The Sample Consent Form

academics.hamilton.edu/psychology/home/SampleConsentForm.doc

Project Zero

Here's a link to Project Zero at Harvard that I was talking about in class before Thanksgiving...

Poor Clive.......

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2075627312667044747&q=Making+Memories&pr=goog-sl&hl=en

He can't remember crap!!!!!

Nurture vs Nature???

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2209108n

Check this kid out....nature....nature...NATURE..!!!!!

Question about Short paper #8

Prof.,
Were we supposed to have gotten hand outs on creativity in class last week? I did not. Do we need them to write Short paper #8?? The syllabus says we would receive them for our nurture vs nature position. Please advise.

more language

another scientific american mind article this month: there's some tribe in the amazon who doesn't have any words for numbers. and apparently they can't learn to count. they have words that kind of mean 'small', 'medium' and 'large'. and use these words to describe things like how many children they have. so for instance, the same word they use to describe a baby, which means small, would also be used to say that they posessed only one of something. so, does that mean that language controls our ability to count?

Using blogs in education

http://prof_chuck.edublogs.org/files/2006/02/weblogs.pdf

Download this PDF

Memory Eraser

Check this stuff out..... Click on the link below...What do you think????

http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/21/memory_drug

Seeking info on the psych department experiment...

...that involved taking tests. I looked on the bulletin board but didn't see it. Is this experiment finished, or if not, where can I sign up?

The Bell Curve

Since the Cognitive Psychology text book does not explore the racial element that caused most of the controversy around the publication of the Bell Curve I thought it useful to add a link to Wikipedia that covers this discussion and various rebutals...

Chomsky and Ali G.

Here.

Rusty

Here.

False Memory Video

"Beth's Testimony"

lost in the mall

More from YouTube

This one is more obvious.. titled "selective attention"
(let me know if you have an easy way to post youtube videos directly to the blog...)

Hokey, but shows different ways language is studied

Group 4 (insert group name here)

The group that includes Kira. Explain what you're doing for your project here and use this as a forum to communicate.

The Reconstructivists

Explain what you're doing for your project here and use this as a forum to communicate.

Group 2: The Drunken Monkies

The group that includes Alex. Explain what you're doing for your project here and use this as a forum to communicate.

Group 1: The False Positives

The group that includes Richard. Explain what you're doing for your project here and use this as a forum to communicate.

Just as an update...

...as my midday post suggests, my jury duty is over. It ended last Thursday. The lawyers actually asked us (the jury) for feedback, including even our estimation of the division of fault for the accident! (Talk about false dichotomies...) Is this a new judicial trend to "improve customer experience," I wonder?

Another kind of cognitive bias: The False Dichotomy

I'm not sure of the technical terms, but I'm referring to 2 tendencies that people seem to have:

1. First and most important, the tendency to ascribe causes to 1 factor only. For example, "he got cancer because he smoked." "No, he got cancer because his whole family was cancer prone." These are not mutually exclusive, but many people exhibit a desire to find one and only one cause for something.

This is actually most distressing with political and policy issues. For example, is healthcare inflation the fault of the medical corporations, doctors, insurers, the government, environmental problems, or we the people as consumers of medical care? From my perspective, it's everyone's fault to varying degrees. For a variety of reasons, I think most people latch on to one or two--usually the one or two that involve the least disutility for them--and ignore the rest. I'm not sure if this is a heuristic to make a complex problem simpler, a competitive strategy to maximize self-interest, or an adaptive way to get something done (as someone once said, "if everyone's to blame, then no one's to blame.")

2. Related to this is a tendency to excessively restrict the set of possible causes or choices or whatever it is that you're identifying, often on insufficient data or info of dubious validity. Mystery movies and books exploit this tendency all the time. "It's the wife." "No, it's the mistress." "No, it's the mistress's boyfriend." Then it turns out to be the husband's business partner.

Her and His istics

Perhaps you'd like to practice before the final?

Remember, "being in a room of supermodels" could be an example (Amanda?), but you have to complete this framing heuristic by explaining how it makes you feel like a hideous eye-sore to all of humanity when, prior, you at least thought you were a visually bearable "Plain Jane" (or Jack, or John or a gender-ambigious 'Jo').

Trippy...

I love optical illusions. Check out this experiment that I found. Why does the eye play tricks on you?

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_mib/index.html

The complete work of Charles Darwin

can now be found here

Stud Muffin of the Week

Guess who?

Violating

...the Maxims.

Go ahead. You know you want to.

Can you write one sentence that violates all four?


Grice would be oh so proud.

From Hunt and Agnoli's paper on Whorfian Hypothesis:

"The sentence 'I went out to buy the pot' can only be disambiguated if we
know wheather the speaker spends leisure time in gardening or recreational
pharmacology."

Ha ha.

Homer Simpson's Interference:

"D'oh! I didn't need that new fact! Now I forgot who won Bud Bowl VIII!"

Great Science section in Tuesday's NY Times

Is ethical behavior hard-wired into the brain? This researcher seems to think so:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/health/psychology/31book.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

This guy's idea of a subconscious moral grammar sounds a bit like human linguistic capability, and not just because of the metaphor.

Also, it turns out that blue-eyed men prefer blue-eyed women because blue-eyed parents can only have blue-eyed children. So by hooking up with blue-eyed women, blue-eyed men can know for sure if her baby is his offspring. By the way, this strategy doesn't work for brown-eyed men because they carry blue-eye and brown-eye genes. No word on green-eyed men yet.

Maybe ethical behavior is wired into the brain, but so is mistrust and a preference for verifiability. Actually, based on game theory, it might be hard to have one without the other.

Great example of Change Blindness today

This surgeon is testifying today, and he's really intent on explaining to us the intricacies of knee anatomy and arthroscopic surgery. While he's demonstrating on an anatomical model, one court stenographer comes over in front of the witness box and replaces the other one, which apparently is normal with really difficult transcription (such as medical). And this changeover occurs in full sight of the doctor.

Ten minutes later, the new stenographer interrupts the doctor to ask him to repeat something. The doctor looks up bewildered, and says "who are you?" I'm not kidding.

Naturally, the whole court started laughing. It would have made a great experiment, but of course cameras aren't allowed...sigh.