[222000760010] |<title>Word meaning as a window into thought</title>
[222000760020] |<a>Benjamin Whorf </a>has perhaps the best name recognition in psycholinguistics, being known for the Whorfian Hypothesis: the idea that the particular language you learn constrains the way you think about the world. 
[222000760030] |This hypothesis has made its way into popular culture (or, perhaps it predated Whorf).
[222000760040] |Many essays -- and sometimes <a>large sections of books</a> -- make a big deal of etymology.
[222000760050] |That is, the origin of a word is supposed to tell us something about culture.
[222000760060] |A popular example is the Mandarin word for "China" means, literally, "Center Country."
[222000760070] |This is supposed to tell us something about how the Chinese view their place in the world. 
[222000760080] |Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.
[222000760090] |But certainly in some cases etymology tells us nothing.
[222000760100] |Here's a quote from "Formal Semantics" by Genarro Chierchia:
[222000760110] |To make this point more vividly, take the word money.
[222000760120] |An important word indeed; where does it come from?
[222000760130] |What does its history reveal about the true meaning of money?
[222000760140] |It comes from Latin moneta, the past participle feminine of the verb moneo 'to warn/to advice.'
[222000760150] |Moneta was one of the canonical attributes of the Roman goddess Juno; Juno moneta is 'the one who advises.'
[222000760160] |What has Juno to do with money?
[222000760170] |Is it perhaps that her capacity to advise extends to finances?
[222000760180] |No.
[222000760190] |It so happens that in ancient Rome, the mint was right next to the temple of Juno.
[222000760200] |So people metonymically transferred Juno's attribute to what was coming out of the mint.
[222000760210] |A fascinating historical fact that tells us something as to how word meanings may evolve; but it revelas no deep link between money and the capacity to advise.
[222000760220] |Back to Chinese.
[222000760230] |Another good example is the word for turkey: huoji.
[222000760240] |Literally, it means "fire chicken."
[222000760250] |Anyone who wants to make a story about how that explains the Chinese psyche is welcome to give it a shot.
[222000770010] |<title>New York Times falls for mind/brain duality...again</title>
[222000770020] |Jack Shafer at Slate runs a periodic column where he <a>calls newspapers to task</a> for over-using anonymous sources.
[222000770030] |An example passage culled from a New York Times article:
[222000770040] |Republicans close to the White House said Mr. Bush was the driver of the changes made so far, including the decision to ask Mr. Rove to focus primarily on the midterm elections.
[222000770050] |Why, Shafer asks, do those "Republicans" need to be kept anonymous down to their number (are there 2? 3?).
[222000770060] |Shafer feels this over-use of anonymous sources is at best getting in the way of informing the public, and at worse hiding people with ulterior motives. 
[222000770070] |As of this entry, I'm starting my own watch-dog column: newspapers which write inane articles espousing mind/brain duality.
[222000770080] |The latest offender is, coincidentally, The New York Times, which ran a disappointing article a few days ago called "<a>My Cortex Made Me Buy It.</a>"
[222000770090] |It describes a recent study in which people sampled "cheap" and "expensive" wines (actually the exact same wines, just marked with different prices).
[222000770100] |When they sampled the wines with lower prices, however, the subjects not only liked them less, their brains registered less pleasure from the experience.
[222000770110] |It's important to consider what the alternative was: that subjects reported liking the cheaper wines less, but their brains reported the same amount of pleasure.
[222000770120] |What would that mean?
[222000770130] |One possibility is that the participants were lying: they liked both wines the same, but said they liked the more expensive ones more in order to look cultured. 
[222000770140] |There's another possibility.
[222000770150] |<a>Dan Gilbert</a>, who studies happiness, usually does so by simply asking people if they are happy.
[222000770160] |He doesn't worry much about people lying.
[222000770170] |He could use a physiological measure (like a brain scan, as was done in the above study), but he points out that the reason we think a particular part of the brain is related to happiness is because it correlates with people's self-reports of being happy.
[222000770180] |Using the brain scan is completely circular.
[222000770190] |Under this logic, if the brain scans fail to show more pleasure when drinking the expensive wine, it could be because the relevant areas of the brain have been misidentified. 
[222000770200] |A final alternative possibility is that the participants' immaterial souls liked the expensive wine better, but their brains didn't register a difference. 
[222000770210] |The Times piece discussed none of this.
[222000780010] |<title>It's a small world</title>
[222000780020] |Recently, <a>Grrlscientist</a> has written a couple posts about double-blind peer review (where the reviewers don't know who the authors are as well as the authors not knowing who the reviewers are).
[222000780030] |She hopes that more double-blind peer reviewing would diminish possible sex discrimination in peer review. 
[222000780040] |Aside from some controversy as to whether there actually is any prejudice against women in peer review, many writing comments have asked whether blind peer review isn't just a facade.
[222000780050] |After all, it's a very, very small world, and we all know who each other are.
[222000780060] |Not only can you usually tell who is writing a paper without looking at the author's names (based on who they cite, their research topic, and their theoretical perspective), it's not always difficult to figure out who the reviewers are once you read the review. 
[222000780070] |It's a small world in other ways, too.
[222000780080] |My section of the department here at Harvard (development) is currently interviewing 6 candidates for faculty positions and 4 prospective graduate students.
[222000780090] |The job candidates are from the following schools: 
[222000780100] |Duke, Yale, Max Planck, University of London, MIT, Stanford 
[222000780110] |The potential graduate students are from: 
[222000780120] |Columbia, Stanford, Yale, Johns Hopkins 
[222000780130] |This is a narrow enough set as it is, but notice the repetition of Stanford and Yale.
[222000780140] |We have particularly close ties with Yale.
[222000780150] |One of my office-mates is from Yale.
[222000780160] |One of our upper-level graduate students will be taking up a professorship at Yale in the fall in developmental psychology (and a good friend of mine, who is graduating from the vision lab this spring will be taking up a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale as well). 
[222000780170] |Consider the job candidates for a different position in the department (cognition, brain and behavior): 
[222000780180] |Yale, MIT, Giessen, Yale, University of Chicago 
[222000780190] |It's not really surprising that it's such a tight-knit community, but it's still interesting to observe.
[222000790010] |<title>Interview Daze</title>
[222000790020] |First-year graduate students in my program are in charge of organizing interviews for prospective graduate students.
[222000790030] |We were given notice last Friday; the interviews start this coming Tuesday.
[222000790040] |So it's been a busy week. 
[222000790050] |When I applied to PhD programs in Psychology the first time around, I didn't know there were interviews.
[222000790060] |Most department websites don't mention them, and the only people I knew who had been to graduate school recently were in other fields and didn't do interviews.
[222000790070] |So I applied to graduate school and went to Spain for the spring, and was very surprised when I started getting invitations to visit schools.
[222000790080] |A friend of mine recently told she also had no idea interviews would be required.
[222000790090] |It turns out, in fact, that some schools do interviews and some do not.
[222000790100] |It is extremely difficult to find out which schools are which. 
[222000790110] |I bring up this story, because I think it is emblematic of the graduate school admissions process, at least for psychology.
[222000790120] |Information is scarce, and the procedure varies considerably from school to school.
[222000790130] |I don't know whether knowing more about the process would help you get into a program, but it seems reasonable to assume so.
[222000790140] |In that case, there would be a significant advantage for people already on the inside. 
[222000790150] |To put this into a concrete example, suppose you want to get a PhD in psychology at Harvard.
[222000790160] |If you are an undergraduate at Stanford or Yale, it's very likely that your professors can tell you a lot about the admissions process at Harvard (which is quite different from that at Stanford or Yale, as it turns out), because there is a lot of cross-talk between those three schools.
[222000790170] |If you are an undergraduate at a regional public university, it's much less likely you can get access to that kind of information. 
[222000790180] |Access to information may not translate into access to admissions.
[222000790190] |I certainly hope it does not.
[222000790200] |But, on the off-chance that it does, one goal of this blog is to give more information about the admissions processes to the extent that I can.
[222000790210] |If any aspiring students have questions, you should be sure to ask.
[222000800010] |<title>Volunteers needed</title>
[222000800020] |I am presenting the preliminary results from my <a>Learning the Names of Things</a> study a week from Monday.
[222000800030] |I still need more participants, though, so if you have not yet participated and have 4-5 minutes, please <a>drop by</a>. 
[222000800040] |It is actually amazing how many people are willing to spend their time doing these experiments, and I really have no right to complain.
[222000800050] |That said, I would get work done faster if I could recruit the numbers Marc Hauser's lab does (200,000 participants and counting).
[222000800060] |Does anyone have any ideas how to do that?
[222000810010] |<title>Misunderstood</title>
[222000810020] |In an effort to understand linguistics slightly better, I am reading Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language.
[222000810030] |He starts off the first chapter with the tale of woe of the modern linguist: 
[222000810040] |Language and biology provide an interesting contrast...
[222000810050] |People expect to be baffled or bored by the biochemical details of, say, cell metabolism, so they don't ask about them.
[222000810060] |What interests people about biology is natural history--strange facts about animal behavior and so forth.
[222000810070] |But they recognize and respect the fact that most biologists don't study that.
[222000810080] |Similarly, what interests people about language is its "natural history": the etymology of words, where language came from, and why kids talk so badly these days.
[222000810090] |The difference is that they don't recognize that there is more to language than this, so they are unpleasantly disappointmed when the linguist doesn't share their fascination.
[222000810100] |This passage sounded familiar.
[222000810110] |The psychologists I know spend a lot of time trying to decide how to answer the question, "What do you do?"
[222000810120] |While there is no agreed-upon response, everybody agrees that saying, "I am a psychologist," is guaranteed to lead to requests for advice about how to deal with somebody's crazy Aunt Maude.
[222000810130] |Saying "developmental psychology" will lead to requests for parenting advice. 
[222000810140] |My wife enjoys chronicling my own choices (for a while, I said cognitive neurosciencce, then neurolinguistics, then cognitive science, and now psycholinguistics -- but never psychology).
[222000810150] |To turn things around, though, she gets tired of people assuming that just because she's studying law, she'll either chase ambulances or defend crooks, when in fact most lawyers probably never set foot in a courtroom. 
[222000810160] |It's interesting that I've heard very similar complaints from vocalists: "Nobody who had never studied the violin would consider themselves a great talent, but anybody who can make noise come out of their mouths thinks they can sing." 
[222000810170] |This leads me to wonder if there are any professions who don't think they are widely misunderstood and don't feel ambushed at cocktail parties by well-meaning but clueless new acquaintances.
[222000820010] |<title>The relationship between neuroscience and psychology</title>
[222000820020] |There are a certain amount of heated arguments within the behavioral sciences about the most appropriate way to study the question of behavior.
[222000820030] |Cellular and systems neuroscientists tend to have no use for psychological methods, finding them inefficient and messy (when I interviewed for graduate school, one monkey physiologist told me that my research interests were a waste of time that would lead to nothing.
[222000820040] |Monkey physiology, on the other hand...).
[222000820050] |People who do more cognitive work often feel that while neuroscience is more exact and perhaps makes more concrete progress, it's progress in the wrong direction. 
[222000820060] |I recently came across an excellent and succinct explanation of why both methods are necessary:
[222000820070] |Experimental psychology on both human subjects and animals is an essential part of the enterprise, for the obvious reason that accurate characterizations of psychological phenomena are necessary to guide the search for explanations and mechanisms.
[222000820080] |Trying to find a mechanism when the phenomenon is misdescribed or underdescribed is likely to be quixotic.
[222000820090] |Neurology is an essential part of the enterprise because it provides both important behavioral data on human subjects and hypothesizes connections between specific brain structures and behavior.
[222000820100] |Neuroscience is essential both to discover the functional capacities of neural components and because reverse engineering is an important strategy for figuring out how a novel device works.
[222000820110] |Churchland &Sejnowski.
[222000820120] |(1991) "Perspectives on cognitive neuroscience" in Lister &Weingarter, Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience, pp. 3-23.
[222000830010] |<title>Why are first-graders smarter than Chomsky?</title>
[222000830020] |Linguistics, it turns out, is very difficult.
[222000830030] |Although it's been over half a century since Chomsky sparked the charge to develop complete, generative grammars for languages (a set of rules that explain how to build grammatical sentences), success has been less than complete -- this despite the fact that c<a>hildren learn languages with ease</a>.
[222000830040] |Why is it so difficult for a group of the world's most brilliant academics? 
[222000830050] |Here's a good explanation from <a>Ray Jackendoff</a>, in <a>Foundations of Language</a>:
[222000830060] |It is useful to put the problem of learning more starkly in terms of what I like to call the Paradox of Language Acquisition: The community of linguists, collaborating over many decades, has so far failed to come up with an adequate description of a speaker's [knowledge] of his or her native language.
[222000830070] |Yet every normal child manages to acquire this f-knowledge by the age of ten or so, without reading any linguistics textbooks or going to any conferences.
[222000830080] |How is it that in some sense every single normal child is smarter than the whole community of linguists? 
[222000830090] |The answer proposed by the Universal Grammar hypothesis is that the child comes to the task with some [preconceptions] of what language is going to be like, and structures linguistic input according to the dictates (or opportunities!) provided by those expectations.
[222000830100] |By contrast, linguists, using explicit reasoning--and far more data from the world than the child--have a much larger design space in which they must localize the character of grammar.
[222000830110] |Hence, their task is harder than the child's: they constantly come face to face with the real poverty of the stimulus.
[222000830120] |In other words, the idea is that linguists are too smart for their own good.
[222000830130] |They consider too many possibilities, and so there isn't enough data to decide between them.
[222000830140] |This is like trying to solve 3 simultaneous equations with 4 variables; if you remember your algebra, this can't be done.
[222000830150] |It's very similar to<a> why philosophers can't figure out how it's possible, even in theory, to learn the meaning of a word</a>. 
[222000840010] |<title>Can you see this illusion?</title>
[222000840020] |Yesterday, Cognitive Daily posted a fairly compelling visual illusion.
[222000840030] |There is a while disk and a black disk.
[222000840040] |In the middle of each disk is a circle.
[222000840050] |The two circles go from black to white back to black in sequence. 
[222000840060] |Normally, the rules of perceptual grouping would cause you to see the two smaller disks blinking in unison as being related.
[222000840070] |However, in this case, due to the smaller disks being inside larger disks, most people see the disks blinking out of sequence.
[222000840080] |That is, you interpret the scene as a hole appearing in the left disk, then in the right disk, then in the left disk. 
[222000840090] |Both interpretations are correct.
[222000840100] |It's a matter of what your visual system focuses on.
[222000840110] |What interests me is, looking at the comments on this post, is that while the vast majority see the alternating blinking, some people only see the disks blinking in unison.
[222000840120] |One possibility is that they are misunderstanding what they were supposed to see.
[222000840130] |If there is some small percentage of people whose visual systems focus on different grouping principles, that could be very interesting and be useful in understanding perceptual grouping in the visual system. 
[222000840140] |So, if you only see the inner disks blinking in unison and don't get the alternation illusion, comment here or send an email to coglanglab_at_gmail.com. 
[222000840150] |Try out the illusion <a>here</a>.
[222000860010] |<title>You like video games, but does your brain?</title>
[222000860020] |According to CBC in Canada:
[222000860030] |Men are more rewarded by video games than women on a neural level, which explains why they're more likely to become addicted to them.
[222000860040] |In other words, men like video games more because their brains like them more.
[222000860050] |Since only one's brain can like or dislike something, this could be rewritten: Men like video games more because they like video games more. 
[222000860060] |It's hard to blame CBC entirely for this one.
[222000860070] |I haven't tracked down the article itself, but the abstract remarks:
[222000860080] |Males showed greater activation and functional connectivity compared to females in the mesocorticolimbic system...
[222000860090] |These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become "hooked" on video games than females.
[222000860100] |This is hard to parse, and given the authors work at Stanford Medical School, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
[222000860110] |However, the way this is phrased seems to have the natural order of investigation backwards.
[222000860120] |Men are more likely to be addicted to video games than are women.
[222000860130] |Given they show these particular brain differences during video game playing, we can make some intelligent guesses as to what those parts of the brain do. 
[222000860140] |Once we understand those parts of the brain much, much better than we do today, we may actually have a good structural model that explains this gender difference.
[222000860150] |That may be what the authors of the study meant, and they may spell this out in the full article.
[222000860160] |However, CBC's statement that men are more likely to get addicted to video games because they are "more rewarded on the neural level," is both repetitious and obvious. 
[222000860170] |See the <a>original CBC article here</a>.
[222000870010] |<title>Music on the Brain (on TV)</title>
[222000870020] |A few weeks ago, our building had a fire alarm.
[222000870030] |A friend who works on another floor speculated that maybe it was all the heat from the lights and cameras in her PI's office that day. 
[222000870040] |"Who was interviewing him?"
[222000870050] |I asked. 
[222000870060] |"I don't know," she replied.
[222000870070] |"There's always somebody interviewing him." 
[222000870080] |Our 11th floor has fewer media stars, but last week it was crawling with reporters.
[222000870090] |A magazine reporter was there most of the week interviewing people (I still don't know what magazine).
[222000870100] |Even more exciting, though, was the NBC camera crew. 
[222000870110] |<a>Click here for the clip</a>. 
[222000870120] |As far as science reporting goes, I'm afraid I have to admit it's uninspiring.
[222000870130] |But it was fun to see my friends and colleagues on the nightly news, and it couldn't have happened to nicer people.
[222000880010] |<title>Sure faces are special, but why?</title>
[222000880020] |Faces are special.
[222000880030] |There appears to be a <a>dedicated area of the brain</a> for processing faces.
[222000880040] |Neonates just a day or two old prefer looking at pictures of faces to looking at non-faces. 
[222000880050] |This has led many researchers to claim humans are born with innate knowledge about faces.
[222000880060] |Others, however, have claimed that these data are not the result of nature so much as nurture.
[222000880070] |<a>Pawan Sinha at MIT</a> attached a video camera to his infant child and let the tape roll for a few hours.
[222000880080] |He found that faces were frequently the most salient objects in the baby's visual field, and (I'm working from memory of a talk here) also found that a computational algorithm could fairly easily learn to recognize faces.
[222000880090] |Similarly, a number of researchers have claimed that the brain area thought to be specialized for face detection is in fact simply involved in detecting any object for which one has expertise, and all humans are simply face experts. 
[222000880100] |Things have seemed to be at an impass, but today, Yoichi Sugita from AIST spoke at both Harvard and MIT.
[222000880110] |The abstract itself was enough to catch everybody's attention: 
[222000880120] |Infant monkeys were reared with no exposure to any faces for 12 months.
[222000880130] |Before being allowed to see a face, the monkeys showed preference for human- and monkey faces in photographs.
[222000880140] |They still preferred faces even when presented in reversed contrast.
[222000880150] |But, they did not show preference for faces presented in upside-down.
[222000880160] |After the deprivation period, the monkeys were exposed first to human faces for a week.
[222000880170] |Soon after, their preference changed drastically.
[222000880180] |They preferred upright human faces but lost preference for monkey faces.
[222000880190] |Furthermore, they lost preference for human faces presented in reversed contrast.
[222000880200] |These results indicate that the interrelated features of the face can be detected without experience, and that a face prototype develops abruptly when flesh faces are shown.
[222000880210] |Just to parse this: the monkeys were raised individually without contact with other monkeys.
[222000880220] |They did have contact with a human caregiver who wore a mask that obstructed view of the face.
[222000880230] |The point about not preferring upside down faces is important, as t<a>his is a basic feature of face processing</a>. 
[222000880240] |This seems pretty decisive evidence for an innate face module in the brain, though one that requires some tuning (the monkeys' face preferences evolved with experience).
[222000880250] |However, Sugita apparently noted during the talk -- I heard this second-hand -- that perhaps the monkeys in question did in fact have some experience with faces prior to the face preference test; they could have learned by touching their own faces.
[222000880260] |This strikes me as a stretch, since that doesn't explain why they would become face experts.
[222000900010] |<title>Monkey language -- better every year</title>
[222000900020] |For many years we've been saying that monkey calls were non-decompositional.
[222000900030] |That is, you can't break them into parts, each of which has its own meaning (as you can do with this sentence, for instance). 
[222000900040] |<a>New research suggests</a> that this monkey calls are more complex than we thought.
[222000900050] |<a>Click here to learn more</a>.
[222000910010] |<title>Snake oil and Neuroscience</title>
[222000910020] |Readers of this blog know how I feel about neuroscience reporting (<a>here</a>, <a>here</a> and <a>here</a>).
[222000910030] |One consistent problem is that reporters enthusiastically relate findings that involve brain scans, while ignoring the original and groundbreaking behavioral work. 
[222000910040] |A truism in psychology, however, is to never trust your impressions of a situation.
[222000910050] |So often our intuitions (e.g., t<a>he average American wouldn't torture an innocent bystander to death just because someone in a lab coat told them to</a>) turn out to be completely incorrect.
[222000910060] |So I was very happy to hear that a group at Yale actually tested the hypothesis that people will believe basic behavioral findings more (like the existence of <a>cognitive dissonance</a>) more if brain-related words are mentioned. 
[222000910070] |In brief, it appears that the average non-expert does, in fact, believe it more if there is a picture of the brain somewhere.
[222000910080] |However, students who have taken an introductory neuroscience class are not only immune to this effect, but they actually find explanations that include references to brain anatomy less compelling.
[222000910090] |So perhaps this research explains not only why the average reader (and reporter) likes the typical neuroscience reportage as why people like myself (<a>and Dan Gilbert</a>) dislike it. 
[222000910100] |<a>Cognitive Daily has an excellent in-depth description of the article here</a>. 
[222000910110] |Weisberg, D.S., Keil, F.C., Rawson, .J., Gray, J.R. (2008).
[222000910120] |The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations.
[222000910130] |Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(3), 470-477.
[222000920010] |<title>Should scientists drink beer?</title>
[222000920020] |Apparently not.
[222000920030] |The more beer you drink, the less you publish and the less your articles are cited...<a>at least, if you are a Czech biologist</a>.
[222000930010] |<title>Calling all language learners</title>
[222000930020] |I looked at the calendar and realized that I have to present data from an experiment to the lab in a few week and to the department in about a month.
[222000930030] |I took a look, and I have nowhere near enough participants. 
[222000930040] |So if you have 5 minutes, please participate in this experiment.
[222000930050] |I've been running it for a while, so do be sure you haven't already participated.
[222000930060] |The experiment is called "Learning the names of things," and it involves listening to a person mention different objects.
[222000930070] |You have to figure out which object he is referring to.
[222000930080] |It's also the only experiment I've done which involves any sound. 
[222000930090] |You can find it <a>here</a>. 
[222000930100] |If you are wondering why I don't have enough participants, the answer is simple.
[222000930110] |There have actually been several versions of this experiment.
[222000930120] |The data from each version has been very helpful, but I haven't yet quite answered the question I set out to answer.
[222000930130] |Unfortunately, each version is similar enough to the older versions that it wouldn't be appropriate to test the same people over and over.
[222000930140] |If you previously participated and want to see what the new version looks like, you can do so, but do be sure to indicate that you have previously participated in the experiment when asked.
[222000940010] |<title>Getting a job in psychology</title>
[222000940020] |Several friends are applying to be research assistants in psychology labs this coming academic year and have been asking me advice.
[222000940030] |It occurred to me that there may be readers of this blog who are also interested in advice.
[222000940040] |With the caveat that this advice is based only on my experience and the experience of a few friends, here it goes. 
[222000940050] |First, if you are considering a PhD in experimental psychology (by which I mean not psychotherapy), I recommend spending some time as a research assistant (either during college or after) before applying to graduate school.
[222000940060] |There are at least three reasons: 
[222000940070] |1) You'll almost certainly get into a better school if you have research experience. 
[222000940080] |2) You'll have a better sense of what type of psychology you want to study, as well as whether you really want to do research at all.
[222000940090] |Many people quit PhD programs, or graduate and then decide to do something else. 
[222000940100] |3) You'll probably be more productive in graduate school, because you'll come in with some valuable skills.
[222000940110] |This may help you get a leg up on the competition (or possibly prevent them from having a leg up on you). 
[222000940120] |Of course, many brilliant psychologists started graduate school with little or no background in psychology, much less research experience.
[222000940130] |Einstein got bad grades in math, but that doesn't mean getting bad grades in math is a recommended strategy for becoming a physics genius. 
[222000940140] |So where are research assistant positions advertised?
[222000940150] |I have no idea.
[222000940160] |I got every RA position I've had (5, counting 2 in high school) by contacting a professor directly and asking if they had an opening.
[222000940170] |But I have noticed that professors sometimes advertise open positions on their websites. 
[222000940180] |Finally, it seems like RA positions are usually filled between late February and early April.
[222000940190] |So if you are interested, now is the time to apply. 
[222000940200] |--- PS If anybody else in the field has anything to add, please use the comments.
[222000950010] |<title>The DaVinci stereogram</title>
[222000950020] |A few posts ago, <a>I described how to make stereograms</a>.
[222000950030] |At the end of the post, I showed a second type of stereogram, in which an illusionary white box appears to float in front of a background of Xs, and I promised to explain how that one was done. 
[222000950040] |This type of stereogram, discovered by <a>Nakayama and colleagues</a>, is called a "DaVinci stereogram" in honor of the famous artist/engineer who worked out the logic centuries ago (though he didn't, to my knowledge, consider building any stereograms). 
[222000950050] |The idea works like this: Look at an object (such as your computer monitor).
[222000950060] |Your left eye can "see around" the left side of the object a bit more than can your right eye, while your right eye can see more of what is behind the object than can your left eye.
[222000950070] |It turns out that this information alone is sufficient to induce a perception of depth.
[222000950080] |Consider that final stereogram (reproduced here).
[222000950090] |In both images, there is a white box in the center.
[222000950100] |However, the left image (the one presented to the right eye, if you use the divergence method) has four extra Xs on the right side of the box, while the right image (the one presented to the left eye) has two extra Xs on the left side of the box.
[222000950110] |This results in the perception of a white box floating above the background.
[222000960010] |<title>Who gets National Science Foundation fellowships?</title>
[222000960020] |The National Science Foundation awards around 900 graduate fellowships each year to a wide variety of sciences, including everything from linguistics and mathematics to physics.
[222000960030] |These fellowships are a big deal, being both very hard to get and making a significant impact on the finances of the awardees. 
[222000960040] |NSF has not yet officially contacted awardees for 2008, but word is spreading rapidly.
[222000960050] |Last night, some enterprising hopefully applicants <a>hacked the NSF website</a> to get the list of awardees.
[222000960060] |By morning, a number of applicants had logged on to the NSF applicant website and found an "accept fellowship" link on their applicant homepage.
[222000960070] |A little later in the morning,<a> the list was made available on the website</a>, though the page itself claimed that the awards list was still not available (that has now, as of this afternoon, been fixed). 
[222000960080] |So, which universities cleaned up?
[222000960090] |This is an incomplete survey of the 913 awards made: 
[222000960100] |Berkeley: 87 Stanford: 58 MIT: 40 Harvard: 36 University of Washington: 25 Cornell: 23 University of Michigan: 22 Princeton: 21 Columbia: 19 Yale: 18 UC-San Francisco: 17 Northwestern: 17 UT-Austin: 16 CalTech: 16 Rice: 14 University of Wisconsin-Madison: 13 University of Chicago: 12 Carnegie Mellon: 11 University of Florida: 11 Duke: 12 UCLA: 10 
[222000960110] |This doesn't list universities that got fewer awards, and it also doesn't account for 73 entering graduate students who did not list what university they will be attending, or any number of entering graduate students who haven't made up their minds and may switch universities.
[222000960120] |But it is a rough count. 
[222000960130] |What matters most, though, of the list, is that Oberlin beat Swarthmore 5 to 3.
[222000970010] |<title>Field psychology</title>
[222000970020] |Most psychology experiments are performed in a laboratory setting.
[222000970030] |This leads critics to wonder about their ecological validity: that is, just because somebody acts one way in the lab, do you know that is how they would act in real life. 
[222000970040] |There is another problem, summarized very nicely in a recent paper by Sugiyama and colleagues.
[222000970050] |In a footnote explaining some "oddities" in the results of their study of one of the world's most remote civilizations (the Shiwiar of the Amazon), they note: 
[222000970060] |Experimentation under field conditions injects higher levels of error variance into results than are obtainable under well-controlled laboratory conditions.
[222000970070] |More significant than factors such as added distractions, interruptions, and language difficulties is the extreme cultural strangeness of experimental testing itself, with its unfamiliar necessity of adhering to formal, abstract, and seemingly arbitrary behavioral and communicative constraints.
[222000970080] |Shiwiar subjects had no prior experience with experimental test-taking situations.
[222000970090] |This situation introduces confusion into the communicative pragmatics inherent in the task situation, and error variance into results.
[222000970100] |Restricting one's responses to the question explicitly asked, and ignoring information (such as who may be exhibiting generosity to whom) that is relevant to real life but not to a test problem, is a skill one learns in classrooms and courtrooms.
[222000970110] |I have run into this in less exotic locales than the Amazon.
[222000970120] |As part of my <a>ongoing study of reading</a>, I have tested a number of native Chinese speakers who reside in the US -- mostly graduate students at Harvard.
[222000970130] |Even though these were smart, well-educated people, a number of them had great difficulty understanding how to do the experiment.
[222000970140] |Colleagues of mine who study visual perception have had similar difficulties when dealing with Chinese participants.
[222000970150] |The fact is that psychology experiments are relatively new and relatively rare in Asia, and so fewer people are familiar with what to do.
[222000970160] |No doubt we American scientists also design our experiments in ways that are culturally familiar to us (and thus not to the Chinese). 
[222000970170] |Sugiyama, L.S., Tooby, J., Cosmides, L. (2002).
[222000970180] |Cross-cultural evidence of cognitive adaptations for social exchange among the Shiwiar of Ecuadorian Amazonia.
[222000970190] |Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99(17), 11537-11542.
[222000980010] |<title>Do words have definitions?</title>
[222000980020] |Defining a word is notoriously difficult.
[222000980030] |Try to explain the difference between hatred and enmity, or define chair in such a way that includes bean bag chairs but excludes stools. 
[222000980040] |This is an annoyance for lexicographers and a real headache for philosophers and psychologists.
[222000980050] |Several centuries ago, British philosophers like Hobbes worked out what seemed like a very reasonable theory that explained human knowledge and how we acquire it.
[222000980060] |However, this system is based on the idea that all words can be defined in terms of other words, except for a few basic words (like blue) which are defined in terms of sensations. 
[222000980070] |This difficulty led at least one well-known philosopher, <a>Jerry Fodor</a>, to declare that words cannot be defined in terms of other words because word meaning does not decompose into parts the way a motorcycle can be disassembled and reassembled.
[222000980080] |You can't define chair as an artifact with legs and a back created for sitting in because chair is not a sum of its parts.
[222000980090] |The problem with this theory is that it makes learning impossible.
[222000980100] |Fodor readily acknowledges that if he is correct, babies must be born with the concept airplane and video tape, and in fact all babies who have ever been born were born with every concept that ever has or ever will exist. 
[222000980110] |This seems unlikely, but Fodor is taken seriously partly because his arguments against definitions have been pretty convincing. 
[222000980120] |<a>Ray Jackendoff</a>, a linguist at Tufts University, argued in his recent <a>Foundations of Knowledge</a>, that words do in fact have definitions.
[222000980130] |However, those definitions themselves are not made up of words composed into sentences.
[222000980140] |Observing (correctly) that one usually cannot find airtight definitions that work all of the time, Fodor concludes that word meanings cannot be decomposed.
[222000980150] |However, his notion of definition is the standard dictionary sort: a phrase that elucidates a word meaning.
[222000980160] |So what he has actually shown is that word meanings cannot be built by combining other word meanings, using the principles that also combine words into phrases. (p. 335)
[222000980170] |That is, there are ways that words can be combined in sentences to achieve meaning that is greater than the sum of the meanings of the words (compare dog bites man to man bites dog).
[222000980180] |This is called phrasal semantics.
[222000980190] |Although linguists still haven't worked out all the rules of phrasal semantics, we know that there are rules, and that these allow for certain combinations and not others. 
[222000980200] |Jackendoff has proposed that a very different system (lexical semantics) using different rules is employed when we learn the meanings of new words by combining little bits of meaning (that themselves may not map directly on to any words). 
[222000980210] |I think that this is a very attractive theory, in that it explains why definitions have been so hard to formulate: we were using phrasal semantics, which is just not equipped for the task.
[222000980220] |However, he hasn't yet proven that words do have definitions in terms of lexical semantics.
[222000980230] |He has the sketch of a theory, but it's not yet complete.
[222000990010] |<title>Publishing papers is slow</title>
[222000990020] |The bread and butter of scientific communication is the peer-reviewed journal.
[222000990030] |For those who are not familiar with the process, when a scientist (me for instance) wants to report some data, he writes it up and sends it to a journal.
[222000990040] |The editors of the journal ask a few other scientists who are experts in the same field to read the article and decide if it's any good. 
[222000990050] |This process has been criticized for <a>being arbitrary</a> and for <a>being unable or unwilling to catch fraud</a>.
[222000990060] |For all that, I honestly believe that peer review serves to improve the quality of papers.
[222000990070] |At least in psychology, it is rare for a journal to accept a paper on the first round.
[222000990080] |Instead, the reviewers suggest changes and additional experiments.
[222000990090] |Since they are experts in the field and bring a fresh eye to the problem, they often have good ideas. 
[222000990100] |There is one issue with peer review, however, that drives me nuts.
[222000990110] |That is how long the process takes.
[222000990120] |In January, a collaborator and I submitted short paper to a journal that promises extra-fast reviews of short papers.
[222000990130] |Three months later, we our expected rejection along with suggestions from the reviewers. 
[222000990140] |The thing is, in the three months that have passed, we've gotten busy with other things.
[222000990150] |I had to reread the paper a few times because I had forgotten all the details (for some reason, January feels like it was years ago).
[222000990160] |I spent the last week figuring out how to edit the experiment software, because it required some fancy programing that I had forgotten how to do. 
[222000990170] |Without further complaining, I'd like to announce the re-launch of <a>The Video Experiment</a>.
[222000990180] |If you have already participated (this is the only experiment I have ever run that involved a video), please do not participate in this version.* First of all, you'll be bored, because this is only a slight variation on the old experiment, and the video is the same.
[222000990190] |But more importantly, knowing what the experiment is about could affect your results. 
[222000990200] |That said, if you've never participated in the video experiment -- if you've never seen the "Bill et John" video or the "Kiwi" bird animation, you haven't participated -- <a>please do so</a>.
[222000990210] |It only takes 5-7 minutes, and it's easily the most entertaining experiment I've run online.
[222000990220] |Plus you get to see your own results at the end.
[222000990230] |With any luck, I can collect all the data we need within a few weeks, and then we can resubmit this paper. 
[222000990240] |*If you really want to participate, go ahead, but be sure to mark on the demographic form that you participated in the past.
[222001010010] |<title>A new use for Facebook in research</title>
[222001010020] |Both <a>sociologists</a> and <a>market researchers</a> have been using Facebook for a few years now in order study human activity.
[222001010030] |I recently came across a new use: developing stimuli.
[222001010040] |A colleague is using a Facebook group to collect photographs for a face perception/memory study.
[222001010050] |<a>Read about it here</a>.
[222001020010] |<title>Sorry, New York Times, cognitive dissonance still exists</title>
[222001020020] |Earlier this week, New York Times columnist John Tierney reported a potential flaw in a classic psychology experiment.
[222001020030] |It turns out that the experimental finding -- cognitive dissonance -- is safe and sound (see below).
[222001020040] |But first, here are the basic claims:
[222001020050] |Cognitive dissonance generally refers to changing your beliefs and desires to match what you do.
[222001020060] |That is, rather than working hard for something you like, you may believe you like something because you worked so hard for it. 
[222001020070] |Laboratory experiments (of which there have been hundreds if not thousands) tend to be of the following flavor (quoted from the Tierney blog post).
[222001020080] |Have someone rate several different objects (such as different colored M&Ms) in terms of how much they like them.
[222001020090] |From that set of objects, choose three (say, red, blue and green) that the person likes equally well.
[222001020100] |Then let the person choose between two of them (the red and blue M&M). 
[222001020110] |Presumably (and this will be the catch) the person chooses randomly, since she likes both equally.
[222001020120] |Say she chooses the red M&M. Then let her choose between red and green.
[222001020130] |You would predict that she would choose randomly, since she likes the two colors equally, but she nearly invariably will be the red M&M. This is taken as evidence that her originally random choice of the red M&M actually changed her preferences to where she now likes red better than either blue or green. 
[222001020140] |The basic problem with this experiment, according to <a>M. Keith Chen</a> of Yale and as reported by Tierney, is that we don't really know that the person didn't originally prefer red.
[222001020150] |She may have rated them similarly, but she chose red over blue.
[222001020160] |The math works out such that if she in fact already preferred red over blue, she probably also actually preferred red over green. 
[222001020170] |Tierney calls this a "fatal flaw" in cognitive dissonance research, and asks "choice rationalization has been considered one of the most well-established theories in social psychology.
[222001020180] |Does it need to be reconsidered?" 
[222001020190] |Short answer: No. First, it is important to point out that Chen has shown that if the original preferences were measured incorrectly, then this type of experiment might suggest cognitive dissonance even where there is none.
[222001020200] |He does not show that the original measurements were in error. 
[222001020210] |However, even if that were true, that would not mean that cognitive dissonance does not exist.
[222001020220] |This is a classic problem in logic.
[222001020230] |Chen's argument is of the following form: If Socrates is a woman, then he is mortal.
[222001020240] |Socrates is not a woman.
[222001020250] |Therefore, he is not mortal. 
[222001020260] |In any case, cognitive dissonance has been shown in studies that do not fall under Chen's criticisms.
[222001020270] |<a>Louisa Egan</a> and collaborators solved this problem by having their subjects choose between items they couldn't see.
[222001020280] |Since the subjects knew nothing about the items, they couldn't possibly have a pre-existing preference.
[222001020290] |Even so, they showed the classic pattern of results. 
[222001020300] |By all appearances in the Tierney article, Chen is unaware of this study (which, to be fair, has not yet been published).
[222001020310] |"I wouldn't be completely surprised if [cognitive dissonance] exists, but I've never seen in measured correctly."
[222001020320] |This is hard to believe, since Chen not only works in the same university as Egan, he is a close collaborator of <a>Laurie Santos</a> (Egan's graduate advisor).
[222001020330] |It's not clear why he would neglect to mention this study, particularly since this blanket critique of cognitive dissonance research in the New York Times is embarrassing to Egan and Santos at a time when Egan is on the job market (and it appears to have a lot of people upset). 
[222001020340] |Thus, it's puzzling that Chen claims that no existing study unambiguously shows cognitive dissonance.
[222001020350] |He might, however, be able to make the weaker claim that it is possible that some studies that have been claimed to show cognitive dissonance in fact to not.
[222001020360] |That is a reasonable claim and worth testing.
[222001020370] |In fact, Chen reports that he is testing it now.
[222001020380] |It is worth keeping in mind that for the time being, Chen has only an untested hypothesis.
[222001020390] |It's an intriguing and potentially valuable hypothesis, but there isn't any evidence yet that it is correct. 
[222001020400] |See the original article <a>here</a>.
[222001030010] |<title>What is the first language?</title>
[222001030020] |Linguists debate whether all languages are descended from a common ancestor.
[222001030030] |This can't be completely true, since many sign languages have been invented out of whole cloth in modern time (<a>Nicaraguan sign is a famous example</a>), as was, to a meaningful extent, <a>Hawaiian Pidgin</a>. 
[222001030040] |However, students of history know from the ancient Greek historian <a>Herodotus</a> that Phrygian is the first language.
[222001030050] |According to his writings, an Egyptian king by the name of Psammetichus ordered that two children "of the ordinary sort" be raised in an isolated cabin without exposure to language.
[222001030060] |At the age of two or so, the children began to speak Phrygian, which was taken as proof that Phrygian, not Egyptian, is the world's earliest language. 
[222001030070] |This study is a great example of why experiments need to be replicated before they are taken too seriously.
[222001040010] |<title>Babies learn a language by just listening to it. Can you?</title>
[222001040020] |<a>Children seem to drink in language</a>, while learning a language as an adult seems to be <a>quite a challenge</a>. 
[222001040030] |That said, it's not the case that you can't learn anything about language just by listening.
[222001040040] |A number of studies over the last few decades have shown that even adults can learn a certain amount of word and grammatical structure just by listening to a speech stream for a few minutes.
[222001040050] |The current focus of research is determining what, exactly, is learnable and what is not.
[222001040060] |A lab-mate is currently running one such <a>study online</a>.
[222001040070] |I mentioned it on this blog a couple weeks ago, but then there were technical difficulties with the experiment, and I pulled the post.
[222001040080] |Here it is again. 
[222001040090] |The study does take 20 minutes or more, and you have to promise to pay attention and not do other things at the same time (which I hope is the case whenever you do a Web-based study!), but it's a good project and worth your donation time.
[222001040100] |When he has results ready to publish, I'll be sure to post them here. 
[222001040110] |You can find the study <a>here</a>.
[222001050010] |<title>What if you heard your first word at age 6?</title>
[222001050020] |Developmental researchers have learned a great deal about the order in which children learn different aspects of language.
[222001050030] |Their first words are almost always nouns.
[222001050040] |Verbs come later.
[222001050050] |Early "sentences" consist of only 1 word.
[222001050060] |Then comes the 2 word stage.
[222001050070] |Etc.
[222001050080] |These stages tend to happen at particular ages. 
[222001050090] |We know much less about how children learn language.
[222001050100] |For instance, just because children typically produce one word sentences first doesn't mean that it's a necessary step (in fact, some children appear to only start speaking when they are capable of producing multi-word sentences).
[222001050110] |Maybe the classic developmental trajectory doesn't say anything about how language must be learned, but instead says a lot more about what babies at different ages are able developmentally able to do.
[222001050120] |Thus, maybe 1 year olds speak like 1 year olds as opposed to 3 year olds not because they only have 1 year of experience but because their brains are only 1 year old. 
[222001050130] |One early interesting "experiment" involved the discovery of a severely abused 6-year-old by the name of "Isabelle."
[222001050140] |She was locked in her attic by her mother and apparently never spoken to.
[222001050150] |With a year of being discovered and rescued, she was able to speak at the level of her 7-year-old peers and even started an ordinary school.
[222001050160] |This was pretty good evidence that the slow pace at which babies learn language may have more to do with their brains than the nature of learning language. 
[222001050170] |Unfortunately for researchers, but luckily for children, cases like Isabelle are very rare, limiting how much research can be done.
[222001050180] |Members of our lab were able to discover another way of doing this research: cross-linguistic adoption.
[222001050190] |Many babies and young children immigrate to the USA each year as adoptees, typically from the former Soviet Union or from China.
[222001050200] |When they come to the US, they typically are no longer exposed to their home language (even when their adoptive parents try to learn the baby's original language, they often learn the wrong language -- Mandarin instead of Fukinese or Russian instead of Ukranian, for instance).
[222001050210] |If caught at the right age, before they have learned much of whatever their home language was, they are excellent case studies in how language develops if you start at, say, 3 years old instead of Day 1. 
[222001050220] |The results of this study (full disclosure: I was not involved in this study) are that these children seem to go through all the typical stages of language development, just much, much faster.
[222001050230] |They very quickly catch up to their American-born peers.
[222001050240] |Which is good news for them, and tells us a great deal about how language develops. 
[222001050250] |Davis, K. (1989).
[222001050260] |Final note on a case of extreme social isolation.
[222001050270] |American Journal of Sociology, 42, 432-437. 
[222001050280] |Snedeker, J., Geren, J., Shafto, C. (2007).
[222001050290] |Starting over: International adoption as a natural experiment in language development.
[222001050300] |Psychological Science, 18(1), 79-87.
[222001060010] |<title>How blind children learn the verb "see"</title>
[222001060020] |See is one of the most common words in English.
[222001060030] |For instance, while <a>time</a>, the most common English noun, gets 3,550,000,000 Google hits, <a>see</a> gets a very respectable 2,980,000,000.
[222001060040] |This compares well with <a>talk</a> (711,000,000) and <a>eat</a> (253,000,000).
[222001060050] |This means that blind children can't really avoid the verb altogether.
[222001060060] |In fact, look and see are among the very first verbs that blind children learn, just like sighted children. 
[222001060070] |So what do they think it means? 
[222001060080] |I probably can't answer the question completely, but here are some relevant research results: 
[222001060090] |When a sighted 3-year-old is asked to "look up," he will tilt their heads upwards, even if they are blindfolded.
[222001060100] |A blind 3-year-old raises her hands instead. 
[222001060110] |If told "You can touch that table, but don't look at it," the blind 3-year-old will lightly touch the table.
[222001060120] |If you later tell her she cal look at the table, she may explore all the surfaces of the table with her hands. 
[222001060130] |It's not likely that blind children are explicitly taught these meanings for these words, so they probably created what are very reasonable meanings for them. 
[222001060140] |(This research is summarized in Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child by Barbara Landau and Lila Gleitman.)
[222001070010] |<title>What if we could run history twice? (Would Madonna still be popular?)</title>
[222001070020] |One difficulty in the study of history is that, although you can make predictions, many are difficult to test.
[222001070030] |You can argue that the US would have still entered World War II even without Pearl Harbor, but the only way to know for sure is to re-run history without the Japanese sneak attack. 
[222001070040] |Similarly -- and this is the point of the article -- you can argue that Madonna rose to become perhaps the cultural icon of the 80s because she anticipated the zeitgeist of the times...or because of luck or good marketing or whatever.
[222001070050] |Who knows.
[222001070060] |We as Americans would like to believe that talent always rises to the top, although research shows <a>actual social mobility is less impressive</a>.
[222001070070] |<a>Duncan Watts and colleagues</a> at Columbia University dreamed up an ingenious scheme to essentially run history twice, harnessing the power of the Internet.
[222001070080] |They<a> created a website</a> (now closed, sorry) that allowed people to listen to and then download songs by unknown bands for free.
[222001070090] |The songs were all ranked according to how often they were downloaded. 
[222001070100] |The trick is that there were actually 9 different "worlds."
[222001070110] |When you logged in, you were randomly assigned to one of these worlds.
[222001070120] |The information you saw about download activity was for your world only.
[222001070130] |(In one of the 9 worlds, you were given no information about download activity.) 
[222001070140] |Not surprisingly, people were more likely to listen to and download songs that other people had downloaded.
[222001070150] |This effect was much weaker in the world in which people didn't know what other people were listening to. 
[222001070160] |What is more interesting is that how popular a song was in one world predicted how popular it would be in all the worlds pretty well, but not perfectly.
[222001070170] |That is, there were songs that tended to be extremely popular in all worlds, and there were songs that were extremely unpopular in all worlds.
[222001070180] |Otherwise, there was a lot of variability.
[222001070190] |There were some songs that were loved in one world but hated in others. 
[222001070200] |This experiment, at least, suggests that some people are destined to be stars, but not everybody who is a star was destined to be so.
[222001070210] |One thing this research doesn't tell us is how to tell which is which.
[222001070220] |But it does narrow the range of options. 
[222001070230] |The experimenters were interested in social networks and not psychology, per se.
[222001070240] |From a psychology standpoint, one limitation of this study is that we don't know whether people actually liked songs better because they knew that other people liked the songs.
[222001070250] |All we know is that they listened to songs that other people had downloaded, and that they were more likely to download songs that other people downloaded.
[222001070260] |Of course, it makes sense to listen to what other people are listening to, and you can't download the song (in this study) until you've listened to it.
[222001070270] |Hopefully some future research will work this out. 
[222001070280] |Salganik, M.J., Doddds, P.S., Watts, D.J. (2006).
[222001070290] |Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market.
[222001070300] |Science, 311, 854-856.
[222001080010] |<title>The chair vs. stool debate: solved?</title>
[222001080020] |Two weeks ago I wrote about the problem with definitions.
[222001080030] |At scienceblog.com, <a>this post got over 11,000 hits and 41 comments</a>, most of which had to do with answering the age-old challenge of defining the word "chair."
[222001080040] |There were some very good attempts, none of which ultimately work, which isn't surprising since may of the greatest minds in the 20th century have tried and failed to solve this problem.
[222001080050] |It happens that this week I am reading from <a>Greg Murphy</a>'s <a>Big Book of Concepts</a>, which contains an excellent explanation of the problem, one which I think is probably right. 
[222001080060] |He starts with a big-picture view of the problem of concepts: 
[222001080070] |We do not wish to have a concept for every single object--such concepts would be of little use and would require enormous memory space.
[222001080080] |Instead, we want to have a fairly small number of concepts that are still informative enough to be useful (Rosch 1978).
[222001080090] |The ideal situation would probably be one in which these concepts did pick out objects...
[222001080100] |Unfortunately, the world is not arranged so as to conform to our needs.
[222001080110] |Translating this into the world of words, we don't want a different word for every single piece of furniture (that is, where each of your dining room chairs has its own name).
[222001080120] |That would be impossible to learn and pretty useless.
[222001080130] |We also don't want one single word to describe anything on which you might sit -- that would be too broad to be very useful in communication.
[222001080140] |He continues: 
[222001080150] |For example, it may be useful to distinguish chairs from stools, due to their differences in size and comfort...
[222001080160] |However, there is nothing to stop manufacturers from making things that are very large, comfortable stools; things that are just like chairs, only with three legs; or stools with a back.
[222001080170] |These intermediate items are the things that cause trouble for us, because they partake of the properties of both... 
[222001080180] |The gradation of properties in the world means that our smallish number of categories will never map perfectly onto all objects: The distinction between members and nonmembers will always be difficult to draw or will even be arbitrary in some cases. 
[222001080190] |I think Murphy makes a very plausible explanation of why, even in the best of cases, our words could never perfectly divide up the world.
[222001080200] |It's not possible to have words that pick out discrete categories of things, because there aren't discrete categories of things in the world. 
[222001080210] |This does leave open the question of what words mean, given that they don't have definitions, since they clearly mean something.
[222001080220] |I'm still on the second chapter of the book, but I suspect the answer won't be in chapter three, since this is still an active area of research and debate. 
[222001090010] |<title>Against peer review</title>
[222001090020] |In response to a recent post, <a>an anonymous commenter wrote </a>that 
[222001090030] |It would be scientific misconduct ... to make statements based on someone else's unpublished work ...
[222001090040] |Scientific results don't exist until they have been peer reviewed and published.
[222001090050] |Peer review has become the gold standard of the scientific community.
[222001090060] |Bring up a scientific finding, and the first thing you may be asked is, "Ah, well, is this peer reviewed?"
[222001090070] |(For those who don't know, peer review means that, before the journal will publish a paper, one or more other scientists who study similar topics).
[222001090080] |There is now even a<a> popular blog aggregater </a>that focuses exclusively on blogging about peer reviewed research. 
[222001090090] |In the age of the <a>Discovery Institute</a> there are some good reasons to focus on peer reviewed research as a way of excluding quacks.
[222001090100] |It's a way of saying that this research has been vetted. 
[222001090110] |That said, when I read comments like the one above, I think the time has come to push back, and point out that peer review is not the arbiter of truth.
[222001090120] |Truth is the arbiter of truth, and peer review is merely a flawed tool we use to help get there. 
[222001090130] |Peer reviewers don't check to make sure the results are true.
[222001090140] |Peer reviewers do not typically replicate the experiment in question.
[222001090150] |They do not check the math.
[222001090160] |Most of what they do is check that the arguments are reasonable and that the experiment(s) were well designed.
[222001090170] |Peer reviewers do not necessarily even have to agree with a paper they accept.
[222001090180] |They may simply think the data are compelling and the arguments are worth hearing, even if they may be wrong. 
[222001090190] |Thus, peer review does a reasonable job of weeding out quacks.
[222001090200] |Luckily, most scientists are not quacks, so what does it do for the rest of us?
[222001090210] |I'm not sure, but I think a partial answer is that two minds are better than one.
[222001090220] |Reviewers often notice things that the authors missed -- not because the authors weren't smart, but because research is damn complicated and you can never think of everything. 
[222001090230] |Typically what happens, at least in psychology, is that the reviewers suggest additional analyses or additional experiments that would make the paper stronger.
[222001090240] |Based on those comments, the authors may run new experiments then revise the paper and resubmit.
[222001090250] |Peer reviewers, in this sense, aren't so much vetters or fact-checkers as editors.
[222001090260] |Peer review is a way of improving -- not perfecting -- an article. 
[222001090270] |So is it scientific misconduct to refer to unpublished work?
[222001090280] |I don't think so.
[222001090290] |It is dangerous, though, because there are good reasons (above) to be more confident of something that has gone through peer review.
[222001090300] |It is a bit impolite to refer to something that has not been published, because then your audience can't go look at it themselves.
[222001090310] |And that's the main point.
[222001090320] |Peer reviewers are not the judges of truth, but all of us are on the jury.
[222001100010] |<title>Talk about the extraordinary</title>
[222001100020] |In a chapter from The Handbook of Social Psychology, 4th Edition, Gilbert notes that people have a
[222001100030] |an odd habit and a not so odd habit.
[222001100040] |The not so odd habit is that they describe behavior that is driven by extraordinary dispositions as having been driven by extraordinary dispositions.
[222001100050] |The odd habit is that they describe behavior that is driven by ordinary dispositions as having been caused by external agencies.
[222001100060] |This may sound like a lot of unnecessary jargon, but he immediate breaks it down (Gilbert is an extremely clear and entertaining writer and definitely worth reading):
[222001100070] |When one runs screaming from a baby rabbit, one usually owes the bystanders an explanation.
[222001100080] |Such explanations are acceptable when they are couched in terms of one's extraordinary dispositions--for example, "I have a morbid fear of fur" or "I sometimes mistake baby rabbits for Hitler."
[222001100090] |On the other hand, when one retreats from a hissing rattlesnake, one does not typically explain that behavior in terms of ordinary dispositions ("I dislike being injected with venom" or "I feel death is bad") but rather, in terms of the stimuli that invoked them ("It shook its thing at me").
[222001100100] |This turns out to be part of a broader phenomenon in language, as Gilbert notes.
[222001100110] |People tend to avoid saying the obvious and focus on the unusual (Grice was probably the first to notice this).
[222001100120] |This might seem like a very reasonable thing to do, but there is nothing necessary about it.
[222001100130] |That is, it's easy to imagine people who are as likely to state the obvious as the non-obvious (and there in fact seem to be some people like that, at least in sitcoms). 
[222001100140] |What I think is the most interesting part of this, though, is not that people tend to state the non-obvious, but we as listeners expect the speaker to do this.
[222001100150] |That suggests either some very sophisticated learning or evolution.
[222001100160] |(The fact that young children are terrible at distinguishing the obvious from non-obvious in conversation doesn't mean that it is a learned skill; it could be a genetically-programmed behavior that simply comes online later in development, just like puberty.)
[222001110010] |<title>Does language affect thought?</title>
[222001110020] |The New York Times is running a pretty <a>good state-of-the-field piece</a> on the <a>Whorfian debate</a>.
[222001120010] |<title>Neuroimaging study does not disprove free will</title>
[222001120020] |An excellent new paper in <a>Nature Neuroscience</a> made a big splash last week by purporting to show <a>activity in the brain related to muscle movement starts up to ten seconds before</a> the person is consciously aware of having made a decision to move.
[222001120030] |This study is in fact a replication and extension of previous research that had suggested that related brain activity starts at least 300 ms before the conscious decision.
[222001120040] |The big news presumably is that new technology (specifically pattern recognition algorithms) allowed the researchers to push back this time window (which really is big news and an excellent application of this technology). 
[222001120050] |The reason I am using words like "purported" is that there are some important methodological assumptions buried into this experiment (to be sure the authors did not mention "free will" in the actual paper, though I imagine they were aware of the implications).
[222001120060] |In this particular version of the experiment
[222001120070] |The subjects were asked to relax while fixating on the center of the screen where a stream of letters was presented.
[222001120080] |At some point, when they felt the urge to do so, they were to freely decide between one of two buttons, operated by the left and right index fingers, and press it immediately.
[222001120090] |In parallel, they should remember the letter presented when their motor decision was consciously made.
[222001120100] |Afterwards, they reported which letter had been on the screen when they made their decision.
[222001120110] |The assumption is that participants are reporting the letter correctly.
[222001120120] |We already know that conscious perception is a distortion of reality (in fact, this study is a demonstration of that fact), so this may not be a fair assumption. 
[222001120130] |This case was made some time ago by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in his excellent Freedom Evolves.
[222001120140] |The argument is somewhat long, but it goes like this.
[222001120150] |First, we have to assume that participants weren't deciding to press a particular button as soon as the next letter popped up; if they were doing that, they would have already made the decision before that letter appeared, throwing off the scientists' measurements.
[222001120160] |But even if we assume that is not the case, there is a bigger confound:
[222001120170] |If we monitor your brain with an array of surface electrodes ... we will find that the brain activity leading up to [a hand movement] has a definite and repeatable time course, and a shape.
[222001120180] |It lasts the better part of a second ... ending when your wrist actually moves.
[222001120190] |Dennett points out that we aren't aware that it takes our brains a good second to plan, coordinate and execute a simple motor movement.
[222001120200] |When we perform an intentional action, we normally monitor it visually (and by hearing and touch, of course) to make sure it is coming off as intended.
[222001120210] |Hand-eye coordination is accomplished by a tightly interwoven system of sensory and motor systems.
[222001120220] |Suppose I am intentionally typing hte words "flick the wrist" and wish to monitor my output for typographical errors.
[222001120230] |Since the motor commands take some time to execute, my brain should not compare the current motor command with the current visual feedback, since by the time I see the word "flick" on the screen, my brain is already sending the command type "wrist" to my muscles.
[222001120240] |The effect, though Dennett doesn't put it this way, of actually being aware of the time it takes for your conscious decision to be converted into muscle movement would create a bewildering sense of out-of-sync-ness, something like being drunk or watching a baseball game at a far distance, where the crack of the bat reaches your ears the same time the image of the runner reaches first base. 
[222001120250] |Dennett formulated this argument to explain the 300ms difference between conscious decision making and the related brain activity found in previous experiments.
[222001120260] |However, it certainly can be extended to the new study.
[222001120270] |If it turns out that it takes 10 seconds from the beginning of a decision to move until the actual movement is carried out, then we most definitely do not want to be aware of it.
[222001120280] |Much better if our minds trick us into thinking movement follows thought instantaneously. 
[222001120290] |This argument does require some mental time distortion: just because we think two things are happening simultaneously does not mean that they are.
[222001120300] |But why should they be?
[222001120310] |If we have learned anything about the brain in the last couple centuries, it is that perception is useful, not accurate. 
[222001120320] |Soon, C.S., Brass, M., Heinze, H.J., Haynes, J.D. (2008).
[222001120330] |Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain.
[222001120340] |Nature Neuroscience 
[222001140010] |<title>What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator for two days?</title>
[222001140020] |What would you do if you do if you were stuck in an elevator for two days?
[222001140030] |Here is what one person did: 
[222001150010] |<title>Should you talk to your baby?</title>
[222001150020] |ABC news is running story about talking to your baby.
[222001150030] |They start with some alarming news: You may not be talking to your baby enough.
[222001150040] |How much you talk to your baby affects everything from school performance to IQ.
[222001150050] |They suggest that an optimal amount is 30,000 words per day.
[222001150060] |They even peddle a new device that will count how many words you say to your baby so that you know if you are hitting that magic 30,000, or even the "more realistic" 17,000. 
[222001150070] |Does it really matter how much you talk to your baby? 
[222001150080] |Maybe, maybe not.
[222001150090] |It is true that babies who are talked to more have higher IQ scores and do better in school.
[222001150100] |This is partly because smarter parents talk more to their kids, and smarter parents also tend to have smarter kids.
[222001150110] |It is also the case that middle- and upper-class parents talk to their kids more than do lower-class parents.
[222001150120] |This may be a factor in why lower-class children do worse in school, but it is probably not the only reason. 
[222001150130] |The problem is one of random assignment.
[222001150140] |We can't assign some babies to hear a lot of speech and some babies to hear no speech.
[222001150150] |WIthout that, it is impossible to un-confound genetic and socio-economic factors.
[222001150160] |A very creative study might be able to do so, but I have not come across any such study, and the news piece doesn't mention such research. 
[222001150170] |Nonetheless, it is certainly possible that talking to your baby makes a difference (even though in some cultures, parents do not talk to their children before the age of 2 or 3 and the children turn out fine).
[222001150180] |However, the 30,000 word rule almost certainly has to be fictitious.
[222001150190] |Assuming the baby is awake for 12 hours a day, that comes out to 42 words per minute nonstop every waking minute.
[222001150200] |I'm not sure I would want a parent who talked that much. 
[222001170010] |<title>Smile, you are in the newspaper</title>
[222001170020] |I have written about Havard happiness professor Dan Gilbert <a>before</a>.
[222001170030] |He was <a>recently interviewed</a> by the New York Times.
[222001170040] |The article is worth the read.
[222001180010] |<title>Getting a Ph.D. in psychology</title>
[222001180020] |Some may have noticed that my posts have been infrequent for the last week or two and wondered why.
[222001180030] |There is a simple answer to this:
[222001180040] |Quals. 
[222001180050] |What are quals?
[222001180060] |They seem to be different in different universities, and quite possibly even between different departments.
[222001180070] |The top Google hit for "qualifying exam" sounds <a>absolutely nothing like what I am doing</a>.
[222001180080] |This seems to be true of graduate school in general, which is to say that there policies differ a great deal.
[222001180090] |I certainly got into trouble as a prospective graduate student by assuming that information I learned about one graduate program would generalize to another. 
[222001180100] |One purpose of this blog is to make more information about the process available.
[222001180110] |So, for those who are interested: As far as I can tell, the traditional qualifying exam is an examination that qualifies one to work on a Ph.D.
[222001180120] |That certainly seems to be the case in <a>Piled Higher and Deeper</a>, which is set at Stanford (see the comic below). 
[222001180130] |In <a>my department</a>, it works very differently.
[222001180140] |Our qualifying exams are rolled into a course we take during our first year (usually).
[222001180150] |This before we get our Master's degree, which is typically at the end of the second year. 
[222001180160] |The course is different depending on which research group you belong to.
[222001180170] |My research group (developmental) actually requires students to take our own qualifying course as well as another.
[222001180180] |I took the developmental course last semester and am taking the cognition, brain and behavior course this semester. 
[222001180190] |What is required for the courses can vary a great deal depending on which professor is in charge.
[222001180200] |This semester, we have a total of 63 hours of examination spread out over 6 tests -- three in the middle of the semester, and three this week.
[222001180210] |Which is why I have not been posting much. 
[222001190010] |<title>Why is losing $10 worse than winning $10 is good?</title>
[222001190020] |Losses loom larger than gains.
[222001190030] |This useful mnemonic describes an odd experimental finding: if you have people rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how unhappy they would be to lose $100, that rating will be higher than if you ask them how happy they would be to win $100.
[222001190040] |Similarly, people tend to be reluctant to gamble when the odds are even (50% chance of winning $100, 50% chance of losing $100).
[222001190050] |Generally, if odds are even, people aren't likely to bet unless the potential prize is greater than the potential loss. 
[222001190060] |This is a well-known phenomenon in psychology and economics.
[222001190070] |It is particularly surprising, because simple statistical analysis would suggest that losses and gains should be treated equally.
[222001190080] |That is, if you have a 50% chance of winning $100 and a 50% chance of losing $100, on average you will break even.
[222001190090] |So why not gamble? 
[222001190100] |(Yes, it is true that people play slot machines or buy lottery tickets, in which, on average, you lose money.
[222001190110] |That's a different phenomenon that I don't completely understand.
[222001190120] |When/if I do, I'll write about it.) 
[222001190130] |A question that came up recently in a conversation is: why aren't people more rational?
[222001190140] |Why don't they just go with the statistics? 
[222001190150] |I imagine there have been papers written on the subject, and I'd love to get some comments referring me to them.
[222001190160] |Unfortunately, nobody involved in this conversation knew of said papers, so I actually did some quick-and-dirty simulations to investigate this problem. 
[222001190170] |Here is how the simulation works: each "creature" in my simulation is going to play a series of games in which they have a 50% chance of winning food and a 50% chance of losing food.
[222001190180] |If they run out of food, they die.
[222001190190] |The size of the gain and the size of the loss are each chosen randomly.
[222001190200] |If the ratio of gain to loss is large enough, the creature will play. 
[222001190210] |For some of the creatures, losses loom larger than gains.
[222001190220] |That is, they won't play unless the gain is more than 1.5 times larger than the loss (50% chance of winning 15.1 units of food, 50% chance of losing 10).
[222001190230] |Some of the creatures treat gains and losses roughly equally, meaning they will play as long as the gain is at least a sliver larger than the loss (50% chance of winning 10.1 units of food, 50% chance of losing 10).
[222001190240] |Some of the creatures weigh gains higher than losses and will accept any gamble as long as the gain is at least half the size of the loss (50% chance of winning 5.1 unites of food, 50% chance of losing 10). 
[222001190250] |(Careful observers will note that all these creatures are biased in favor of gains.
[222001190260] |That is, there is always some bet that is so bad the creature won't take it.
[222001190270] |There are never any bets so good that the creature refuses.
[222001190280] |They just differ in how biased they are.) 
[222001190290] |Each creature plays the game 1000 times, and there are 1000 creatures.
[222001190300] |They all start with 100 units of food. 
[222001190310] |In the first simulation, the losses and gains were capped at 10 units of food, or 10% of the creature's starting endowment, with an average of 5 units.
[222001190320] |Here's how the creatures faired: Losses loom larger than gains:0% died.807 = average amount of food at end of simulation. 
[222001190330] |Losses roughly equal to gains:0% died.926 = average amount of food at end of simulation. 
[222001190340] |Gains loom larger than losses:2% died.707 = average amount of food at end of simulation. 
[222001190350] |So this actually suggests that the best strategy in this scenario would be to treat losses and gains similarly (that is, act like a statistician -- something humans don't do).
[222001190360] |However, the average loss and gain was only 5 units of food (5% of the starting endowment), and the maximum was 10 units of food.
[222001190370] |So none of these gambles were particularly risky, and maybe that has something to do with it.
[222001190380] |So I ran a second simulation with losses and gains capped at 25 units of food, or 25% of the starting endowment: Losses loom larger than gains:0% died1920 = average amount of food at end of simulation Losses roughly equal to gains:1% died2171 = average amount of food at end of simulation Gains loom larger than losses:14% died1459 = average amount of food at end of simulation 
[222001190390] |Now, we see that the statistician's approach still leads to more food on average, but there is some chance of starving to death, making weighing losses greater than gains seem like the safest option.
[222001190400] |You might not get as rich, but you won't die, either. 
[222001190410] |This is even more apparent if you up the potential losses and gains to a maximum of 50 units of food each (50% of the starting endowment), and an average of 25 units: Losses loom larger than gains:1% died.3711 = average amount of food at end of simulation Losses equal to gains9% died3941 = average amount of food at end of simulation Gains loom larger than losses35% died.2205 = average amount of food at end of simulation 
[222001190420] |Now, weighing losses greater than gains really seems like the best strategy.
[222001190430] |Playing the statistician will net you 6% more food on average, but it also increases your chance of dying by 9!
[222001190440] |(The reason that the statistician ends up with more food on average is probably because the conservative losses-loom-larger-than-gains creatures don't take as many gambles and thus have less opportunity to win.) 
[222001190450] |So what does this simulation suggest?
[222001190460] |It suggests that when the stakes are high, it is better to be conservative and measure what you might win by what you might lose.
[222001190470] |If the stakes are low, this is less necessary.
[222001190480] |Given that humans tend to value losses higher than gains, this suggests that we evolved mainly to think about risks with high stakes. 
[222001190490] |Of course, that's all according to what is a very, very rough simulation.
[222001190500] |I'm sure there are better ones in the literature, but it was useful to play around with the parameters myself. 
[222001200010] |<title>Why admissions interviews should be abandoned</title>
[222001200020] |An important part of the admission process to a competitive college is the admissions interview.
[222001200030] |I'm against it.
[222001200040] |And that isn't just because interviews were originally instituted to <a>keep Jews out of Harvard</a>.
[222001200050] |It's because they are poor predictors of future performance and, even worse, they are poor predictors that people weight very heavily. 
[222001200060] |I was first clued into this by none other than Google.
[222001200070] |Google recently revamped the way it chooses new hires, and an important part of the overhaul was minimizing the importance of the interview.
[222001200080] |As Laszlo Bock, Google's vice president for people operations said, "<a>Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance.</a>" 
[222001200090] |This stands to reason.
[222001200100] |We all know people who make great first impressions but then turn out to be lousy employees/students/friends/etc.
[222001200110] |Similarly, we know people who originally struck us as dull but turned out to be our best employee/student/friend/etc.
[222001200120] |However, it would be nice to have something quantitative to back up this observation, and so I've been on the lookout ever sense. 
[222001200130] |It is in this context that I read this following quote from a classic Science paper by Tversky and Kahneman: 
[222001200140] |It is a common observation that psychologists who conduct selection interviews often experience considerable confidence in their predictions, even when they know of the vast literature that shows selection interviews to be highly fallible.
[222001200150] |The continued reliance on the clinical interview for selection, despite repeated demonstrations of its inadequacy, amply attests to the strength of this effect. 
[222001200160] |Tversky and Kahneman probably did not think this was a problem with the clinical interview per se.
[222001200170] |They give several other examples, including a study in which participants read a short description of a particular lesson a student teacher gave.
[222001200180] |Some participants were asked to evaluate the quality of the lesson, giving it a percentile score.
[222001200190] |Others were asked to guess the percentile score of that student teacher's overall abilities 5 years in the future.
[222001200200] |The judgments in both conditions were identical.
[222001200210] |That is, the participants believed that the quality of a single lesson fully predicted how good a future teacher would be.
[222001200220] |They don't take into consideration that the student teacher might be having a bad or good day. 
[222001200230] |Tversky and Kahneman have an explanation for why people care so much about interviews.
[222001200240] |Across the board, people believe that small samples are much more reliable than they are.
[222001200250] |I recommend the original paper if you want the full argument, but they bring up many examples.
[222001200260] |For instance, participants believe a random sample of 10 men is just as likely to have an average height of 6 feet as a random sample of 1000.
[222001200270] |This is not mathematically possible, but even experts in statistics can, under the right circumstances, fall for this. 
[222001200280] |This is why I think the admissions interview, as well as the job interview, should be scrapped.
[222001200290] |It takes place over a short period of time, which means it is an inherently unreliable predictor of future performance.
[222001200300] |It's unreliable, but, even knowing that, the information gleaned from it irresistible. 
[222001200310] |Tversky, A., Kahneman, D. (1974).
[222001200320] |Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases.
[222001200330] |Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.
[222001210010] |<title>Another reason everyone should learn statistics</title>
[222001210020] |Here is another insightful experiment from Tversky and Kahneman: 
[222001210030] |In a discussion of flight training, experienced instructors noted that praise for an exceptionally smooth landing is typically followed by a poorer landing on the next try, while harsh criticism after a rough landing is usually followed by an improvement on the next try.
[222001210040] |The instructors concluded that verbal rewards are detrimental to learning, while verbal punishments are beneficial.
[222001210050] |It's not clear from the description whether the instructors considered whether their lesson plan would be beneficial to morale, but in any case, they were almost certainly wrong.
[222001210060] |They fell for a statistical phenomenon known as "regression to the mean." 
[222001210070] |Basically, every time you measure something, there is some error.
[222001210080] |For instance, although Sally may be a B student, sometimes she gets As on her tests and sometimes she gets Cs.
[222001210090] |Some days she has good days and some days she has bad days. 
[222001210100] |Now suppose you give a test to the whole class and then select all the students who got As to be in a special program.
[222001210110] |That group of students who got As will include some who are normally A students, but it will also include some people who normally are B or C students but who had a good day.
[222001210120] |So, if you were to re-test those same students, the average grade would decline, perhaps to an A- or B+.
[222001210130] |This isn't because the students got stupider; it's just that the students who got fluke As the first time are unlikely to repeat their performance. 
[222001210140] |Similarly, if you had picked all the students who failed the exam, that group of students would have included both true F students as well as a few C or D students (maybe even B or A students) who were having a rough day.
[222001210150] |If you retest them, the average grade will move up, because those C and D students will likely do better the second time.
[222001210160] |They haven't gotten smarter; it's just regression to the mean. 
[222001210170] |Those flight students would probably have had a better experience if their instructors knew about regression to the mean. 
[222001210180] |---- Some readers might have wondered the following: if, in the group of students who got As, some of their scores will go down upon re-testing, shouldn't some go up?
[222001210190] |Yes and no.
[222001210200] |Some scores would go up, but those are mostly typically A students who got Bs or Cs on that particular exam.
[222001210210] |However, you have already excluded them from the group, so their rebounding scores can't off-set the falling scores of the typically B and C students. 
[222001210220] |Tversky, A., Kahneman, D. (1974).
[222001210230] |Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases.
[222001210240] |Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.
[222001220010] |<title>Why are humans risk averse?</title>
[222001220020] |After my <a>first foray into computational simulations</a> successfully predicted that losses should loom larger than gains, at least when the stakes are high, I decided to take on an even more complicated phenomenon in psychology and economics: risk aversion.
[222001220030] |<a>Daniel Kahneman</a>, one of the few psychologists to win a Nobel Prize -- largely because there is no Nobel Prize for psychology -- along with Amos Tversky achieved at least some of his fame by demonstrating that humans are risk-averse for gains but risk-seeking for losses. 
[222001220040] |The most famous demonstration of this came from the following experiment (known as the "Asian Flu problem"): The Center for Disease Control discovers there is an outbreak of Asian Flu in the United States.
[222001220050] |If nothing is done, they predict that 600 people will die.
[222001220060] |Two courses of action have been suggested.
[222001220070] |If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
[222001220080] |If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.
[222001220090] |Which of the two programs do you favor? 
[222001220100] |Most people, it turns out, pick program A, the sure bet.
[222001220110] |This is interesting, because, on average, the two programs are exactly the same.
[222001220120] |That is, on average, program B will save 200 people, just like program A.
[222001220130] |The difference is that program B is more risky. 
[222001220140] |This would seem to demonstrate that people are risk-averse.
[222001220150] |However, you can reword the problem just slightly and get a very different response: Two courses of action have been suggested.
[222001220160] |If program A is adopted, 400 will die.
[222001220170] |If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.
[222001220180] |Which of the two programs do you favor? 
[222001220190] |Given this scenario, most people pick program B. However, notice that this is the exact same program as in the first version of the problem!
[222001220200] |It turns out that if people think about the issue in terms of lives saved, they are risk-averse.
[222001220210] |If they think about the issue in terms of lives lost, they are risk-seeking (they choose the riskier option). 
[222001220220] |There is no right or wrong answer according to logic, because logic and statistics tell us that program A and B are essentially identical. 
[222001220230] |In my last simulation, I suggested that it actually makes sense for losses to loom larger than gains, even though statistics and logic don't predict this.
[222001220240] |Maybe the same is true for being risk averse for gains and risk-seeking for losses.
[222001220250] |Maybe that is actually adaptive. 
[222001220260] |Here's how my simulation worked: Each of my simulated "creatures" played the following game: They could either take a sure gain of 10 units of food, or they could take a risky gain: a 50% chance of 5 units or a 50% chance of 15 units.
[222001220270] |Again, the two choices are statistically identical -- on average, you get 10 units of food either way.
[222001220280] |Some of the creatures were risk-averse and always took the sure bet; some were risk-seeking and always took the risky bet. 
[222001220290] |The creatures also played the same game for losses: they either had a guaranteed loss of 10 units or a 50% chance of losing 5 and a 50% chance of losing 15.
[222001220300] |Again, some were risk-seeking and some were risk averse. 
[222001220310] |Each creature played both games (the gain game and the loss game) 1000 times.
[222001220320] |There were 1000 creatures who were, like humans, risk-averse for gains and risk-seeking for losses.
[222001220330] |There were 1000 creatures who were risk-seeking for gains and risk-averse for losses (the opposite of humans).
[222001220340] |There were also 1000 creatures who were risk-seeking for both gains and losses. 
[222001220350] |The creatures all started with 100 pieces of food. 
[222001220360] |Risk-averse for gains/Risk-seeking for losses:52% died98 = average units of food at end of simulation Risk-seeking for gains/Risk-averse for losses:54% died92 = average units of food left at end of simulation Risk-seeking for gains &losses:68% died94 = average units of food left at end of simulation 
[222001220370] |While this simulation suggested that being risk-seeking across the board is not a good thing, it did not suggest that being risk-seeking for gains and risk-averse for losses was any better than the other way around.
[222001220380] |This could be because the size of the gains and losses was too large or two small relative to the starting endowment of food.
[222001220390] |I tried both larger endowments of food (200 units) and smaller (50 units), but the pattern of results was the same. 
[222001220400] |Again, this was a very simple simulation, so it is possible that it does not include the crucial factors that make the human strategy an adaptive one.
[222001220410] |It is also possible that the human strategy is not adaptive.
[222001220420] |Hopefully I will come across some papers in the near future that report better simulations that will shed some light onto this subject. 
[222001220430] |-----(Note that as far as I can tell, being risk-seeking for losses should prevent people from buying insurance, yet people do.
[222001220440] |I'm not sure why this is, or how Kahneman's theory explains this.) 
[222001220450] |Tversky, A., Kahneman, D. (1981).
[222001220460] |The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice.
[222001220470] |Science, 211, 453-458.
[222001230010] |<title>Illegal Philosophy</title>
[222001230020] |One of the most famous thought problems from the philosophy of language in the latter half of the 20th century turns out to have legal ramifications.
[222001230030] |To illustrate that what is meant is not always the same thing as what is said, <a>H. Paul Grice</a> created a hypothetical letter of recommendation for a would-be professor of philosophy.
[222001230040] |There are many variants of this letter around these days (it's a popular example).
[222001230050] |Here is one: 
[222001230060] |To whom it may concern: 
[222001230070] |Jones dresses well and writes grammatical English. 
[222001230080] |Sincerely, Professor So-and-so
[222001230090] |That is what is said.
[222001230100] |What is meant is clearly that Jones is no good at philosophy.
[222001230110] |Explaining in a rigorous fashion how we come to that conclusion has occupied a number of researchers for half a century and no doubt will continue to do so for some time.
[222001230120] |This is despite the fact that such letters appear to be illegal in California (the state in which Grice worked).
[222001230130] |In a footnote to a <a>recent book chapter</a>, the linguist <a>Laurence Horn</a> cites a court case (Randi M. v. Livingston Union School District, 1995 Cal. App. LEXIS 1230 (Dec. 15, 1995)), in which it was found that "a statement that contains only favorable matters and omits all reference to unfavorable matters is as much a false representation as if all the facts stated were untrue." 
[222001230140] |The moral of this story may be that philosophy is great, but check with a lawyer before trying to apply it to the real world. 
[222001240010] |<title>Avoiding risk</title>
[222001240020] |One of the most famous figures in psychology is the following:
[222001240030] |This is the famous utility curve that helped <a>Daniel Kahneman</a> win the Nobel Prize.
[222001240040] |To understand just what a big deal this is, psychologists very rarely win the Nobel Prize because there is no Nobel Prize for psychology (he won for economics). 
[222001240050] |Here's how to understand the figure.
[222001240060] |On the X axis is objective gains and losses (for sake of simplicity, assume what we are gaining and losing is money).
[222001240070] |On the Y axis is subjective utility -- how much you like the gain or dislike the loss. 
[222001240080] |The striking thing is that the line is not straight.
[222001240090] |The idea is that the difference between winning $5 and winning $15 is greater than the difference between winning $1005 and $1015.
[222001240100] |The same goes for losses -- losing $5 is annoying, but losing an extra $5 on top of a loss of $1000 is just a drop in the bucket.
[222001240110] |This explains, among things, why people will spend an extra $5 on a car or a house but not on a stick of gum (a strange finding, when you think about it, since $5 is $5 either way). 
[222001240120] |These curves also predict something very interesting.
[222001240130] |Suppose you had a 50% chance of winning $10 and a 50% chance of winning nothing or you could take a guaranteed $5.
[222001240140] |Which would you do?
[222001240150] |Most people go with the guaranteed bet.
[222001240160] |This makes no sense according to probability theory, since your expected win is $5 either way, but it does when you look at the graph.
[222001240170] |The average subjective value of $10 and $0 is actually less than the subjective value of $5.
[222001240180] |Thus the best bet in terms of subjective value is the sure-thing $5. 
[222001240190] |With losses, you see something different.
[222001240200] |Suppose you had a 50% chance of losing $10 and a 50% chance of losing $0 or a guaranteed loss of $5.
[222001240210] |Most people would take their chances on the coin flip rather than going with the guaranteed loss.
[222001240220] |This again makes no sense if you look at the monetary values -- it's $5 on average either way.
[222001240230] |However, the average subjective pain of losing $10 and losing nothing is actually less than the subjective pain of losing $5.
[222001240240] |So the best bet in terms of the subjective value of the losses is to go with the coin flip. 
[222001240250] |This graph also shows that <a>losses loom larger than gains,</a> but I leave it to the reader to work this out for themselves.
[222001240260] |Altogether, these few squiggles pack in a lot of information.
[222001250010] |<title>Reading between the lines (even when you don't know you are doing it)</title>
[222001250020] |I have been writing for a few days about risk-seeking and risk-averse behavior.
[222001250030] |In particular, I described the famous Asian Flu problem.
[222001250040] |For those who haven't read about it yet or don't remember it, here it is again:
[222001250050] |Version 1A new strain of flu is expected to kill 600 people.
[222001250060] |Two programs to combat the disease have been proposed.
[222001250070] |If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
[222001250080] |If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.
[222001250090] |Which of the two programs would you favor? 
[222001250100] |Version 2A new strain of flu is expected to kill 600 people.
[222001250110] |Two programs to combat the disease have been proposed.
[222001250120] |If program A is adopted, 400 people will die.
[222001250130] |If program B is adopted, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.
[222001250140] |Which of the two programs would you favor? 
[222001250150] |The important result is that even though the two questions are exactly the same, when given Version 1, people prefer program A.
[222001250160] |When given Version 2, people prefer program B.  At least, that is the story usually given.
[222001250170] |Steven Pinker has made a very convincing argument that the two versions are not the same: 
[222001250180] |The description "200 people will be saved" refers to those who survive because of the causal effects of the treatment. it is consistent with the possibility that additional people will survive for different and unforeseen reasons--perhaps the flu may be less virulent than predicted, perhaps doctors will think up alternative remedies, and so on.
[222001250190] |So it implies that at least 200 people will survive.
[222001250200] |The scenario "400 people will die," on the other hand, lumps together all the deaths regardless of their cause. it implies that no more than 200 people will survive.
[222001250210] |(Stuff of Thought, p. 260)
[222001250220] |It is difficult to tell from the text whether Pinker is suggesting an explanation for why people are risk-averse for gains but risk-seeking for losses, or whether he is just noting a contributor factor to this particular experiment.
[222001250230] |Risk-aversion has been so well studied over the last several decades I seriously doubt that every demonstration is susceptible to this criticism. 
[222001250240] |The reason that I think this is a really important point is that it illustrates how the strict logical meaning of a sentence is not always what the sentence "means."
[222001250250] |That is, we often read between the lines without even noticing it.
[222001250260] |Here, these two versions of the Asian Flu problem, strictly speaking and according to logic, are identical.
[222001250270] |That doesn't mean that they are necessarily interpreted identically. 
[222001250280] |Tversky, A., Kahneman, D. (1981).
[222001250290] |The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice.
[222001250300] |Science, 211, 453-458.
[222001260010] |<title>The best spam filter ever</title>
[222001260020] |The famous <a>Turing Test</a> tests the intelligence of computers in the following way: if a computer can convince us it is a human, it is probably as intelligent as a human (that's not Turing's original version, but it's better known). 
[222001260030] |What is interesting is that although Turing focused on language and problem solving, one of the easiest ways of telling a human from a machine is our perceptual system -- especially our sense of vision, which in humans is the dominant of the five senses.
[222001260040] |So one of the most important forms of the Turing Test today is actually a vision test. 
[222001260050] |To get an account on just about any website, you must prove you are human by copying a few sloppily-written letters.
[222001260060] |Machines, despite decades of research, are very bad at visual recognition of objects, including alphanumeric letters.
[222001260070] |These bits of text that you have to rewrite are called CAPTCHAs. 
[222001260080] |Bring to the scene <a>reCAPTCHA</a>.
[222001260090] |The website says it all: 
[222001260100] |About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day.
[222001260110] |In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent.
[222001260120] |Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.
[222001260130] |What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books. 
[222001260140] |That is, each CAPTCHA is in fact a section of text in a book that is being digitized that their computer is unable to read.
[222001260150] |I have no idea how well the system has worked so far or the details of the implementation, but the idea is brilliant, and really captures part of what makes the Web so powerful: millions of people all donating just a few minutes of their time.
[222001260160] |This is of course what has given us <a>the Fray</a>, Wikipedia, and <a>Web-based experiments</a>.
[222001260170] |But unlike those cases, filling out CAPTCHAs is something people have to do anyway.
[222001270010] |<title>Games with a purpose</title>
[222001270020] |I like to believe we are running <a>some of the more innovative experiments</a> on the Web.
[222001270030] |Occasionally, however, I run across true masters of the form.
[222001270040] |One of my current favorites is <a>Games With a Purpose</a>.
[222001270050] |The avowed purpose of the site is to "make computers smarter."
[222001270060] |From what I can tell, they are mainly focusing on labeling.
[222001270070] |As I have <a>written before</a>, we often think that children learn words like "dog" by seeing a dog while their mother or some other adult says "dog."
[222001270080] |It turns out that this kind of learning is actually <a>very, very difficult. </a>
[222001270090] |In fact, it has been shown that a very smart baby who used impeccable logic -- that is, a baby who was like a well-programmed computer -- would in fact never learn any words at all.
[222001270100] |We must have some innate biases that allow us to learn words. 
[222001270110] |This brings us to the issue of GoogleImage.
[222001270120] |Google would like to help us find pictures on the web.
[222001270130] |But we search by typing in a phrase.
[222001270140] |To make this work, then, Google needs to figure out what words would best describe any given picture.
[222001270150] |As I just mentioned above, this is something humans do well but at which computers are hopeless. 
[222001270160] |This, I assume, explains the existence of <a>Google Image Labeler</a>, a game previously created by the same folks behind Games with a Purpose.
[222001270170] |This is a game based around labeling images.
[222001270180] |Games with a Purpose has a <a>similar game in which you label music</a>. 
[222001270190] |Unfortunately, neither Google nor GWAP.com have much information that I can find about how exactly this information is used.
[222001270200] |One obvious possibility is that the labels they derive from the players go directly into the Google database.
[222001270210] |Another possibility is that the researchers are using the information derived in these games to create data sets with which they can train computers using learning algorithms. 
[222001270220] |So what do I think is cool about this stuff?
[222001270230] |It's an application of very simple Web technology to do something that is difficult or impossible to do without the Internet. 
[222001270240] |It should hopefully be clear that the problems being solved here require massive amounts of labor.
[222001270250] |Labeling all the images on the Internet is way beyond the capabilities of even the most dedicated engineer.
[222001270260] |However, if everybody in the world labeled a handful, that would be tens or hundreds of billions of labels.
[222001270270] |Similarly, even if one is not trying to label all the images on the web and only trying to provide training data for a computer model, such models require massive data sets. 
[222001290010] |<title>Psychologist runs for Congress</title>
[222001290020] |Earlier in March, a <a>physicist won a congressional seat</a>.
[222001290030] |This, one has to hope, will be good for science, and particularly for the <a>embarrassing funding shortfalls at FermiLab</a>. 
[222001290040] |With any luck, the state of Washington will turn this anecdote into a trend by sending <a>Mark Mays</a> to the capital to represent its 5th district.
[222001290050] |Mark Mays studied with <a>Guy Manaster</a> at the University of Texas, and is the type of psychologist who treats patients.
[222001290060] |He has been active in Spokane for many years, particularly in the field of mental health -- especially veterans' mental health.
[222001290070] |With an increasing number of war-weary veterans returning to the US, it would be great to have a professional who has actually treated veterans part of the decision-making process. 
[222001290080] |Oh, and he's also a great guy (full disclosure: Mays is a family friend).
[222001290090] |If you are in the 5th district, I suggest checking out his <a>newly minted web site</a>.
[222001300010] |<title>Fearing the Terminator</title>
[222001300020] |I heard one of the guys behind Games With A Purpose speaking on <a>Future Tense</a> a few days ago (sadly, their names are not listed on the website, and I don't recall who it was).
[222001300030] |He pointed out that many people are concerned about his project of "making computers smarter."
[222001300040] |A good example is <a>a recent commenter on this blog</a>. 
[222001300050] |This researcher's response to such concerns is, essentially, "Computers have already taken over the world, and they are stupid.
[222001300060] |Wouldn't it be better if they were smarter?" 
[222001300070] |That's one argument, though I'm not sure how well it speaks to those who worry about the Terminator.
[222001300080] |Another argument would be that, sure, smart computers are scary.
[222001300090] |But the world is already pretty scary, and smart computers would make it a little less so.
[222001300100] |The question is whether the advantages outweigh the risks. 
[222001300110] |In the past, it has.
[222001300120] |Whatever side-effects technology has had -- and I'm including global warming, here -- so far it's made life unimaginably better (for one thing, without modern technology, not only could you not read this post, but many if not most people reading this post would have died before reaching their present age). 
[222001300130] |This is the essence of Dan Savage's retort to a writer who worried about the harmful effects of chlorine in water: (approximately) "I'd rather have a little bit of chlorine than a whole lot of cholera."
[222001320010] |<title>We know toddlers can't count, but are they good at statistics?</title>
[222001320020] |<a>Toddlers can't count</a>.
[222001320030] |And, to be honest, statistics is the one field of math that has never really clicked for me.
[222001320040] |But there is mounting evidence that children and adults are very sensitive to the statistical nature of the world.
[222001320050] |This has been shown in vision studies, some of which I've worked on, but which I won't talk about more here (but check out <a>Brian Scholl's lab</a>, among others). 
[222001320060] |Statistical learning has also been found for language-like material.
[222001320070] |Certainly, statistics could help with learning language.
[222001320080] |For instance, a given words (e.g., the) is more likely to be followed by some words (e.g., book or table) than other words (e.g., contemplate or earn).
[222001320090] |Moreover, rare sound combinations typically mark boundaries between words (no word contains the sound combination thst, but it can occur -- rarely -- between words, such as with steam).
[222001320100] |Babies could, at least in theory, use that information to break the sound stream that they hear into words (contrary to popular imagination, people rarely speak in single words, even to infants, so determining that winsome is one word but withsome is two is non-trivial). 
[222001320110] |So, statistical information that could be valuable for language learning is available in what babies hear.
[222001320120] |A number of studies have shown that babies are in fact sensitive to such information (check out <a>Gomez &Gerken, 2000</a>, for a review).
[222001320130] |Whether or not statistical learning is actually used in real live language learning as opposed to the laboratory experiments just mentioned is an open question, but it certainly could be. 
[222001320140] |The issue that is bothering me lately is that I'm not aware of any evidence that infants are better at statistical learning than adults.
[222001320150] |Given that children tend to be much better language-learners than are adults, this raises an important question: what aspect of language learning are adults bad at?
[222001320160] |(Some people think that adults aren't impaired at learning languages; I don't think that's true and may eventually write a post about it.)
[222001320170] |The evidence lately seems to be that adults are bad at syntax, so this makes me wonder just how likely it is that statistical learning is used to help learn syntax, as some people have claimed. 
[222001320180] |Gomez, R.L., Gerken, L. (2000).
[222001320190] |Infant artificial language learning and language acquisition.
[222001320200] |Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(5), 178186.
[222001330010] |<title>I'm on Google's blacklist</title>
[222001330020] |I have been <a>very excited about the application of Google to research</a>.
[222001330030] |When, as a psycholinguist, I am interested in whether a particular phrase is ever seen in normal English, it is very simple to just Google that phrase and find out.
[222001330040] |Google is a little less useful for looking at the frequency of individual words, since it automatically includes related words (e.g., search for dog and you also get dogs), but some useful information can be found.
[222001330050] |Both of these types of analyses regularly appear on <a>Language Log</a>.
[222001330060] |Unfortunately, my love is not reciprocated.
[222001330070] |In the course of conducting basic research, I had my ability to use Google temporarily revoked. 
[222001330080] |What happened?
[222001330090] |Well, I lately got <a>interested in the use of the word "because."</a>
[222001330100] |I wanted to see how "because" is used in normal contexts.
[222001330110] |Unfortunately, types of utterances I am interested in aren't that common, so there weren't enough example available in the typical databases a researcher would use, like <a>CHILDES</a>.
[222001330120] |So I decided to use Google. 
[222001330130] |Basically, what I needed to do was search for phrases involving the word "because," then go to the pages in which the phrases appeared in order to copy the full context in which the phrase appears.
[222001330140] |Then I can analyze those contexts.
[222001330150] |I need a few thousand of those.
[222001330160] |I did think about having my <a>summer research assistant</a> do it, but it just seemed cruel.
[222001330170] |So a friend helped me (thanks Tim!) write a short script in Perl to automate the process. 
[222001330180] |I had finally gotten it up and running when it suddenly crashed on me.
[222001330190] |It took a little while to figure out that Google had identified my searches as potentially virus-induced and temporarily blocked my IP address.
[222001330200] |It appears that one can get special permission from Google in order to conduct these types of searches ... if you can actually contact anyone at Google, which is not easy. 
[222001330210] |So if you know somebody at Google...
[222001340010] |<title>New ideas</title>
[222001340020] |When I was named, my father worried that the name my parents were giving me was too unusual.
[222001340030] |He didn't know anybody named "Josh." 
[222001340040] |Steven Pinker discusses this phenomenon in terms of child naming in his most recent book, The Stuff of Thought, having the exact same experience as me; his parents thought "Steven" was a fresh new name. 
[222001340050] |This doesn't happen just with names.
[222001340060] |A couple weeks ago, I was talking with a couple friends at the excellent <a>Semiproductivity in Grammar workshop at Tufts</a> about a problem we seem to share.
[222001340070] |On of the friends, who works on computational modeling, had discovered another research group with a similar model.
[222001340080] |Both the friends were concerned about the fact that Bayesian-style computational modeling world has been getting a little too crowded.
[222001340090] |Myself, I recently entered the world of pragmatics research with the idea that is was relatively unexplored only to discover that many, many other researchers have had the same idea.
[222001340100] |Of course, this goes back a long way.
[222001340110] |Darwin and <a>Wallace</a> arrived at the theory of natural selection independently.
[222001340120] |Something similar happened with Newton, Leibniz and calculus. 
[222001340130] |So why does it happen?
[222001340140] |Certainly some people have come up with some entertaining anthromorphic theories in which fate has a direction or it is the universe itself pushing us in one direction or another, or perhaps humans are all connected at some psychic level.
[222001340150] |Another, less extravagant possibility, is that humans are fundamentally similar and react similarly to the same environments. 
[222001340160] |In terms of computational modeling, early in the decade it was clear that <a>connectionism</a> had run out of speed.
[222001340170] |Yet there were many researchers who like the computational approach.
[222001340180] |Bayesian formalisms were not well-known, but were well-known enough for those interested to come across them, and they offered a good alternative to connectionism.
[222001340190] |Given that there were many people looking, it's not surprising a number found it. 
[222001340200] |This brings up a general point.
[222001340210] |Trends often occur when many people are all dissatisfied with the options available and there is a prominent available alternative that isn't too radically different, but which is just different enough.
[222001340220] |In the 1980s, boys names starting with the letter J were very popular in America.
[222001340230] |A parent might be looking for a new "J" name and stumble across Joshua, a once-popular but now under-used name.
[222001340240] |It seems fresh and new but still fits the general milieu of liking J-names.
[222001340250] |Unfortunately, there are only so many J names to go around, so many parents ended up finding the same ones. 
[222001340260] |There's a very good chapter on this phenomenon in Pinker's book, which I strongly recommend.