General announcements
February 22nd, 2012 2:47pm
Re-Vision
Psych 110s
We’re ramping up CONS since we haven’t been getting in as many as we need. So, we should be seeing some stability in the data soon.
Projects
Depletion: This data is very peculiar. It seems like we do have something happening with the depletion manipulation, but I think there might be too much variance in pre-experimental depletion (i.e. depletion prior to manipulation) to make sense of things.
Single-Quad: Ramping up data collection.
Implicit Explicit: I’ve been ramping up editing and should be shooting this back to you shortly. Since we’re going to submit to cognition next, we can be somewhat liberal with word count. Obviously, concise is good, but at least we can expand on ideas.
Wiitar: Sweet Mary, it’s done. Now it just needs to be analyzed…
mTurk Delay: Draft mode.
mTurk Fragments: What’s happening with this one?
A/B/C: Dave is going to rescore his Sound vs. No-Sound and let us know if he finds anything interesting. This is sitting on the backburner while I hammer out the I/E manuscript – that is definitely at the forefront right now.
Posted by Danny
February 15th, 2012 3:30pm
Research and Insanity
Psych 110s
Collection is looking pretty decent, although sign-ups are slowing down tremendously. I just looked at the data, and am not sure entirely what to make of any of it.
Projects
Depletion: Collecting Data
Single-Quad: Collecting Data
Implicit Explicit: I’ve been working on editing this. Few Notes: The in-text results only report means for trained sequence and foil sequences separately, but not the subtraction score. However, the figures only have subtraction scores. I think I’ll edit this to be more consistent (i.e. add in-text subtraction numbers). Also, the correlation between recognition score and SISL score in Experiment 1 dropped from .3 to .22 and is no longer significant. The difference between the high-rec and low-rec post-hoc groups has also dropped so the significance is sitting at p = .09. Upon closer inspection, the correlations between recognition and SISL score in Experiment 1 are hugely driven by the explicit pre-training group (.39) as opposed to the implicit group (.03). I’m thinking we’ll want to reframe this in the manuscript (or possibly just get rid of it?). The motivation for Experiment 2 is still valid even without the post-hoc results (more robust explicit training).
Wiitar: The manual rescoring is going well. I keep finding new categories that my old code didn’t catch. For instance, someone would always press the next button without lifting off the previous button (so, essentially, their button press would look like D, DF) and then lift off the previous button (D) before strumming. Completely legitimate and allowed, but a very different left-hand response profile. However, I think this will essentially collapse into categories as if the person had released the previous key like every other normal person who was in the experiment. Interesting none-the-less (at least to me).
mTurk Delay: Still being drafted.
mTurk Fragments: Totally cool data. Very interested to see the next round. However, I was thinking about the “precognitive” trigrams in the 3-fragment experiment. Essentially, the first two cues are predictive of the third. From a response stand-point, that’s not argued. However, if you take spatial layout into account, that on-screen triplet is unique and viewable prior to responding to any of the cues. It’s possible that the appearance of that learned spatial layout (in this instance, a small triplet of circles) is cuing the knowledge in a way that is allowing for the expression of knowledge across all three items in the 3-item fragment.
A/B/C: I’ve got ABC data AND Sound vs. No Sound data from Dave. If I get tired of editing manuscripts and hand-scoring data, I might write a quick script to analyze these. ABC is clearly on the back-burner; but the sound data might be interesting (especially if it’s only a small time investment on my part).
Posted by Danny
January 31st, 2012 4:46pm
Brain training in the news
Kati sent a link to a piece in the New Yorker on Anti-Aging games: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/01/30/120130ta_talk_seabrook
Fountain of Youth Dept.
Re-Start
by John Seabrook January 30, 2012
Nolan Bushnell stopped by the office the other day, to play an anti-aging video game. “It’s what I call a ‘looking forward by looking backward’ game,” he said, settling in at the keyboard and loosening up his shoulders. “Meaning that you have to be able to solve a problem using information you received before you were distracted by something else. That’s why older people lose their cars in parking lots. They park, then they go in and shop—that’s the distraction—and then they can’t remember where they put their car.”
This also reminded me that I saw a CEO profile in the Tribune of the founder of Marbles: The Brain Store, Lindsey Gaskins, the other day:
The Brain Store sells puzzles and games under the guise of improving cognition and fighting age-related cognitive decline. The article is more about the business side of the store, but I had heard of them before and didn’t realize it was a Chicago-area company.
The fact that people can sell brain training doesn’t necessarily mean that it works. But it probably does.
Posted by Paul
January 12th, 2012 8:58am
The Research Works Act
Here’s an interesting NY Times Opinion piece on some bill going forward that would stop NIH from requiring grantees to provide copies of their papers.
Tax dollars funding our research is especially touchy in the given economy, so it seems like this would be another bit of negative news to the researchers just wanting to do their jobs.
Posted by Danny
January 11th, 2012 2:15pm
Biggest memory experiment ever
An email from my friend Jon Simons at Cambridge:
Please excuse the spam, but I’d be very grateful if people would be kind enough to spread the word to their students and colleagues about an online memory experiment we’ve launched this week in collaboration with the Guardian newspaper. We’re hoping that thousands of people from all over the world will take part.
See press release: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/test-your-memory/
You can test your memory at the Guardian experiment website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/memorystudy
Thanks so much!
Best wishes,
Jon Simons.
I haven’t clicked the links to see what this is about, but in principle I like the idea of large N studies on memory collected online and given who it is from, it’s likely scientifically sensible.
Posted by Paul
January 3rd, 2012 2:52pm
Avoid flow to learn better?
That’s the advice from a blogger/writer who has been studying and writing about how to achieve excellence. It’s mainly advice passed on from an expert piano player, but it has a certain intuitive appeal to it.
I think the idea comes from the perspective of “deliberate practice” and the idea that practicing that which is too easy (and therefore you experience a flow state during practice) does not lead to improvement.
Can we reconcile this with our idea that practice should maximize dopamine release by successfully overcoming challenges? I have described that idea previously as training so that you have as much success as possible while also realistically expecting that you might fail.
Perhaps we’d say that the flow state described by the pianist reflects a state of euphoria associated with performing so successfully that you cannot fail? That would separate the idea of a “flow state” from our idea of dopamine reward release — which is just a rough hypothesis anyway. Or perhaps the experience of the truly skilled expert is that they need to be challenged with more difficult training tasks to hit the maximal training reward level. That would account for the pianist’s experience seeing the “mediocre” practicing things that seem too easy as just reflecting the fact that they are less skilled and simpler training tasks are optimal for them. I wonder if anybody at the Music School here would have any insight on this kind of phenomenon.
In theory, we could test this with the SISL task by comparing sequence learning in conditions where we set the task speed to adaptively keep people at 75% correct or at ~100% correct (then test them under identical conditions).
Posted by Paul
December 2nd, 2011 4:40pm
Starcraft in SciAm
This is cool, but I have to say I’m also a little sad that I didn’t write this…
How a Computer Game is Reinventing the Science of Expertise
There’s also some discussion of Starcraft as brain training to boot.
Posted by Paul
November 16th, 2011 2:42pm
Writing Time
Conferences
SFN is done. Huzzah. MPA and CNS are both submitted, and now we wait for approvals (hopefully). Obviously not at the top of my “To Do” list, but nice to mention something that is technically crossed off.
Implicit/Explicit
I’m finally going to start editing this. Going through the manuscript, comments, and I’ll make sure we’re getting to all the literature we should be.
F31
This is going to be quite a bit of work (as usual). I just got in touch with Catherine Berardi to get the OSR paperwork and everything started.
Next Quarter
I was discussing with Matt that it might be good to run the Variable Velocity paradigm since it complements the single column task really well. We might see transfer in one, but not the other, or transfer in neither. In either case, it would make a strong case for the visuo-spatial perceptual component being quite important for learning/expression. What else might we be running?
Posted by Danny
November 9th, 2011 2:42pm
Glitch
These guys are building the social networking/gaming environment that would be idea for embedding cognitive training
Tuning the quests and interactions to provide the right level of difficulty and reward was complicated. In beta testing, the development team found that while singing to butterflies was repetitive and boring, people would still sing to butterflies obsessively—because it provided small but guaranteed amounts of experience. The devs tried to balance this by making singing to animals cost energy, but then players simply farmed huge numbers of girly drinks (which made animals interactions cost no energy) and continued to grind the same thing again and again. The girly drinks were then nerfed, and people immediately complained.
“We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”
Just make the grindy things (singing to butterflies) training for WM, attention, executive control, etc. We can put up with being secretly hated if we are covertly improving their brains.
Posted by Paul
November 9th, 2011 11:26am
Autism–excess of neurons?
An interesting article came out on the TIME website today, haven’t looked at the actual paper, but seems like a good read.
http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/09/study-autistic-children-have-too-many-brain-neurons/
Posted by eyarnik