[222001350010] |<title>Are we more moral than cavemen?</title>
[222001350020] |Over the weekend, Eric Posner of <a>Slate</a> asked whether <a>humans have become any more moral</a> in the last few thousand years.
[222001350030] |His target was opinion leaders (most recently, <a>David Brooks</a>) who decry a moral decline in our society.
[222001350040] |Posner asks if opinion leaders have been making such statements since the beginning of time (I believe they have, but I couldn't track down the right citation), and whether if we are to take from that fact that we as humans are far less moral than our caveman ancestors. 
[222001350050] |Posner suspects that we are at least as moral as our ancestors.
[222001350060] |I'm not sure if there is good data on morality (definition would be the first problem in that study), but there is good evidence in terms of violence. 
[222001350070] |In pre-state societies, about 60% of men die in violence.
[222001350080] |Since the Middle Ages, the murder rate in Europe has fallen a hundredfold.
[222001350090] |A smaller proportion of the human population died due to violence in the 20th century than in any previous century (yes, that's including both world wars and Stalin). --------------Further Reading The first two of the factoids above come from The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.
[222001350100] |Chapter 17 is particularly relevant. 
[222001360010] |<title>What is knowledge?</title>
[222001360020] |There are a number of good reasons to want a definition for knowledge.
[222001360030] |For instance, you might be a <a>lexicographer</a>.
[222001360040] |Or you might be a philosopher, wondering what knowledge is.
[222001360050] |Either way, you're out of luck, because knowledge turns out to be a tricky beast. 
[222001360060] |Know vs. Believe The easiest way to start is to compare know with believe.
[222001360070] |What is the difference between: I believe it's Friday. and I know it's Friday. 
[222001360080] |The latter is more certain, but that's not all.
[222001360090] |It's possible to believe it's Friday on a Thursday.
[222001360100] |It's not possible to know that it's Friday on a Thursday.
[222001360110] |So we might be tempted to define knowledge = true belief That's not going to be enough, though.
[222001360120] |Suppose John just woke up from a coma.
[222001360130] |He knows he was in a coma, and he hasn't seen a calendar.
[222001360140] |Still, his intuition tells him it's Friday.
[222001360150] |Can he say he knows that it's Friday? 
[222001360160] |Well, he can say it.
[222001360170] |But even if it turns out that today really is Friday, we still would be uncomfortable saying John knows that it's Friday, unless we believe in ESP or some similar phenomenon. 
[222001360180] |Similarly, I might say that I know Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.
[222001360190] |Even if it turns out that I am right and Obama does become the next president, it's a little weird to say that I knew it.
[222001360200] |It seems better to say I strongly believed it. 
[222001360210] |So we might try the following definition: knowledge = justified true belief The idea being that it only counts as knowledge if I have sufficient evidence. 
[222001360220] |Unfortunately, that won't work, either, though it took some fancy philosophizing to prove it.
[222001360230] |Consider the following example. 
[222001360240] |Suppose I am watching the Red Sox play the Yankees.
[222001360250] |Unbeknownst to me, there has actually been an electrical outage at Fenway, so the cameras aren't working.
[222001360260] |<a>NESN</a> quickly substitutes a tape of a previous game in which the Red Sox played the Yankees, but I don't realize it. 
[222001360270] |In this rebroadcast, the Red Sox beat the Yankees.
[222001360280] |At the same time as I am watching the taped game, the Red Sox are actually beating the Yankees.
[222001360290] |So if I then say, "Today, the Red Sox beat the Yankees," my statement is true (the Red Sox really did beat the Yankees) and justified (I have every reason to believe what I am saying), but still it seems very strange to say that I know that the Red Sox beat the Yankees. 
[222001360300] |Where does this leave us? 
[222001360310] |You might try to save justified true belief by fiddling with justified, but most philosophical accounts I've seen just stop there and claim there is no definition.
[222001360320] |I am inclined to agree, and this is just one more reason to suspect that <a>words just don't have definitions</a>. 
[222001360330] |As I've pointed out before, Greg Murphy has a pretty good explanation of why it makes sense that words don't have definitions.
[222001360340] |The original post is<a> here</a>, but in short, words are used to distinguish objects, but it is always possible to come up with a new object (or idea) that is midway between two words -- that is, fits both and neither, just as the baseball game example above seems to fit both knowledge and belief and neither. 
[222001360350] |I find this pretty convincing, but if he is right, it raises the following question: why do we think words have crisp definitions?
[222001360360] |Even more, why do we really want words to have crisp definitions?
[222001360370] |It seems generations of philosophers would have saved a lot of time.
[222001370010] |<title>Common knowledge</title>
[222001370020] |Language is based on common knowledge.
[222001370030] |This is true in a trivial sense: If I say
[222001370040] |Cats are mammals. 
[222001370050] |Your ability to interpret that sentence relies on our common knowledge that the word cat refers to a furry domestic animal that meows.
[222001370060] |Likewise, I only believe that the sentence will be successful in communicating with you based on my belief that you know what a cat is. 
[222001370070] |Common knowledge and inference Language requires common knowledge in a much more subtle way as well.
[222001370080] |Suppose I say: I am going to Paris tomorrow. 
[222001370090] |Your ability to interpret this sentence correctly depends on your being able to correctly assign meaning to tomorrow.
[222001370100] |Consider the fact that the sentence means different things spoken on different days.
[222001370110] |For us to successfully communicate about tomorrow, we must have interpreted it the same way and know that we have interpreted it the same way. 
[222001370120] |Notice that the word I and even the word Paris has the same problem. 
[222001370130] |It actually gets worse, since some communication requires the even more stringent concept mutual knowledge.
[222001370140] |Suppose I ask my wife if she has fed the cats today.
[222001370150] |Technically, she could response "yes" as long as she has fed at least two cats today.
[222001370160] |But of course, I am asking whether she fed our cats.
[222001370170] |I assume she will understand that's what I mean. 
[222001370180] |Now suppose she just answers "yes."
[222001370190] |For me to interpret this as meaning she fed our cats, I have to assume she knows that I was referring to our cats.
[222001370200] |Of course, for her to be confident that I will correctly interpret her response, she has to assume I assume that she assumes that I originally asked about her feeding our cats. 
[222001370210] |And so on. 
[222001370220] |Certain knowledge? 
[222001370230] |In their highly influential book <a>Relevance</a>, Sperber and Wilson argue that common knowledge cannot exist (actually, they talk about "mutual knowledge," which is something slightly different, but the differences aren't important here): "Mutual knowledge must be certain, or else it does not exist; and since it can never be certain it can never exist." (p. 20) Why do they think mutual knowledge can never be certain?
[222001370240] |Because, in a philosophical sense, it is true.
[222001370250] |I can never be certain my wife knows I'm talking about our cats.
[222001370260] |And she can't be certain that I am referring to our cats.
[222001370270] |Probabilities get multiplied.
[222001370280] |So if confident is always 90%, my confidence that she knows that I know that she knows that I know that she knows I'm referring to our cats is only 53%. 
[222001370290] |Sperber and Wilson use a much-expanded version of this argument to claim that mutual knowledge just doesn't exist and can't play a role in language, beyond perhaps giving the basic meaning of basic words like cat. 
[222001370300] |Are we certain philosophers? 
[222001370310] |A potential problem with their argument is that they assume people are only certain when certainty is justified.
[222001370320] |This is clearly not the case. 
[222001370330] |In recent talks, <a>Steven Pinker</a> has presented evidence that, at least in some circumstances, people really do act as if they believe in mutual knowledge.
[222001370340] |Pinker is interested indirect speech, so his study involved innuendo.
[222001370350] |Suppose John says to Mary, "Would you like to come up to my apartment for a nightcap." 
[222001370360] |How certain are you that John is proposing sex?
[222001370370] |Most people are fairly certain. 
[222001370380] |How certain are you that Mary knows that John is proposing sex?
[222001370390] |Most people are a little less certain. 
[222001370400] |How certain are you that John knows Mary knows John is proposing sex?
[222001370410] |Certainty drops again. etc. 
[222001370420] |Now, change the scenario.
[222001370430] |What if John is particularly crass and says to Mary, "How would you like to go back to my apartment and have sex?" 
[222001370440] |How certain are you that John is proposing sex?
[222001370450] |That Mary knows John is proposing sex?
[222001370460] |That John knows that Mary knows that John is proposing sex?
[222001370470] |Most people remain certain no matter how far out the question is extended. 
[222001370480] |Notice that, at least in theory, Sperber &Wilson's argument should have applied.
[222001370490] |Nobody should be completely certain.
[222001370500] |Mary could have misheard.
[222001370510] |John might have a really odd <a>idiolect</a>.
[222001370520] |But people don't seem to be phased. 
[222001370530] |Does mutual knowledge exist? 
[222001370540] |Well, at least sometimes.
[222001370550] |But I'm not completely sure how this affects Sperber &Wilson's argument.
[222001370560] |They weren't talking just about indirect speech, but about a much broader range of phenomena.
[222001370570] |They were arguing against theories that invoke mutual knowledge right and left, so it still remains to be seen whether mutual knowledge is such a pervasive phenomenon.
[222001380010] |<title>Does your child have philosophical potential?</title>
[222001380020] |Having just written about the difficulty in defining the word know, the following passage from <a>Sperber</a> &<a>Wilson</a>'s <a>Relevance</a>: 
[222001380030] |Suppose, for example, that a child has not yet realised that X knows that P implies P, and so uses know interchangeably with believe.
[222001380040] |We would say that he had not yet mastered the concept.
[222001380050] |On the other hand, if he has grasped this logical pint but is unable to think of a single instance of something he is prepared to call knowledge, we would regard this as a failure of memory or experience (or a mark of philosophical potential) rather than of understanding.
[222001380060] |Cheekiness aside, it actually takes children a while to fully understand the difference between know and believe.
[222001380070] |According to <a>Bartsch</a> &<a>Wellman</a>'s classic corpus study, <a>Children Talk about the Mind</a>, children begin understanding those two verbs in their third year of life, but they don't appear to have truly mastered the concepts until around the age of 4.
[222001380080] |This is in contrast with verbs of desire like want, which kids know by the time they are 2. 
[222001380090] |Why are kids slow to understand know and believe?
[222001380100] |Some of the difficulty appears to be in understanding false beliefs -- that is, the fact that the contents of a person's mind may conflict with the actual state of the world (John believes Algeria is in South America, but it's not).
[222001380110] |Until a child has mastered that concept, there isn't any substantive difference between know and believe.
[222001390010] |<title>Motivations for Science</title>
[222001390020] |Where do cognitive scientists get subjects for their studies?
[222001390030] |There is a certain amount of variation, but the workhorse of cognitive science is the Psych 100 student.
[222001390040] |At many universities, introductory psychology students are required to participate in studies (though I believe there is often an option for people who strongly object). 
[222001390050] |This is billed as an educational experience, and more or less effort is put into making it educational (I've been very impressed with both Harvard and MIT on this point), but it is also part of the machinery that makes the science possible. 
[222001390060] |The other option typically is to pay participants.
[222001390070] |Currently, the going rate at Harvard is $10/hour.
[222001390080] |This is supposed to be compensation for time, travel, etc., but certainly lots of undergraduates who are not currently enrolled in a psych class use it to generate pocket cash. 
[222001390090] |Conflicting Goals One potential drawback of this system is that the motivations of the participants and of the researchers are not always aligned.
[222001390100] |The researcher typically wants to get good data; the participant may just want their $10 or course credit. 
[222001390110] |The truth is the vast majority of participants give the experiment a good faith effort, but there are always some (I'd say about 5-10%, in my experience) who just answer randomly and quickly in order to get out as soon as possible. 
[222001390120] |There are ways to help realign the participants' and researchers' interests.
[222001390130] |One is to the program the experiment such that if you get all the answers right, you finish sooner than if you guess randomly.
[222001390140] |That makes guessing a bit less tempting a strategy.
[222001390150] |(An easy way of doing this in a computerized experiment is to have the computer respond with a long error message every time a question is answered incorrectly, with the effect that participants who make many errors take longer to finish.)
[222001390160] |What Motivations do Parents Have? 
[222001390170] |Prior to working in a <a>developmental lab</a>, I wondered what motivations parents have for bringing in their children for developmental studies.
[222001390180] |It takes them more time, since unlike our "adult" subjects, they typically do not live on campus, and they get compensated less (we give our participants a cheap toy plus $5 for gas -- and $5 means a lot less to a parent than a college student). 
[222001390190] |I had heard it rumored that many are hoping the "affiliation" with Harvard will help their kids in the future or that they are very interested in having a scientist study their kid and discover what a genius the kid is.
[222001390200] |This frankly made me a bit uncomfortable. 
[222001390210] |Now I've actually interacted with a lot of parents and kids, and if those are their motivations, I don't see it.
[222001390220] |The main motivation seems to be that the kids really enjoy coming to the lab.
[222001390230] |We have a big bin full of toys, and we usually play with them for a while when they first come in.
[222001390240] |And then, the experiments are tailored such that kids really find them entertaining.
[222001390250] |Finally, many seem to really enjoy collecting the stuffed animals we give them as prizes at the end. 
[222001390260] |Parents are always looking for ways to keep their children entertained.
[222001390270] |It never occurred to me that taking the kids to a developmental lab would be one of those ways, but it appears that it is. 
[222001390280] |(Some parents are also definitely motivated by participating in science.
[222001390290] |At the end of the experiment, I always describe the experiment to them.
[222001390300] |Some are clearly not overly interested, but others may stay an extra 10-15 minutes to talk about the study.)
[222001400010] |<title>Forgetting what you haven't yet learned</title>
[222001400020] |More than one student has complained that the space in their head is limited, and new information is simply pushing the old information out.
[222001400030] |In the terms of memory research, this is <a>retroactive interference</a>: learning new information causes you to forget old information.
[222001400040] |The way this is typically studied in the laboratory is to have the participant learn something -- often a paired associate (think "<a>Concentration</a>") -- then learn something else, and then finally be tested on the original memory item(s).
[222001400050] |This way, one can vary that middle task in order to study how different activities cause different amounts/types of retroactive interference. 
[222001400060] |The is another type of interference: proactive interference.
[222001400070] |This is the effect that learning one piece of information has on future learning.
[222001400080] |That is, the books a student has already read make it harder to learn new information. 
[222001400090] |Just like retroactive interference, <a>proactive interference</a> is seen in both short-term and long-term memory. 
[222001400100] |Memory Systems: How Does Memory Work? 
[222001400110] |The existence of interference tells us a lot about how memory works, because there is nothing necessary about it. 
[222001400120] |Consider a computer.
[222001400130] |We don't expect each new file we add to our computer to cause the computer to lose other files, short of copying over those original files.
[222001400140] |Similarly, the file I added today should not affect a file I add tomorrow, short of causing me to run out of disk space. 
[222001400150] |So why is human memory affected this way? 
[222001400160] |Overlapping Memories There are a couple reasons it could be.
[222001400170] |One is that memory is probably overlapping.
[222001400180] |A computer -- at least, in its basic forms -- saves each file in a unique place in memory.
[222001400190] |The human brain, however, probably reuses the same units for different memories.
[222001400200] |Memories are overlapping. 
[222001400210] |How exactly this works is still very much a matter of research and debate, but it makes a certain amount of sense.
[222001400220] |Suppose you have several different memories about your mother.
[222001400230] |It would make sense for your mental representation of your mother to show up in each of those memories.
[222001400240] |For one thing, that should make it easier to relate those memories to one another. 
[222001400250] |Searching for Memories Another way interference might appear in memory is in how it effects memory retrieval.
[222001400260] |The more files you put on your computer, the harder it is to find the files you want.
[222001400270] |This is especially true if you keep them all in one directory and use keyword searches. 
[222001400280] |Human memory retrieval probably does not work like a keyword search, but nonetheless it is reasonable to assume that the more memories you have, the more similar memories you have.
[222001400290] |Thus, finding the right memory is harder, because you have to distinguish it from similar memories. 
[222001400300] |How exactly this plays out depends on your model of memory.
[222001400310] |I will talk about one I particularly like in a future post. 
[222001400320] |Upcoming Posts Although  my main research is in semantics and pragmatics -- aspects of language -- I have also worked on working memory.
[222001400330] |I have a paper coming out shortly based partly on an experiment I ran at my Web-based lab.
[222001400340] |Over the next week or two, I plan to write about some of the fundamental questions about memory addressed in that paper, as well as write about the paper and lay out its results.
[222001410010] |<title>It appears I am in the right field</title>
[222001410020] |<a>What Advanced Degree Should You Get?</a>
[222001420010] |<title>Neuroscience that matters</title>
[222001420020] |Science, like any other human activity, is subject to trends and fashions.
[222001420030] |Some are brief fads; others are slow waves that wash through society.
[222001420040] |For the last decade or two, cognitive neuroscience has been hot -- particularly neuroimaging. 
[222001420050] |A pretty typical example of cognitive neuroscience appears in this recent piece by the New York Times about research into the <a>brain basis of sarcasm</a>, which I read because I've been considering starting some work on sarcasm.
[222001420060] |I generally don't like the media coverage of cognitive neuroscience, since it often <a>acts surprised</a> that human behavior is the result of activity in our brain.
[222001420070] |This particular article did not have that problem, but it still suffered from failing to answer the most important question any article has to answer. 
[222001420080] |The Right <a>Parahippocampal Gyrus</a> detects Sarcasm.
[222001420090] |So What? 
[222001420100] |The punch line of the article was that a neuroimaging study found the right parahippocampal gyrus to be active in sarcasm detection.
[222001420110] |Why this is important is left to the reader to decide. 
[222001420120] |So why is it? 
[222001420130] |In a lecture last spring, <a>Randy Buckner</a> distinguished between two types of cognitive neuroscience. 
[222001420140] |In one, neuroscience techniques (patient studies, fMRI, single-cell recording, etc.) are used as behavioral measures.
[222001420150] |The goal of that type of research is to better understand human behavior.
[222001420160] |For instance, you might use fMRI to see if different brain regions are used in interpreting sarcasm and irony, which would suggest that the two phenomena are truly distinct. 
[222001420170] |The other kind of cognitive neuroscience uses the techniques of neuroscience to better understand how the brain produces the behavior in question.
[222001420180] |For instance, what computations to the neurons perform such that a person can perceive sarcasm? 
[222001420190] |I am sympathetic to both types of cognitive neuroscience, though I tend to feel that there are very few human behaviors we understand well enough to seriously explore their neural instantiations (the basic phenomena of sensory perception are the only clear candidates I can think of, though basic memory processes might also make that list).
[222001420200] |You can't reverse-engineer a product if you don't know what it does. 
[222001420210] |Interpreting Cognitive Neuroscience In terms of the sarcasm article, it wasn't clear what this study adds to our understanding of what sarcasm is.
[222001420220] |So I don't think it counts as the first type of cognitive neuroscience. 
[222001420230] |Is it the second type?
[222001420240] |Some part of the brain must be involved in detecting sarcasm, so discovering which part of the brain it is in and of itself doesn't tell us much about implementation.
[222001420250] |Finding out that Sprint's national HQ is in Overland Park, KS, doesn't, by itself, tell you very much about Sprint, other than that it has an HQ, which you already probably guessed. 
[222001420260] |That doesn't  mean it's without information.
[222001420270] |Based on what you know about Overland Park, KS -- its tax regulations, local worker pool, lines of transportation and communication, etc. -- you might derive a great deal of information about how Spring works.
[222001420280] |But, unfortunately, the Times article didn't tell us much useful.
[222001420290] |I certainly don't know enough about the right  parahippocampal gyrus to really tell much of a story. 
[222001420300] |This is not a criticism of the journal article, which I haven't yet read.
[222001420310] |I'm actually pretty happy somebody is working on this issue.
[222001420320] |I just wish the Times had told me something useful about their work.
[222001430010] |<title>Interference in Memory</title>
[222001430020] |I wrote recently about <a>interference processes that cause memory failure</a>.
[222001430030] |As I wrote before, retroactive interference is when learning new information causes you to forget what you learned previously.
[222001430040] |In proactive interference, old information makes it hard to learn new information.
[222001430050] |It turns out that there are (maybe) two types of proactive interference, and this may tell us a great deal about how memory works. 
[222001430060] |How Specific? 
[222001430070] |Half a century ago, Keppel &Underwood found that people quickly get worse at memory tasks.
[222001430080] |A basic task works like this: Remember the following letters: "etnmwo" 
[222001430090] |Now look away from the screen.
[222001430100] |After a few seconds, ask yourself what the letters were.
[222001430110] |How many could you remember? 
[222001430120] |Keppel &Underwood task was slightly different, but this gives you the basic idea.
[222001430130] |Again, what they found was that as people play this game, they actually do best on the first trial, worse on the 2nd, even worse on the 3rd, etc.
[222001430140] |(People bottom out fairly quickly, as we'll see in a future post.) 
[222001430150] |Keppel &Underwood suggested that this was due to proactive interference, which now seems pretty well established. 
[222001430160] |Later researchers discovered a curious thing.
[222001430170] |If the memory task is done with letters for a while, and then the experimenter switches to numbers, the participants suddenly get better.
[222001430180] |It doesn't have to just be letters and numbers.
[222001430190] |Switching from one type of item (say, names of car manufacturers) to another type (say, names of animal species) typically leads to an improvement in performance. 
[222001430200] |This has been called "<a>release from proactive interference</a>."
[222001430210] |But it is not the only kind. 
[222001430220] |More Specific The type of proactive interference discussed above has been called "item-nonspecific" proactive interference.
[222001430230] |Learning information about one item made it harder to remember information about similar items. 
[222001430240] |This can be contrasted with "item-specific" proactive interference.
[222001430250] |As an example, go back to the sample memory test above.
[222001430260] |You were asked to remember "etnmwo."
[222001430270] |Suppose in the next trial, I asked you to remember "oaqzp" for a few seconds, after which I asked you: "Is one of the letters are are supposed to remember an E?" 
[222001430280] |There is a decent chance you would incorrectly say "yes."
[222001430290] |This is because, although E was not one of the letters on this trial, it was one of the letters on the previous one.
[222001430300] |If I had instead asked about the letter C, which was not in either trial, you would be more likely to respond correctly and say "No." 
[222001430310] |This effect was discovered by Monsell using what is called the "Recent Probes Paradigm" -- which is basically what I just described. 
[222001430320] |Two Types or One? 
[222001430330] |One could legitimately wonder if these are really two different phenomena.
[222001430340] |That is, maybe item-specific proactive interference is simply a stronger version of item-nonspecific proactive interference. 
[222001430350] |It is hard to answer that question using behavioral experiments.
[222001430360] |Luckily, this is one of those places where neuroimaging can be helpful in understanding behavior.
[222001430370] |Recent neuroimaging results have found a strong overlap between the brain regions involved in the two types of proactive interference. 
[222001430380] |What Does this Say about Models of Memory? 
[222001430390] |Jonides and colleagues have been developing a model of memory that may both describe and predict the data on proactive interference. 
[222001430400] |In the model, to the extent that I understand it, you perform a short-term memory task like the ones described above by activating representations of the items.
[222001430410] |That is, to remember "aort," you would activate your long-term memory representations of A, O, R &T. But you do not actually hold those representations in consciousness; it is more that you make them easy to retrieve. 
[222001430420] |Now, suppose I ask you to repeat back those letters.
[222001430430] |You have to retrieve each of the four letters into consciousness so that you can give me your answer.
[222001430440] |You do this via something vaguely akin to a keyword search.
[222001430450] |That is, you search your memory for relevant features (e.g., a letter, recently encountered, seen on a blog, etc.).
[222001430460] |Since A, O, R &T all match those features and are all activated in memory, you retrieve them successfully. 
[222001430470] |Suppose on the next trial, though, you have to remember W, Z, P &E.
[222001430480] |So you activate those representations in memory.
[222001430490] |But A, O, R &T also remain somewhat active.
[222001430500] |And they also match most of the features (i.e., "keywords").
[222001430510] |So you might accidentally retrieve one of them (item-specific proactive interference).
[222001430520] |In addition, since <a>memories overlap</a>, the still-active A, O, R &T representations make it harder to activate and maintain the representations of W, Z, P &E, since the compete for use of some of the same neurons.
[222001430530] |This might just make you fail to activate or retrieve anything at all. 
[222001430540] |Notice that if on the next trial, I ask you to remember 9, 3, 5, &2, these items share fewer features with the letters on the previous trials, making the "keyword search" easier.
[222001430550] |Also, the representations of 9, 3, 5 &2 in the brain are more distinct from the representations of the letters in trials one and two than either were from each other.
[222001430560] |Thus, you get release from item-nonspecific proactive interference. 
[222001430570] |Monsell, S. (1978).
[222001430580] |Recency, immediate recognition memory, and reaction time.
[222001430590] |Cognitive Psychology, 10(4), 465-501. 
[222001430600] |Keppel, G., Underwood, B.J. (1962).
[222001430610] |Proactive inhibition in short-term retention of single items.
[222001430620] |Journal of Verbal Learning &Verbal Behavior, 1, 153-161. 
[222001430630] |Jonides, J., Lewis, R.L., Nee, D.E., Lustig, C.A., Berman, M.G. (2008).
[222001430640] |The mind and brain of short-term memory.
[222001430650] |Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 193-224. 
[222001440010] |<title>Children are very, very strange</title>
[222001440020] |I mentioned previously that I have a <a>summer intern working with me</a> on a language acquisition project.
[222001440030] |As part of one of our projects, she is analyzing transcripts of children interacting with their parents.
[222001440040] |Here are some observations she made recently:
[222001440050] |I have come to learn that interacting with small children must be incredibly painful and that parents and their children have weird conversations. 
[222001440060] |The "painful" observation was left without further information, but she included the following excerpt from a transcript to illustrate the latter point: Father: Marky's sexy?Child: Yeah.Father: Why is he sexy?Child: Because he doesn't have any clothes on.Father: You're right.Father: Marky's sexy because he doesn't have any clothes on. 
[222001440070] |Father: Are you sexy now? 
[222001440080] |Here is another data point she included: Child: But we think G-d is mean.Father: Why?Child: Because he spanks me.
[222001450010] |<title>How Much do you Know?</title>
[222001450020] |Mahesh Srinivasan, another member of the <a>Laboratory for Developmental Studies</a>, has just started his inaugural <a>Web-based study</a>.
[222001450030] |It's a quick 1-2 minute experiment assessing people's general knowledge about the world.
[222001450040] |Participants will answer two simple questions and be asked to do a simple task.
[222001450050] |At the end of the experiment, you will find out what it was all about. 
[222001450060] |Participate by <a>clicking here</a>.
[222001460010] |<title>Publishing scientific results: a timeline</title>
[222001460020] |A couple months ago, I talked about the <a>slow rate of publication</a>.
[222001460030] |I find the sloth-speed process irritating not so much because I am impatient -- though I am -- but because I would like to release the results of studies to my participants while they still remember they were in the study.
[222001460040] |Just for fun, I thought I would outline the chronology of my upcoming paper in <a>PLoS One</a>. 
[222001460050] |Winter 2006-2007 Began <a>data collection</a>. 
[222001460060] |June 2007 Data collection complete September 11, 2007 Paper submitted to <a>Experimental Psychology</a> October 11, 2007 Paper rejected by Experimental Psychology ...Several months spent thinking about how to improve the paper... 
[222001460070] |March 22, 2008 New paper submitted to <a>PLoS One</a>.
[222001460080] |Told to expect a reply within a few weeks. 
[222001460090] |June 3, 2008 PLoS One asks for some minor revisions June 16, 2008 Revision sumbitted June 20, 2008 Paper accepted July 23, 2008 Paper will be published online ................It is worth noting that both Experimental Psychology and PLoS One are extraordinarily fast.
[222001460100] |That's part of why I submitted to those two journals.
[222001460110] |I submitted another paper in late January to a more traditional journal.
[222001460120] |I am still waiting for a reply. 
[222001470010] |<title>Cats, instincts, and evolution</title>
[222001470020] |Cats are <a>very strange animals</a>.
[222001470030] |One of their odder behaviors is scratching around their food bowl.
[222001470040] |They look like they are trying to kick dirt over the food in order to bury it.
[222001470050] |Presumably that is what <a>they do in the wild</a>.
[222001470060] |But the "dirt" house cats are kicking over the food is imaginary.
[222001470070] |This suggests that wild cats do not know they are burying their food.
[222001470080] |That is, it is not goal-directed behavior.
[222001470090] |If it were goal-directed, house cats would either not bother with the scratching, or they would be very frustrated by their lack of success. 
[222001470100] |This is not to suggest at all that cats are all dumb instinct.
[222001470110] |On the one hand, much of their behavior seems very human-like.
[222001470120] |On the other hand, plenty of human behavior is instinct masquerading as goal-directed behavior.
[222001470130] |Sex, for instance, has a clear purpose but that's not usually why we do it.
[222001470140] |(Even if you believe sex has purposes other than procreation, such as pair bonding, it is hard to explain <a>prostitution</a> -- which, while not as common as cats "burying" their food, is still common enough to require explanation. 
[222001470150] |So why do cats scratch around their bowl?
[222001470160] |I suspect it just feels good.
[222001470170] |Evolution does not require that we know why we do what we do -- just that we do it.
[222001480010] |<title>CogLangLab's first published paper!</title>
[222001480020] |The first paper to contain data collected at my website (technically, at the old website) has <a>just been published</a>.
[222001480030] |The experiment in question was <a>The Time Course of Visual Short-Term Memory</a>.
[222001480040] |This is the first of hopefully two papers using that data.
[222001480050] |The second paper will look at individual differences and aging.
[222001480060] |That paper is still in preparation and will hopefully be submitted in August. 
[222001480070] |I will explain the results and import of the just-published paper in an upcoming post. 
[222001480080] |-------- Hartshorne, J.K. (2008).
[222001480090] |Visual working memory capacity and proactive interference.
[222001480100] |Public Library of Science One
[222001490010] |<title>Results from an Experiment: The Time Course of Visual Short-Term Memory</title>
[222001490020] |The first <a>experiment I ran on the Web</a> has <a>finally made it into print</a>. Rather fittingly, it has been published in a Web-based journal: <a>The Public Library of Science One</a>.
[222001490030] |Visual Memory is a Scrawny Creature That experiment, <a>The Time Course of Visual Short-Term Memory</a>, was part of a larger study probing a fundamental question about memory: why is visual working (short-term) memory so lousy?
[222001490040] |In recent years, visual memory folk like <a>Edward Vogel</a> and <a>George Alvarez</a> have debated whether we can store as many as four items in visual memory, while on the other hand researchers looking more at verbal memory, such as Nelson Cowan, have been arguing over whether verbal memory can store only four items.
[222001490050] |There are memory tricks that can allow you to keep a hundred words in short-term memory; nobody has reported any similar tricks for visual memory. 
[222001490060] |There are many other ways in which visual memory is piddly compared to verbal memory, and I go into them in depth in the paper.
[222001490070] |Interestingly, previous researchers have not made much out of this difference, possibly because people seem to work on either visual memory or verbal memory, but not both. 
[222001490080] |Does Verbal Memory Explain the Differences between Humans and Apes? 
[222001490090] |One possibility that occurred to me is that if verbal memory in fact is considerably more robust and more useful than visual memory, that would endow verbal animals (i.e., adult humans) with significant advantages over non-verbal animals (e.g., human infants and all other animals).
[222001490100] |Just as writing has allowed some human cultures to supplement our limited memory capacity -- try doing a complicated math problem in your head; the real limitation is memory -- language could allow us to supplement limited non-verbal memory systems. 
[222001490110] |In fact, I found that many of the differences between adult humans on the one side and young children and apes on the other are found in tasks with large working memory demands.
[222001490120] |More examples are given in the paper, but this includes <a>theory of mind</a> tasks. 
[222001490130] |Is Verbal Memory Really Better? 
[222001490140] |Of course, this is fruitless speculation unless visual working memory is really inferior.
[222001490150] |The problem is that visual and verbal memory capacity is tested in somewhat different ways.
[222001490160] |The easiest way to test verbal memory capacity is to give people a list of words to remember and then ask them to repeat that list back (this forms an important part of many IQ tests). 
[222001490170] |This is obviously impossible with visual memory tests. 
[222001490180] |In a visual memory test, the participant is usually shown several images to remember.
[222001490190] |Then, after a delay, they are shown another image and asked if that is the same as one of the original images.
[222001490200] |Notice that you can be right 50% of the time just by guessing.
[222001490210] |Thus, to get a good measure, you need to do this many times. 
[222001490220] |Proactive Interference This brings up the specter of proactive interference.
[222001490230] |I have <a>written about proactive interference</a> recently and won't belabor it here.
[222001490240] |The basic intuition is that if you do many trials of a memory test, it becomes hard to remember which stimuli were on which trial.
[222001490250] |So if you have been asked to remember circles of different colors, and then you are asked if the last trial contained a blue circle, you might remember that you have seen a blue circle recently but not remember if it was on the last trial or not. 
[222001490260] |So if visual working memory capacity tasks require many trials and verbal working memory tasks do not, one possible reason for the poor performance observed for visual working memory might be greater proactive interference. 
[222001490270] |Nope -- not proactive interference The short version of the results of the published paper is that proactive interference does decrease measured capacity for visual working memory, but not by very much (about 15%).
[222001490280] |So it cannot account for the differences between visual and verbal working memory.
[222001490290] |The search must go on. 
[222001490300] |I hope to describe how the Web-based experiment contributed to this result in a future post.
[222001490310] |But interested readers can also read <a>the paper itself</a>.
[222001490320] |It is fairly short and reasonably non-technical. 
[222001490330] |<a>Participate in current Web-based experiments at my lab by clicking here</a>. ------- Hartshorne, J.K. (2008).
[222001490340] |Visual working memory capacity and proactive interference.
[222001490350] |Public Library of Science One 
[222001500010] |<title>Should we trust experiments on the Web?</title>
[222001500020] |When I first started doing Web-based experiments, a number of people in my own lab were skeptical as to whether I would get anything valuable out of them.
[222001500030] |Part of this was due to worries about method (How do you know the participants are paying attention?
[222001500040] |How do you know they are telling the truth?), but I think part of it was also a suspicion of the Internet in general, which, as we all know, is full of an awful lot of crap.
[222001500050] |For this reason, I expected some difficulties getting my Web-based studies published.
[222001500060] |However, the <a>first of these studies</a> was accepted without much drama, and what concerns the reviewers did raise had nothing to do with the Web (granted that only one of the experiments in that paper was run online).
[222001500070] |Similarly, while the second study (run in collaboration with <a>Tal Makovski</a>) has run into some significant hurdles in getting published, none of them involved the fact that the experiments were all run online. 
[222001500080] |Until now.
[222001500090] |After major revisions and some new experiments, we submitted the paper to a new journal where we thought it would be well-received.
[222001500100] |Unfortunately, it was not, and many of the concerns involved the Web.
[222001500110] |Two of the reviewers clearly articulated that they just don't trust Web-based experiments.
[222001500120] |One went so far as to say that Web-based experiments should never be run unless there is absolutely no way to do the experiment in the lab. 
[222001500130] |(I would use direct quotes, but the reviewers certainly did not expect their comments to show up on a blog, anonymously or not.
[222001500140] |So you will have to take my word for it.) 
[222001500150] |Obviously, I trust Web-based experiments.
[222001500160] |I have written enough posts about why I think concerns are misguided, so I won't rehash that here.
[222001500170] |I am more interested in why exactly people have trouble with Web-based experiments as opposed to other methodologies. 
[222001500180] |Is it because the Web-based method is relatively new?
[222001500190] |Is it because the <a>Internet is full of porn?</a>
[222001500200] |Or is it simply the case that for any given method, there are a certain number of people who just don't trust it? 
[222001500210] |I have been doing street-corner surveying lately (a well-established method), and I can tell you that although it ultimately gives decent results, some very odd things happen along the way.
[222001500220] |But I suppose if, as a reviewer, I tried to reject a paper because I "just don't trust surveys," the action editor would override me.
[222001510010] |<title>A scientist at work: Street corner surveying</title>
[222001510020] |As much as I love <a>Web-based experiments</a>, they aren't ideal in all situations.
[222001510030] |Currently, I have a series of short surveys, each of which requires 20 or so participants.
[222001510040] |When I say "series of short surveys," that doesn't mean I have them all in advance.
[222001510050] |The results of each survey dictate what the next survey will be.
[222001510060] |This is hard to run online, because it means I need time between surveys to analyze the results and think up a new experiment.
[222001510070] |On the Web, it's hard to take a timeout. 
[222001510080] |Instead, I took on a new research assistant, made a sign, and bought a bunch of candy.
[222001510090] |Then I set up shop outside the <a>Harvard Science Center</a> and began giving away candy in exchange for participation in the surveys. 
[222001510100] |At first, it was awful.
[222001510110] |We got lots of tight-lipped smiles, but nobody stopped or even really made eye-contact.
[222001510120] |I thought, "Why did I think this was a good idea?
[222001510130] |I hate this sort of thing."
[222001510140] |Within about 10 minutes, though, we got into a groove and have been collecting data at a pretty good clip every time we go out. 
[222001510150] |It turns out that, other than feeling like a canvaser, it's a fun way of collecting data.
[222001510160] |You get to be outdoors and away from the computer.
[222001510170] |You get to actually interact with people.
[222001510180] |And the pace of the research is if anything even faster than Web-based research.
[222001510190] |We typically average 30 or so participants per hour.
[222001510200] |The <a>Moral Sense Test</a> gets that kind of traffic; The<a> Cognition and Language Lab</a>, unfortunately, does not.
[222001510210] |This is probably not unrelated to the <a>392 appearances of "Marc Hauser" in the New York Times</a> archives, compared with the <a>single appearance for "Joshua Hartshorne.</a>"
[222001510220] |(Journalists: if you are reading this, call me!) 
[222001510230] |Street corner surveying is an old method.
[222001510240] |Many people seem to believe it is more reliable than Web-based surveying.
[222001510250] |Why is beyond me.
[222001510260] |We are stopping busy people with other things on their minds.
[222001510270] |Many just want candy.
[222001510280] |We are in a busy, noisy area with tours passing by, camera bulbs flashing and the occasional demonstration.
[222001510290] |And on Tuesdays, there is a farmer's market in the same area. 
[222001510300] |Sometimes the responses are hard to explain.
[222001510310] |One control question reads along the lines of: "John has two children.
[222001510320] |How likely do you think it is that he has two children?
[222001510330] |How likely do you think it is he has three children?"
[222001510340] |More than a few people agree that it is more likely that John has three children than that he has two.
[222001510350] |One person carefully corrected the grammar on one page, which was a neighborly thing to do, except that the grammar on that page was actually right, and the "corrections" made it wrong. 
[222001510360] |When collecting data from humans, there is always noise.
[222001520010] |<title>The verbal memory hegemony</title>
[222001520020] |One fact about the world is that the most famous memory researchers did most of their work on verbal memory.
[222001520030] |<a>Alan Baddeley</a> and <a>George Miller</a> both come to mind -- and I doubt anybody can think of more famous memory researchers in the last 50 years.
[222001520040] |Another fact about the world is that many researchers -- not necessarily Baddeley or Miller -- have assumed that anything discovered using memory tests involving words should apply to other forms of memory as well.
[222001520050] |To pick unfairly on one person, Cowan notes in his masterful paper "<a>The magical number 4 in short-term memory</a>" that out of several related experiments, one has results that diverge from the others.
[222001520060] |Cowan attempts an explanation but basically throws up his hands.
[222001520070] |He doesn't notice that of all the experiments discussed in that section, the divergent one was the only one to use visual rather than verbal stimuli. 
[222001520080] |Similarly, a reviewer of<a> my paper</a> which just came out complained that the results reported in the paper only "told us things we already knew."
[222001520090] |As evidence, the reviewer cited a number of other papers, all of which had investigated verbal rather than visual short-term memory. 
[222001520100] |As it happens, the results in this case were very similar to what had been reported previously for verbal memory.
[222001520110] |But it could have come out differently.
[222001520120] |That was the point of doing the experiment. 
[222001520130] |Partly because of this bias in favor of verbal materials, not enough is known about visual memory, though this has been changing in recent years, thanks in part to folks like Steve Luck, George Alvarez, Yuhong Jiang, Edward Vogel and several others. ----------Cowan, N. (2001).
[222001520140] |The magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity.
[222001520150] |Behavioral and brain sciences, 24, 87-185.
[222001520160] |Hartshorne, J.K. (2008).
[222001520170] |Visual working memory capacity and proactive interference.
[222001520180] |Public Library of Science One
[222001520190] |Miller, G.A. (1956).
[222001520200] |The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information.
[222001520210] |Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
[222001530010] |<title>Monkey See, Monkey Do</title>
[222001530020] |Despite the well-known phrase, monkeys are very poor imitators.
[222001530030] |They also don't point.
[222001530040] |Some researchers have built up theories about the differences between humans and animals around these facts. 
[222001530050] |Recent evidence, however, suggests that <a>dolphins may point</a>. 
[222001530060] |---- This abbreviated post may be the last for a few weeks.
[222001530070] |Coglanglab is going on vacation.
[222001540010] |<title>Research by one of the Progenitors of Web-based Research</title>
[222001540020] |As science goes, Web-based research is still fairly new.
[222001540030] |However, it is now at least a decade old, as the <a>publication record of Ulf-Dietrich Reips</a> shows.
[222001540040] |Reips was one of the first to turn to the Web and has been at the forefront of the field since then. 
[222001540050] |It appears that Reips and Uwe Matzat run a yearly journal devoted to Web-based experiments: the <a>International Journal of Internet Science</a>.
[222001540060] |This journal is, fittingly, open-source.
[222001540070] |Although the journal describes itself as "a peer reviewed open access journal for empirical findings, methodology, and theory of social and behavioral science concerning the Internet and its implications for individuals, social groups, organizations, and society," much of the research so far appears to concentrate on that middle goal: evaluation of Web-based experiments as a methodology (a project in which Reips has been involved in the past). 
[222001540080] |This is obviously important, since a number of people <a>remain skeptical of Web-based research</a>.
[222001540090] |A few of the papers that have come out already are worth mentioning and will appear in future posts.
[222001560010] |<title>What if someone is watching?</title>
[222001560020] |I have heard a number of <a>concerns about </a><a>Web-based research</a>.
[222001560030] |One of the most reasonable -- at least, the one that I find most compelling -- is that participants may be more motivated when an experimenter is physically present.
[222001560040] |This makes some sense: people might take a test more seriously if it is handed to them by a living person than if they run across it on Google.
[222001560050] |The presence of someone watching you provides a certain amount of social pressure. 
[222001560060] |The implications of this question go beyond Web-based experimenting to any type of work conducted "virtually." 
[222001560070] |There are some empirical reasons to suspect this might be a real concern.
[222001560080] |In the famous <a>Milgram experiments</a>, participants' behavior in a simulated torture scenario varied considerably depending on the appearance and actions of the experimenter. 
[222001560090] |That said, <a>my Web-based experiments</a> do not involve torture.
[222001560100] |Some are actually quite fun.
[222001560110] |So it is not at all clear whether the lack of a physical experimenter actually affects how the participant behaves. 
[222001560120] |Luckily, Heike Ollesch, Edgar Heineken, and Frank Schulte of the Universitat Duisberg-Essen have looking into just this question.
[222001560130] |They ran a couple simple experiments.
[222001560140] |In one, participants compared visual images.
[222001560150] |In another, they memorized lists of words.
[222001560160] |Some participants were recruited as part of a standard Web-based experiment.
[222001560170] |In control trials, the same experiment was run, but either in the lab, with an experimenter present, or outside in campus public areas, again with an experimenter present. 
[222001560180] |Participants did no better in the lab-based condition than in the Web-based condition, though in the word-memorization experiment, participants performed more poorly in the public areas (as might be expected), than in either the Web-based or lab-based conditions. 
[222001560190] |In a final, third experiment, participants described short videos.
[222001560200] |They actually produced more comprehensive descriptions in the Web-based condition than in the lab-based or public-area conditions. 
[222001560210] |-------- Stanley Milgram (1963).
[222001560220] |Behavioral Study of obedience.
[222001560230] |The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67 (4), 371-378 DOI: <a>10.1037/h0040525</a> 
[222001560240] |Heike Ollesch, Edgar Heineken, Frank P. Schulte (2006).
[222001560250] |Physical or virtual presence of the experimenter: Psychological online-experiments in different settings International Journal of Internet Science, 1 (1), 71-81
[222001570010] |<title>Politicians who blame universities for their own failings</title>
[222001570020] |There has been <a>some flack in Congress lately</a> about the cost of tuition as the famous private universities.
[222001570030] |The primary senator behind the movement is <a>Charles Grassley</a>, a Republican of Iowa. 
[222001570040] |Tuition, room, board and fees at a university like Harvard are now hovering around $50,000.
[222001570050] |In a recent <a>press release, Grassley writes</a> that: 
[222001570060] |"The Congressional Research Service reports that, on the basis of mean household income of a household in the bottom fifth of the population, the price of college in 2005 was over 70 percent of the household's income." 
[222001570070] |Is there an easy solution that won't cost me anything? 
[222001570080] |Luckily, according to Grassley, there is: make schools spend more of their endowments.
[222001570090] |He notes that endowments are an awful lot like the funds of private foundations: 
[222001570100] |"In the 1960s, Congressman Wright Patman issued a series of reports, one of which included recommendations to limit foundation life to 25 years..." 
[222001570110] |So, colleges should only last for 25 years? 
[222001570120] |I'll give Grassley the benefit of the doubt and assume that's not where he was going with that quote (though there is <a>no evidence to the contrary in the original document</a>).
[222001570130] |In any case, he has a bigger problem: most schools don't have large endowments.
[222001570140] |Just 75 universities control 71% of all endowment assets.
[222001570150] |So that means the other 29% must cover <a>the remaining 2,543 accredited four-year institutions</a> in the US. 
[222001570160] |It's not clear just how well that will work. 
[222001570170] |Grassley also has a big conceptual problem.
[222001570180] |Universities invest their endowments and use the interest for operating costs.
[222001570190] |Costs go up each year.
[222001570200] |Inflation is one reason.
[222001570210] |Increasing numbers of students is another.
[222001570220] |Libraries must expand to incorporate new books.
[222001570230] |New departments (microbiology, ecological studies, Arabic, etc.) must be founded, and rarely are old ones (history, physics, literature) abandoned.
[222001570240] |A stagnant endowment is death to such a university. 
[222001570250] |Again, if your university has an endowment.
[222001570260] |So what about the rest?
[222001570270] |What about the University of Iowa?
[222001570280] |The flagship public university in Grassley's state is the <a>University of Iowa</a>.
[222001570290] |As a relatively wealthy public university, it has an endowment of almost $1,000,000,000.
[222001570300] |That seems like a lot, but it also has over 30,000 students, which gives the university an endowment of just over $32,000 per student. 
[222001570310] |That sounds like a lot, only if the university spends it all this year, after which there won't be any money for next year.
[222001570320] |Grassley wants universities to spend at least 5% of their endowment each year -- even in bad years in which they get less than 5% interest on the endowment. 
[222001570330] |That comes out to $1,615 per student per year.
[222001570340] |The in-state tuition this year (not counting room and board) appears to be $6,554.
[222001570350] |So that kind of spending will make a dent. 
[222001570360] |Except that schools already rely heavily on their endowments.
[222001570370] |That's why they have them.
[222001570380] |I couldn't find numbers for the University of Iowa, but I have heard that many school already spend over 4% of their endowment yearly.
[222001570390] |So let's assume the University of Iowa spends 4%.
[222001570400] |That means Grassley is calling for his home state university to spend an extra $323 per year from its endowment -- or, about the cost of 3-4 college textbooks. 
[222001570410] |And remember, this is one of the country's richest universities.
[222001570420] |The vast majority of schools have far, far smaller endowments, if they have one at all.
[222001570430] |Right on the fact.
[222001570440] |Wrong on the reason. 
[222001570450] |Governments have been steadily cutting funding for publicly-funded universities.
[222001570460] |I'm fortunate to be at an endowment-rich university, but my father is at a public institution in Michigan.
[222001570470] |The budget crisis there has caused steep cutbacks in funding ... and thus steep increases in tuition. 
[222001570480] |This is a story I've heard repeated at many universities across the country. 
[222001570490] |It's nice to be able to go to Harvard.
[222001570500] |But only about <a>2,000 students each year are accepted</a>.
[222001570510] |I'm sure they'd appreciate the help with tuition, but it's not going to affect most Americans.
[222001570520] |The university tuition crisis is in the public universities, which have small endowments, if any. 
[222001570530] |But I suppose Grassley doesn't want to talk about that.
[222001580010] |<title>How many memories fit in your brain? More than we thought</title>
[222001580020] |One of the most obvious facts about memory is that it is not nearly so good as we would like.
[222001580030] |This definitely seems true in day-to-day life, and one focus of my research during the last couple years has been why our ability to remember what we see over even very short time periods is <a>so very limited</a>. 
[222001580040] |So memory is crap, right? 
[222001580050] |It may be hard to remember a visual scene over a very short time period, but <a>new evidence suggests that it is remarkably easy to remember a visual image</a> over a longer period of time (several hours). 
[222001580060] |Researchers at MIT showed participants nearly 3,000 visual images (<a>see some of them here</a>) over the course of 5 1/2 hours.
[222001580070] |Afterwards, their memory was tested.
[222001580080] |They were able to discriminate the pictures they actually saw from slightly altered versions of the same picture nearly 90% of the time. 
[222001580090] |This is frankly incredible.
[222001580100] |When I show participants much, much simpler images and then ask them to recognize the same images just 1 second later, accuracy is closer to 80%! 
[222001580110] |These results are going to necessitate some re-thinking the literature.
[222001580120] |It suggests that our brains are storing a lot more information than many of us thought just a little while ago.
[222001580130] |It also suggests a very strange interaction between time and memory strength that will need to be better understood. 
[222001580140] |So this is a surprise? 
[222001580150] |Yes, and no.
[222001580160] |The results are surprising, but their publication last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was not, at least not for me.
[222001580170] |I had the opportunity to first be stunned by these data nearly a year ago, when the <a>third author</a> gave a talk at Harvard.
[222001580180] |It came up again when he gave another talk during the winter.
[222001580190] |(Oh, and I've known the <a>first author</a> since we sat next to each other during a graduate school application event at MIT, and we still regularly talk about visual memory). 
[222001580200] |So I and many others have had the opportunity to think through the implications for a long time now, which means it is very possible that there are labs which have already completed follow-up studies. 
[222001580210] |While this has nothing to do with the big story itself -- the sheer massiveness of visual memory elicited in this study -- I bring it up as an example of my point from last week: <a>the fact that America is (for now) the center of the scientific world gives us tremendous institutional advantages</a>, the least of which is that it is much easier to stay fully up-to-date.
[222001580220] |If that mantle passes to another country, we will be the ones reading about old news only when it finally comes out in press. 
[222001580230] |Parting Thoughts 
[222001580240] |If you yourself have done research like this, the first thing you probably wondered was where they got 3,000 carefully controlled visual images, not to mention all the test images. 
[222001580250] |<a>Google Images</a>, baby, Google Images.
[222001580260] |It still took a great deal of time, but as I hear the story told, the ability to download huge numbers of web images via Google was immensely helpful.
[222001580270] |This is just one more example of <a>Web search as a tool for science</a>.
[222001590010] |<title>Science Funding and Presidential Politics</title>
[222001590020] |John McCain has just answered a questionnaire by <a>Scientists and Engineers for America</a> (Obama did so several weeks ago). 
[222001590030] |You should <a>read the answers yourself</a>, but as someone who expects to be involved in American science for the next number of decades, I found McCain's disappointing. 
[222001590040] |Obama begins his answer to the first question about American innovation this way: 
[222001590050] |Ensuring that the U.S. continues to lead the world in science and technology will be a central priority for my administration.
[222001590060] |Our talent for innovation is still the envy of the world, but we face unprecedented challenges that demand new approaches.
[222001590070] |For example, the U.S. annually imports $53 billion more in advanced technology products than we export.
[222001590080] |China is now the world’s number one high technology exporter.
[222001590090] |This competitive situation may only worsen over time because the number of U.S. students pursuing technical careers is declining.
[222001590100] |The U.S. ranks 17th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; we were in third place thirty years ago.
[222001590110] |This reassures me that <a>he understand the problem</a>.
[222001590120] |McCain, on the other hand, merely says "I have a broad and cohesive vision for the future of American innovation.
[222001590130] |My policies will provide broad pools of capital, low taxes and incentives for research in America, a commitment to a skilled and educated workforce, and a dedication to opening markets around the world." 
[222001590140] |Solutions to our Problems. 
[222001590150] |OK.
[222001590160] |Maybe McCain isn't as good at setting up the problem as Obama is.
[222001590170] |What does his broad and cohesive vision look like?
[222001590180] |Most of his proposals sound nice, but it's hard to tell what exactly he means.
[222001590190] |For instance, he wants to "utilize the nation's science and technology infrastructure to develop a framework for economic growth both domestically and globally." 
[222001590200] |Sounds good.
[222001590210] |How?
[222001590220] |(One way might be to make the R&D tax credit permanent, something which Obama supports but which McCain strangely neglects to mention.) 
[222001590230] |Other parts of the boilerplate sound like he is merely suggesting we do what we are already doing.
[222001590240] |I am refering to points like "Fund basic and applied research in new and emerging fields such as nanotechnology and biotechnology..." 
[222001590250] |Hmmm.
[222001590260] |<a>We already do that</a>.
[222001590270] |Maybe he intends to increase funding for such projects, but he doesn't say. 
[222001590280] |McCain also says he has supported and will continue to support increasing federal funding for research.
[222001590290] |However, he doesn't say how much.
[222001590300] |Federal funding has increased over the last few years.
[222001590310] |It's just not keeping up with inflation.
[222001590320] |So hazy talk about "increasing funding" may well be meaningless. 
[222001590330] |One of the few concrete proposals McCain makes is to "eliminate wasteful earmarks in order to allocate funds for science and technology investments."
[222001590340] |Sounds good.
[222001590350] |There are <a>$16 billion of earmarks in the 2008 federal budget</a>.
[222001590360] |The budget for the National Institutes of Health alone is $28 billion.
[222001590370] |So even if all the "earmarks savings" were spent on science -- and he has other things he wants to do with that money -- we couldn't even get close to doubling science funding, as Obama has proposed. 
[222001590380] |Does Obama do any better? 
[222001590390] |If I find McCain's answers discouraging, Obama's are heartening.
[222001590400] |Although he uses fewer words than McCain, those words are packed with specific proposals, such as doubling federal funding for basic research over the period of 10 years and making the R&D tax credit permanent. 
[222001590410] |Within the general increase in science funding, Obama shows again that he, or at least his advisors, actually know something about the state of American science, in that he singles out the need to "increase research grants for early-career researchers to keep young scientists entering these fields." 
[222001590420] |The problem that he is referring to is that the current average age of a scientist receiving their f<a>irst NIH grant is over 40 years old</a>.
[222001590430] |While the truism that scientists do their best work prior to the age of 40 is less true for the biomedical researchers NIH funds than it is for mathematicians and physicists, this funding trend is still worrisome. 
[222001590440] |While on that topic, out of all NIH 2007 applications in for a new RO1 grant -- the bread-and-butter grant that funds many or most large labs -- <a>only 19% were funded</a>.
[222001590450] |While we certainly want money to go to the best projects, it's important to remember that when a scientist doesn't get a grant, she doesn't just go back to our day job.
[222001590460] |Science is her day job.
[222001590470] |So she has to apply again.
[222001590480] |With 81% of scientists applying to the NIH failing to get funding each year, that means many, many burdensome reapplications -- taking time and money away from doing actual science. 
[222001590490] |All that is just another reason that significantly increasing federal funding for research is crucial. 
[222001590500] |I won't go into detail about <a>Obama's other policies</a>, but I found them similarly encouraging and, frankly, a breath of fresh air. 
[222001590510] |The Candidate with Vision and Expertise 
[222001590520] |When Obama first began campaigning, some people wondered what the substance behind his vision was.
[222001590530] |As I read through his responses to this questionnaire, I was struck time and time again that (1) he seemed to really understand and appreciate what challenges I face in my daily attempts to do science, and (2) he had concrete plans to address those issues. 
[222001590540] |McCain's, answers, on the other hand, rang hollow and out of touch.
[222001600010] |<title>How to win at baseball (Do managers really matter?)</title>
[222001600020] |It's a standard observation that when a team does poorly, the coach -- or in the case of baseball, the manager -- is fired, even though it wasn't the manager dropping balls, throwing the wrong direction or striking out. 
[222001600030] |Of course, there are purported examples of team leaders that seem to produce teams better than the sum of the parts that make them up.
[222001600040] |<a>Bill Belichick</a> seems to be one, even modulo the cheating scandals.
[222001600050] |<a>Cito Gaston</a> is credited with transforming the Blue Jays from a sub-.500 team into a powerhouse not once but twice, his best claim to excellence being this season, in which he took over halfway through the year. 
[222001600060] |But what is it they do that matters? 
[222001600070] |Even if one accepts that managers matter, the question remains: how do they matter?
[222001600080] |They don't actually play the game.
[222001600090] |Perhaps some give very good pep talks, but one would hope that the world's best players would already be trying their hardest pep talk or no. 
[222001600100] |In baseball, one thing the manager controls is the lineup: who plays, and the order in which they bat.
[222001600110] |While managers have their own different strategies, most lineups follow a basic pattern, the core of which is to put one's best players first. 
[222001600120] |There are two reasons I can think of for doing this.
[222001600130] |First, players at the top of the lineup tend to bat more times during a game, so it makes sense to have your best players there.
[222001600140] |The other reason is to string hits together. 
[222001600150] |The downside of this strategy is that innings in which the bottom of the lineup bats tend to be very boring.
[222001600160] |Wouldn't it make sense to spread out the best hitters so that in any given inning, there was a decent chance of getting some hits. 
[222001600170] |How can we answer this question? 
[222001600180] |To answer this question, I put together a simple model.
[222001600190] |I created a team of four .300 hitters and five .250 hitters.
[222001600200] |At every at-bat, a player's chance of reaching base was exactly their batting average (a .300 hitter reached base 30% of the time).
[222001600210] |All hits were singles.
[222001600220] |Base-runners always moved up two bases on a hit. 
[222001600230] |I tested two lineups: one with the best players at the top, and one with them alternating between the poorer hitters. 
[222001600240] |This model ignores many issues, such as base-stealing, double-plays, walks, etc.
[222001600250] |It also ignores the obvious fact that you'd rather have your best power-hitting bat behind people who get on base, making those home-runs count for more.
[222001600260] |But I think if batting order has a strong effect on team performance, it would still show up in the model. 
[222001600270] |Question Answered 
[222001600280] |I ran the model on each of the line-ups for twenty full 162-game seasons.
[222001600290] |The results surprised me.
[222001600300] |The lineup with the best players interspersed scored nearly as many runs in the average season (302 1/4) as the lineup with the best players stacked at the top of the order (309 1/2).
[222001600310] |Some may note that the traditional lineup did score on average 7 more runs per game, but the difference was not actually statistically significant, meaning that the two lineups were in a statistical tie. 
[222001600320] |Thus, it doesn't appear that stringing hits together is any better than spacing them out. 
[222001600330] |One prediction did come true, however.
[222001600340] |Putting your best hitters at the front of the lineup is better than putting them at the end (291 1/2 runs per season), presumably because the front end of the lineup bats more times in a season.
[222001600350] |Although the difference was statistically significant, it still amounted to only 1 run every 9 games, which is less than I would have guessed. 
[222001600360] |Thus, the decisions a manager makes about the lineup do matter, but perhaps not very much. 
[222001600370] |Parting thoughts 
[222001600380] |This was a rather simple model.
[222001600390] |I'm considering putting together one that does incorporate walks, steals and extra-base hits in time for the World Series in order to pick the best lineup for the Red Sox (still not sure how to handle sacrifice flies or double-plays, though).
[222001600400] |This brings up an obvious question: do real managers rely on instinct, or do they hire consultants to program models like the one I used here? 
[222001600410] |In the pre-<a>Billy Beane</a>/<a>Bill James</a> world, I would have said "no chance."
[222001600420] |But these days <a>management is getting much more sophisticated</a>.
[222001610010] |<title>Where else to read the Cognition and Language Lab blog</title>
[222001610020] |Dear coglanglab.blogspot.com readers. 
[222001610030] |As many of you know, I have what amounts to a mirror of this blog running over at <a>scienceblog.com</a>.
[222001610040] |I maintain this one because it has some great features, like good archiving, better formatting, and the ability to save drafts of posts. 
[222001610050] |However, almost all the traffic is over at the other site.
[222001610060] |This means that while those posts get a number of comments, the ones here do not.
[222001610070] |So if you like reading comments or enjoy the give-and-take of a conversation in comments, you might prefer to read the other site. 
[222001610080] |This has gotten even easier now that scienceblog.com has added my own RSS feed, <a>which you can find here</a>.
[222001610090] |The purveyor of scienceblog.com promises to add some of that extra functionality eventually, but until he does, I will continue posting here as well, so if you prefer this site, you should be able to continue reading it for some time.
[222001620010] |<title>Which do you answer: Mail or Email?</title>
[222001620020] |One of the most difficult problems in research on humans is response bias.
[222001620030] |If you want to study rabbits, it's relatively easy to get a random sample of rabbits to test.
[222001620040] |Rabbits have very little say in the matter. 
[222001620050] |Humans, on the other hand, can choose to participate or not.
[222001620060] |Certain types of people tend not to participate in experiments (low-income, rural people, for instance), while other groups provide the bulk of test subjects (college psychology majors, for instance).
[222001620070] |If you are studying something thought to be fairly independent of geography, SES or education (low-level vision, for instance), this may not matter so much.
[222001620080] |If you are studying social attitudes, it does. 
[222001620090] |Web-based Response Bias 
[222001620100] |One potential concern about Web-based research is that it changes the dynamics of the response bias.
[222001620110] |Surveying college undergraduates may involve consider sample bias, but at least we know what the bias is.
[222001620120] |Some researchers are concerned that Web-based studies must suffer from some research bias (suburban teenagers are probably over-represented on the Web), but it's one we don't understand as well and have less control of. 
[222001620130] |At least one study suggests that, at least in some circumstances, we may not need to worry about this.
[222001620140] |This is according to Sabina Gesell, Maxwell Drain and Michael Sullivan, writing in the last issue of the <a>International Journal of Internet Science</a>.
[222001620150] |They ran an employee-satisfaction survey of hospital employees.
[222001620160] |Half were sent surveys by the Web, and half by regular mail.
[222001620170] |The response rate (the number of surveys completed) was equivalent using both methods, and the reported job satisfaction of both groups was identical. 
[222001620180] |Interestingly, the respondents were also asked whether they preferred a Web-based or paper-based survey.
[222001620190] |The most common response was that they did not care, but of those who expressed an opinion, the majority preferred the survey type they had actually received (sounds like <a>cognitive dissonance</a>). 
[222001620200] |-------- 
[222001620210] |Sabina B. Gesell, Maxwell Drain, Michael P. Sullivan (2007).
[222001620220] |Test of a Web and paper employee satisfaction survey: comparison of respondents and non-respondents International Journal of Internet Science, 2 (1), 45-58
[222001630010] |<title>US science funding stagnates (China charges ahead)</title>
[222001630020] |When the <a>New York Times talks about the US falling behind</a> in science -- <a>or when I do</a> -- it's worth looking at what we mean. 
[222001630030] |The US has long been the world leader in science and technology.
[222001630040] |In 2003, the <a>US accounted for 30% of all scientific publications</a>, and in 2005 it accounted for<a> 30% of all research expenditures</a>.
[222001630050] |However, that first number has fallen precipitously (it was 38% in 1992), probably because the second number is also falling. 
[222001630060] |Adding up the numbers Probably the two most significant sources of public science funding the US are the National Science Foundation (NSF), which covers most types of foundational research, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds medicine- and health-related research (this is broadly interpreted -- I've done research using NIH funds). 
[222001630070] |The following chart shows the levels of NIH funding during the Bush administration.<a><img/></a> 
[222001630080] |As can be seen, the numbers are pretty flat from 2003 on.
[222001630090] |In fact, it hasn't even kept up with inflation. 
[222001630100] |Here are the numbers for NSF, which are similarly flat in recent years:<a><img/></a> 
[222001630110] |To compare with the previous administration, NIH's budget increased 44% in the Bush years -- mostly during the first two.
[222001630120] |In contrast, it grew over 70% during the Clinton years.
[222001630130] |(I couldn't track down NSF funding levels in 1992.) 
[222001630140] |Well, at least funding isn't decreasing.
[222001630150] |That's good, right? 
[222001630160] |Steady levels of funding are better than falling levels of funding, but only barely.
[222001630170] |First, research has driven the US economy for a long time, but its importance grows with each year.
[222001630180] |This means it requires more investment. 
[222001630190] |Second, research becomes more expensive with time.
[222001630200] |The Clinton and Bush years witnessed the incredible explosion in neuroimaging, which has revolutionized neuroscience.
[222001630210] |Neuroimaging is also incredibly expensive.
[222001630220] |(My off-hand recollection is that it costs about $500/hour to use an fMRI machine.)
[222001630230] |The number of neuroimaging projects has grown exponentially in the last two decades.
[222001630240] |That money must come from somewhere. 
[222001630250] |Also, in terms of the US's relative position with the rest of the world, it's important to point out that other countries are emphatically not dropping the ball.
[222001630260] |These are China's government science and technology expenditures from 2001 to 2006: 
[222001630270] |That is much more like it.
[222001630280] |Chinese research expenditures have been increasing rapidly for the last couple decades, but I graphed only the Bush-era data I could find in order to make it comparable to the charts above. 
[222001630290] |China is of course not alone.
[222001630300] |The EU, like China, currently lags far behind the US in terms of research expenditures.
[222001630310] |However, the EU parliament adopted a plan to <a>increase expenditures (this include private-sector spending) to 3% of the GDP</a>, which would put it slightly ahead of the US in terms of percentage of GDP and well ahead of the US in terms of total expenditures (the EU's GDP is larger than that of the US). 
[222001630320] |The Road Ahead 
[222001630330] |Although nobody should be a one-issue voter, I firmly believe that investment in science funding is crucial to America's future.
[222001630340] |As <a>I pointed out recently</a>, Barack Obama has repeatedly <a>called for substantial increases in US science funding</a>.
[222001630350] |If John McCain is interested in increasing science funding, I can't find evidence of it.
[222001650010] |<title>Do you have the memory of a crow?</title>
[222001650020] |It appears that humans aren't the only ones with <a>exceptionally good long-term memory</a>.
[222001650030] |<a>Crows not only remember individual faces over long periods</a> of time and even seem to be able to communicate to other crows information about the people in question. 
[222001650040] |That animals, especially birds, have good memories is not all that surprising.
[222001650050] |That they remember human faces so well is striking. 
[222001650060] |There is an <a>ongoing debate in the literature</a> about whether the fact that humans are so good at processing faces is because we have specialized neural circuitry for human faces.
[222001650070] |Given that humans are an intensely social species, it would make sense for us to develop special face-recognition systems.
[222001650080] |It remains to be seen just how good crow memory for human faces is (the study in question is limited in some ways), but if their human face perception is very good, that would call for a very interesting explanation.
[222001660010] |<title>Who advises McCain and Obama on science issues?</title>
[222001660020] |I <a>mentioned recently</a> that Obama's statements on science policy convinced me that he had actually talked to some scientists and understood what it's like on the ground.
[222001660030] |McCain has yet to convince me. 
[222001660040] |I wasn't surprised, then, to see in this week's Science a report that Obama has been very active in soliciting advice from scientists, whereas McCain's advisory committee was described as "two guys and a dog." 
[222001660050] |The article (<a>subscription required</a>) details interactions between scientists and the two campaigns.
[222001660060] |The primary additional piece of analysis that struck me was the following statement: 
[222001660070] |For many U.S. academic researchers, presidential politics comes down to two big issues: getting more money for science and having a seat at the table.
[222001660080] |The first requires agreement between the president and Congress, however, and any promise to increase research spending could easily be derailed by the Iraq war, an ailing economy, and rising health care and energy costs.
[222001660090] |That puts a premium on the second issue, namely, the appointment of people who will make the key decisions in the next Administration.
[222001660100] |This makes the open nature of the Obama campaign a good sign. 
[222001660110] |The article also reports that Obama's science advisors weren't necessary even asked whether they supported his candidacy.
[222001660120] |After an administration that excluded anyone with a contrary opinion -- or contrary facts -- that is also encouraging.
[222001670010] |<title>New research on understanding metaphors</title>
[222001670020] |Metaphors present a problem for anybody trying to explain language, or anybody trying to teach a computer to understand language.
[222001670030] |It is clear that nobody is supposed to take the statement, "<a>Sarah Palin is a barracuda</a>" literally. 
[222001670040] |However, we can imagine that such phrases are memorized like any other idiom or, for that matter, any word.
[222001670050] |Granted, we aren't sure how word-learning works, but at least metaphor doesn't present any new problems. 
[222001670060] |Clever Speech 
[222001670070] |At least, not as long as it's a well-known metaphor.
[222001670080] |The problem is that the most entertaining and inventive language often involves novel metaphors. 
[222001670090] |So suppose someone says "<a>Sarah Palin is the new Harriet Miers</a>."
[222001670100] |It's pretty clear what this means, but it seems to require some very complicated processing.
[222001670110] |Sarah Palin and Harriet Miers have many things in common.
[222001670120] |They are white.
[222001670130] |They are female.
[222001670140] |They are Republican.
[222001670150] |They are American.
[222001670160] |They were born in the 20th Century.
[222001670170] |What are the common characteristics that matter? 
[222001670180] |This is especially difficult, since in a typical metaphor, the common characteristics are often abstract and only metaphorically common. 
[222001670190] |Alzheimer's and Metaphor 
[222001670200] |Some <a>clever new research just published in Brain and Language</a> looked at comprehension of novel metaphors in Alzheimer's Disease patients. 
[222001670210] |It is already known that AD patients do reasonably well on comprehending well-known metaphors.
[222001670220] |But what about new metaphors? 
[222001670230] |Before I get to the data, a note about why anybody would bother troubling AD patients with novel metaphors: neurological patients can often help discriminate between theories that are otherwise difficult to distinguish.
[222001670240] |In this case, one theory is that something called <a>executive function</a> is important in interpreting new metaphors. 
[222001670250] |Executive function is hard to explain and much about it is poorly understood, but what is important here is that AD patients are impaired in terms of executive function.
[222001670260] |So they provide a natural test case for the theory that executive function is necessary to understand novel metaphors. 
[222001670270] |The results 
[222001670280] |In this study, AD patients were as good as controls at understanding popular metaphors.
[222001670290] |While control participants were also very good at novel metaphors, AD patients had a marked difficulty.
[222001670300] |This may suggest that executive function is important in understanding novel metaphors and gives some credence to theories based around that notion. 
[222001670310] |This still leaves us a long way from understanding how humans so easily draw abstract connections between largely unrelated objects to produce and understand metaphorical language.
[222001670320] |But it's another step in that direction. 
[222001670330] |----- M AMANZIO, G GEMINIANI, D LEOTTA, S CAPPA (2008).
[222001670340] |Metaphor comprehension in Alzheimer’s disease: Novelty matters Brain and Language, 107 (1), 1-10 DOI: <a>10.1016/j.bandl.2007.08.003</a>
[222001680010] |<title>Why the Insanity Defense is Un-scientific</title>
[222001680020] |In his class book <a>Emotional Intelligence</a>, Daniel Goleman presents a very compelling case for studying individual differences in social and emotional skills.
[222001680030] |Since people who are less empathic -- less aware of others' thoughts and feelings -- are apparently more likely to commit crime, Goleman argues that this raises the issue of what to do about criminals who are biologically limited in their empathic abilities:
[222001680040] |If there are biological patterns at play in some kinds of criminality -- such as a neural defect in empathy -- that does not argue that all criminals are biologically flawed, or that there is some biological marker for crime ...
[222001680050] |Even if there is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases, that does not mean all who have it will drift to crime; most will not.
[222001680060] |A lack of empathy should be factored in with all other psychological, economic, and social forces that contribute to a vector toward criminality.
[222001680070] |This may seem like a reasonable, middle-of-the road take on the issue, but I would argue that it is actually an extremely radical, non-scientific statement.
[222001680080] |(Since it is such a common sentiment, I realize this means I may be calling most of the public crazy radicals.
[222001680090] |So be it.
[222001680100] |Sometimes, that's the case.) 
[222001680110] |The Fundamental Axiom of Cognitive Science 
[222001680120] |It is the scientific consensus that all human behavior is the result activity in the brain.
[222001680130] |Like <a>gravity</a> and the <a>laws of thermodynamics</a>, this cannot be proven beyond a doubt (in fact, <a>there's a good argument that nothing can be proven beyond a doubt</a>).
[222001680140] |However, it is the foundation upon which modern psychology and neuroscience is built, and there is no good reason to doubt it. 
[222001680150] |In fact, many of the world's events cannot be understood otherwise.
[222001680160] |Classic examples are people who, as a result of brain injury, are <a>unaware of the fact that they can see</a> or that <a>the left half of the world exists</a> or think their leg is a foreign entity not part of their own body.
[222001680170] |The oddest fact about such syndromes is that such patients sometimes are completely unaware of their problem and cannot understand it when it is explained to them (<a>Oliver Sacks</a> is a great source of such case histories). 
[222001680180] |The Problem for the Insanity Defense 
[222001680190] |Back to Goleman.
[222001680200] |He writes "Even if there is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases..." 
[222001680210] |I hope that the fundamental problem with the quote is now clear.
[222001680220] |The consensus of the scientific community is that for any behavior, personality trait or disposition, there is always a biological basis.
[222001680230] |There are fundamental brain differences between Red Sox fans and Yankees fans, or between those attracted to <a>Tom Cruise</a> or <a>Nicole Kidman</a>.
[222001680240] |There is some brain state such that it is being a Red Sox fan. 
[222001680250] |So whenever somebody says, "My brain made me do it," they are telling the truth. 
[222001680260] |The Soft Bigotry of Medical Evidence 
[222001680270] |As matters currently stand, however, certain brain differences are privileged over others.
[222001680280] |Say Jane and Sally are both accused of a similar crime, but Jane has a known brain "abnormality" that correlates with criminal behavior, but Sally has no such brain data to point to.
[222001680290] |They may likely face different sentences. 
[222001680300] |However, the difference between Jane and Sally may have more to do with the state of our scientific understanding than anything else.
[222001680310] |If Sally is predisposed to crime in some way, then it must be because of some difference in her brain.
[222001680320] |At the very least, if you were able to take a snapshot of her brain during the moments leading up the crime, there would be some difference between her brain and the brain of Rebecca, who had the opportunity to commit the crime but chose not to, because the act of choosing is itself a brain state. 
[222001680330] |The effect is to discriminate between people based, not on their actions or on their persons, but based on current medical knowledge. 
[222001680340] |A problem without an easy solution 
[222001680350] |I think that most people prefer that the legal system only punish those who are responsible for wrongdoing.
[222001680360] |If we exclude from responsibility everybody whose actions are caused by their brains, we must exclude everybody.
[222001680370] |If we include even those who clearly have little understanding or control of their own actions, that seems grossly unfair. 
[222001680380] |I don't have any insight into how to solve the problem, but I don't think the current standard is workable.
[222001680390] |It is an exceptionally complex problem, and many very smart people have thought about it very hard.
[222001680400] |I hope they come up with something good.
[222001690010] |<title>What Babies Pay Attention To</title>
[222001690020] |The world is a busy place, and there is much for an infant to learn.
[222001690030] |The typical infant, when carried around town by her parent, when she is not asleep is fixating curiously and intently on the world around her. 
[222001690040] |Of course, there are a lot of things in the world that are relevant and worth knowing about, and many which are probably not worth paying too much attention to.
[222001690050] |Since the baby has so much learn, it would be ideal if children had some mechanism for knowing what they should learn and what they can safely ignore. 
[222001690060] |The Pedagogical Learning Stance 
[222001690070] |Gergely Csibra and Gyorgy Gergely have argued that specific social cues are used by caregivers to direct infants to those things most worth learning about.
[222001690080] |They refer to this as a form of "pedagogy," but my sense is that they don't mean something much like formal education -- these cues can be exchanged without the adult necessarily being aware of them. 
[222001690090] |Their theory has drawn more attention to the ways in which adults and infants communicate, and what they communicate about.
[222001690100] |In a recent paper published in Science Magazine, Csibra, Gergely and colleagues suggest that they have found a partial solution to an old riddle in human development. 
[222001690110] |Perseveration 
[222001690120] |Perserverance -- sticking to your goals -- is often an admirable quality.
[222001690130] |Perseveration -- fixating on the same thing long after it ceases to be relevant or useful -- is not. 
[222001690140] |Babies are known to perseverate.
[222001690150] |In one particularly classic experiment, <a>Piaget</a> found a strange perseveration in infant behavior.
[222001690160] |The experiment is easy to replicate at home and works like this: 
[222001690170] |Put a ball in a bucket such that the infant cannot see into the bucket.
[222001690180] |Let the infant retrieve the ball from the bucket.
[222001690190] |Repeat this several times. 
[222001690200] |Now, in full view of the child, put the ball in a different bucket.
[222001690210] |Despite the fact that the infant just saw the ball go into the second bucket -- and despite the fact that infants are very good at tracking hidden objects and remembering where they are (contrary to earlier believe, infants ahve no problems with basic object permanence) -- they will typically look for the ball in the first bucket (81% of the time in the current study). 
[222001690220] |Are babies just stupid? 
[222001690230] |This failure on the part of the infants to carry out this simple task has often been described as a failure of inhibition.
[222001690240] |The babies remember that a particular action (searching in the first bucket) has typically led to a positive reward (a ball to play with).
[222001690250] |Even though they have information suggesting that this won't work this time around, they have difficulty inhibiting what is now an almost instinctual behavior. 
[222001690260] |What the new study shows is that a fair portion of this is due to the way the experimenter behaves during the experiment.
[222001690270] |If the experimenter actively engages the baby's attention during the task, the babies show the typical effect of continuing to search in Bucket 1 even when they saw the ball go into Bucket 2. 
[222001690280] |However, if the experimenter does not directly engage the baby (looking off to the side, not speaking to the baby, etc.), the baby actually does much better (fewer than 50% look in the wrong bucket, down from about 80%).
[222001690290] |The authors argue that this shows the perseveration effect can't be due to simply motor priming. 
[222001690300] |They suggest, instead, that by socially interacting with the baby, the experimenter is suggesting to the baby that there is something to be learned here: namely, that a ball can always be found in Bucket 1.
[222001690310] |When the experimenter does not socially engage the baby, the baby has no reason to make that inference. 
[222001690320] |Limitations 
[222001690330] |One might suggest that the babies in the non-social condition were less likely to perseverate because they were less interested in the game and just didn't learn the connection between the ball and Bucket 1 as well. 
[222001690340] |This is to some extent what the authors are also suggesting.
[222001690350] |It's important to point out that if the perseveration were caused by <a>priming</a>, attention does not appear to be particularly important to the phenomenon of priming in that you can be primed by something you aren't even aware of (subliminal priming).
[222001690360] |Still, one could imagine some other mechanism beyond infants believing the adult in the social condition wanted them to learn an association between the ball and Bucket 1. 
[222001690370] |Also, it is important to note that even in the non-social condition, nearly half of the infants perseverated anyway. 
[222001690380] |------- J. Topal, G. Gergely, A. Miklosi, A. Erdohegyi, G. Csibra (2008).
[222001690390] |Infants' Perseverative Search Errors Are Induced by Pragmatic Misinterpretation Science, 321 (5897), 1831-1834 DOI: <a>10.1126/science.1161437</a>
[222001700010] |<title>The science of flirting and teasing</title>
[222001700020] |Flirting appears to be a universal -- and I would venture, innate -- human behavior.
[222001700030] |It is so universal that the degree to which many aspects of it are downright odd often go unnoticed. 
[222001700040] |One of the more bewildering aspects of flirting is the degree to which it involves -- on the surface, at least -- insulting one another.
[222001700050] |This is summed up rather unironically in a <a>dating tips website</a> (check out <a>this article</a> as well): 
[222001700060] |"From the outside, teasing seems to be a twisted pleasure: affectionate and sort of insulting all at once.
[222001700070] |Teasing is a very articulate way of winning a person's attraction.
[222001700080] |It actually helps bring people closer."
[222001700090] |Huh? 
[222001700100] |Something about this analysis seems right, but the "why" seems very unconvincing.
[222001700110] |Teasing works because it draws attention and brings people closer together.
[222001700120] |Teasing also leads to <a>bar fights</a> and <a>school shootings</a>. 
[222001700130] |What gives? 
[222001700140] |Teasing to reduce social space Part of an answer appears in Penelope Brown &Stephen Levinson's classic 1978 Politeness: Some universals in language use.
[222001700150] |On page 72 of the second edition, they note in passing that "a criticism, with the assertion of mutual friendship, may lose much of its sting -- indeed ... it often becomes a game and possibly even a compliment." 
[222001700160] |I'm not completely sure where they were going with that, but one possible interpretation is that there are things that can be said between friends but not between strangers (criticism, for instance).
[222001700170] |So when you criticize somebody, you are either being offensive or asserting friendship.
[222001700180] |If the criticism is done in the right tone under the right circumstances, it comes across as an assertion of friendship. 
[222001700190] |Of course, the <a>balance can be hard to maintain</a> and it's easy to foul up. 
[222001700200] |I don't think this is a complete explanation by any means, but there seems to be something right about it.
[222001700210] |I'm justing beginning to read more in this area of pragmatics, so hopefully I'll have more to add in the future.
[222001700220] |If anybody is more familiar with this line of research and has something to add, comment away!
[222001710010] |<title>Dead languages</title>
[222001710020] |Latin is dead, as dead as dead can be.
[222001710030] |First it killed the Romans, and now it's killing me. 
[222001710040] |But not kids in Westchester County, <a>it would seem</a>. 
[222001710050] |The linked article also notes that the number of students taking the National Latin Exam has risen steadily in the last few years.
[222001710060] |As somebody who studied Latin in high school and who loves languages generally, that seems like a good thing.
[222001710070] |But I do have to wonder: why Latin?
[222001720010] |<title>Does literacy still matter?</title>
[222001720020] |In an intriguing recent article in Science Magazine (<a>subscription required</a>), Douglas Oard of the University of Maryland asks what the cultural consequences of better speech recognition software will be. 
[222001720030] |He notes that the reason literacy is so important is the "emphemeral nature of speech."
[222001720040] |Even after audio recording became cheap, print was still necessary because it is easier to store and easier to skim and search. 
[222001720050] |However, new technology is rapidly shifting the balance, as hardware space becomes cheap and computerized searching of audio material becomes effective.
[222001720060] |Perhaps the costs of learning to read will soon cease to be justified. 
[222001720070] |Really? 
[222001720080] |Oard recognizes there will be resistance to the idea (note that he doesn't actually endorse eliminating reading and writing), but he cautions that we should think with our heads, not our biases: 
[222001720090] |Our parents complained that our generation relied on calculators rather than learning arithmetic...
[222001720100] |In Plato's Phaedrus, the Pharaoh Thamus says of writing, "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written." ...
[222001720110] |Our generation will unlock the full potential of the spoken word, but it may fall to our children, and to their children, to learn how best to use that gift. 
[222001720120] |--------- D. W. Oard (2008).
[222001720130] |SOCIAL SCIENCE: Unlocking the Potential of the Spoken Word Science, 321 (5897), 1787-1788 DOI: <a>10.1126/science.1157353</a>
[222001750010] |<title>Psychic word learning. No, seriously.</title>
[222001750020] |When I started to read chapter books, I frequently ran across words I didn't know.
[222001750030] |Being too lazy to look them up in a dictionary, I just made up definitions for the words and continued along. 
[222001750040] |<a>Children learn tens of thousands of words</a>, and since they don't generally carry around a pocket dictionary to look up every new word, they are frequently forced to do what I did: make a good guess and run with it.
[222001750050] |(Contrary to popular belief, adults rarely define words for children, and children don't necessarily ask for definitions, either.) 
[222001750060] |While we tend to focus on children's acquisition of language, the truth is that even adults must deal with new vocabulary.
[222001750070] |For one thing, the English language contains many more words than any one person can know.
[222001750080] |Estimates vary considerably, but you typically see estimates of about <a>500,000 words in English</a> and only <a>60,000 in the adult vocabulary</a>.
[222001750090] |So the chances of coming across a new word are pretty good, especially if you read the <a>New Yorker</a>. 
[222001750100] |Similarly, new words pop into the language all the time, such as <a>to Bork</a> somebody or to fax a document.
[222001750110] |(Those are the classic and now somewhat rusty examples.
[222001750120] |A more modern one is <a>to Swift-Boat a candidate</a>.) 
[222001750130] |While we can sometimes look up definitions, we often trust our instincts to define these new words for us.
[222001750140] |How exactly this happens is still not completely understood.
[222001750150] |Some new uses of old words are probably adopted as a type of metaphor (<a>not that we know how metaphor works, either</a>).
[222001750160] |Others may be related to <a>derivational morphology</a> (the method of creating a new word from an old word by adding an affix; e.g., happy -> happiness, employ -> employee). 
[222001750170] |I recently <a>posted a new experiment</a>, the results of which will hopefully help us better understand this process.
[222001750180] |If you have 5 minutes, please participate (<a>click here</a>).
[222001750190] |As always, when this study is done, I will post the results here and <a>on the main website</a>.
[222001760010] |<title>Text messages for elephants</title>
[222001760020] |It has been widely noted that even in areas too remote or poor to have regular telephone service, cell phones and text messaging are ubiquitous.
[222001760030] |Now, even elephants send text messages. 
[222001760040] |Modern conservation <a>As reported by the New York Times</a>, a protected elephant has been fitted with a collar that sends a text message whenever the elephant nears local farms.
[222001760050] |This was done after several elephants on a local reservation had to be shot to protect the area farmers.
[222001760060] |Now, when the elephant wanders from its range, rangers arrive to scare it back. 
[222001760070] |The article is worth reading in its entirety.
[222001760080] |It's great that a smart method has been found to help wild animals and human civilization coexist. 
[222001760090] |What struck me, though, was the note that elephants learn from one another, and deterring one elephant from raiding farms can help stop other elephants as well.
[222001760100] |If anybody knows more about this, I'd be very interested in hearing what is known about elephant social learning.
[222001770010] |<title>Learning verbs is hard</title>
[222001770020] |I am getting ready to write up some of my recent research on verb learning -- a project for which <a>the Dax Study</a> and the <a>Word Sense</a> experiments are both follow-ups.
[222001770030] |This means a spate of reading.
[222001770040] |As I come across interesting papers, I'll be sharing them here. 
[222001770050] |A <a>PsychInfo</a> search turned up a very intriguing paper by Kerstin Meints, Kim Plunkett and Paul Harris published earlier this year in <a>Language and Cognitive Processes</a> on verb learning. 
[222001770060] |What is tricky about verbs? 
[222001770070] |Verbs are very difficult words -- both for linguists to describe and for babies to learn.
[222001770080] |In this post, I'll focus on the second part. 
[222001770090] |First, unlike nouns, verbs refer to something you can't see.
[222001770100] |You can point to a ball, but it is much harder to point to thinking.
[222001770110] |Even action verbs (break, jump) are typically used when the action has already been completed and is no longer visible. 
[222001770120] |To make matters worse, <a>Lera Boroditsky</a> and <a>Deidre Gentner</a> have noted that verbs are more variable across languages than are nouns, which means either that there can be fewer innate constraints in acquisition or that there simply are fewer such constraints. 
[222001770130] |The tricky aspect of verbs that Meints, Plunkett and Harris focus on, though, is the way in which verbs generalize.
[222001770140] |For instance, to use the verb eat correctly, you have to use it to describe the actions of many different eaters (horse, cow, Paul, Sally, George) as well as many different objects which are eaten (sandwich, apple, old boot). 
[222001770150] |Nouns, of course, have to be generalized.
[222001770160] |Not all apples look the same.
[222001770170] |But then, neither do all acts of eating (politely, messily, with a fork). 
[222001770180] |Using a verb to its fullest 
[222001770190] |Meints, Plunkett &Harris noted that for any given verb, there are stereotypical direct objects (John ate the cookie) and unusual direct objects (John ate the bush). 
[222001770200] |One might imagine that children start off expecting verbs to apply only to stereotypical events, because that's what they actually hear their parents talk about (Don't eat the cookie!).
[222001770210] |Only later do they learn that the verb extends much more broadly to events which they have never witnessed or discussed (Don't eat the bush!). 
[222001770220] |This seems like a very plausible learning story, very similar to Tomasello's <a>Verb Islands</a> hypothesis, though I'm not sure if it's one he explicitly endorses (hopefully, I'll be reading more Tomasello shortly). 
[222001770230] |Alternatively, children might start by assuming a verb can apply across the board.
[222001770240] |That is, children treat verbs categorically, more in line with the algebraic theories that most linguists seem to endorse but which a number psychologists find implausible. 
[222001770250] |The data 
[222001770260] |The researchers used a tried-and-true method to test the language abilities of young kids: present the kids with two videos side by side (for instance, of John eating a cookie and of Alfred sweeping a floor) and say "look at the eating."
[222001770270] |If the child knows what "eating" means, they should look at John and not Alfred. 
[222001770280] |The key manipulation was that the eating event was either stereotypical (John eating a cookie) or unusual (John eating a bush).
[222001770290] |Note, of course, that a number of verbs were tested, not just eating. 
[222001770300] |15 month olds failed at the task.
[222001770310] |They didn't appear to know any of the verbs.
[222001770320] |18 month olds, however, looked at the correct video regardless of the typicality of the event.
[222001770330] |They understood verbs to apply across the board.
[222001770340] |24 month olds, just slightly older, however, looked at the correct video for the typical event but not for the atypical.
[222001770350] |By 3 years old, though, the kids were back to looking at the correct event regardless of typicality (though they reportedly giggled at the atypical events). 
[222001770360] |What does that mean? 
[222001770370] |The difficulty with cognitive science is not so much in creating experiments, but in interpreting them.
[222001770380] |This one is difficult to interpret, though potentially very important, which is why I called it "intriguing." 
[222001770390] |The results minimally mean that by the time kids can perform this task -- look at an event described by a verb when that verb is mentioned -- they are not immediately sensitive to the typicality of the event.
[222001770400] |Later, they become sensitive. 
[222001770410] |At least two issues constrain interpretation.
[222001770420] |First, we don't really know that the 18 month old infants were not sensitive to typicality, only that they didn't show it in this experiment.
[222001770430] |Second, we don't know whether the 24 month olds thought the event of John eating a bush could not be described by the verb eat (which would be wild!) or if they simply found the video such an implausible instance of the verb eat that they paid equal attention to the other video, just in case an a more typical example of eating showed up there. 
[222001770440] |In conclusion 
[222001770450] |So which theory of language learning does this result support?
[222001770460] |I honestly am not sure.
[222001770470] |If it had shown a growing, expanding interpretation of verb meaning, I might have said it supported something like the Verb Island hypothesis.
[222001770480] |If children started out with an expansive understanding of the verb and stuck with it, I might say it endorsed a more classic linguistic point of view. 
[222001770490] |The actual results are some combination of the two, and very hard to understand.
[222001770500] |(I don't want to try characterizing the authors' interpretation, because I'm still not sure I completely understand it.
[222001770510] |I recommend reading the paper instead.) 
[222001770520] |------- Kerstin Meints, Kim Plunkett, Paul Harris (2008).
[222001770530] |Eating apples and houseplants: Typicality constraints on thematic roles in early verb learning Language and Cognitive Processes, 23 (3), 434-463 DOI: <a>10.1080/01690960701726232</a>