mixingmemory
Posts by this author
November 1, 2006
Sometimes I forget that not everyone who happens upon this blog today has been reading it from day one (I mean come on, why haven't you?). It surprises me, then, when people tell me they've seen no evidence that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory is, well, wrong. I guess I…
October 31, 2006
OK, so apparently there's a blogging scholarship, and it just so happens that someone who comments here at Mixing Memory, Jennifer Wong of Cyberspace Rendezvous, is a finalist, as is fellow Science Blogger Shelley Batts. You should go vote for one of those two here. I'm going to endorse Jennifer,…
October 31, 2006
Via Amy Perfors at the Harvard statistics blog, Social Science Statistics Blog, I learned of the Jeffrey-Lindley Paradox in statistics. The paradox is that if you have a sample large enough, you can get p-values that are very close to zero, even though the null hypothesis is true. You can read a…
October 30, 2006
As I said yesterday, I love research that challenges the common sense view that perception, especially visual perception, represents the world as it "is." The paper I talked about there showed cognitive influences (memory) on relatively low-level visual processes (color perception occurs pretty…
October 29, 2006
One of the things that I love the most about cognitive science is that it's always challenging our intuitions about the world and how we perceive it. Think, for example, of all the classic Gestalt illusions, such as my all time favorite, the Kanizsa Triangle. What these illusions, and many other…
October 28, 2006
You may have seen this illusion in a post from earlier in the week over at Cognitive Daily, but I thought I'd say a little bit more about it, and talk about a related illusion. First, click play (from Sham's demo site)
If the illusion is working -- Dave at Cognitive Daily had a bit of trouble…
October 27, 2006
There's a really interesting post by Alberto over at Alpha Psy titled "Methodological Materialism" that I thought I'd point you to, in case you hadn't read it already. Here's an excerpt:
As I see things, there is no deeper epistemological concern in recognizing that methods from natural sciences…
October 27, 2006
By now you've probably heard about the Dar-Nimrod and Heine study on stereotype threat and math performance in women. If you're interested in learning more about that study, check out Hugo's post at Alpha Psy. Since Hugo did such a nice job describing the study, and since I'm lazy, I'm not going to…
October 26, 2006
Just to let you know where things stand, I'm in the process of setting up the study. Some of the coding is a bit over my head, because I've never done this sort of thing on the web before. Fellow Science Blogger Razib has been helping me a great deal, but if you have knowledge of how these web page…
October 25, 2006
Everyone's heard that losing a particular sensory modality causes the sensitivity of the other modalities to be heightened. Blind people are supposed to hear and smell really, really well, for example. While this is something that's been talked about for ages, there are actual neuroscinetific…
October 24, 2006
OK, the initial response to my quesitons about the internet study was overwhelmingly positive, so I'm going to go ahead with it. I just need one more thing from you. Ordinarily with a study like this, I would run a pilot study to figure out exactly what concepts to include in the final version, but…
October 23, 2006
If you're not reading the Columbia University stats blog, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, you're missing a lot of great stuff. For example, today's post by Andrew Gelman discusses the paper "Forecasting House Seats from Generic Congressional Polls" by Bafumi, Erikson,…
October 23, 2006
I'm working on writing up a lengthy description of an alternative to Lakoff's political theory, mostly because I feel guilty about doing little more than trashing it without offering anything positive to the discussion. My approach is based on, well, actual research, and unlike Lakoff's, it won't…
October 23, 2006
Psychologists are now fairly confident that humans have an agency-detection mechanism, and an itchy agency-detection trigger finger. This is because the consequences of not detecting agency are often greater than those of agency-detection false positives. As Atran and Norenzayan put it:
From an…
October 21, 2006
Everyone else who's answered this question has been very decisive, but I really can't choose an particular science TV series. I've always loved Nova, Nature, National Geographic, and I remember watching and loving Marty Stouffer's Wild America on Sunday mornings when I was a kid. But I think my…
October 21, 2006
Given the ubiquitousness of weight, obesity, and eating discussions these days, I thought I'd talk about some research that has, for some reason, stuck in my mind since I first heard about it a few years ago. It concerns the relationship between memory and eating. We all know that the desire to eat…
October 20, 2006
Over the next few months, several cognitive science books will be coming out that look really interesting. I thought I'd list a few of them, in case you're interested in checking them out once they're published.
The Prehistory of Cognitive Science - Andrew Brook, Editor
Description
Featuring…
October 19, 2006
Since I posted on a really bad study that's outside of my area of expertise the other day, I thought I should make it up to you by posting on what I think is a good study by Gelman et al. that's also outside of my area of expertise today. Plus, with a title like "Rich state, poor state, red state,…
October 19, 2006
I know you're probably not looking for movie recommendations from an anonymous cognitive psychologist, but if you haven't seen
October 16, 2006
Every once in a while I run across a paper that I have no idea what to make of. That happened earlier today, when I read a paper titled "Does television cause autism?" by Waldman, Nicholson, and Adilov (you can read the entire paper at that link). Television causes autism? If you'd asked me this…
October 14, 2006
Note: This was originally posted at the old blog on August 14, 2005. Enjoy.
After I finally finished Language in Mind, about which I posted the other day, I went back and looked at some of the literature on linguistic relativity that I had read over the years, but had mostly forgotten. And since…
October 13, 2006
NoteI get a lot of questions in email about linguistic relativity, or the influence of language on thought. So instead of writing something new, I thought I'd repost two posts I wrote on the topic back on the old blog. Here's the first, originally posted on August 10, 2005. The second will be up…
October 10, 2006
This is just funny. In case you don't remember, in this year's World Cup finals, French star Zinedine Zidane, who was playing in his last World Cup game, headbutted Italian defender Marco Materazzi in extra time. He was promptly red carded, and thus removed from the game. There was a lot of…
October 10, 2006
Sometime yesterday, the 200,000th unique visitor dropped by Mixing Memory (combining the old and new incarnations). That's a hell of a lot of people. Hopefuly, somebody got something out of it. Thanks for visiting everyone. As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or requests, feel free to…
October 7, 2006
George Lakoff has published two new political books, Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea, and Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, as follow ups to his Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant. I haven't read either of the new books (my New…
October 5, 2006
OK, time for a few links.
First up, there's a very good new blog by cognitive anthropologists called Alpha Psy. I disagreed pretty strongly with some of the points in their post on terror management theory, but overall I've really enjoyed the blog so far. I strongly recommend the post on majority…
October 4, 2006
Over at the Experimental Philosophy blog, Joshua Knobe has a post about a series of experiments that he has run with Jesse Prinz on people's intuitions about consciousness, and he includes a link to a draft of the paper they're writing on the experiments. The experiments were motivated by two…
October 4, 2006
Is it wrong that I like this? I'd like to see the Nietzschean Dilbert, too.
And I had to include a second one, because this is one of my favorite quotes from Zarathustra:
October 2, 2006
Of all the mirror neurons discovered in monkeys, auditory mirror neurons may be the coolest. These cells respond when a monkey performs an action, and when that monkey hears the sounds of that action being performed by another. Until recently, there was limited evidence of a corresponding auditory…
October 1, 2006
We interrupt this weekend of mirror neurons (I know, I'm slow getting the posts out -- the weekend may extend into the week) to bring you this public service announcement. Well, not so much an announcement as a begging for advice and discussion.
Since I started writing about cognitive science…