Day: February 16, 2008

Neuroimaging and Max Coltheart

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchPsyBlog has a post, “Can Cognitive Neuroscience Tell Us Anything About the Mind?” which starts out with a skeptical stance.  There is an opening feint, that scientists throw out theories about the brain and mind (and by this, we’re really talking about hypotheses).  It’s an important point, in my mind, that the focus on testing relatively small and specific hypotheses, while adding bricks and mortar to the edifice of knowledge, does little to capture the holistic nature of the mind and often runs afoul the mind-body (or brain) dichotomy.

 Basically the post then provides a quick look at some general work by Max Coltheart, Director of the Macquarie Center for Cognitive Science (Macquarie is Greg’s home institution, so just had to do that shout-out).  Coltheart has his own statement on cognitive neuropsychology on Scholarpedia (first time I’ve run across that), the peer-reviewed version of Wikipedia.

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchI’ve been away from Neuroanthropology for a few days, typing my fingers numb working on a grant application for the Australian Research Council. I won’t go into it too much here (maybe later), but I will say that I have NEVER seen a more complicated, bureacratized, byzantine system than the ARC grant competition. I felt semi-conscious when I finished the ‘interactive’ budgeting section alone (I put ‘interactive’ in quotes only because the system would have to give the applicant something back to call it ‘interaction’). Many thanks, especially to Daniel, for covering my absence while I was ‘away,’ or at least pulling out clumps of hair trying to figure out what the instructions on the application were asking me to do.

But I’ve been wanting to post a number of things, including a recent article by Ashley Newton and Jill de Villiers that appeared in Psychological Science. Special thanks to Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily whose posting about this article drew it to my attention. (And Prof. Munger is also responsible for creating the ‘Blogging about refereed research’ system that we’re trying to work with on Neuroanthropology.)

Newton and de Villiers ran experiments in which subjects were asked to solve ‘false-belief’ problems, questions about how individuals would act when it was likely that they had developed false beliefs; for example, if the subject see Max watch Sam put food in one place, then Max leaves the room, only to have Same move the food to a new location. Will Max believe the food is in the first place, or in its actual location, when he returns to the room? These problems test the subject’s ability to reason about another person’s beliefs, even when they are false. Young children tend to get these problems wrong, saying that Max will look for the food in the new location because the child knows the food is there. Very young children do not recognize that Max will have a ‘false belief.’ (Alright, so ‘false belief’ problems aren’t that hard, but the researchers made the tasks a bit more difficult…)

Continue reading “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of?”