Author: tom

Geoffrey Sampson doesn’t believe in the language instinct. I remember reading his book Educating Eve in my final year at university and being splendidly, incoherantly, annoyed by his views on the nature-nurture debate. My girlfriend at the time had been set the book as part of her linguistics course and I singularly failed to express to her just how wrong-headed Sampson’s arguments were – how he completely failed to engage with the whole point of Pinker’s book., for one thing.

Of course I was fresh from reading things like Rethinking Innateness and had all the zeal of the new convert. I can’t remember the details of Sampson’s argument, and now I think i’d like to re-read it to check if i still feel the same way, and maybe to recapture that feeling of annoyance. Maybe my appreciation of it will have changed, I certainly think my appreciation of the language innateness debate has changed – i’ve had the luck to read Terance Deacon’s The Symbolic Species for a start, and that’s a book which should stretch anyone’s appreciation of language and brain evolution.

This is a screenshot of me playing with the BrainVoyager BrainTutor. BrainVoyager make fMRI analysis and visualisation software, and they’re kind enough to offer this interactive guide to different cortical regions for free.

Pictures can’t describe how much fun it is to play with, adding and removing the different hemispheres, labels, views, rotating the whole head, etc. It’s a shame they don’t have more areas programmed in at the moment (it’s just the lobes the gyri and sulci – but there’s a promising ‘forthcoming’ button for Brodmann areas).

Precis of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Oxford University Press, 1999

Abstract: How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart, we explore fast and frugal heuristics–simple rules in the mind’s adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments. In this precis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search. These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data–that is, simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program.

Haven’t read this for a while, and on re-reading this jumped out

5.1 Exploiting environment structure
Fast and frugal heuristics can benefit from the way information is structured in environments. The QuickEst heuristic described earlier, for instance (see chapter 10), relies on the skewed distributions of many real-world variables such as city population size–an aspect of environment structure that traditional statistical estimation techniques would either ignore or even try to erase by normalizing the data. Standard statistical models, and standard theories of rationality, aim to be as general as possible, so they make as broad and as few assumptions as possible about the data to which they will be applied. But the way information is structured in real-world environments often does not follow convenient simplifying assumptions. For instance, whereas most statistical models are designed to operate on datasets where means and variances are independent, Karl Pearson (1897) noted that in natural situations these two measures tend to be correlated, and thus each can be used as a cue to infer the other (Einhorn & Hogarth, 1981, p. 66). While general statistical methods strive to ignore such factors that could limit their applicability, evolution would seize upon informative environmental dependencies like this one and exploit them with specific heuristics if they would give a decision-making organism an adaptive edge.

Because ecological rationality is a consequence of the match between heuristic and environment, we have investigated several instances where structures of environments can make heuristics ecologically rational:

Noncompensatory information. The Take The Best heuristic equals or outperforms any linear decision strategy when information is noncompensatory, that is, when the potential contribution of each new cue falls off rapidly (chapter 6).

Scarce information. Take The Best outperforms a class of linear models on average when few cues are known relative to the number of objects (chapter 6).

J-shaped distributions. The QuickEst heuristic estimates quantities about as accurately as more complex information-demanding strategies when the criterion to be estimated follows a J-shaped distribution, that is, one with many small values and few high values (chapter 10).

Decreasing populations. In situations where the set of alternatives to choose from is constantly shrinking, such as in a seasonal mating pool, a satisficing heuristic that commits to an aspiration level quickly will outperform rules that sample many alternatives before setting an aspiration (chapter 13).
By matching these structures of information in the environment with the structure implicit in their building blocks, heuristics can be accurate without being too complex. In addition, by being simple, these heuristics can avoid being too closely matched to any particular environment–that is, they can escape the curse of overfitting, which often strikes more complex, parameter-laden models, as described next. This marriage of structure with simplicity produces the counterintuitive situations in which there is little trade-off between being fast and frugal and being accurate.

How wierd is this- I was looking at a review paper [1] of the development of visual acuity in human infants and I plotted the average acuity measurements for the first three years of life. It’s a straight line. A very straight line.

Not only is it testament to the experimental rigour of the studies included in the review but it’s also pretty developmentally odd- I mean what else develops linearly? Height doesn’t. Vocabularly use doesn’t. Number conservation doesn’t.

Does anything else develop linearly? There must be so many non-linear processes involved in the neural development of vision it’s a marvel it comes out linear with respect to age.

[1] Courage, M.L., and Adams, R.J. (1990). Visual acuity assessment from birth to three years using the acuity card procedure: Cross-sectional and longitudinal samples. Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics, 67(9), 713-718.

Acuity was measured with black and white gratings of different spatial frequencies and is shown here in cpd, cycles per degree of visual angle (this is an inverse function of the Snellen rating (eg 20/20).