On Sun, 2 Nov 2008 15:08:59 -0800 (PST), Annette Taylor wrote: [snip] > Mike: OK, a new book on my amazon wishlist: Artificial Dreams. > Interestingly, it has no reader reviews,
Expect APA's online book review journal PsycCritiques to have a review in the near future. Some obscure Tipster wrote it. > and is a bit pricey. Hmm, maybe I should get it from the > library :) Or you could get it in paperback. On Amazon the paperback version is $24.99. Similar price at Barnes & Noble online but if you have a B&N membership, it's $22.49. At Buy.com it's $19.99. >How do you find time to keep up with all the literature? Oh, it just seems to come my way. > I knew I could count on tips folks to get a discussion going; I will follow > along. > > However, I think I still stand by my current thinking (but am willing to > change) > that for the junior/senior level undergraduate what I want to teach them is > more > strongly focused on our incomplete knowledge developed from behavioral > studies, rather than spending too much time talking about imaging correlates > of > incomplete knowledge. Does that make sense? I'd suggest that focusing on experiments which have been replicated many times over and produce consistent data is more important than the theories used to explain them because theories are (a) tentative explanations which will be modified or abandoned as new research identify the flaws/limitations of those explanations and (b) given that much of the cognitive neuroscience research is relatively new, one should wait for a good number of replications before investing too much meaning or significance in them (e.g., on pages 50-51 of Bruce Goldstein's 2nd ed Cog Psych text, he referes to research by Quiroga et al 2005 that suggests the existence of "Jennifer Aniston" or "Halle Berry" detector cells based on the "grandmother cell" idea which is covered earlier on pages 40-42; I don't know what is actually going on Quiroga's situation but I think that it might be irresponsible of Goldstein to present such research because it is so recent and the theoretical explanation, I think, is wanting). With respect to point (a) above, one can use the following to illustrate the role of method/data relative to theory: (1) Cermak & Craik's (1970) text "Levels of Processing in Human Memory" provides a number of chapters that identify why the original explanation (i.e., sensory memories = fragile, semantic memories=strong) is wrong and other explanations have to be considered (I'm somehat partial to Douglas Nelson's chapter). So, we can readily replicate a levels of processing effect but what is its explanation? J.J. Jenkins chapter which presents the "tetrahedral model of memory" might be one thing to present in order to direct thinking about the study of human memory. (2) I assume that people still do Shepard & Metzler type studies of mental rotation because these are available on opl.apa.org and other websites. But, though these results are consistent with an interpretation that visual mental images have psychological reality (i.e., mental representations have pictorial properties which can be mentally transformed such as rotation). However, back in the 1970s there was a significant debate between people who supported an "analog" view (i.e., mental representations preserve the properties of the objects they represent; visual mental images have the 2-D properties of 2-D physical images) or a propositional view (i.e., "mentalese", the language of cognition is purely abstract and mental imagery is an epiphenomenal by-produce of more fundamental abstract processing). Zenon Pylyshyn was and still is associated with the latter perspective. However, John R. Anderson (1978) in Psych Rev argued that there was no real way to decide whether mental representations had sensory properties or purely abstract representations since abstract representations could have all of the info contain in an analog/sensory representation). The re-emergence of this debate in the early 2000s by Kosslyn and Pylyshyn (see their exchange in the journal "Trends in Cognitive Science") shows that old arguments die hard and though Kosslyn would like to use a neuroscientific explanation (i.e., visual mental imagery activate the areas of the brain that appear to be involved in visual perception), he also has to concede that, as Pylyshyn notes, the neuroimaging results have note been consistently supportive. (3) Finally, I like to use the Psych Review article by Tien Ming Chang (1986) "Semantic Memory: Facts and Models" which lays out the empirical results about semantic memory know to that time as well as the list of theoretical models developed to explain the results. I think it provides an interesting example of how to systematically look at the relationship between research results and their theoretical explanations and how to decide when certain theoretical positions should be abandoned in favor of theories that are more consistent with the empirical research. I'll shut up now. -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
