Reberlab Cognitive Neuroscience of Learning and Memory

osu!

A new paradigm for studying expertise?  Osu! is a free rhythm game that uses the mouse instead of the keyboard.  It’s pretty hard, but some people get pretty good at it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=mCAE6nzB6LI#t=526s

The game itself is available here: http://osu.ppy.sh/

It has potential value for introspection during skill learning, I think.  If you practice a specific “map” until you beat it, you’ll definitely notice that you’re getting better via skill learning.  But there is also a powerful sense of familiarity — you definitely feel like you recognize the sequence as you repeat it.  The memory system theory question is: is that conscious memory contributing to learning or is it epiphenomenal?

P.S. It’s mildly tricky to get running.  You have to download and install the executable, create an account on their site, then you can browse and download specific maps to try to play.  Also fair warning: much of the music is horrible.

Posted by Paul

Facebook and gray matter density

Haven’t done a Randomness in awhile.  This one is courtesy of Syeda in the Beeman lab:

Facebook Friend Count Linked to Brain Density

(mashable.com reporting from Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences)

The write-up even nicely opens with the correlation/causation problem — do brain differences cause more friends or do more friends cause brain differences?  The areas of gray matter density correlating with number of friends are a collection of temporal lobe regions, mostly non-MTL.  Intriguing but not trivial to make sense of.  I headed to google scholar to see if there was any other work in this area and found a study on Facebook use in TBI patients (http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/02699052.2011.613086).  Interestingly, they also approach Facebook/social networking as a positive thing and with these patients find what we’d expect: some barriers to use related to level of impairment and prior familiarity.

Posted by Paul

Expertise in gaming

Saw this linked via a gaming site:
SkillCraft.ca: A SC2 Expertise Study

It’s a study being run by Mark Blair at Simon Frasier Univ using Starcraft2 as a domain for looking at the development of expertise.

Nice idea. I wonder what the approach is.

Posted by Paul

Does Google hurt your brain?

Apparently there’s a new research study out suggesting that people don’t remember things as well if they know they can look the information up later on Google. This set off a spate of media reports on the predictable theme that technology is bad for our brains, e.g.: http://techland.time.com/2011/07/15/is-google-really-wrecking-our-memory/.

I got an email from a reporter, Rachelle Dragani from ECT News Network, this morning and got a chance to chip in on the other side:
http://www.ectnews.com/story/72879.html

My point was that since we don’t remember everything, choosing to put more effort into remembering things we can’t look up online is pretty adaptive actually. I also threw in a reference to the Flynn effect and my opinion that Google is making us smarter by giving us more access to more information. But those didn’t make it into the short report.

Posted by Paul

SISL Task Example

Posted by Danny

Newsweek Examines Mechanical Turk

Apparently I mis-remembered; the study was done by Newsweek, not a fancy academic research institution.

http://www.newsweek.com/content/newsweek/2011/06/19/the-real-minimum-wage.html

Posted by Danny