"Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions."

The part of me which imprinted on _Why I Am Not a Christian_ is chortling. Another part of me, however, is wondering how hard it would be to write "Analytic Thinking Promotes Disbelief in Psychological Studies".

BBS target article.
Abstract: "An emerging class of theories concerning the functional structure of the brain takes the reuse of neural circuitry for various cognitive purposes to be a central organizational principle. According to these theories, it is quite common for neural circuits established for one purpose to be exapted (exploited, recycled, redeployed) during evolution or normal development, and be put to different uses, often without losing their original functions. Neural reuse theories thus differ from the usual understanding of the role of neural plasticity (which is, after all, a kind of reuse) in brain organization along the following lines: According to neural reuse, circuits can continue to acquire new uses after an initial or original function is established; the acquisition of new uses need not involve unusual circumstances such as injury or loss of established function; and the acquisition of a new use need not involve (much) local change to circuit structure (e.g., it might involve only the establishment of functional connections to new neural partners). Thus, neural reuse theories offer a distinct perspective on several topics of general interest, such as: the evolution and development of the brain, including (for instance) the evolutionary-developmental pathway supporting primate tool use and human language; the degree of modularity in brain organization; the degree of localization of cognitive function; and the cortical parcellation problem and the prospects (and proper methods to employ) for function to structure mapping. The idea also has some practical implications in the areas of rehabilitative medicine and machine interface design."

"Abstract: 20 years after the birth of neuroimaging, we have the exciting opportunity to review the accumulated evidence, and revisit some fundamental assumptions about the functional organization of the brain.  The current talk will focus on the issue of selectivity, and present evidence suggesting that local neural circuits are in fact used to support multiple tasks across diverse task categories–but that they cooperate with different neural partners in each category.
"Overall, the imaging data suggest a story about the evolution and development of the brain whereby new function emerges via the reuse and reconfiguration of existing neural machinery, leaving existing uses largely intact. In addition to reviewing the evidence from neuroimaging, I will discuss in some detail one specific instance of apparent reuse: the involvement of a local neural circuit in finger awareness, number representation, and other diverse functions.
"Specific implications for numerical cognition, and general implications for anatomical and functional modularity will be considered."
Unfortunately, I'm going to be missing the talk...

"The conclusion is straightforward. Although inferring different processing stages (or 'modules') from additive factors in data is a venerable tradition in psychology, and one that remains popular (Sternberg, 2011), it is a mistake. As Henson (2011) points out, there's too much non-linearity in cognitive processing, so that you need additional constraints if you want to make inferences about cognitive modules."

--- I find it astonishing that anyone would ever have been tempted to make this inference at all.

To be clear, "bad_data_analysis" applies to what Yarkoni is talking about, not to Yarkoni.

"Law needs a model of human behavior. The law and economics model has proven quite useful for many reasons, including its parsimony. However, many scholars have concluded that the parsimony comes at an unacceptable cost: too much realism is sacrificed. The challenge is to construct a model that is, in Albert Einstein's notable phrase, "as simple as possible but no simpler." Behavioral law and economics and behavioral economics are attempting to rise to the challenge.

The Institute for Law and Rationality seeks to contribute to this effort, promoting interdisciplinary collaborations among legal scholars and scholars in such fields as psychology, political science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics (and neuroeconomics) to inquire into how the law does and should understand human behavior. The Institute's aim is to help develop a model of human behavior that lawmakers can use to ground public policy."

"Learning to navigate plays an integral role in the survival of humans and other animals. Research on human navigation has largely focused on how we deliberately map out our world. However, many of us also have experiences of navigating on “autopilot” or out of habit. Animal models have identified this cognitive mapping versus habit learning as two dissociable systems for learning a space—a hippocampal place-learning system and a striatal response-learning system. Here, we use this dichotomy in humans to understand variability in navigational style by demonstrating that brain activation during spatial encoding can predict where a person's behavior falls on a continuum from a more flexible cognitive map-like strategy to a more rigid creature-of-habit approach. These findings bridge the wealth of knowledge gained from animal models and the study of human behavior, opening the door to a more comprehensive understanding of variability in human spatial learning and navigation."

"...a survey of recent neuroscientific research on representational systems in animals and humans. Representational systems provide their owners with useful information about their environment and are shaped by the special informational needs of the organism with respect to its environment..."

TBSAAFT, but if they have experiments where perceptual tasks interfere with motor ones and vice versa, they've pretty much nailed a common bottleneck.  Whether that's anatomically localized is interesting to know, but there's no reason a unified bottleneck couldn't be anatomically distributed.  Conversely, without such an experiment, all they'd have is some localization of _two separate_ bottlenecks in anatomically close parts of the brain.  So fMRI seems strictly irrelevant to whether there's a unified bottleneck.

"If pant-wetting were a sport, the recent study on how memory adjusts to the constant availability of online information would have launched the damp drawers Olympics.
‘Poor memory? Blame Google’ claimed The Guardian. ‘Internet search engines cause poor memory, scientists claim’ said The Telegraph. ‘Google turning us into forgetful morons’ wibbled The Register.
If you want a good write-up of the study you couldn’t do better than checking out the post on Not Exactly Rocket Science which captures the dry undies fact that although the online availability of the information reduced memory for content, it improved memory for its location.
Conversely, when participants knew that the information was not available online, memory for content improved. In other words, the brain is adjusting memory to make information retrieval more efficient depending on the context..."

"Bayesian models of human learning are becoming increasingly popular in cognitive science. We argue that their purported confirmation largely relies on a methodology that depends on premises that are inconsistent with the claim that people are Bayesian about learning and inference. Bayesian models in cognitive science derive their appeal from their normative claim that the modeled inference is in some sense rational. Standard accounts of the rationality of Bayesian inference imply predictions that an agent selects the option that maximizes the posterior expected utility. Experimental confirmation of the models, however, has been claimed because of groups of agents that “probability match” the posterior. Probability matching only constitutes support for the Bayesian claim if additional unobvious and untested (but testable) assumptions are invoked. The alternative strategy of weakening the underlying notion of rationality no longer distinguishes the Bayesian model uniquely."

" how explanations of social and moral development inform our understandings of morality and culture. A common theme in the latter part of the twentieth century has been to lament the moral state of American society and the decline of morality among youth. A sharp turn toward an extreme form of individualism and a lack of concern for community involvement and civic participation are often blamed for the moral crisis. Turiel challenges these views, drawing on a large body of research from developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology as well as social events, political movements, and journalistic accounts of social and political struggles. Turiel shows that generation after generation has lamented the decline of society and blamed young people. Using historical accounts, he persuasively argues that such characterizations of moral decline entail stereotyping, nostalgia for times past, and a failure to recognize the moral viewpoint of those who challenge traditions."

Review: http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2011-08.html#laughlin

Miller's classic paper, transcribed (rather ugly).

I'll have to miss this, since I'll be teaching and otherwise working, but it looks very interesting.

Nice expository piece by Mark; part of the point here being that we know people who understand words perfectly well can flub what seem like simple logical applications of those words...

New-ish BBS article claiming there isn't any universal grammar, merely several stable strategies in a sort of evolutionary game.

Using statistical learning theory to quantify the human ability to see patterns in noise. (Found while looking for something else...)

Well, yes, isn't this obvious*? We begin by reasoning with others; only later do we come to reason with ourselves. (*: where by "obvious" I mean "intensely debatable, yet compelling to people like me.")

"The relevance interpretation - if we could only make it more specific! - would help us understand why appreciation of high-culture works can be used for the self-identification of elite groups. Far from being the case that anything goes, as far as elitism is concerned, it would seem that only some fairly limited kinds of public representations will do. They must share enough with the common genre that everyone can identify them (a Chopin waltz does sound a bit like like a waltz) but it should also be clear that they will not provide immediate or easy gratification (like a Strauss waltz).

Perhaps we need a cognitive anthropology of refinement, something that is missing from anthropological theory so far. Maybe that’s because so few anthropologists have any knowledge or appreciation of their own (high) culture! All this could be done experimentally, without at any point engaging in normative judgments.

Except about claptrap like that Da Vinci book, of course."

"novel concepts are shown to arise out of the interplay of three factors: an attempt to solve specific problems; the use of conceptual, analytical, and material resources provided by the cognitive-social-cultural context of the problem; and dynamic processes of reasoning that extend ordinary cognition. Focusing on the third factor... show[s] how scientific and ordinary cognition lie on a continuum, and how problem-solving practices in one illuminate practices in the other. ... [C]onceptual change as deriving from the use of analogies, imagistic representations, and thought experiments, integrated with experimental investigations and mathematical analyses. ... [C]onstructed models as hybrid objects, serving as intermediaries between targets and analogical sources in bootstrapping processes. ... [T]hese complex cognitive operations and structures are not mere aids to discovery, but that together they constitute a powerful form of reasoning—model-based reasoning—that generates novelty."

Sounds like it should either be interesting or truly horrible.

How to do sensible statistics for typical cog-sci models; I think this is a great paper (though I'd prefer it to be less Bayesian, naturally.)

... in which pragmatism returns to its roots in the lab, apparently.

Famous 1975 Turing Award lecture, transcribed into HTML.

Ooh.

Despite the title and cover, actually very serious and thoughtful.

Excellent review on what fMRI does, how it works, the methods used to analyze it, and how basic neurophysiology puts real limits on its interpretability.

Nice profile of Stanislas Dehaene and his work on numerical cognition. Dehaene's book, _The Number Sense_, is quite good.

full review, http://bactra.org/reviews/hhnt-induction/

Looks interesting.

"The Ptolemaic approach has recently taken another form in psychology, as 'rational' Bayesian modeling of human judgement, for example of causal relations. "

Schemata are your friends.

Really interesting book about cognitive modeling of architectural thought

Another really excellent book: experimental cognitive psychology used to _test_ hypotheses from narrative theory. It's brilliant, and, here, cheap.