Research & Theory
mixingmemory | June 5, 2008This morning, while I was riding the bus to campus, I checked my email on my phone (man, I love that thing), and had a cognitive psychology topic alert from ScienceDirect. There were only three papers in the alert, but the title of the first one caught my eye: "No disease in the brain of a 115-year-old woman." I don't know whether it was the fact that she was really, really old, that they expected to find disease in her brain, or what, but the title drew me in. I need to start coming up with better titles myself.
Anyway, the paper's in press in the journal Neurobiology of Aging (you can read…
mixingmemory | February 11, 2008The January issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (the same journal that gave us the alien IAT) has some really interesting, and short, review articles. Unfortunately, they're only available with a subscription, but for those of you who are lucky enough to have access to a university library, I thought I'd point you to them in case you're interested.
The most interesting of the articles, I think, is by Roy Baumeister, and is titled "Free Will in Scientific Psychology." Here's the abstract:
ABSTRACT--Some actions are freer than others, and the difference is palpably…
mixingmemory | May 1, 2007Jeremy Dean of PsyBlog is doing another online study, this time on emotions, and he needs participants. So if you have about 10 minutes, and you'd like to participate in some real live research, click here and follow his instructions.
mixingmemory | November 11, 2006The stuff in this post at the Social Science Statistics Blog is seriously cool. Data representation in faces (in the post, the data represented is baseball stats -- go Braves!). From the post:
Chernoff faces are a method introduced by Herman Chernoff (Prof Emeritus of Applied Math at MIT and of Statistics at Harvard) in 1971 that allows one to convert multivariate data to cartoon faces, the features of which are controlled by the variable values.
Go read it.
mixingmemory | October 23, 2006If 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, and Wlezian. From the paper:
This paper is intended to provide some guidance for translating the results of generic congressional polls into the election outcome.1 Via computer simulation based on statistical analysis of historical data, we show how generic vote polls can be used to forecast the…
mixingmemory | October 16, 2006Every 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 morning, I'd have told you that was crazy talk, but this as of yet unpublished (and unsubmitted, apparently, which means unreviewed) paper takes the idea very seriously. Well, they don't really set out to show that television is the cause of autism, but that it's part of a causal chain that begins…
mixingmemory | September 20, 2006There's been some hubbub recently over a study by Gerber and Malhotra (you can get a copy in pdf here), which shows a couple things. First, political science journals don't publish many articles that report negative (null) results, but instead tend to publish those that report statistically significant results. Second, a large portion of those statistically significant results involve probabilities that are pretty damn close to .05 (the generally accepted cutoff for statistical significance). My first reactions were duh, and who cares?
Of course, I'm not a political scientist, so I can't…
mixingmemory | July 1, 2006The literature on robot navigation is huge, and summarizing it would be difficult, if not impossible, but I thought I'd provide a few examples of papers you can read on robots that utilize ant-like navigational mechanisms.
Franz, M.O., Schölkof, B., Mallot, H.A., & Bülthoff, H.H. (1998). Learning view graphs for robot navigation. Autonomous Robots, 5, 111-125.
Abstract: We present a purely vision-based scheme for learning a topological representation of an open environment. The system represents selected places by local views of the surrounding scene, and finds traversable paths between…
mixingmemory | June 30, 2006 I'm going to play biologist for a moment, and talk about a species other than humans or nonhuman primates. First, imagine that you're about 10 mm long, a couple mm high, and you're stuck in the middle of the Sahara desert. Eventually you've got to find food, so you leave the comfort of your burrow to forage for food that could be many meters away. When you find food, you then have to find your way back home. And all you have to do this is a brain that weighs 0.1 mg (see the image below). If you're a member of the genus Cataglyphis, you do this on a daily basis, and you do it so well that you…
mixingmemory | June 16, 2006A few weeks ago, I wrote a post that was pretty critical of the current state of Experimental Philosophy. In the post, I focused on the work of Joshua Knobe, not because his work is the worst Experimental Philosophy has to offer, but because it is, in my mind, the best by far. Yesterday on the Experimental Philosophy blog, David Pizarro linked to a manuscript he's writing with Knobe and Paul Bloom that demonstrates quite well why I think this, and furthermore provides a very good example of what Experimental Philosophy can be when it closely aligns itself with scientific psychology.
The…