1

General Science / Participate in experiments

« on: 07/01/2008 14:21:57 »

Hi all,

I've posted here before, but it's been a while. I just wanted to let those who are interested know that I run a number of cognition experiments via the web at http://coglanglab.org. At the end of each experiment, you can find out more about what the hypotheses, etc., are. For some experiments, you also get to see your own results.

If you find this entertaining or just like to help out with science, here is the Web's biggest list of ongoing experiments on the Internet: http://psych.hanover.edu/research/exponnet.html

2

Physiology & Medicine / Birth Order

« on: 22/09/2007 04:24:50 »

You can read about our privacy politicies here.

Just a few technical points: Websites typically automatically log IP addresses. It's part of the server log. And if you go to a website that uses a hits counter, it's fairly likely it's saving your IP address. Basically, you should assume that your IP address is being saved at every website you visit. It may not be, but it's better to assume that it is.

The good thing is that an IP address isn't always very useful for tracking an individual person. IP addresses track computers, not people. Many people's computers are on networks with dynamically-assigned IP addresses, which means every so often -- sometimes every few seconds -- your IP address changes. So an IP address is not always very useful for finding people.

So, yes, we do record IP addresses. No, they aren't shared with anybody. We use them to track potential vandalism (somebody repeating an experiment over and over and over without admitting to it). In any case, although all the experiments are anonymous, we don't ask any information that anybody is likely to have a burning desire to keep quiet. Unless you are really touchy about your age.

That said, if you find information being asked that you don't want to share, I'd like to know about it.

3

Physiology & Medicine / Birth Order

« on: 20/09/2007 01:53:32 »

Hi Coglanglab,
 I took the test, but at the end on "click to learn more about this experiment" my window shut down.  Is there anyway to get to the information on the experiment without taking the test again?
Thanks

Sure, email coglanglab@coglanglab.org.

4

Physiology & Medicine / Birth Order

« on: 19/09/2007 22:37:09 »

Secondly, you suggest that proof of a birth order effect would undermine the nature side of the nature/nurture debate.  I would disagree with this categorically. 

I would also disagree! Currently, there are people (such as Steve Pinker) very seriously arguing that nurture has essentially no role in personality. At least, that's how I read them. So I'm not trying to argue that nature has no role. That would be patently ridiculous, based on twin studies. The question is whether nurture has any role.

5

Physiology & Medicine / How do I prove that it is a life event memory and not a dream memory?

« on: 19/09/2007 16:29:11 »

OK, I will try and explain my understanding about how memory works, but I will stress that this is my own conjecture based on my observations, and not anything authoritative.

Firstly, memory obviously comes in many forms.

another_someone's explanation was a nice start. There are definitely many, many types of memories, and they differ from each other in different ways.

For instance, if considering just visual memory, there is iconic memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Visual iconic memory is almost like an echo or an after-image. It lasts only a very brief period of time (a few hundred milliseconds), and is essentially a reconstruction of the original visual experience.

Right after that, you have visual short-term memory, which is said to last a few seconds. Some recent research I did suggests that it isn't so much limited by time as by space. When you see something new, whatever was in your short-term memory gets pushed out in favor of the new information. You can also read these blog posts I wrote about visual short-term memory:

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/visual-memory-does-it-even-exist-14213.htm
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/whats-relationship-between-short-term-memory-and-long-term-memory-14135.html


Then, there is long-term memory, which we are all more familiar with.

And that's just visual memory, which is distinguishable for verbal memory, which definitely has long-term and short-term components. I don't recall if there is an iconic verbal memory as well.

Long-term visual and verbal memory, along with other types of memory, is generally considered to be part of declarative memory, which is generally your memory for facts. I believe declarative memory also includes "source memory," which is the memory for where you learned something. This is a bit different from the memory itself. It's one of the reasons advertising works. You remember that you heard Trident is the best toothpaste; you forget that you heard that in a commercial.

There is also procedural memory, which is the memory for how to do something, like ride a bicycle.

What amnesics have lost is long-term declarative memory. Procedural memory and short-term memory systems are all intact, which is why they can remember new facts only for short periods of time, but they can learn entire new skills (like how to play the piano) and it sitll sticks with them.

6

Physiology & Medicine / Can some people see more colours?

« on: 19/09/2007 16:17:45 »

I have also read that some women have photorecepters for 4 different wavelengths of light, whereas most people have only 3, and people who are red-green colorblind only have 2.

----
Please take a moment for science at http://coglanglab.org

7

Physiology & Medicine / Could Memories be transferred ?

« on: 19/09/2007 16:11:52 »

It is suspected, but not yet proven, that any given neuron can be utilised in more than 1 memory. The fact that 1 memory can trigger another indicates, in my opinion, that this may be the case.

It depends on how, exactly, memories are stored. Yes, current neuroscience models use neural networks, in which case each neuron must be involved in multiple memories, because there aren't that many neurons relative to the number of memories we have. Plus, that's just how neural networks work.

However, neural networks are provably finite state computing machines. That is, they aren't Turing machines. This also means that they aren't capable of many or most human cognitive activities. So the neural network model, at least as currently developed, is probably wrong.

The debate right now is between people who say, as I just did, "The human brain can do many things that require non-finite state computing. Since neural networks can't accomplish those tasks, there must be more to the brain than neural networks," and people who say, "We know of know possible neural mechanism to allow for symbolic processing such as in a Turing machine. So the brain must be composed of neural networks."

That's neither here nor there with regards to the original question, but I think it's an interesting point.

----
Please take a moment for science at http://coglanglab.org

8

Physiology & Medicine / Birth Order

« on: 19/09/2007 15:59:19 »

I've seen this research about birth order an homosexuality. I understand it's fairly controversial, although the paper just quoted was published in in PNAS, which is a good journal.

I wrote a little bit more about birth order effects on my new blog, so in case anybody is interested: http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/does-birth-order-affect-personality-13956.html

9

Physiology & Medicine / Birth Order

« on: 20/08/2007 12:35:15 »

Have just taken your test, but am not at all convinced about your premise.

I would agree that people will associate with other people who share a similar value set, but not necessarily of a similar personality.

On the other hand, my anecdotal observations are that people will also tend to associate with people of a similar IQ (and in particular, women tend to have great difficulty if they marry a man of lower IQ to themselves, which will tend to mean that high IQ women will have a greater likelihood of marrying a high IQ man, although the converse is not always as true).  Given that we already have evidence that first borns are differentiated from their siblings by their IQ, have you made any allowances that what your method is really measuring similarity of personality, or just another way of measuring similarity of IQ?

That's a good point. This is the third experiment in a study that was started before the IQ results were as clear. I'm going to see what the literature says about self-association among people with similar IQ. I'm also not sure about the exact distribution of the the IQ results among oldest, middle, youngest, only, and it's possible the results of my experiments will show a different pattern. Or the same. We'll see.

10

Physiology & Medicine / Birth Order

« on: 20/08/2007 03:06:39 »

Ukmicky, if you think there is a better place to move it, by all means do. Thanks for visiting the site.

11

Physiology & Medicine / Birth Order

« on: 20/08/2007 01:19:59 »

Nearly a century ago Alfred Adler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler suggested that one's birth order (oldest, middle, youngest) affects one's personality. The evidence is increasingly clear that it does affect performance on IQ tests (it tends to go down for younger siblings, on average, if only slightly), but the evidence for its effect on personality has been mixed.

Many of the experiments that have failed to show birth order effects on personality quantified personality in terms of a psychometric test such as Meyer-Briggs or Big Five. There is some controversy as to whether personality tests are particularly accurate. If they aren't accurate or reliable, then finding a correlation between their scores and birth order would be unlikely.

Although our personality tests may not be very accurate, individual humans are pretty good at judging the personality of others. So I tried to think of a way to use people's intuitions about a person in order to measure that person's personality and correlate it back to their birth order. If that were possible, then perhaps that would show the effect of birth order that other experiments have failed to show. If no effect is found, then it becomes even more unlikely that birth order effects are real.

Once I found a method, the next step was to test it. I am running an survey right now to test this hypothesis. I would really appreciate it if you participated. You can find it at the Cognition and Language Laboratory http://coglanglab.org/BirthOrder.

(To the moderator: Yes, this is a type of advertisement, but I think that the topic would be interesting to people at this forum. Plus, there is more information about current research at that site that may interest readers.)

12

General Science / what is the speed of thought?

« on: 20/08/2007 01:10:31 »

Chris has made some wonderful replies to this open-ended question. I would agree with him and some others that have been pointing out that there are different kinds of thoughts that probably operate at different speeds. The facts about neuronal signal transduction are interesting, but of course the relationship between thought and the firing of individual neurons isn't understood very well yet.

One interesting piece of work that may interest Paul was done by Molly Potter at MIT many, many years ago. She found that if you show somebody a picture of a scene for only about 100ms, they are able to remember and describe a great deal of the information presented in that time. This is interesting primarily because 100ms is a very short time period for neurons. A signal can only travel down a few neurons in that time. This comes back to the issue of trying to tie the speed of neuronal signals to the speed of thought. (If you don't think scene recognition is thought, consider that a great deal of interpretation must be done to go from the visual imprint of some line drawings to the representation of Don Quixote on a hill.)

--
Please take a few minutes for science by participating in experiments at http://coglanglab.org

13

General Science / The Potency Of Truth, The Simple Perception of A Child

« on: 20/08/2007 01:03:51 »

The prepared mind. It seem clear to me that the ability to perceive a reasonable understanding of any proposition or idea requires, at the very least, a prepared mind. What does this mean. A mind that is free from preconceptions and biases. Any subject, topic, or ides that is discussed within this forum, or anywhere else, is of limited value, if not viewed with a mind that is unfettered with conditioned thinking, and ungrounded knowledge. As such, we are often to quick to access the value of an opinion or "fact" without the minimum degree of information necessary to form a useful response. I do not deny that such exchanges can have real value, as with, for instance ,the exchanges between a knowledgeable teacher and a budding student. But if our goal is to facilitate a path towards the quality of knowledge and understanding that lead to a genuine dialog, than, perhaps we might consider what is essential to achieve the direct perception of a child. I don't pretend to hold the key. Moreover, I cannot persuade you of its value. I suspect, many of you instinctively realize the need for this goal. Perhaps meditation, journalizing, reflection, communing with nature, creative endeavors, and the like can get us closer to this goal. You must discover the best way for yourself. I believe it is a worthy and difficult ambition. Thank you for this opportunity to precipitate.   

You might enjoy reading some of the "Child as Scientist" research in developmental psychology. Important researchers in this area include Susan Carey and Alison Gopnik (who frequently writes for a general audience). If you aren't familiar with this work, I think  you would enjoy it. The basic idea is that both children and scientists learn about the world in similar ways.

---
Please take a moment for science at http://coglanglab.org