the participant could be extended through the robe to look as though they were the arms of the participant.”
[222000330060] |The helper’s arms moved through a series of positions.
[222000330070] |If the participant heard through the headphones a description of each movement before it happened, they were reported “enhanced feeling of control over the arm movements” than if they had not heard those commands in advance. (read the paper <a>here</a>.) 
[222000330080] |Ultimately, he tries to use these data to explain the “illusion” of free will.
[222000330090] |In the following paragraphs, I am going to try to unpack the claim and see where it is strong and where it may be weak. 
[222000330100] |First, what exactly is he claiming?
[222000330110] |He does not argue that free will does not exist –he assumes it does not exist.
[222000330120] |That’s not a criticism– you can’t fit everything into one article –but it means I won’t be able to evaluate his argument against free will, though I will discuss free will in terms of his data and hypotheses below.
[222000330130] |Instead, he is interested in why we think we have free will.
[222000330140] |In all, he claims that (1) we can be mistaken about whether our thoughts cause events in the world, (2) this is because when we think about something happening and then it happens, we’re biased to believe we’ve caused it, and (3) this illusion that our conscious thoughts lead to actions is useful and adaptive –that is, evolution gave it to us for a reason. 
[222000330150] |That’s what he says.
[222000330160] |First, he isn’t really arguing that we don’t have a conscious will.
[222000330170] |Clearly, we will things to happen all the time.
[222000330180] |Some of the time he seems to be arguing that our will is simply impotent.
[222000330190] |The rest of the time he appears to think that the contents of our will are actually caused by something else.
[222000330200] |That is, our arm decides to move and tells our conscious thoughts to decide to want a cookie (more on this later). 
[222000330210] |Otherwise, I think claim #1 is pretty straightforward.
[222000330220] |Sometimes we have an illusion of conscious control when in fact we have none.
[222000330230] |Wegner compares this to visual illusions, of which there are plenty.
[222000330240] |Just like with visual illusions, just because you know it’s an illusion (watching the ballgame isn’t going to affect the score) you can’t help not feel it anyway.
[222000330250] |In fact, given that illusions exist in sight, sound and probably many other senses, so it’s not surprising that the sense of conscious will also is subject to illusions. 
[222000330260] |It’s important to point out that this itself is not an argument against the potency of conscious will.
[222000330270] |The fact that we are sometimes mistaken does not mean we are always mistaken.
[222000330280] |Otherwise, we’d have to claim that because vision is sometimes mistaken, we are all blind.
[222000330290] |Of course, Wegner isn’t actually making this argument.
[222000330300] |He already assumes that free will is an illusion.
[222000330310] |He is just interested in this article in showing how that illusion might operate, which is point #2. 
[222000330320] |Although he describes the illusion of conscious choice as a magic show we put on for ourselves, this does not mean that he thinks conscious thought has no effect on behavior –that’s point #3 above.
[222000330330] |He simply doesn’t that deciding to pick up a cookie leads to your hand reaching out to pick up a cookie.
[222000330340] |In fact, it would be a pretty extraordinary claim that conscious thought (and the underlying brain processes) have no purpose, effect or use whatsoever.
[222000330350] |In that case, why did we evolve them?
[222000330360] |This question is answerable, but it would be hard to answer.
[222000330370] |The claim, then, is simply that the conscious decision to perform a behavior does not cause that behavior. 
[222000330380] |Suppose we agree that picking up a cookie is not caused by the conscious decision to pick up a cookie –which, just to be clear, I don’t –what does cause that conscious decision?
[222000330390] |Wegner does not get into this question, at least not in this chapter, which is a shame.
[222000330400] |In these last paragraphs I’ll try to describe what he might mean and what the consequences would be. 
[222000330410] |What would it mean if the conscious mind did cause cookie-picking-up?
[222000330420] |That depends on what the conscious mind is.
[222000330430] |Perhaps it’s an ethereal, non-corporeal presence that makes a decision, then reaches down and pulls a lever and the hand reaches out to grab a cookie.
[222000330440] |That would be similar to what Descartes argued for many centuries ago, but it’s not something many cognitive scientists take seriously now.
[222000330450] |The basic assumption –for which there is no proof but plenty of good evidence –is that the mind is the brain.
[222000330460] |Activity in your brain doesn’t cause your conscious mind to want a cookie, nor does your conscious mind cause brain activity.
[222000330470] |Your conscious mind is brain activity.
[222000330480] |If we assume that this is how Wegner thinks about the mind, then his hypothesis can be restated: 
[222000330490] |The part of the brain that is consciously deciding to pick up a cookie does not give orders to the part of the brain that actually gives the motor commands to your hand to pick up the cookie.
[222000330500] |The motor cortex gets its marching orders from somewhere else. 
[222000330510] |This is an interesting hypothesis, and I’m not going to discuss it in too much detail right now.
[222000330520] |What I am interested in is what does this hypothesis have to say about free will?
[222000330530] |I would argue: maybe nothing.
[222000330540] |If your decisions are made in your brain by a non-conscious part of your mind (<a>of which there are many</a>) and the conscious part of your mind turned out to simply be an echo chamber where you tell yourself what you’ve decided to do, would you say that you have no free will? 
[222000330550] |The real question becomes: what decides to pick up the cookie?
[222000330560] |Where is the ultimate cause?
[222000330570] |Lack of free will means that the ultimate cause is external to the person.
[222000330580] |They picked up the cookie because of events that occurred out there in the world.
[222000330590] |Free will means that the ultimate cause was internal to the person.
[222000330600] |Nothing in Wegner’s article is really relevant to distinguishing between these possibilities (again, this is not a criticism.
[222000330610] |That wasn’t what his article was about.
[222000330620] |It’s what my article is about). 
[222000330630] |The loss of a belief in a non-corporeal mind has left us with a dilemma.
[222000330640] |Nothing we know about physics or chemistry allows for causes to be internal to a person in the sense that we mean when we say “free will”.
[222000330650] |This makes many people feel that free will can only exist if there is a non-corporeal mind operating outside the constraints of physics.
[222000330660] |On the other hand, nothing we know about physics or chemistry allows for consciousness to exist, yet essentially all cognitive scientists –including, probably, Wegner –are reasonably comfortable believing in consciousness without believing in a non-corporeal mind. 
[222000330670] |In the 19th century, physicists said that the sun could not be millions of years old, much less billions of years old, because there was no known mechanism in physics or chemistry that would allow the sun to burn that bright that long.
[222000330680] |Although entire fields of thought –such as evolution or geology –required an old, old sun in order to make any sense of their own data, the physicists said “Impossible!
[222000330690] |There must be another explanation for your data.”
[222000330700] |Later, they discovered the mechanism: fusion. 
[222000330710] |In the early 20th century, there were chemists who said that the notion of a “gene” was hogwash, because there was no known chemical mechanism for inheritance in the form of a gene.
[222000330720] |The fact that mountains of experimental data could not be explained without reference to “genes” didn’t bother them.
[222000330730] |Then Watson and Crick found the mechanism in the structure of DNA. 
[222000330740] |We may be in the same situation now.
[222000330750] |We have an incredible amount of data that only makes sense with reference to internal causation –free will.
[222000330760] |Evolution, Wegner says, built the belief in free will into us.
[222000330770] |Liz Spelke and others have run fantastic experiments showing that even infants only a few months old believe in something akin to free will.
[222000330780] |The world makes very little sense if we don’t believe that our friends, colleagues and random people on the street are causing their own behavior.
[222000330790] |Or maybe we’re not in the same situation, and free will is truly a figment of our imagination. 
[222000330800] |Physicists were right about one thing: the sun hasn’t been burning for billions of years.
[222000330810] |It doesn’t burn.
[222000330820] |It does something else entirely.
[222000330830] |The real answer to the question of free will may look like rote, dumb physical causation –a snowball rolling down a hill.
[222000330840] |It may look very similar to Descartes’ non-corporeal soul.
[222000330850] |Or it may look very different from both. 
[222000330860] |Note: Wegner is a very engaging writer.
[222000330870] |If you are interested, <a>most of his articles are available on his website</a>.
[222000340010] |<title>GoogleScience</title>
[222000340020] |A Google search can help you find cutting-edge research.
[222000340030] |A Google search can also be cutting-edge research. 
[222000340040] |Many questions in linguistics (the formal study of language) and psycholinguistics (<a>the study of language as human behavior</a>) are answered by turning to a corpus.
[222000340050] |A corpus is a large selection of texts and/or transcripts.
[222000340060] |Just a few years ago, they were difficult and expensive to create.
[222000340070] |Arguably the most popular word frequency corpus in English -- the verable <a>Brown Corpus</a> -- was based off of one million words of text.
[222000340080] |One million words sounds like a lot, but so many of those are "the" and "of" that in fact many words do not appear in the corpus at all. 
[222000340090] |The Google corpus contains billions of pages of text. 
[222000340100] |So what does one do with a corpus?
[222000340110] |One obvious thing is to figure out which words are more common than others.
[222000340120] |The most common words in English are short function words like "a" (found on 4.95 billion web pages) and "of" (3.61 billion pages).
[222000340130] |Google, of course, doesn't tell you how many times a words appears, but only on how many pages it appears...which may actually be an advantage, since we're typically more interested in words that show up on many websites than a word that shows up many, many times on just one website. 
[222000340140] |You might be interested in what the most common noun is.
[222000340150] |Is it "time," "man," "city," "boy," or "Internet?"
[222000340160] |You might check to see whether verbs or nouns are more common in English by comparing a large sample of verbs and nouns.
[222000340170] |You can also compare across languages.
[222000340180] |Children learn verbs more slowly than nouns in <a>English but not in Chinese</a>.
[222000340190] |Is that because verbs are more common in Chinese than English? 
[222000340200] |OK, those are fun experiments, but none of them sound very cutting-edge.
[222000340210] |If you want to see the Google corpus in action, check out <a>Language Log</a>.
[222000340220] |The writers there <a>regularly turn to the Google corpus</a> to answer their questions.
[222000340230] |Google is probably less-commonly used in more formal contexts, but the PsychInfo database turned up 76 hits for "Google."
[222000340240] |Many were studies about how people use Google, but some were specifically using the Google corpus, such as "Building a customised Google-based collocation collector to enhance language learning," by Shesen Guo and Ganzhou Zhang.
[222000340250] |Another -- "Nine psychologists: mapping the collective mind with Google" by Jack Arnold -- looked at the organization of conceptual knowledge.
[222000340260] |At a recent conference, I saw a presentation by vision scientists using Google Image to explore the organization of visual memory.
[222000340270] |I expect to see more and more of this type of research in the near future. 
[222000340280] |Of course, there's nothing specific to Google about this.
[222000340290] |It's just what everybody seems to use.
[222000350010] |<title>Scientists create mice with human language gene</title>
[222000350020] |Scientists at the Max Plank institute in Germany recently announced that they had successfully knocked the human variant of the FOXP2 "language" gene into mice. 
[222000350030] |The FOXP2 gene, discovered in 2001, is the most famous gene known to be associated with human language.
[222000350040] |There has been some debate about what exactly it does, but a point mutation in the gene is known to cause speech and language disorders. 
[222000350050] |Part of the interest in FOXP2 stems from the fact that it is found in a wide range of species, including songbirds, fish and reptiles with only slight variations.
[222000350060] |Also, FOXP2 is expressed in many parts of the body, not just the brain.
[222000350070] |Previous research had found that removing the gene from mice decreased their vocalizations...and ultimately killed the mice. 
[222000350080] |In the new study, scientists created a new mouse "chimera" with the human variant of the FOXP2 gene.
[222000350090] |This time, the only differences they could find between the transgenic mice and typical mice was in their vocalizations. 
[222000350100] |<a>Read more about FOXP2</a>. 
[222000350110] |(Disclosure: This research does not appear to have been published yet.
[222000350120] |I heard about it from <a>Marc Hauser</a> of Harvard University, who heard about it this summer from a conference talk by <a>Svante Paabo</a> of Max Plank, one of the researchers involved in the project.)
[222000360010] |<title>Brazil issues warrant for scientist's arrest</title>
[222000360020] |The government of Brazil recently ordered the arrest of the well-known linguist and anthropologist, Dan Everett. 
[222000360030] |Everett has been both famous and infamous for his study of the Piraha people, a small tribe in Brazil.
[222000360040] |He has made a number of extraordinary claims about their culture and language, such as that they do not have number words or myths. 
[222000360050] |These claims are important because they undermine a great deal of current linguistic and psychological theory, and so they have been hotly debated.
[222000360060] |Some of these debates, however, have spilled over from arguments about data and method to personal attacks. 
[222000360070] |Just before Everett spoke at MIT last fall, a local linguist sent out an email to what amounted to much of Boston's scientific community involved in language and thought.
[222000360080] |It looked like the sort of email that one means to send to a close friend and accidentally broadcasts.
[222000360090] |<a>Language Log describes it better than I can</a>, but the gist was that Everett is a liar who exploits the poor Piraha for his own fame and glory. 
[222000360100] |This was just one instance in a series of ad hominem attacks on Everett over the last few years.
[222000360110] |I am not going to weigh in on whether Everett is exploiting anybody, because I simply don't feel I know enough.
[222000360120] |I've never met a Piraha -- not that any of Everett's detractors have either, to my knowledge.
[222000360130] |If this means anything, I am told by friends who have visited the Piraha that they really like Everett. 
[222000360140] |A couple weeks ago, I heard from a friend who has collaborated with Everett that all further research on Piraha language and has been essentially banned.
[222000360150] |A warrant is out for Everett's arrest on charges of, essentially, exploiting the Piraha.
[222000360160] |I have no idea how much this has to do with the controversy the aforementioned linguist has been raising, but I suspect that it is not unrelated. 
[222000360170] |On the topic of language, my <a>Web-based study of how people interpret sentences</a> is still ongoing, and I could use more participants.
[222000360180] |Not to exploit this post to further my own academic fame and glory...
[222000370010] |<title>People who can't count</title>
[222000370020] |Babies can't count.
[222000370030] |Adults can.
[222000370040] |When I say that babies don't count, I don't mean that they don't know the words "one," "two," "three," or "four."
[222000370050] |That's obvious.
[222000370060] |What I mean is that if you give an infant the choice between 5 graham crackers or 7, the baby doesn't know which to pick. 
[222000370070] |Does that mean we have to learn numbers, or does it mean that the number system simply comes online as we mature.
[222000370080] |Babies also have bad vision, but that doesn't mean the learn vision.
[222000370090] |One of the reasons we might assume that number is innate rather than learned is that all reasonably intelligent children learn to count around the same time...or do they?
[222000370100] |This is where a few cultures, such as the Piraha, become very important. 
[222000370110] |I believe that I have heard that there are some languages that only have words for "one," "two," and "many," but I'm not sure, so if you know, please make comments.
[222000370120] |I am fairly certain that the Piraha are the only known culture not to even have a word for "one." 
[222000370130] |How does one know whether they have a word for "one?"
[222000370140] |Your first impulse might be to check a bilingual dictionary, but that begs the question.
[222000370150] |How did the dictionary-maker know?
[222000370160] |The way a few people have done it (like Peter Gordon at Columbia and Ted Gibson &Mike Frank from MIT) is to show the Piraha a few objects and see what they say.
[222000370170] |According to Mike Frank's talk at our lab a couple weeks ago, they never found a word that was used consistently to describe "one" anything.
[222000370180] |Instead, there was a number that was used for small numbers of object (1, 2, etc.), another word for slightly larger numbers, and third word that seems to be used the way we use "many." 
[222000370190] |Well, maybe they just weren't using number words in this task.
[222000370200] |Did they really even understand what was being required of them?
[222000370210] |Who knows.
[222000370220] |But there are other ways to do the experiment.
[222000370230] |For instance, you can test them the same way we test babies.
[222000370240] |You show them two boxes.
[222000370250] |You put 5 pieces of candy into one box.
[222000370260] |Then you put 7 pieces of candy into the other box.
[222000370270] |Then you ask them which box they want.
[222000370280] |Remember that they never see both groups of candy at the same time, so they have to remember the groups of candy in order to compare them. 
[222000370290] |Well, Mike Frank tried this.
[222000370300] |This is an example of the responses he got: 
[222000370310] |"Can I have both boxes?" 
[222000370320] |No.
[222000370330] |You have to choose. 
[222000370340] |"Oh, is that what this game is about?
[222000370350] |I don't want to play this game.
[222000370360] |Who needs candy?
[222000370370] |Can we do spools of thread?
[222000370380] |My wife needs those.
[222000370390] |Or how about some shotgun shells?" 
[222000370400] |This experiment was a failure.
[222000370410] |Instead, they tried a matching task.
[222000370420] |You show them a row of, say, 5 spools of thread.
[222000370430] |Then you ask them to put down the same number of balloons as there are spools of thread.
[222000370440] |They can do this.
[222000370450] |Now, you change the game.
[222000370460] |You show them some number of spools of thread, then cover those spools.
[222000370470] |You then ask them to put down the same number of balloons.
[222000370480] |Since they can't see the thread, they have to do this by memory. 
[222000370490] |The Piraha fail at this and related tasks.
[222000370500] |People who can count do not. 
[222000370510] |Of course, they might not have understood the task.
[222000370520] |This is very hard to prove one way or another.
[222000370530] |I have been running a study in my lab that involves recent Chinese immigrants.
[222000370540] |I designed the study and tested it in English with Harvard undergrads.
[222000370550] |They found the task challenging, but they quickly figured out what I needed them to do.
[222000370560] |Some of my immigrant participants do so as well, but many of them find it impossibly difficulty -- literally.
[222000370570] |Some of them have to give up. 
[222000370580] |It's not that they aren't smart.
[222000370590] |Most of them are Harvard graduate students or even faculty.
[222000370600] |What seems to be going on is a culture clash.
[222000370610] |For one thing, they aren't usually familiar with psychology experiments, since very few are done in China.
[222000370620] |I suspect that some of the things I ask them to do (repeat a word out loud over and over, read as fast as possible, etc.) may seem perfectly normal requests to my American undergraduates but very odd to my Chinese participants, just as the Piraha discussed above didn't want to choose boxes of candy.
[222000370630] |So it is always possible that the Piraha act differently in these experiments because they have different cultural expectations and have trouble figuring out what exactly is required of them. 
[222000370640] |That said, it seems pretty unlikely at this point that the Piraha have number words or count.
[222000370650] |This suggests counting must be learned.
[222000370660] |In fact, it suggests counting must be taught.
[222000370670] |This contrasts with language itself, which often seems to <a>spring up spontaneously</a> even when the people involved have had little exposure to an existing language.
[222000370680] |(<a>Click here for a really interesting take on why the Piraha don't seem particularly interested in learning how to count</a>.)
[222000380010] |<title>New Harvard president to be installed today</title>
[222000380020] |Drew Faust will be installed today as Harvard's 28th president.
[222000380030] |That's right -- Harvard has only had 28 presidents since Henry Dunster was named in 1640.
[222000380040] |That's not counting some acting presidents, like Samuel Willard (1701-1707) or Nathaniel Eaton, who was "schoolmaster" from 1637 to 1639.
[222000380050] |Faust is of course the first female president of Harvard.
[222000380060] |She is also the first since Charles Chauncy (1654-1672) to have neither an undergraduate nor graduate degree from Harvard (From 1672 to 1971, all Harvard presidents had done their undergraduate work at Harvard.
[222000380070] |The last three -- Derek Bok, Neil Rudenstine and Larry Summers -- had graduate degrees from Harvard).
[222000380080] |The ceremony will be outdoors on Harvard Yard at 2pm.
[222000380090] |It rained heavily overnight, but it seems to be clearing up now.
[222000380100] |If the weather is decent, I'll check it out and report back.
[222000380110] |I hear tell that Harvard ceremonies have all the pomp and splendor you would expect, but I have yet to see one.
[222000390010] |<title>Do ballplayers really hit in the clutch?</title>
[222000390020] |If you've been watching the playoffs on FOX, you'll notice that rather than present a given player's regular-season statistics, they've been mostly showing us their statistics either for all playoff games in their career, or just for the 2007 post-season.
[222000390030] |Is that trivia, or is it an actual statistic?
[222000390040] |For instance, David Ortiz hits better in the post-season than during the regular season.
[222000390050] |OK, one number is higher than the other, but that could just be random variation.
[222000390060] |Does he really hit better during the playoffs? 
[222000390070] |Why does this even matter?
[222000390080] |There is conventional wisdom in baseball that certain players hit better in clutch situations -- for instance, when men on base.
[222000390090] |This is why RBIs (runs-batted-in) are treated as a statistic, rather than as trivia.
[222000390100] |Some young Turks (i.e., Billy Beane of the Oakland A's) have argued vigorously that RBIs don't tell you anything about the batter -- they tell you about the people who bat in front of him (that is, they are good at getting on base).
[222000390110] |Statistically, it is said, few to no ballplayers hit better with men on and 2 outs. 
[222000390120] |So what about in the post-season? 
[222000390130] |I couldn't find Ortiz's lifetime post-season stats, so I compared this post-season, during which he's been phenomenally hot (.773 on-base percentage through the weekend -- I did this math last night during the game, so I didn't include last night's game), compared with the 2007 regular season, during which he was just hot (.445 on-base percentage). 
[222000390140] |There are probably several ways to do the math.
[222000390150] |I used a formula to compare two independent proportions (see the math below).
[222000390160] |I found that his OBP is significantly better this post-season than during the regular season.
[222000390170] |So that's at least one example... 
[222000390180] |Here's the math. 
[222000390190] |You need to calculate a <a>t statistic</a>, which is the difference between the two means (.773 and .445) divided by the standard deviation of the difference between those two means.
[222000390200] |The first part is easy, but the latter part is complicated by the fact that we're dealing with ratios.
[222000390210] |That formula is: 
[222000390220] |square root of: (P1*(1-P1)/N1 + P2*(1-P2)/N2) where P1 = .773, P2 = .445, N1 = 659 (regular season at-bats - 1), N2 = 22 (post-season at-bats - 1). 
[222000390230] |t = 2.99, which gives a <a>p value</a> of less than .01. 
[222000390240] |I was also considering checking just how unusual Colorado's winning streak is, but that's where my knowledge of statistics broke down (maybe we'll learn how to do that next semester).
[222000390250] |If anybody has comments or corrections on the stats above or can produce other MBL-related math, please post it in the comments.
[222000400010] |<title>How are monkeys and humans different (I mean, besides the tail)</title>
[222000400020] |Marc Hauser, one of a handful of professors to be tenured by Harvard University (most senior faculty come from other universities), has spent much of his career showing that non-human primates are smart.
[222000400030] |It is very dangerous to say "Only humans can do X," because Hauser will come along and prove that the <a>cotton-top tamarin</a> can do X as well.
[222000400040] |Newborn babies can tell Dutch from Japanese?
[222000400050] |Well, <a>so can the tamarins</a>. 
[222000400060] |For this reason, I have wondered what Hauser thinks really separates human cognition from that of other animals.
[222000400070] |He is well-known for a hypothesis that recursion is the crucial adaptation for language, but I'm never sure how wedded he is to that hypothesis, and certainly he can't think the ability to think recursively is all that separates human thought from tamarin thought. 
[222000400080] |Luckily for me, he gave a speech on just that topic at one of the <a>weekly departmental lunches</a>.
[222000400090] |Hopefully, he'll write a theory paper on this subject in the near future, if he hasn't already.
[222000400100] |In the meantime, I'll try to sketch the main point as best I understood it. 
[222000400110] |Hauser is interested in a paradox.
[222000400120] |In many ways, non-human primates look quite smart -- even the lowly tamarin.
[222000400130] |Cotton-top tamarins have been able to <a>recognize fairly complex grammatical structures</a>, yet they do not seem to use those abilities in the same ways we do -- for instance, they certainly don't use grammar. 
[222000400140] |In some situations, non-human primates seem to have a theory of mind (an understanding of the contents of another's mind).
[222000400150] |For instance, if a low-ranking primate (I forget the species, but I think this was with Chimpanzeees) sees two pieces of good food hidden and also sees that a high-ranking member of the troop can see where one piece was hidden but not the other, the low-ranking primate will high-tail it to the piece of food only he can see.
[222000400160] |That might seem reasonable.
[222000400170] |But contrast it with this situation: these primates also know how to beg for food from the researchers.
[222000400180] |What if primate is confronted with two researchers, one who has a cloth over her eyes and one who has a cloth over her ears.
[222000400190] |Does the primate know to beg only from the one who can see?
[222000400200] |No. 
[222000400210] |Similarly, certain birds can use deception to lure a predator away from their nest, but they never use that deceptive behavior in other contexts where it might seem very useful. 
[222000400220] |These are just three examples where various primates seem to be able to perform certain tasks, but only in certain contexts or modalities.
[222000400230] |Hauser proposes that part of what makes humans so smart are the interfaces between different parts of our brains.
[222000400240] |We can not only recognize statistical and rule-based regularities in our environment -- just like tamarins -- but we can also use that information to produce behavior with these same statistical and rule-based regularities.
[222000400250] |That is, we can learn and produce grammatical language.
[222000400260] |We can take something we learn in one context and use it in another.
[222000400270] |To use an analogy he didn't, our brains are an office full of computers after they have been efficiently networked.
[222000400280] |Monkey computer networks barely even have modems. 
[222000400290] |This same theory may also explain great deal of strange human infant behavior.
[222000400300] |More about that in the future.
[222000410010] |<title>Having solved the question of monkeys & humans, I move on to children and adults</title>
[222000410020] |Newborns are incredibly smart.
[222000410030] |They appear to either be born into the world knowing many different things (the <a>difference between Dutch and Japanese</a>, for instance), or they learn them in a blink of an eye.
[222000410040] |On the other hand, toddlers are blindingly stupid.
[222000410050] |Unlike infants, toddlers don't know that a ball can't roll through a solid wall.
[222000410060] |What is going on? 
[222000410070] |First, the evidence.
[222000410080] |Construct a ramp.
[222000410090] |Let a ball roll down the ramp until it hits a barrier (like a small wall).
[222000410100] |The ball will probably bounce a little and rest in front of the wall.
[222000410110] |Now let an infant watch this demonstration, but with a screen blocking the infant's view of the area around the barrier.
[222000410120] |That is, the infant sees the ball roll down a ramp and go behind a screen but not come out the other side.
[222000410130] |The infant can also see that there is barrier behind the screen.
[222000410140] |If you then lift the screen and show the ball resting beyond the barrier -- implying that the ball went through the solid barrier, the infant acts startled (specifically, the infant will look longer than if the ball was resting in front of the barrier as it should be). 
[222000410150] |Now, do a similar experiment with a toddler.
[222000410160] |The main difference is there are doors in the screen, one before the barrier and one after.
[222000410170] |The toddler watches the ball roll down the ramp, and their task is to open the correct door to pull out the ball.
[222000410180] |Toddlers cannot do this.
[222000410190] |They seem to guess randomly. 
[222000410200] |Here is another odd example.
[222000410210] |It's been known for many decades that three-year-olds do not understand false beliefs.
[222000410220] |One version of the task looks something like this.
[222000410230] |There are two boxes, one red and one green.
[222000410240] |They watch Elmo hide some candy in the red box and then leave.
[222000410250] |Cookie Monster comes by and takes the candy and moves it from the red box to the green box.
[222000410260] |Then Elmo returns.
[222000410270] |"Where," you ask the child, "is Elmo going to look for his candy?" 
[222000410280] |"In the green box," the child will reply.
[222000410290] |This has been taken as evidence that young children don't yet understand that other people have beliefs that can contradict reality.
[222000410300] |(<a>Here's a related, more recent finding.</a>) 
[222000410310] |However, <a>Kristine Onishi and Renee Baillargeon showed in 2005</a> that 15-month-old infants can predict where Elmo will look, but instead of a verbal or pointing task, they just measured infant surprise (again, in terms of looking time).
[222000410320] |(Strictly speaking, they did not use "Elmo," but this isn't a major point.) 
[222000410330] |So why do infants succeed at these tasks -- and many others -- when you measure where they look, while toddlers are unable to perform verbal and pointing tasks that rely on the very same information? 
[222000410340] |One possibility is that toddlers lose an ability that they had as infants, though this seems bizarre and unlikely. 
[222000410350] |Another possibility I've heard is that the verbal and pointing tasks put greater demands on memory, executive functioning and other "difficult" processes that aren't required in the infant tasks.
[222000410360] |One piece of evidence is that the toddlers fail on the ball task described above even if you let them watch the ball go down the ramp, hit the wall and stop and then lower the curtain with two doors and make them "guess" which door the ball is behind. 
[222000410370] |A third possibility is something very similar to <a>Marc Hauser's proposal for non-human primate thought</a>.
[222000410380] |Children are born with many different cognitive systems, but only during development do they begin to link up, allowing the child to use information from one system in another system.
[222000410390] |This makes some intuitive sense, since we all know that even as adults, we can't always use all the information we have available.
[222000410400] |For instance, you may know perfectly well that if you don't put your keys in the same place every day, you won't be able to find them, put you still lose your keys anyway.
[222000410410] |Or you may know how to act at that fancy reception, but still goof up and make a fool of yourself. 
[222000410420] |Of course, as you can see from my examples, this last hypothesis may be hard to distinguish from the memory hypothesis.
[222000410430] |Thoughts?
[222000430010] |<title>Quantum Vision</title>
[222000430020] |Can quantum physics explain consciousness?
[222000430030] |The fact that the mind is instantiated in the physical brain has made it difficult for people to imagine how a physical object like the brain leads to conscious experience in similar ways that it becomes <a>difficult to believe in free will</a>.
[222000430040] |A number of people have hoped to find the solution in the indeterminacy of quantum physics.
[222000430050] |There is a new hypothesis out from Efstratios Manousakis of Florida State University.
[222000430060] |The phenomenon that he is interested in understanding is binocular rivalry.
[222000430070] |In binocular rivalry, a different image is displayed to each of your eyes.
[222000430080] |Instead of seeing a mishmash of the two images, you tend to see one, then the other, then the first one again, ad infinitum.
[222000430090] |It's not possible to do a demonstration over the internet, but the experience is similar to looking at a <a>Necker Cube</a>, where you first see it popping out of the page, then receding from the page, then popping out, and so on.
[222000430100] |Notice that what your "eye" sees doesn't change.
[222000430110] |But your conscious experience does.
[222000430120] |Manousakis has found that quantum waveform formulas describe this reasonably well.
[222000430130] |The question is whether they describe it well because the phenomenon is a quantum phenomenon or because there are two different phenomena for which the same formulas work.
[222000430140] |Keep in mind that binocular rivalry is something that can actually be seen with neuroimaging.
[222000430150] |That is, you can see the patterns in the brain change as the person first sees one image, then the other, etc.
[222000430160] |So if this is really a quantum effect, it is operating at a macro scale.
[222000430170] |<a>New Scientist has an interesting article on this story this last week</a>.
[222000430180] |It's not clear from the article if this is a problem Manousakis has thought about or not, and unfortunately his actual journal article isn't available on his website.
[222000440010] |<title>Are babies prejudiced?</title>
[222000440020] |In 1994, in discussing how children come to learn about inheritance, Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke wrote: "There are many ways children may come to resemble their parents: Curly-haired parents may have curly-haired children because they give them permanents; prejudiced parents may have prejudiced children because they taught them to be so.
[222000440030] |Such mechanisms are not part of a biological process of inheritance..." 
[222000440040] |It's not clear that Carey &Spelke thought prejudice is taught to children rather than inherited through genes, but it's interesting that in picking only two examples of non-biological inheritance, Carey &Spelke chose prejudice as one.
[222000440050] |What makes this quotation remarkable is how unremarkable it is.
[222000440060] |It seems quite natural to assume that prejudice is learned.
[222000440070] |Recently, however, a number of researchers -- including Spelke -- have been suggesting that although the specifics of a prejudice may come through experience, being prejudiced is innate. 
[222000440080] |(Just to be clear, nobody I know is saying that prejudice is natural, good, or something that cannot be overcome.
[222000440090] |The specific claim is that it isn't something you have to learn.) 
[222000440100] |It's actually been known for a few years that infants prefer to look at familiar-race faces.
[222000440110] |Very recently, Katherine Kinzler in the Spelke lab at Harvard has started looking at language prejudice.
[222000440120] |People can get very fired up about language.
[222000440130] |Think about the fights over bilingualism or ebonics in the US.
[222000440140] |Governments have actively pursued the extinction of various non-favored, minority languages. 
[222000440150] |In a long series of studies, Kinzler has found evidence that this prejudice against other languages and against speakers of other languages is innate.
[222000440160] |Young infants prefer to look at a person who previously spoke their language than somebody who spoke a foreign language.
[222000440170] |Infants show the same preference to somebody who speaks with their accent rather than with a foreign accent.
[222000440180] |Older infants (who can crawl), will crawl towards a toy offered by someone who speaks their language rather than towards a toy offered by a foreign-language speaker.
[222000440190] |Keep in mind that these infants probably do not understand what is being said.
[222000440200] |Also, the speakers are bilingual (the infants don't know this), which allows the experimenters to control for things like what the speakers look like.
[222000440210] |For instance, for some babies, one speaker speaks English and the other French, and for the other babies, they reverse.
[222000440220] |Also, French babies prefer French-speakers to English-speakers, while English babies prefer English-speakers to French-speakers. 
[222000440230] |Preschool children would rather be friends with somebody who speaks their own language, which is not surprising.
[222000440240] |They also prefer to be friends with somebody who uses their own accent rather than a foreign accent, even when they are able to understand what the foreign-accented child says. 
[222000440250] |Of course, none of this says that babies are born knowing which languages and accents to prefer.
[222000440260] |However, they seem to quickly work out which languages and accents are "in-group" and which are "out-group."
[222000440270] |This also doesn't say that linguistic prejudice cannot be overcome.
[222000440280] |For one thing, simply exposing children to many accents and language would presumably do much all by itself.
[222000440290] |Although it's not possible yet to rule out alternative explanations, what it does suggest is that prejudice -- at least, linguistic prejudice -- can't be overcome by simply not teaching it to children.
[222000440300] |They must be actively taught not to be prejudiced. 
[222000440310] |The paper, which is pretty easy to understand, is not available on the authors' website, but if you have a decent library: 
[222000440320] |Kinzler, Dupoux, Spelke.
[222000440330] |(2007).
[222000440340] |The native language of social cognition.
[222000440350] |Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(30), 12577-12580.
[222000450010] |<title>Finding guinea pigs</title>
[222000450020] |One problem that confronts nearly every cognitive science researcher is attracting participants.
[222000450030] |This is less true perhaps for vision researchers, who can sometimes get away with testing only themselves and their coauthors, but it is definitely a problem for people who conduct Web-based research, which often needs hundreds or even thousands of participants. 
[222000450040] |Many researchers when they start conducting experiments on the Internet are tempted to offer rewards for participation.
[222000450050] |It's too difficult to pay everybody, so this is often done in the context of a lottery (1 person will win $100).
[222000450060] |This seems like an intuitive strategy, since we usually attract participants to our labs by offering money or making it a requirement for passing an introductory psychology course. 
[222000450070] |If you've been reading the Scienceblog.com top stories lately, you might have noticed a <a>recent study</a> by University of Florida researchers, which suggested that people -- well, UF undergrads -- are less likely to give accurate information to websites which offered rewards. 
[222000450080] |Although these data are in largely in the context of marketing, this suggests that using lotteries to attract research participants on the Web may actually be backfiring.
[222000460010] |<title>SNPs and genes for language</title>
[222000460020] |Modern genetic analyses have told us a great deal about many aspects of the human body and mind.
[222000460030] |However, genetics has been relatively slow in breaking into the study of language.
[222000460040] |<a>As I have mentioned before</a>, a few years ago resarchers reported that a damaged version of the gene FOXP2 was responsible for the language impairments in the <a>KE family</a>.
[222000460050] |This sounds more helpful than it really was, since it turns out that even some reptiles have versions of the FOXP2 gene.
[222000460060] |In humans, FOXP2 isn't just expressed in the brain -- it's expressed in the gut as well.
[222000460070] |This means that there is a lot more going on than just having FOXP2 or not. 
[222000460080] |Over the weekend, researchers presented new data at the <a>Boston University Conference on Language Developmen</a>t that hones in on what, just exactly, FOXP2 does. 
[222000460090] |It turns out that there is a certain amount of variation in genes.
[222000460100] |One type of variation is a <a>Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP)</a>, which is a single base pair in a string of DNA that varies from animal to animal within a species.
[222000460110] |Some SNPs may have little or no effect.
[222000460120] |Others can have disastrous effects.
[222000460130] |Others are intermediate.
[222000460140] |The Human Genome Project simply cataloged genes.
[222000460150] |Scientists are still working on cataloging these variations.
[222000460160] |(This is the extent of my knowledge.
[222000460170] |If any geneticists are reading this and want to add more, please do.) 
[222000460180] |The paper at BUCLD, written by J. Bruce Tomblin and Jonathan Bjork of the University of Iowa and Morten H. Christiansen of Cornell University, looked at SNPs in FOXP2.
[222000460190] |They selected 6 for study in a population of normally developing adolescents and a population of language-impaired adolescents. 
[222000460200] |Two of the six SNPs under study correlated well with a test of procedural memory (strictly speaking, one correlation was only marginally statistically significant).
[222000460210] |One of these SNPs predicted better procedural memory function and was more common in language-normal adolescents; the other predicted worse procedural memory function and was more common in language-impaired adolescents. 
[222000460220] |At a mechanistic level, the next step will be understanding how the proteins created by these different versions of FOXP2 do.
[222000460230] |From my perspective, I'm excited to have further confirmation of the theory that <a>procedural memory is important in language</a>.
[222000460240] |More importantly, though, I think this study heralds a new, exciting line of research in the study of human language. 
[222000460250] |(You can read the <a>abstract of the study here</a>.)
[222000470010] |<title>How do children learn to count? Part 1</title>
[222000470020] |How do children learn to count?
[222000470030] |You could imagine that numbers are words, and children learn them like any other word.
[222000470040] |(Actually, this wouldn't help much, since we still don't really understand how children learn words, but it would neatly deflect the question.)
[222000470050] |However, it turns out that children learn to count in a bizarre fashion quite unlike how they learn about other words. 
[222000470060] |If you have a baby and a few years to spend, you can try this experiment at home.
[222000470070] |Every day, show you baby a bowl of marbles and ask her to give you one.
[222000470080] |Wait until your baby can do this.
[222000470090] |This actually takes some time, during which you'll either get nothing or maybe a handful of marbles. 
[222000470100] |Then, one day, between 24 and 30 months of age, your toddler will hand you a single marble.
[222000470110] |But ask for 2 marbles or 3 marbles, etc., your toddler will give you a handful.
[222000470120] |The number of marbles won't be systematically larger if you ask for 10 than if you ask for 2.
[222000470130] |This is particularly odd, because because by this age the child typically can recite the count list ("one, two, three, four..."). 
[222000470140] |Keep trying this, and within 6-9 months, the child will start giving you 2 marbles when asked for, but still give a random handful when asked for 3 or 4 or 5, etc.
[222000470150] |Wait a bit longer, and the child will manage to give you 1, 2 or 3 when asked, but still fail for numbers greater than 3. 
[222000470160] |This doesn't continue forever, though.
[222000470170] |At around 3 years old, children suddenly are able to succeed when asked for any set of numbers.
[222000470180] |They can truly count.
[222000470190] |(This is work done by Karen Wynn some years ago, who is now a professor of psychology at Yale University.) 
[222000470200] |Of course, this is just a description of what children do.
[222000470210] |What causes this strange pattern of behavior?
[222000470220] |We seem to be, as a field, homing in on the answer, and in my next post I'll describe some new research that sheds light onto the question.
[222000480010] |<title>How do children learn to count? Part 2</title>
[222000480020] |<a>In my last post</a>, I showed that children learn the meaning of number words in a peculiar but systematic fashion.
[222000480030] |Today, I'll continue trying to explain this odd behavior. 
[222000480040] |Important to this story is that children (and non-human primates) are born with several primitive but useful numerical systems that are quite different from the natural number system (1, 2, 3, ...).
[222000480050] |They can't use these systems to count, but they may be useful in learning to count.
[222000480060] |In this post, I'll try to give a quick summary of how they work. 
[222000480070] |One is a basic system that can track about 3-4 objects at a time.
[222000480080] |This isn't a number system per se, just an ability to pay attention to a limited and discrete number of things, and it may or may not be related to <a>similar limits in visual short-term memory</a>. 
[222000480090] |You can see this in action by playing the following game with a baby under the age of 2.
[222000480100] |Show the baby two small boxes.
[222000480110] |Put a single graham cracker into one of the boxes.
[222000480120] |Then put, one at a time, two graham crackers into the other box.
[222000480130] |Assuming your baby likes graham crackers, she'll crawl to the box with two graham crackers.
[222000480140] |Interestingly, this won't work if you put two graham crackers in one box and four in the other.
[222000480150] |Then, the baby chooses between the boxes randomly.
[222000480160] |This is understood to happen because the need to represent 6 different objects all in memory simultaneously overloads the poor baby's brain, and she just loses track.
[222000480170] |(If you want to experience something similar, try to find a "multiple object tracking" demo with 5 or more objects.
[222000480180] |I wasn't able to find one, but you can <a>try this series of demos</a> to get a similar experience.) 
[222000480190] |On the other hand, there is the analog magnitude system.
[222000480200] |Infants and non-human animals have an ability to tell when there are "more" objects.
[222000480210] |This isn't exact.
[222000480220] |They can't tell 11 objects from 12.
[222000480230] |But they can handle ratios like 1:2.
[222000480240] |(The exact ratio depends on the animal and also where it is in maturity.
[222000480250] |We can distinguish smaller ratios than infants can.) 
[222000480260] |You can see this by using something similar to the graham cracker experiment.
[222000480270] |Infants like novelty.
[222000480280] |If you show them 2 balls, then 2 balls again, then 2 balls again, they will get bored.
[222000480290] |Then show them 4 balls.
[222000480300] |They suddenly get more interested and look longer.
[222000480310] |However, this won't happen if you show them 4 balls over and over, then show them 5.
[222000480320] |That ratio is too similar.
[222000480330] |(I'm not sure if you get this effect in the graham cracker experiment.
[222000480340] |I suspect you do, but I couldn't find a reference off-hand.
[222000480350] |The graham cracker experiment is more challenging for infants, so it's possible the results might be somewhat different.) 
[222000480360] |You can also try this with adults.
[222000480370] |Show them a picture with 20 balls, and ask them how many there are.
[222000480380] |Don't give them time to count.
[222000480390] |The answer will average around 20, but with a good deal of variation.
[222000480400] |They may say 18, 19, 21, 22, etc.
[222000480410] |If you give the adult enough time to count, they will almost certainly say "20." 
[222000480420] |Those are the two important prelinguistic "number" systems.
[222000480430] |In my next post, I'll try to piece all this information together.
[222000490010] |<title>How do children learn to count? Part 3</title>
[222000490020] |Two posts ago, I presented some rather odd data about the developmental trajectory of counting.
[222000490030] |It turns out children learn the meanings of number words in a rather odd fashion.
[222000490040] |In my last post, I described the "number" systems that are in place in animals and in infants before they learn to count.
[222000490050] |Today, I'll try to piece all this together to explain how children come to learn to be able to count. 
[222000490060] |Children first learn to map number words onto a more basic numerical system.
[222000490070] |They learn that "one" maps on to keeping track of a single object.
[222000490080] |After a while, they learn "two" maps onto keeping track of one object plus another object.
[222000490090] |Then they learn that "three" maps onto keeping track of one object plus another object plus another object.
[222000490100] |All this follows from the Wynn experiments I discussed two posts ago. 
[222000490110] |Up to this point, they've been learning the meanings of these words independently, but around this time they notice a pattern.
[222000490120] |They know a list of words ("one, two, three, four") and that this list always goes in the same order.
[222000490130] |They also notice that "two" means one more object than "one," and that "three" means one more object than "two."
[222000490140] |They put two and two together and figure out that "four" must mean one more object than "three," even though their memory systems at that age don't necessarily allow them to pay attention to four objects simultaneously.
[222000490150] |Having made this connection, figuring out "five," "six," etc., comes naturally. 
[222000490160] |So what is that more basic number system?
[222000490170] |One possibility is that children to learn to map the early number words onto the analog number system I also described in the last post (the system adults use to estimate number when we don't have time to count)? 
[222000490180] |Something like this claim has been made by a number of well-known researchers (<a>Dehaene</a>, Gallistel, Gelman and <a>Wynn</a>, to name a few).
[222000490190] |There are a number of a priori reasons <a>Susan Carey</a> of Harvard thinks this won't work, but even more important is the data. 
[222000490200] |As I described two posts ago, very young children can hand you one marble when asked, but hand you random numbers of marbles if asked for "two," "three" or any larger number.
[222000490210] |They always give you more than one, but they can't distinguish between the other numbers.
[222000490220] |Following Wynn, these are called "one-knowers."
[222000490230] |Slightly older children are "two-knowers," who can give you one or two marbles, but give you random amounts greater than 2 if asked for another other number.
[222000490240] |At the next stage, the child becomes a "three-knower."
[222000490250] |Usually, the next stage is being able to succeed on any number.
[222000490260] |I'll call those "counters." 
[222000490270] |Recently, <a>LeCorre and Carey </a>replicated this trajectory using cards with circles on them.
[222000490280] |They presented the children a card with some number of circles (1 to 8) and asked the kid, "How many?"
[222000490290] |One-knowers tended to reply "one" to a card with one circle, and then guessed incorrectly for just about everything else.
[222000490300] |Two-knowers could count one or two circles, but guessed incorrectly for all the other cards.
[222000490310] |Three-knowers could count up to three, but just guessed beyond that.
[222000490320] |Counters answered correctly on essentially all cards. 
[222000490330] |So far this doesn't tell us whether children learn to count by bootstrapping off of analog magnitudes or some other system.
[222000490340] |<a>Carey and Mathieu LeCorre published a paper</a> this year that seems to settle the question.
[222000490350] |The setup was exactly the same as in the last paper (now with cards with anywhere from 1 to 10 circles), except that this time the children were only briefly shown the card.
[222000490360] |They didn't have enough time to actually count "one, two, three..."
[222000490370] |The data for one-, two- and three-knowers didn't change, which isn't surprising.
[222000490380] |Both the "3-object" and the analog magnitude systems are very fast and shouldn't require explicit counting. 
[222000490390] |However, counters fell into two groups.
[222000490400] |One group, about 4.5 years old on average, answered just as adults.
[222000490410] |When they saw six circles, their answers averaged around "six."
[222000490420] |When they saw ten circles, their answers averaged around "ten."
[222000490430] |This is what you'd expect if they have mapped number words onto the analog magnitude system. 
[222000490440] |However, the other group, which was slightly younger (average age of 4 years, 1 month), guessed randomly for cards with 5 or more circles, just as if they didn't know how to count.
[222000490450] |However, these kids can count.
[222000490460] |If given time to look at the cards, they would have said the right number.
[222000490470] |So despite the fact that they can count, they do not seem to have their analog magnitude system mapped onto number words. 
[222000490480] |This means that the analog magnitude system isn't fundamental in learning how to count, and it actually takes some time for children to learn that mapping even after they've learned to count.
[222000490490] |Carey takes this as meaning that the analog magnitude system doesn't play a fundamental role in learning to count, either, and there are other reasons as well that this is probably the case. 
[222000490500] |One remaining possibility is that children use the "3-object system" to understanding the meanings of 1, 2 and 3.
[222000490510] |This seems to work nicely, given that the limits of the system (3 objects in children, 4 in adults) seem to explain why children can learn "one," "two," and "three" without really learning to count.
[222000490520] |Carey actually has a somewhat more nuanced explanation where children learn the meanings of "one," "two," and "three" the same may that quantifiers (like "a" in English) are learned.
[222000490530] |However, to the best of my knowledge, she doesn't have an account of how such quantifiers are learned, and if she had an account, I suspect it would itself hinge off of the 3-object system, anyway. 
[222000490540] |That's it for how children learn to count, unless I get enough comments asking for more details on any point.
[222000490550] |For those who want to read more, there are many papers on this subject at Carey's<a> web page</a>.
[222000500010] |<title>Scientists arguing about the scientific method</title>
[222000500020] |The scientific method should be at least passingly familiar to most people who took a high school science class.
[222000500030] |Generate a hypothesis, then design an experiment that will either support or contradict your hypothesis.
[222000500040] |A more nuanced version is to find two competing hypotheses, then design an experiment that will unambiguously support at most one of those two hypotheses. 
[222000500050] |But is this what scientists actually do?
[222000500060] |Is it what scientists should do?
[222000500070] |This question was put to us by <a>Ken Nakayama</a> in our first-year graduate psych seminar last week.
[222000500080] |Though it may surprise some of you, his answer was "no."
[222000500090] |In contrast to theory-driven research (the proposal above), Nakayama prefers data-driven research. 
[222000500100] |Although there are some good descriptions and defenses of <a>theory-driven research</a>, I don't know of one for data-driven research.
[222000500110] |Here's my best effort at describing the two. 
[222000500120] |Suppose you are a tinkerer who wants to know how a car works.
[222000500130] |If you are a theory-driven tinkerer, you would start with competing hypotheses (that tube over there connects the gas tank to the engine VS that tube over there is part of an air circulation system) and conduct experiments to tease those hypotheses apart.
[222000500140] |The theory-driven tinkerer will focus her energies on experiments that will best tease apart the most important theories, ignoring phenomena that aren't theoretically important. 
[222000500150] |A data-driven tinkerer would say, "I wonder what happens if I do this," do it, and see what happened.
[222000500160] |That is, she may run experiments without having any hypotheses about the outcome, just to see what happens.
[222000500170] |If the data-driven tinkerer's attention is caught by some odd phenomenon (the car seems to run better in the afternoon than in the morning), she may pursue that phenomenon regardless of whether it seems theoretically interesting or helps distinguish between competing hypotheses. 
[222000500180] |One potential reason to favor data-driven research is that while theory-driven research is constrained by our theories (which, at this stage in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, frankly aren't very good), while data-driven research is constrained only by your imagination and skill as an experimentalist.
[222000500190] |Data-driven exploration, one might argue, is more likely to lead to surprising discoveries, while theory-driven research is may only show you what you expected to see. 
[222000500200] |I suspect that most psychologists use some combination of the two strategies, though  when it comes time to write a paper, it seems to be easier to publish data that is relevant to theory (whether it was theory that led you to do the experiment in the first place is another question). 
[222000500210] |Thoughts?
[222000510010] |<title>Wait -- are you suggesting your brain affects your behavior?</title>
[222000510020] |One of my office-mates burst out laughing on Monday after receiving an email.
[222000510030] |The email was a forward, but it wasn't intended to be funny.
[222000510040] |It was a brief news blurb about a recent study looking <a>at teenage impulsiveness</a>, entitled "Teens' brains hold key to their impulsiveness."
[222000510050] |What's funny about that?
[222000510060] |Well, where did the journalist think the key to impulsiveness was hidden -- in teens' kidneys?
[222000510070] |Many scientists puzzle over the fact that 150 years of biology have not driven out Creationism, but 150 years of psychology and neuroscience have been even less successful.
[222000510080] |Many people -- probably most -- still believe in mind/brain duality. 
[222000510090] |Philosophers began suggesting that all human behavior is caused by the physical body at least as early as <a>Thomas Hobbes</a> in the 1600s.
[222000510100] |A century and a half of psychology and neuroscience has found no evidence of an immaterial mind, and now the assumption that all behavior and thought is caused by the physical body underlies essentially all modern research.
[222000510110] |It's true that nobody has proved that immaterial minds do not exist, but similarly nobody has ever proved the nonexistence of anything.
[222000510120] |It just seems very unlikely. 
[222000510130] |This leads to an interesting dichotomy between cognitive scientists and the general public.
[222000510140] |While journalists get very excited about studies that prove some particular behavior is related to some particular part of the brain, many cognitive scientists find such studies to be colossal wastes of time and money.
[222000510150] |It would be like a physicist publishing a study entitled "Silicon falls when dropped."
[222000510160] |Maybe nobody ever tested to see whether silicon falls when dropped, but the outcome was never really in doubt. 
[222000510170] |This isn't to say that the study I mentioned above wasn't a useful study.
[222000510180] |I have no doubt that it is a very useful study.
[222000510190] |Determining mechanistically what changes in what parts of the brain during development affect impulsiveness is very informative.
[222000510200] |The mere fact that the brain changes during development, and that this affects our behavior, is not.
[222000520010] |<title>Knowing the meanings of words</title>
[222000520020] |In “On the evolution of human motivation: the role of social prosthetic systems,” <a>Stephen Kosslyn</a> makes a very interesting conjecture about social interactions.
[222000520030] |He argues that, for a given person, “other people serve as prosthetic devices, filling in for lacks in an individual’s cognitive or emotional abilities.”
[222000520040] |This part seems hard to argue with.
[222000520050] |Intuitively, we all rely on other people to do certain things for us (mow our grass, edit our papers, provide us with love).
[222000520060] |His crucial insight is that “the ‘self’ becomes distributed over other people who function as long-term social prosthetic systems.” 
[222000520070] |You may or may not agree with that stronger claim.
[222000520080] |I haven't made up my own mind yet.
[222000520090] |I recommend reading the paper itself, which unfortunately is not available on his website but should be available in a decent college library. 
[222000520100] |There is one interesting application of his idea to an old problem in linguistics and philosophy.
[222000520110] |What is the problem?
[222000520120] |Intuitively, we would like to believe that our words pick out things in the world (although words and concepts are not interchangeable, for the purposes of this discussion, they have the same problems).
[222000520130] |When I say “cows produce milk,” I like to believe that this sentence is either true or false in the world.
[222000520140] |For this to even be plausible, we have to assume that the words “cow” and “milk” refer to sets of real, physical objects. 
[222000520150] |This is problematic in myriads of ways.
[222000520160] |It is so full of paradoxes that Chomsky has tried to define away the problem by denying that words refer to anything in the world.
[222000520170] |I will focus on one particular problem that is relevant to the Kosslyn conjecture. 
[222000520180] |If you are like me, you know nothing about rare plants such as the three-seeded mercury or the Nova Scotia false-foxglove.
[222000520190] |Yet, we are able to have conversations about them.
[222000520200] |I can tell you that the both are endangered in the state of Maine, for instance.
[222000520210] |If I tell you that they both survive on pure Boron, you would probably be skeptical.
[222000520220] |Thus, we can talk about these plants and make empirical claims about them and learn new things about them without having any idea what these words actually pick out in the world.
[222000520230] |This is true of a large number of things we talk about on a daily basis.
[222000520240] |We talk about people we have never met and places we have never been. 
[222000520250] |What distinguishes these words from words that truly have no reference?
[222000520260] |To you, likely neither the words “Thistlewart” nor the word “Moonwart” mean anything.
[222000520270] |Now, suppose I tell you the first is a made-up plant, while the second is a real plant.
[222000520280] |To you, these are still both essentially empty words, except one refers to something in the world (though you don’t know what) and the other doesn’t. 
[222000520290] |Intuitively, what makes “Thistlewart” an empty concept and “Moonwart” not is that you believe there is some expert who really does know what a Moonwart is and could pick one out of a lineup.
[222000520300] |This “Expert Principle” has seemed unsatisfying to many philosophers, but within the context of the “social prosthetic system” theory, it seems quite at home.
[222000520310] |Certainly, it seems like it might at least inform some of these classic problems of reference and meaning.
[222000530010] |<title>How does the brain read?</title>
[222000530020] |Reading is an important skill, so it's not surprising it gets a lot of attention from researchers.
[222000530030] |Reading is an ancient skill -- at least in some parts of the world -- but not so old that we don't know when it was invented (as opposed to, for instance, basic arithmetic).
[222000530040] |And, unlike language, it appeared recently enough in most of the world that it's unlikely that evolution has had time to select for reading skill...which would explain the high prevalence of dyslexia. 
[222000530050] |Some decades ago, there was a considerable amount of debate over whether reading was phonologically based -- that is, "sounding out" is crucial (CAT -> /k/ + /{/ + /t/ -> /k{t/) -- or visual-recognition based -- that is, you simply recognize each words as a whole form (CAT -> /k{t/).
[222000530060] |People who favored the former theory emphasized <a>phonics-based reading instruction</a>, while the latter theory resulted in "<a>whole language</a>" training. 
[222000530070] |At least from where I sit, this debate has been largely resolved in favor of phonics.
[222000530080] |This isn't to say that skilled readers don't recognize some high-frequency words as whole, but it does mean that sounding out words it crucial at least in learning to read.
[222000530090] |One important piece of evidence is that "phonological awareness" -- the ability to figure out that CAT has 3 sounds by COLON has 5 or that DOG and BOG rhyme -- is just about the best predictor of reading success.
[222000530100] |That is, preschoolers who are at the bottom of the pack in terms of phonological awareness tend to in the future be at the bottom of the pack in learning to read. 
[222000530110] |At least, that is the story for writing systems like English that are alphabetic.
[222000530120] |There has been some question as to the role of phonology in learning to read character-based systems like Chinese.
[222000530130] |Two years ago, a group including <a>Li Hai Tan</a> of Hong Kong University <a>presented evidence</a> that in fact phonological awareness may not be particularly important in learning to read Chinese. 
[222000530140] |I have been trying to test one aspect of their theory for some time.
[222000530150] |Not having collaborators in China or Taiwan, I have to recruit my Chinese-speakers here in Cambridge, which is harder than you might think.
[222000530160] |The first experiment I ran took nearly six months, most of which was spent trying to recruit participants, and it was ultimately inconclusive.
[222000530170] |Last spring I piloted a Web-based version of the experiment, thinking that I might have more luck finding Chinese participants through the Internet.
[222000530180] |However, that experiment failed.
[222000530190] |I think it was too complicated and participants didn't understand what to do. 
[222000530200] |I have spent the last few months thinking the problem through, and now I have a new Web-based study.
[222000530210] |I am trying it in English first, and if it works well enough, I will write a Chinese version of the experiment.
[222000530220] |If you are interested, please <a>try it out here</a>.
[222000540010] |<title>Why languages can't be learned</title>
[222000540020] |One of the most basic, essentially undisputed scientific facts about language -- and the one that tends to get the most interest from laypeople -- is that while learning a foreign language as an adult is very difficult, children learn their native languages with as much ease and proficiency as they learn to walk.
[222000540030] |This has led researchers such as Steven Pinker to call language learning an "<a>instinct</a>."
[222000540040] |In fact, this "instinct" is more than remarkable -- it's miraculous.
[222000540050] |On careful reflection it seems impossible to learn just a single word in any language, much less an entire vocabulary (and thus figuring out how we nonetheless all learned a language is a major area of research). 
[222000540060] |The paradox goes back to <a>W. V. O. Quine </a>(who, I'm proud to say, is a fellow <a>Obie</a>), who suggested this thought experiment: Suppose you are an anthropologist trying to learn the language of a new, previously undiscovered tribe.
[222000540070] |You are out in the field with a member of the tribe.
[222000540080] |Suddenly, a rabbit runs by.
[222000540090] |The tribesperson points and says, "Gavagai!" 
[222000540100] |What do you make of this?
[222000540110] |Most of us assume that "gavagai" means "rabbit," but consider the possibilities: "white," "moving whiteness," "Lo, food", "Let's go hunting", or even "there will be a storm tonight" (suppose this tribesperson is very superstitious).
[222000540120] |Of course, there are even more exotic possibilities: "Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage" or "Lo, undetached rabbit parts."
[222000540130] |Upon reflection, there are an infinite number of possibilities.
[222000540140] |Upon further reflection (trust me on this), you could never winnow away the possibilites and arrive at the meaning of "gavagai" ... that is, never unless you are making some assumptions about what the tribesman could mean (that is, if you assume definitions involving undetached rabbit parts are too unlikely to even consider). 
[222000540150] |Quine offered this thought experiment in a <a>discussion about translation</a>, but it clearly applies to the problems faced by any infant.
[222000540160] |To make matters worse, people rarely name objects in isolation -- parents don't say "bunny," they say "Look, see the bunny?" or "Look at that bunny go!" 
[222000540170] |Generally, it should be very clear that infants could not learn a language if they didn't make certain assumptions about which words meant what.
[222000540180] |One of the major areas of modern psycholinguistics is figuring out what those assumptions are and where do they come from (that is, are they innate or are they learned?). 
[222000540190] |Long-time readers know that<a> the major focus of my research </a>is on how people resolve ambiguity in language.
[222000540200] |My first web-based experiment on this topic <a>has been running for a while</a>.
[222000540210] |Last week I posted a new experiment.
[222000540220] |Participants hear sentences like "Show me the dax" and try to guess which of several new objects might be the "dax."
[222000540230] |As usual, I can't say much about the purpose of the experiment while it's still running, but participants who finish the experiment will get an explanation of the experiment and also will get to see their own results.
[222000540240] |<a>You can try it by clicking here</a>.
[222000550010] |<title>Is psychology a science?</title>
[222000550020] |Is psychology a science?
[222000550030] |I see this question asked a lot on message boards, and I thought it was time to discuss it here.
[222000550040] |The answer depends entirely on what you mean by "psychology" and what you mean by "science." 
[222000550050] |First, if by "psychology" you mean seeing clients (like in Good Will Hunting or Silence of the Lambs), then, no, it's probably not a science.
[222000550060] |But that's a bit like asking whether engineers or doctors are scientists.
[222000550070] |Scientists create knowledge.
[222000550080] |Client-visiting psychologists, doctors and engineers use knowledge.
[222000550090] |Of course, you could legitimately ask whether client-visiting psychologists base their interventions on good science.
[222000550100] |They often don't.
[222000550110] |But that can also be said about doctors and, I'd be willing to bet, engineers. 
[222000550120] |However, there is a different profession that, largely for historical reasons, shares the same name.
[222000550130] |That is the branch of science which studies human and animal behavior, and it is also called "psychology."
[222000550140] |It's not as well known, and nobody makes movies about us (though <a>if paleoglaciologists get to save the world</a>, I don't see why experimental psychologists don't!), but it does exist. 
[222000550150] |A friend of mine (a physicist) once claimed psychologists don't do experiments (he said this un-ironically over IM while I was killing time in a psychology research lab).
[222000550160] |My response now would be to invite him to participate in <a>one of these experiments</a>.
[222000550170] |Based on this <a>Facebook group</a>, I know I'm not the only one who has heard this. 
[222000550180] |There are also those, however, who are aware that psychologists do experiments, but deny that it's a true science.
[222000550190] |Some of this has to do with the belief that psychologists still use introspection (there are probably some somewhere, but I suspect there are also physicists who use voodoo dolls somewhere as well, along with mathematicians who play the lottery).
[222000550200] |The more serious objection has to do with the <a>statistics used in psychology</a>. 
[222000550210] |In the physical sciences, typically a reaction takes place or does not, or a neutrino is detected is not.
[222000550220] |There is some uncertainty given the precision of the tools being used, but on the whole the results are fairly straight-forward and the precision is pretty good. 
[222000550230] |In psychology, however, the phenomena we study are noisy and the tools lack much precision.
[222000550240] |When studying a neutrino, you don't have to worry about whether it's hungry or sleepy or distracted.
[222000550250] |You don't have to worry about whether the neutrino you are studying is smarter than average, or maybe too tall for your testing booth, or maybe it's only participating in your experiment to get extra credit in class and isn't the least bit motivated.
[222000550260] |It does what it does according to fairly simple rules.
[222000550270] |Humans, on the other hand, are terrible test subjects.
[222000550280] |Psychology experiments require averaging over many, many observations in order to detect patterns within all that noise. 
[222000550290] |Some people find this noisiness deeply unsettling and dislike the methods social scientists have developed to compensate for it, and thus would prefer to exclude the social sciences from the term "science."
[222000550300] |This is fair in the sense that you can define words however you want, but it does mean that a great deal of the world -- basically all of human and animal behavior -- is necessarily unexplainable by science. 
[222000550310] |So what do you think?
[222000550320] |Are the social sciences sciences?
[222000550330] |Comments are welcome.
[222000560010] |<title>Is there a moral grammar?</title>
[222000560020] |Morality may seem like a topic for philosophers and theologians rather than psychologists.
[222000560030] |While it is true that during the last few decades moral reasoning hasn't been a hot topic of psychological research, moral reasoning is a behavior -- and an important one -- and that makes it a worthy topic for psychology.
[222000560040] |(I don't mean that psychologists should study what is moral and what isn't, but rather what humans think is moral and what they think is not, and why.)
[222000560050] |In the last few years, interest in the field has exploded.
[222000560060] |One of the most controversial new approaches, promoted by <a>Marc Hauser</a> of Harvard University, is to study moral reasoning by analogy to linguistics.
[222000560070] |For instance, what are the <a>phonemes </a>of moral reasoning?
[222000560080] |What is the <a>grammar</a> that determine whether an action is considered moral or not?
[222000560090] |There has been a lot of criticism of this analogy, none of which seems to particularly bother Hauser.
[222000560100] |What is interesting is that he has put forward the analogy of moral reasoning to linguistic reasoning not so much because he thinks it's literally true (in fact, he thinks it would be bizarre if morality was exactly like language -- they are obviously different systems), but because he thinks the analogy leads to new questions about moral reasoning that nobody was asking.
[222000560110] |This leads to new experiments, new data, and hopefully better theories.
[222000560120] |Hauser argues that the linguistic analogy has does just this.
[222000560130] |There is something to this argument.
[222000560140] |Obviously having a correct theory is ideal.
[222000560150] |However, few if any theories -- psychological or otherwise -- are through-and-through true, and so it's better to have an incorrect theory that at least points research in a profitable new direction than an incorrect theory that leads nowhere.
[222000560160] |You can find some of his recent published papers <a>here</a>.
[222000560170] |For a less technical treatment, though, you might read his <a>new book</a>.
[222000560180] |You can also participate in his <a>Moral Sense Test</a> here.
[222000560190] |For more thoughts about the scientific method, read <a>this</a>.
[222000560200] |For more about the scientific method and psychology in particular, read <a>yesterday's post</a>.
[222000570010] |<title>Ambiguity</title>
[222000570020] |I came across this excellent quote in a journal article yesterday about ambiguity in language: 
[222000570030] |However, the flexibility of language allows us to go far beyond this.
[222000570040] |For example, as revealed by a brief Internet search, speakers can use “girl” for their dog (“This is my little girl Cassie…she's much bigger and has those cute protruding bulldog teeth”), their favorite boat (“This girl can do 24 mph if she has to”), or a recently restoredWorld War II Sherman tank (“The museum felt that the old girl was historically unique”).
[222000570050] |Such examples reveal that for nouns, it is often not enough to just retrieve their sense, i.e., some definitional meaning, from our mental dictionaries. 
[222000570060] |-Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, Nieuwland (2007) Establishing reference in language comprehension: an electrophysiological perspective.
[222000570070] |Brain Research, 1146, 158-171. 
[222000570080] |For more about ambiguity in language, check <a>here</a>, <a>here</a> and <a>here</a>.
[222000580010] |<title>Why scientists need to do better PR</title>
[222000580020] |A couple days ago I asked whether <a>psychology was a science</a>.
[222000580030] |Many of the responses I got confirmed what I already knew from reading message boards and talking with other academics.
[222000580040] |Psychology must have done a terrible job of PR, given that so many well-educated folk and scientists in other fields have absolutely no idea what it's about. 
[222000580050] |I commonly hear statements like "psychologists don't do experiments" or "p<a>sychology experiments aren't well-controlled</a>" or "<a>psychology experiments aren't replicable</a>."
[222000580060] |Saying psychologists don't use experimental controls is like saying that the existence of electrons is "<a>unproven</a>" or that evolution is a "<a>theory in crisis</a>."
[222000580070] |Basically, the only way somebody could say something like this is if they are entirely ignorant of the field. 
[222000580080] |The big difference, though, is I doubt it's widely accepted among biologists that electrons probably don't exist or among physicists that evolution is an unproven, shaky hypothesis, but it does seem that an embarrassingly large number of physicists and biologists (and other scientists, too -- I'm not picking on physics or biology) have similarly unfounded views about psychology. 
[222000580090] |(If you really need an example of a replicable, robust psychological phenomenon, try out the <a>Stroop effect</a>, which is also an example of an experiment with good controls.
[222000580100] |This is a bit like defending evolution, though.
[222000580110] |Leafing through any reputable journal should be sufficient.) 
[222000580120] |So why care if people are ignorant of psychology?
[222000580130] |For the same reasons it's important that they be informed about every branch of science.
[222000580140] |First, there's a lot of information there that would be useful to people in their daily lives.
[222000580150] |Second, if people don't understand and value a discipline, they're less likely to fund it.
[222000580160] |Science in America is largely funded directly or indirectly by the public.
[222000580170] |If you believe a particular science is important for the health of the country, then it's important that enough voters also value it. 
[222000580180] |On the question of replicability, it's true that some results in psychology don't replicate, sometimes because the results were a fluke and sometimes because the experimenters made a mistake.
[222000580190] |I wonder, though, if it's actually less common in other fields.
[222000580200] |In physics lab in college, my lab partners and I measured the speed of light, getting an answer way different from the accepted figure (no, we weren't even within measuring error of the correct number).
[222000580210] |So that's at least an existence proof that it's possible to do an experiment in physics that won't replicate (that is, our experimental results don't replicate).
[222000590010] |<title>Does diversity increase productivity?</title>
[222000590020] |One of the arguments for diversity-based hiring is that a more diverse workforce is more productive.
[222000590030] |Is that true?
[222000590040] |Scott E. Page, a professor of complex systems, political science and economics and the University of Michigan argues that it does.
[222000590050] |He uses mathematical models and case studies to support the claims, which themselves are pretty straight forward.
[222000590060] |Here's a quote from a <a>recent interview in the New York Times:</a>
[222000590070] |The problems we face in the world are very complicated.
[222000590080] |Any one of us can get stuck. if we're in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place.
[222000590090] |But if we have people with diverse tools, they'll get stuck in different places.
[222000590100] |One person can do their best, and then someone else can come in and improve on it.
[222000590110] |Of course, this isn't exactly a new idea.
[222000590120] |But ideas are a dime a dozen.
[222000590130] |What Page has are data.
[222000590140] |On a related topic, <a>Richard Hackman</a> of Harvard University, who also studies the productivity of work teams, is now arguing that panels of experts can be less productive due to their expertise.
[222000590150] |He specifically argues that blue-ribbon commissions like the 9/11 Commission are often unproductive because, although they are filled with people with a great deal of expertise, such panels are often very inefficient at using that expertise.
[222000600010] |<title>What is neuroimaging good for?</title>
[222000600020] |On page 32 of the November/December issue, Seed Magazine reports that in July of 2007
[222000600030] |Neuroscientists seeking to discern whether culture affects the human brain examined those of a group of Americans and Nicaraguans as they watched different hand gestures specific to their respective cultures.
[222000600040] |Hopefully, this is not what said neuroscientists (no reference is given) were actually trying to do, because fMRI is very expensive (it typically costs hundreds of dollars an hour just to rent the machine), and you wouldn't really need to do an experiment to answer this question. 
[222000600050] |I think it's fairly obvious that people respond differently to language-specific hand gestures (for one thing, they are more likely to respond to them).
[222000600060] |If people respond differently, then their brains should also respond differently.
[222000600070] |To suggest otherwise means that you believe that the difference in behavior is due to either (1) an immaterial soul that controls that can engage in activities independently of the body, or (2) these behaviors are controlled by some organ of the body outside the brain. 
[222000600080] |These are both logically possible hypotheses, but the research over the last few centuries makes them so unlikely to be the case that unless you have a really, really good reason to suspect that the brain is not involved in interpreting hand gestures, then it's not really worth the incredible cost of fMRI to answer this particular research question. 
[222000600090] |Seed is a decent, informative magazine, so the fact that they let this slip is just more evidence of how <a>pervasive this thinking is</a>.
[222000610010] |<title>This week at the cognition and language lab</title>
[222000610020] |I just finished watching several episodes of Scrubs.
[222000610030] |If you watch enough TV, you get a sense of what it's like to be a <a>doctor</a> or a <a>lobbyist</a> or a <a>policeman</a> or a <a>Mafioso</a>.
[222000610040] |Some of these shows are more accurate, some are less.
[222000610050] |But it's very hard to get even an inaccurate sense of what it's like to be a working scientist by watching TV.
[222000610060] |Even if we go to movies, all that comes to mind is <a>Brent Spiner </a>or <a>Dennis Quaid</a> . 
[222000610070] |I have no idea what it's like to be a xenobiologist or a paleoglaciologist (though I did once spend a couple days hitchhiking with a pair of paleoglaciologist on Sakhalin, taking tree cores), but I can open a window on a week in the life of a psychology graduate student. 
[222000610080] |My first year proposal was due Tuesday.
[222000610090] |I spent last weekend reading papers in preparation to write about my work on <a>pronoun resolution</a>.
[222000610100] |The purpose of that project was/is to determine whether a particular odd linguistic phenomenon generalized to a large number of words in English, or if it was specific to just a relatively small number of famous examples.
[222000610110] |That didn't seem like enough to propose as a year-long project, but beyond that I didn't have any particular hypotheses. 
[222000610120] |Sunday morning I finally thought of something, but at 8pm, I decided I didn't like what I had written, gave up and wrote about a <a>different project</a> instead.
[222000610130] |Monday morning, I sent the project proposal to my advisor and spent most of the day extending that essay into my final paper for my <a>developmental proseminar</a> class.
[222000610140] |Monday night, I began our take-home final for the developmental proseminar. 
[222000610150] |I worked on the final for most of Tuesday as well, finishing in the evening.
[222000610160] |Having spent all day on a frustrating exam, I wanted to do something fun...which for me meant analyze data.
[222000610170] |I downloaded the results from the <a>Birth Order survey</a>.
[222000610180] |Over 2,500 people participated, and the data were the stuff of dreams -- much better than I hoped.
[222000610190] |So I archived that survey.
[222000610200] |I don't need any more data, and I'd rather people who visit the site do one of the <a>new experiments</a>. 
[222000610210] |Wednesday and Thursday were spent writing and testing the code for a new pilot study on a particular type of linguistic inference.
[222000610220] |There are three versions of that experiment, and I ran all three on myself (one of them more than once) until I was satisfied.
[222000610230] |I also had two coworkers give it a run-through. 
[222000610240] |On Friday, I ran 13 subjects on that pilot study.
[222000610250] |It's the end of the semester, and many of the undergraduate psych students waited to the last minute to participate in the required number of experiments in order to get credit in their classes.
[222000610260] |This is always a good time to find subjects. 
[222000610270] |Since my experiments are all computer-based, running subjects is fairly dull.
[222000610280] |I greet the participant when s/he shows up, explain the procedure, have him/her sign the consent form, and then get the program up and running.
[222000610290] |When the participant finishes, I give him/her a debriefing form and answer any questions.
[222000610300] |I spent the time while waiting reading papers about birth order effects, working on the blog, answering email, and working on the one final project of the week I haven't yet mentioned. 
[222000610310] |The results of the <a>Video Experiment</a> were much more interesting than expected.
[222000610320] |I don't want to say anything about it, because we may have to run more conditions in the future, but basically, we were doing what was supposed to be a confirmatory study, proving something everybody already knew.
[222000610330] |Psychologists often get criticized for spending all their time proving the obvious (people who like to eat tend to eat more, for instance), but the Video Experiment was an example of why we run these studies: we found exactly the opposite of what we and I suppose everybody else would have predicted. 
[222000610340] |My co-author is in charge of writing the paper, but he has been shooting me emails all week asking for additional analyses.
[222000610350] |I've also read and commented on several drafts.
[222000610360] |It is looking pretty good -- much better than if I had written it -- but the senior author hasn't read it yet.
[222000610370] |We'll see what she says.
[222000610380] |After she's satisfied (if she's satisfied), we'll send it off to a journal, where the reviewers will tear it to shreds and reject it.
[222000610390] |We'll rewrite it (after perhaps running another experiment or two) and then resubmit it.
[222000610400] |It's a long process. 
[222000610410] |And that was one week in the life of a psychology graduate student.
[222000610420] |There's definitely a TV show in there somewhere!
[222000620010] |<title>Are birth order effects due to SES?</title>
[222000620020] |As early as 1874, Sir Francis Galton noted that first-borns and only children were overrepresented in <a>English men of science</a>, making birth order effects one of the earliest constructs studied in psychology.
[222000620030] |Over a thousand studies has since been conducted, most of them contradicting the rest.
[222000620040] |As is typical in <a>psychology</a>, the arguments tend to center around the correct way of measuring birth order. 
[222000620050] |A common counterargument is that birth order is also an index of SES.
[222000620060] |Poor families have more children.
[222000620070] |Just from that, you would expect that there would be few scientists with ten older siblings (Galton actually pointed this out himself, noting that among the wealthy, first-borns tend to have large inheritances, and thus are freed to pursue whatever they like).
[222000620080] |That said, many birth-order effects have held up even when holding SES constant. 
[222000620090] |The typical pro-birth-order position is that children are shaped by their environment, and their environment is shaped by the age of their siblings.
[222000620100] |Here is a quote from Alfred Adler, who developed the first full-blown theory of birth order effects: 
[222000620110] |It is a common fallacy to imagine that children of the same family are formed in the same environment.
[222000620120] |Of course there is much which is the same for all children in the same home, but the psychological situation of each child is individual and differs from that of others, because of the order of their succession.
[222000620130] |Then, this weekend, I read what was meant to be a counter-argument by Wichman, Rodgers and MacCullum (2006), who are adamantly on the side of no birth order effects: 
[222000620140] |For example, as parents age, they typically increase in SES level and also may spend more time at work and less time with their children.
[222000620150] |Thus, later-born children may, on average, mature in a slightly higher SES environment than their earlier-born siblings, but one in which parents spend less time with them and which therefore may negatively affect their intellectual development.
[222000620160] |If later-born children have lower IQs, are we observing an effect of being a later-born child (a real birth order effect) or an indirect effect of SES? 
[222000620170] |It's hard to see why they think this is explains away birth order effects.
[222000620180] |It's simply a different explanation of birth order effects. 
[222000620190] |Anyway, I expect to finish my review of the birth order literature today or tomorrow (no, I'm not reading all 1000+ articles; I'm at 25 and counting, though), so I'll update soon with what I've learned.
[222000630010] |<title>"Every psychology major starts by wanting to be a therapist"</title>
[222000630020] |One of my officemates, also a first-year graduate student, recently claimed that all undergraduate psychology majors enter the field because they want to be therapists.
[222000630030] |This definitely wasn't true of me.
[222000630040] |I often forget that there is a branch of psychology that does therapy (this is easy to forget at my school, which <a>doesn't offer a counseling program</a>.
[222000630050] |In fact, I'm not sure any school I applied to offers a counseling program).
[222000630060] |But, then, I wasn't a psychology major. 
[222000630070] |Someone recently suggested to me that I write about who I am and how I got here.
[222000630080] |I personally doubt anybody is all that interested in my life story, but I do have one reason to tell bits and pieces of it.
[222000630090] |Most people seem to <a>know very little about psychology</a>.
[222000630100] |In fact, for all my father is a professor of psychology and I had worked in several psychology labs, I knew far too little about the career track at first, and I believe this hurt me the first time I applied to graduate school (yes, I applied twice).
[222000630110] |A lot of really crucial information simply isn't available. 
[222000630120] |This post kicks of what will be a series of probably non-consecutive posts about the psychology career track, as illustrated by my own path (keep in mind that I'm only half way there). 
[222000630130] |First, since my father was a psychologist, I was determined not to be.
[222000630140] |That had already been done.
[222000630150] |Otherwise, though, I had no good idea what I might do, other than a vague idea that maybe <a>I'd be a writer</a>. 
[222000630160] |One day in a deep Ohio December, as I was at my study carrel in <a>Mudd Library</a> studying for <a>discrete mathematics exam</a>, suddenly, the clouds parted, the light shone down, angels sang, and I knew what I wanted to do: 
[222000630170] |Artificial intelligence. 
[222000630180] |When asked what that meant, I typically said that I wanted to make one of <a>these</a>, but what really interested me was making a talking robot.
[222000630190] |Artificial intelligence wasn't a course track really offered at Oberlin, and though I majored in computer science for a while, I eventually switched to math, which I found more appealing.
[222000630200] |In the meantime, I volunteered at the <a>Brain and Language Lab</a> at Georgetown University. 
[222000630210] |I really enjoyed my work at Georgetown.
[222000630220] |Then, I went to a conference on natural language processing, which is essentially the field of trying to make a talking robot, and I was very disappointed.
[222000630230] |It wasn't want I imagined at all.
[222000630240] |At the time -- and maybe still now -- the most successful technique was to use a lot of templates.
[222000630250] |This seems to work very well -- and if you believe <a>Tomasello</a>'s theory about language, it might even be how humans produce language -- but it wasn't for me.
[222000630260] |I preferred my current work in cognitive neuroscience. 
[222000630270] |So, for a while, I was going to be a cognitive neuroscientist.
[222000630280] |However, it turns out that there are very few cognitive neuroscience labs that study high-level language processing, particularly in the cities that were options for me in terms of graduate school.
[222000630290] |Relative to memory or vision, for instance, it has been difficult to use traditional cognitive neuroscience techniques to learn about language.
[222000630300] |The best fits turned out to be primarily labs in psychology departments.
[222000630310] |So, reluctantly, I decided to mostly apply to those (recall that I didn't want to be a psychologist). 
[222000630320] |It actually gets worse.
[222000630330] |I ended up in a developmental psychology lab.
[222000630340] |My father is a school psychologist, which is quite different on many levels, but it's still about the psychology of children.
[222000630350] |Thus, my path to psychology may be summarized as one man's unsuccessful fight against Nature. 
[222000630360] |For those of you working in the cognitive sciences, feel free to leave a comment with your story.
[222000640010] |<title>Updating the website</title>
[222000640020] |For those who haven't noticed, this blog now has a blogroll as well as labels for posts.
[222000640030] |Both can be browsed on the right-hand side of the page.
[222000640040] |Note that I don't necessarily label every single post.
[222000640050] |Some posts are just too off-topic to be easily categorized, and I don't want to end up with 4,000 different labels.
[222000640060] |If you want to find everything, your best option is going through the archives.
[222000650010] |<title>Public relations and science</title>
[222000650020] |The latest issue of Seed has an excellent quote form Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University: 
[222000650030] |I remember, I was on a visiting committee at MIT, and these students tend to think they're going to be successful because they're good at what they're doing.
[222000650040] |But in fact, a large barometer of their success will be how well they can communicate what they're doing.
[222000650050] |Not just to the outside public, which most scientists don't necessarily have to do -- though I think that's important, too -- but within the field, or to your company.
[222000650060] |It isn't just what you do, it's often how you present it.
[222000650070] |And, traditionally, we've spent very little time educating our students on how to communicate.
[222000650080] |I absolutely agree.
[222000650090] |This could be dismissed as "spinning," something which scientists shouldn't do.
[222000650100] |But the truth is thousands of scientific papers are published every month.
[222000650110] |Nobody has time to read them all, and most of the papers one does read can't be read carefully.
[222000650120] |If the writer doesn't do a good job of explaining what the results mean and why they are important, they are likely to be missed.
[222000650130] |If you are giving a talk about your research, hopefully the audience can figure out for themselves why your information is relevant to their work, but you're doing everybody a favor if you help them.
[222000650140] |Many very good researchers are terrible at communicating their ideas and their findings. 
[222000650150] |Many people are aware that Mendel's groundbreaking studies of heredity were buried and what he learned had to be re-discovered independently.
[222000650160] |According to Frank Sulloway in Born to Rebel, this was partly due to Mendel's inability to communicate the importance of his findings. 
[222000650170] |Just in case anybody thinks Krauss is advocating spin: 
[222000650180] |So strategies of persuasion, I think, are vitally important within the field.
[222000650190] |But -- and I should be very clear about this -- while I understand science as a sociological phenomena, I do believe in objective reality and I do believe that, ultimately, important science wins out in spite of the social constructs adn the social or peer pressures to do certain things...That's what makes science special.
[222000670010] |<title>The Heat Death of Science</title>
[222000670020] |Several years ago, I was fairly up-to-date on dyslexia research.
[222000670030] |A couple colleagues and I were writing a comprehensive review of the literature.
[222000670040] |Several drafts of the pape were written, but for various reasons that project got put aside and was never finished. 
[222000670050] |I'm currently preparing to overhaul that paper and update it based on recent research.
[222000670060] |To put this in perspective, 147 papers on dyslexia were published in 2007 alone (according to PsychInfo*). 
[222000670070] |Like the physical universe, the universe of knowledge has been expanding at an accelerated rate.
[222000670080] |It's hard to be current in several fields.
[222000670090] |By the time you are current in psychology, sociology has moved on.
[222000670100] |With time, it seems increasingly difficult to stay on top of multiple subfields (e.g., autism and dyslexia). 
[222000670110] |I wonder how long it will be before it is impossible to stay on top of even a single, narrow topic.
[222000670120] |This postulated moment would be the equivalent of <a>heat death</a> for science.
[222000670130] |Or not.
[222000670140] |Perhaps science will end in a <a>big crunch</a> instead. 
[222000670150] |Or will we find ways of dealing with massive amounts of information.
[222000670160] |While our technologies in this arena have improved, I take it as self-evidence that they have not improved as fast as information has increased. 
[222000670170] |Thoughts? 
[222000670180] |*If anybody for some reason wants to check for themselves, I searched for papers with the word "dyslexia" in the abstract.
[222000670190] |If you search for "dyslexia" in any field, you get 177.
[222000680010] |<title>Angry cats</title>
[222000680020] |What is it like to be an angry cat?
[222000680030] |According <a>to a new study</a>, not much different than being an angry human. 
[222000680040] |I'm curious, though, how much evidence there is that other animals don't share many/most of their emotions with humans.
[222000680050] |It was definitely common to think once that animals didn't have emotions, but as far as I can tell, it's widely accepted now that they do. 
[222000680060] |For previous posts about cat behavior, click <a>here</a> or <a>here</a>.
[222000700010] |<title>Guest-blogging on Retrospectacle</title>
[222000700020] |<a>Check it out.</a>
[222000710010] |<title>Pauses in speech</title>
[222000710020] |While I was <a>off guest-posting</a> elsewhere, I talked <a>Kristina Lundholm</a>, a PhD student in linguistics and also a speech &language pathologist, into guest-posting here.
[222000710030] |She knows a great deal more about speech errors and disfluencies than I do.
[222000710040] |This is her follow-up to <a>my post about errors in speech</a>: 
[222000710050] |For a long time, spoken language was seen as inferior to written language.
[222000710060] |Hesitations and pauses were seen as flaws in the production of speech.
[222000710070] |This way of looking at language and communication (as proposed by e.g. Chomsky) proposes that there is an ultimate way to deliver an utterance. 
[222000710080] |Today, we know that pauses, hesitations etc are a vital part of communication and not some sort of unnecessary interruption in the speech signal.
[222000710090] |<a>Natural conversation is studied by conversation analysts, sociolinguists, sociologists, anthropologists and more</a>. 
[222000710100] |To understand why pauses are important, imagine trying to have a conversation with someone who never pauses.
[222000710110] |Would you get anything said?
[222000710120] |Pauses are necessary in communication; we need to breathe, think, and leave gaps where another person can take over.
[222000710130] |Pauses also make it easier for the listener to process and understand what we are saying. 
[222000710140] |Even when the people engaged in conversation understand the importance of pausing and make pauses in all the right places, that might not be enough.
[222000710150] |An agreement on pause length is key to a successful conversation.
[222000710160] |Pause length tolerance, i.e. how long pause you tolerate before the silence seems unbearable and you feel you have to say something, varies between languages, sociolects, dialects etc. 
[222000710170] |Because of this you may experience what a friend of mine went through when he moved south to study: he had a high tolerance of pauses, which also meant that if the pause in conversation was short, he didn't take his turn since he felt he was interrupting.
[222000710180] |Therefore, he felt that his new friends were quite rude who never let him talk, and they thought he must be terribly shy since he rarely spoke.
[222000710190] |The effect of different pause lengths has been verified by for example <a>Scollon &Scollon</a> and <a>Deborah Tannen</a>. 
[222000710200] |Pauses also influence how we perceive what is being said.
[222000710210] |If someone asks you for a ride home, your answer will be interpreted as more negative if you take longer to respond, even if the answer itself is positive; see e.g. <a>Roberts et al.</a> 
[222000710220] |The location of the pause is also meaningful: if the speaker does not want to be interrupted, it is wise to pause within a syntactic unit, for example before an important content word: "I want a (pause) green sweater".
[222000710230] |If you pause between syntactical units, chances are that your conversation partner will think that you're finished and will start talking. 
[222000710240] |Now, about those uuuums and eeeers… There are a bunch of different names for those small units in communication: filler words, fillers, filled pauses, hesitation phenomena, disfluencies etc.
[222000710250] |I prefer the term "filled pause" since I classify them as a sort of pause.
[222000710260] |Filled pauses have a lot of functions in spoken conversation.
[222000710270] |One is to signal to other persons that "even though I'm not saying anything particular right now, I don't want anyone else to take over".
[222000710280] |It can also mean "difficult question, I have to think about that".
[222000710290] |Or a number of different things, depending on position, prosody, context etc.
[222000710300] |Quite a lot of research has focused on filled pauses in spoken dialogue, but I don't know if anyone has investigated filled pauses in written communication –well, if not, someone should! 
[222000710310] |So, in conclusion: pauses are not only important: they may make or break a conversation.
[222000710320] |And in linguistics today, the spherical cow is not so spherical anymore, but seen as the irregularly formed creature it is.
[222000720010] |<title>Understanding our own minds</title>
[222000720020] |Freud was wrong about most things, but one thing he was dead on about was that we have at best limited access to our own minds.
[222000720030] |Here is an excellent quote from Daniel Dennet's Freedom Evolves: 
[222000720040] |For Descartes, the mind was perfectly transparent to itself, with nothing happening out of view, and it has taken more than a century of psychological theorizing and experimentation to erode this ideal of perfect introspectability, which we can now see gets the situation almost backward.
[222000720050] |Consciousness of the springs of action is the exception, not the rule, and it requires some rather remarkable circumstances to have evolved at all. 
[222000720060] |See also previous posts on related topics: <a>Your brain knows when do be afraid, even if you don't.</a> <a>Free will</a>.
[222000720070] |<a>Not your granddaddy's subconscious mind.</a>
[222000730010] |<title>The impostor syndrome</title>
[222000730020] |The New York Times is carrying an interesting story about the Impostor Syndrome: the belief that any success you have enjoyed is due to luck.
[222000730030] |Many graduate students I know admit to feeling -- or, at least, admit to their friends feeling -- that they are a fraud and don't deserve to be in the program. 
[222000730040] |The Times article suggests that at least some impostors are impostors (phony phonies).
[222000730050] |<a>Read on</a>.
[222000740010] |<title>Will neuroscience end responsibility?</title>
[222000740020] |As we learn more and more about the brain, it seems fewer and fewer people are responsible for their actions.
[222000740030] |You may be mean, ignorant or violent simply because of bad genes or a bad brain. 
[222000740040] |In <a>Freedom Evolves</a>, <a>Daniel Dennett</a> argues that this is not a perpetually sliding slope, leading to nobody being responsible for anything: 
[222000740050] |"The anxious mantra returns: 'But where will it all end?'
[222000740060] |Aren't we headed toward a 100 percent 'medicalized' society in which nobody is responsible, and everybody is a victim of one unfortunate feature of their background or another (nature or nurture)?
[222000740070] |No, we are not...
[222000740080] |People want to be held accountable.
[222000740090] |The benefits that accrue to one who is a citizen in good standing in a free society are so widely and deeply appreciated that there is always a potent presumption in favor of inclusion.
[222000740100] |Blame is the price we pay for credit, and we pay it gladly under most circumstances."
[222000740110] |What does he mean by "benefits that accrue?"
[222000740120] |Put it this way: <a>kleptomania</a> is the impulsive desire to steal.
[222000740130] |I had a friend his high school who was a compulsive shop-lifter, and I believe the disease is real.
[222000740140] |However, it doesn't matter whether you think kleptomania is a true medical condition or simply another symptom of Prozac Nation -- either way, you wouldn't put a kleptomaniac in charge of your store.
[222000740150] |More generally, people recognized as moral and responsible are likely to receive many advantages (more friends, better credit rating, community awards, etc.). 
[222000740160] |I'm less sure what he means when stating that this causes people to "want to be held responsible."
[222000740170] |However, I think do think the argument can be made that we will continue to hold people responsible for their actions.
[222000740180] |Acting morally leads to personal gain, but only if society at large recognizes and rewards good character (for instance, by employing people known to be honest and passing over thieves).
[222000740190] |Of course, anyone who does not distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy neighbors is not going to last long -- it doesn't matter whether the untrustworthy neighbor has a "condition" is is simply "bad." 
[222000740200] |By this argument, bad behavior is always going to punished.
[222000740210] |The question is how.
[222000740220] |Our growing understanding of neuroscience may change what bad behavior leads to jail time and what bad behavior leads to medication, but it won't affect whether we hold people responsible for their actions.
[222000740230] |As Dennett and others have convincingly argued, morality is useful.
[222000750010] |<title>The algebraic mind</title>
[222000750020] |The brain is a computational device.
[222000750030] |There may be some cognitive scientists out there who disagree with that statement, but I don't think there are many.
[222000750040] |There is much less agreement on what type of computational device it is. 
[222000750050] |One possibility is that the brain is a symbol-processing device very much like a computer.
[222000750060] |A computer can add essentially any two numbers using the same circuitry.
[222000750070] |It does not have one microchip for adding 1 + 1 and a different one for adding 2 + 2.
[222000750080] |It has a single algorithm that can be applied to any arbitrary number (assuming the computer can represent that number -- obviously there are numbers too large for any modern machine to handle). 
[222000750090] |One of the big mysteries of the brain is that it is unclear how to make a symbol-processing/algebraic device out of neurons.
[222000750100] |This has led many schools of thought, such as Connectionists, to deny that the brain can do symbol-processing or works anything like a digital computer (see Marcus's <a>The Algebraic Mind</a> for some blow-back).
[222000750110] |On the flip side, folks like <a>Randy Gallistel</a> have argued that if we don't know how to implement read/write memory into neurons (a related question), then there is a gaping hole in our knowledge about neurons. 
[222000750120] |This all comes to mind in relation to some work done in the last decade on barn owls.
[222000750130] |Barn owls locate their prey via both sight and sound, and neuroscientists have located the area of the brain where these two signals are combined.
[222000750140] |If you put prism goggles on a barn owl so that it's vision is offset (e.g., everything looks like it's 10 degrees left of where it actually is), the two signals get distorted at first, but eventually the neural map that represents location according to the ears shifts so that it's in sync with the the visual map. 
[222000750150] |As a computer programmer, the obvious thing to do would be to just add 10 degrees to the auditory signals across the map.
[222000750160] |However, that's not what the brain does.
[222000750170] |This can be shown by putting barn owls into goggles that shift only part of the field of vision.
[222000750180] |Only the auditory signals for that region of space shift.
[222000750190] |That strikes me as very non-algebraic in nature (not that a computer programmer couldn't achieve this effect, but why would she write that ability into the code.
[222000750200] |Keep in mind that barn owls didn't evolve to wear prism goggles). 
[222000750210] |That said, there's no reason that all the brain must compute things algebraically.
[222000750220] |Perceptual systems may be unusual in that respect.
[222000750230] |Still, as very little is known about how the brain computes anything, this example is very interesting. 
[222000750240] |For those interested in the barn owl details, check out: 
[222000750250] |Knudsen, E.I. (2002).
[222000750260] |Instructed learning in the auditory localization pathway of the barn owl.
[222000750270] |Nature, 417, 322-328.