Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
--- Bryan D Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Actually, I was thinking about kids' amazing ability to learn languages, which involves massive memorization. Language learning is a hard-wired trait--another well established fact. Kids pick up language automatically from their environment. Some neuroscientists consider it to be analogous to imprinting, the space for language is already there waiting to be filled. This imprinting faculty dries up around puberty. That's why it is so much easier for kids to learn new languages, and to learn them as native speakers, i.e. to become true polyglots. It is also why most adults are never really able to get rid of their accents when after learning a new language. ...IQ is this all powerful explanatory device, or that it is meaningless when it's neither Not all powerful, just one of the best available. The purpose of the IQ test, and its main use, is to predict school success; it is used to identify children who need extra help in school before it's too late. How this relates to cooperative problems is another issue. -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
William Dickens wrote: Come on, Fab - pointing out examples of brain differences explaining behavioral differences is hardly convincing evidence that brain differences are the right explanation in this case. Hey Bryan, don't you know the plural of anecdote is data? Seriously, there is plenty of evidence (and it is widely accepted) that injuries to different parts of the brain consistently produce particular changes in behavior. Not even Jensen would argue that g is the only aspect of neurology that matters for behavior (assuming g has a neurological basis which is not established). What is wrong with the notion that there are parts of the brain that specialize in controling social behavior and that they develop late? Nothing, if you actually have some facts about the brain to share with us. But great as we all know Fab is, I don't think his original post had any such facts to share. I don't think Fab had anymore reason to say that children's brains simply aren't developed enough to cooperate than he had to say Bryan's brain simply isn't developed enough to watch football. We know that there are some profoundly specialized cognitive abilities having to do precisely with regulating trading behavior. Maybe they develop more slowly than other aspects of personality. - - Bill Dickens Yea, maybe. But I was hoping for a less hand-waving answer. William T. Dickens The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 797-6113 FAX: (202) 797-6181 E-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AOL IM: wtdickens -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] He lives in deadly terror of agreeing; 'Twould make him seem an ordinary being. Indeed, he's so in love with contradiction, He'll turn against his most profound conviction And with a furious eloquence deplore it, If only someone else is speaking for it. Moliere, *The Misanthrope*
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
fabio guillermo rojas wrote: Come on, Fab - pointing out examples of brain differences explaining behavioral differences is hardly convincing evidence that brain differences are the right explanation in this case. My point is that behavior is more than cost-benefit calculations with IQ as an intervening variable. I don't see why you - Fab - would need to say this? The cognitive faculties you're talking about could simply alter the cost-benefit calculations. My purpose in citing this kind of evidence is that behavior depends on cognitive faculties which are dependent on well developed parts of the brain. Damasio's book shows some evidence that brain differences *might* lead to behavioral differences. I'm not an anatomist, but I wouldn't be surprised if children's brains simply didn't have all the parts developed for correctly learning social behavior. You should be very surprised if they lacked the parts, because children do in fact cooperate some of the time. Yes, there are cognitive abilities with low g-loading, and memory is one. But now that I think about it, I shouldn't have let you get away with citing memory differences in the first place. Children in fact seem to have much *better* memorization ability than adults in numerous respects. Prof. Bryan Caplan It's well documented that long term memory is nil for children less than five years of age (doctors call it pediatric amnesia) and is very spotty until about 12. Maybe children can remember strings of numbers well in labs, but they can't remember things from a year or two ago terribly well. Actually, I was thinking about kids' amazing ability to learn languages, which involves massive memorization. Also, while were at it, I think you overinterpret the G-loading thing. I don't. Yes, there is a complex statistical process involved in constructing g. But this construct correlates highly with our common sense understanding of intelligence. It's the natural interpretation. My whole point is that obsessing over G might lead one to ignore the stuff that leads to G. In a lot of these IQ/behavior debates people seems to take extreme positions that IQ is this all powerful explanatory device, or that it is meaningless when it's neither. Not all powerful, just one of the best available. I really think that some people are more intelligent than others and that this matters alot, but explaining everything in terms of G seems a bit dicey to me. Explaining everything - dicey. Explaining seemingly stupid behavior of children - who are already *known* to have much lower raw IQs than adults - quite plausible. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] He lives in deadly terror of agreeing; 'Twould make him seem an ordinary being. Indeed, he's so in love with contradiction, He'll turn against his most profound conviction And with a furious eloquence deplore it, If only someone else is speaking for it. Moliere, *The Misanthrope*
RE: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
It's well documented that long term memory is nil for children less than five years of age (doctors call it pediatric amnesia) and is very spotty until about 12. Maybe children can remember strings of numbers well in labs, but they can't remember things from a year or two ago terribly well. And it's this long term learning that's needed for socialization. Social behavior draws from a large pool of past experience, not the short term memory tested in laboratories. If I may butt in... I'm 20 this year, but I remember as clear as yesterday when I was about 4 yrs old and my grandma was scolding me for playing in the rain. My earliest memory starts from early childhood, starting at age 3. If this may help, I have observed that I have particulary good long-term memory. (Do a real world test: ask a 7 year old about how they misbehaved two years ago. If you get anything remotely accurate, I'll buy you lunch.) I guess this means free lunch for someone. =) dianne
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
fabio guillermo rojas wrote: It's well documented that long term memory is nil for children less than five years of age (doctors call it pediatric amnesia) and is very spotty until about 12. Maybe children can remember strings of numbers well in labs, but they can't remember things from a year or two ago terribly well. Bryan D Caplan wrote: Actually, I was thinking about kids' amazing ability to learn languages, which involves massive memorization. I'm told there are three kinds of long-term memory -- semantic (`the capital of France is Paris'), episodic (events personally experienced) and procedural (how to do stuff) -- and strength in one does not imply strength in another. Social cooperation depends on episodic memory, language on the other two. -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/
Autism, brain damage and cooperation
In any case, all of the deficiencies in children's brains you point out more or less sound like extensions of their low absolute IQ. Not really. One listed deficiency is memory. That might be correlated with IQ, but it's certainly not the same as IQ. Analogy: a computer with a small storage capacity might have sophisticated software (analogy with low memory/high IQ). Real world example: Autistic children. Their behavior is described as misbehavior because they simply can't learn how to interact with adults. However, they can perform very complex tasks such as math problems and some autistic people have been able to score well on IQ tests. Abother real world example: In the book Descarte's Error, a well adjusted rail road worker in the 19th century is injured on the job. He recieves a severe trauma to the head which results in localized brain damage. According to the author, the part of the brain which was damaged many scientists believe is responsible for producing emotions, which may conflict with detached rationalist thinking. Once the railroad worker recovered from his injury, he abandoned his job, started to consort with criminals and lived the rest of his life as a con-artist. As far as people could tell, he retained his cognitive abilities but his personality completely changed. My conclusion from such facts is that the ability to conduct normal social interactions is a combination of learning, IQ, percpetion, memory and other mental abilities. You really can't bundle them all together. Child misbehavior is not reducible to IQ, but might be a result of one or more of a deficiency in one or more of these mental abilities. A simple economic model really seems to leave a lot out. Fabio
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...a well adjusted rail road worker in the 19th century is injured on the job. It was Phineas Gage, he had a tamping iron blown throught his head. The Malcolm Macmillan School of Psychology has a homepage dedicated to him at www.deakin.edu.au/hbs/GAGEPAGE . It is fairly thorough. -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
Come on, Fab - pointing out examples of brain differences explaining behavioral differences is hardly convincing evidence that brain differences are the right explanation in this case. My point is that behavior is more than cost-benefit calculations with IQ as an intervening variable. My purpose in citing this kind of evidence is that behavior depends on cognitive faculties which are dependent on well developed parts of the brain. Damasio's book shows some evidence that brain differences *might* lead to behavioral differences. I'm not an anatomist, but I wouldn't be surprised if children's brains simply didn't have all the parts developed for correctly learning social behavior. Yes, there are cognitive abilities with low g-loading, and memory is one. But now that I think about it, I shouldn't have let you get away with citing memory differences in the first place. Children in fact seem to have much *better* memorization ability than adults in numerous respects. Prof. Bryan Caplan It's well documented that long term memory is nil for children less than five years of age (doctors call it pediatric amnesia) and is very spotty until about 12. Maybe children can remember strings of numbers well in labs, but they can't remember things from a year or two ago terribly well. And it's this long term learning that's needed for socialization. Social behavior draws from a large pool of past experience, not the short term memory tested in laboratories. (Do a real world test: ask a 7 year old about how they misbehaved two years ago. If you get anything remotely accurate, I'll buy you lunch.) Also, while were at it, I think you overinterpret the G-loading thing. A G-loading is essentially a factor analysis of responses to a standardized test. Statistically, you estimate a linear model. G - response to Question 1 G - ... Question 2, etc. G is often called a latent factor that is *unmeasured*. See any non-economics statistics book (economists rarely use this and it's not in Golderger, Amimiya or Greene). Then you can test alternative models like G1 - Q1, Q2, Q4 G2 - Q3, Q5, etc. and do model comparisons. IIUC, the psychometric literature has found that the first model has a really good fit while other models have poorer fits for tests of abstract thinking. What is this G? It's a *construct* from the test, not a direct measurement of anything. Which means to assert one single process called IQ is really strecthing it. What you can safely say is that G is the dimension along which test responses vary. This dimension can be the consequence of a bunch of other things and you can collect data to test hypotheses about these more complex models: F1, F2 -- G -- Q1, Q2, Q3. My whole point is that obsessing over G might lead one to ignore the stuff that leads to G. In a lot of these IQ/behavior debates people seems to take extreme positions that IQ is this all powerful explanatory device, or that it is meaningless when it's neither. I really think that some people are more intelligent than others and that this matters alot, but explaining everything in terms of G seems a bit dicey to me. Fabio
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
--- fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's well documented that long term memory is nil for children less than five years of age (doctors call it pediatric amnesia) The Hippacampus isn't fully developed, and it's the organ of the brain responsible for transferring short term memories into long term memories. It is well documented that adults with hippacampal lesions cannot put memories into long term storage. The brain goes through alot of development and fine tuning up through adolescense, and the formative years are when all the major pathways are solidified. Additionally, it's also the time when all the unused neurons die; the only time more neurons die than in early childhood is at death. Still, it nevertheless seems odd to address the question to children's non-cooperation--Mr. Hanson's post notwithstanding. Cooperation as we think of it here in the west is not really a species wide phenomenon; i.e. it's probably not instictive. As I understand it, about 40% of adult male Yanomami have killed another person and about 25% of adult males will die from some form of violence. That's hardly the sort of peacful social cooperation that this string seems to assume. In some cultures it is considered kosher to hide in wait and actually hunt people. While I WOULD be interested to see how child cooperative behavior compares between modern societies and hunter-gatherer societies, as Mr. Hanson suggested, it still seems a bit unreasonable to suggest that adult cooperative behavior as we understand it is the standard against which the strangeness of child behavior should be guaged. Rather one should ask: 1. Is child social behavior more stereotyped across the species? And if so 2. Why does adult behavior develop the way it does in so many different forms? Or possibly 3. If child social behavior not stereotyped across the species, what accounts for the differences. Thanks for your time, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com