Children integrating their senses

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchTwo of the pieces that I have wanted to discuss appear together in Current Biology, both on evidence of sensory integration in adults compared to their integration in children. Nature News carried a story about both articles, One sense at a time, by Matt Kaplan. As Kaplan explains, the research generally supports the idea that: ‘Adults readily integrate sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in their everyday lives without a second thought. But research is revealing that this is not the case with children. Two new studies hint that children under the age of eight only use one sense at a time to judge the world around them.‘

As I started to discuss in an earlier piece on human equilibrium (long ago — still working on parts two and three), adults learn how to weight different sensory information depending on context and the task at hand, evaluating one stream against another if they conflict. When confronted with two contradictory impressions from different senses — such as video of a person saying one thing and audio of a slightly different word — adult sensory systems figure out a way to integrate the sense world, sometimes creating ‘sensory’ compromises or syntheses. The ability to integrate sensory information is fundamental to normal human functioning, but it tends to undermine certain conceptions of brain ‘modularity,’ as I argued in the earlier post.

But with these two articles, I want to explore something a bit different, so I’m going to tackle each one individually, and then reflect on one issue that I think is important: the tendency to see child development in a teleological framework, that is, as an incomplete version of an adult system rather than as a deployment of the child’s distinctive neural resources. Before you click on ‘read more’ below though, be warned; this piece is a bit long…

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Kids falling down

The Appeal of DirtIf, like me, you find the sense of balance and its development fascinating, or if you just want to learn more about toddlers falling over, check out Cognitive Daily’s wonderful piece discussing research on toddlers’ balance. A research team put weighted vests on toddlers to see how they would compensate when they tried to walk, and the poor little folks leaned the wrong way. That is, put a bit of weight on a toddler’s back, and he or she tends to lean backward to try to compensate. Man, little kids are ka-razy!

The piece by Dave Munger is, What backpack-wearing toddlers can tell us about how kids learn to walk. As always, Munger’s discussion is very thorough and gives a great sense for the original research. The work is reminiscent of the research of the late Esther Thelen, one of the psychologists who really opened my eyes to dynamic systems theory and a rethinking of developmental theory.

Jeff Scher and The Wrong Reasons of Culture

Jeff Scher is a New York based artist who runs The Animated Life blog at the New York Times. He creates animated films from his art work, for example, Tulps with both paintings (see right) and a movie.

His most recent Animated Life film is entitled ‘All the Wrong Reasons.’ As he describes this movie:

“Everyone makes experimental films when they dream. Dreams are picture-driven, non-linear quilts of movie-like moments sprinkled with cryptic epiphanies… “All the Wrong Reasons’ is an experiment in making a film that feels as if it has percolated up from the subconscious; a dream you can watch with your eyes open. It’s one of those big cathartic dreams, a labyrinth of fleeting moments full of metaphor and mischief. I wanted it to feel like a bumpy roller coaster ride in and out of the dark side of the brain where all the wrong reasons reside. And, as with all dreams, the meaning and significance are open to interpretation.”

Here’s the first minute or so on a YouTube piece, but I recommend going to his blog to watch the full three minute feature.

What most struck me with this film is how much closer Scher is to the quick of life and culture than most anthropologists, with our theories of symbols and meanings and post-modern discourses. All of that is almost too politically correct. Scher paints us something else, a labyrinth of metaphor and mischief, interpretations that get us at the wrong reasons behind meaning and significance, a place where a lot of us live everyday.

What makes humans unique?

Photo by JoProf. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, whose work on chimpanzees and human children, on the biological capacity for culture, and a range of other subjects, must place him among the most important contemporary thinkers using comparative primate data, asks ‘How Are Humans Unique?’ in a recent piece for The New York Times‘ Idea Lab.

As Tomasello suggests, many things that we thought once definitively marked the difference between humans and other species, have gradually been found in evidence in other species — tools, deductive learning, language, even certain patterns of anti-social behaviour suggesting war and the like. The result is, for some, an uneasy sense that we might not be so different from other animals, and for others, a satisfaction that humans might be thought about using analytical frames developed with other species.

One thing that Tomasello points out very well is that many of humans’ cognitive advantages over other intelligent animals are ‘products of collective cognition,’ that is, not so much just an individual’s ability as the ability of an individual invested with the collective creativity and mental tricks invented by previous generations of humans.

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Intelligent Design & Creationism

Dr. X recently posted this YouTube video on how creation “science” lead directly into intelligent design, a key component in the Dover legal case that went against the teaching of intelligent design. The video summarizes the work done by the National Center for Science Education to show that the textbook Of Pandas and People was “creationism in disguise.”

I also found this related video about the work of Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, a key witness who analyzed the early drafts of Of Pandas and People to show how drafts of the book went from talking about creationism to framing everything in terms of intelligent design.

Back from absence with links on human evolution

I’ve been noticeably silent on Neuroanthropology of late — I didn’t think I could get any busier after January was bad, but it’s been awful around here. I’ve been involved in local politics, if you can believe that, and set up another website (www.berrybypass.com) to try to expose a bit of local corruption and misinformation that was trying to reroute a highway bypass. So I’ve been blogging, just not on Neuroanthropology, putting my knowledge of WordPress to alternative uses.

With the absence, I’ve got a backlog of interesting stuff that I will not be able to write substantial comments on, so I thought I could at least put some links to a couple of pieces:

ABC News has an intriguing short piece on vestigial organs, Five Things Humans No Longer Need, by Laura Spinney. Some of the usual subjects are there (like wisdom teeth and the coccyx), but there’s also some less well-known examples. If I were writing a long piece on this, though, I’m still not persuaded by the notion of ‘vestigial’ organs because it seems to imply that other organs ARE doing what they were selected for, and I doubt that’s the case; too many organs have likely been co-opted into other things over evolutionary time. I worry that the notion of ‘vestigial’ organs singles these out, when in fact the issue is broader, BUT I also love using vesigial organs when I teach.

The other piece I’m not going to get to is Tracing Humanity’s Path, by Michael Balter on ScienceNOW Daily News. The piece is a news story on a longer article available on PLoS Genetics, Inferring Human Colonization History Using a Copying Model, by Garrett Hellenthal, Adam Auton, and Daniel Falush, that uses genome-wide statistical modeling to reconstruct human dispersal patterns that, although not earth-shattering, does produce some interesting wrinkles in the usual account of how humans got all over the globe. And it has cool animated maps linked to it that show the patterns.