Author: tom

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Me psychology

Mea culpa musings (angry cyclist edition)

I screwed up. My latest column for BBC Future is about why cyclists enrage motorists. My argument is that cyclists offend the ‘moral order’ of the roads, evoking in motorists a feeling of outrage over perceived rule breaking.

Unfortunately, I included some loose words in my article that implied things I don’t believe and wasn’t arguing. Exhibit A:

Then along comes a cyclist, who seems to believe that the rules aren’t made for them, especially the ones that hop onto the pavement, run red lights, or go the wrong way down one-way streets.

This wrongly suggests both that I think the typical cyclists breaks the law (they don’t), and/or that motorists are enraged by cyclists’ law breaking. This is not the case, rather I am arguing that motorists are engaged by cyclists’ perceived rule breaking, where I mean rule in the sense of ‘convention’. Cyclists habitually, legally, and sensibly break conventions of car-driving such as waiting in queued traffic, moving at the speed limit or not under-taking.

Exhibit A has now been changed in the article to the more pleasing:

Then along come cyclists, innocently following what they see are the rules of the road, but doing things that drivers aren’t allowed to: overtaking queues of cars, moving at well below the speed limit or undertaking on the inside.

So, my bad and apologies for this. I should have been a lot clearer than I was. I’m just grateful that a few people understood what I was getting at (if you read the whole article I hope the correct interpretation is supported by the rest of the phrasing I use). The amount and vehemence of feedback has been quite surprising. Lots of people thought I was a frustrated driver who hated cyclists. In fact, the bike is my main form of transport. I’ve ridden nearly every day for over ten years (and been hit by a car once). For this article I was trying not to sound like the self-righteous cycling proto-fascist I feel like sometimes. I obviously succeeded. Perhaps too well.

Other people thought I was claiming that this was the only factor affecting road-user’s attitudes. I don’t think this. Obviously selective memory (for bad cyclists or drivers), in- group/out-group effects and the asymmetry in vulnerability all play a role. I did write a version of the article which laid out the conceptual space a bit clearer, but I decided it was boring to read, and really I wanted to talk about evolutionary game theory and make a novel – and, I thought, interesting – claim.

I sometimes think I should get “Telling the truth, just not the whole truth” translated into Latin so I can use it as the motto for the column. Each one I write someone comes back to me with something I missed out. If I tried to be comprehensive I’d end up with a textbook, instead of a 800 word magazine column. I don’t want to write textbooks, so I’m reasonably happy with leaving things out, but I do worry that there is a line you cross when telling some of the truth amounts to a deception or distortion of the whole truth. I’m trying, each time, not to cross that line. Feedback on how to manage this is welcome.

There were many other comments of all shades. You can ‘enjoy’ some of them on the BBC Future facebook page here. If you did leave a comment on email/facebook/twitter I’m sorry I couldn’t respond to all of them. I hope this post clarifies things a bit.

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links

Links for January 2013

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quotes

Quote #293

Work for 6 years. The 7th, go alone or among strangers, so the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become

Either Vinay, or via Vinay

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quotes

Quote #292

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Thomas Edison, attib.

Categories
psychology science

Bootstrap: corrected

So, previously on this blog (here, and here) I was playing around with the bootstrap as a way of testing if two samples are drawn from a different underlying distribution, by simulating samples with known differences and throwing different tests at the samples. The problem was that I was using the wrong bootstrap test. Tim was kind enough to look at what I’d done and point out that I should have concatenated my two sets of numbers and the pulled two samples from that set, calculated the mean difference and then used that statistic to constructed a probability distribution function against which I could compare my measured statistic (ie the difference of means) to perform a hypothesis test (viz. ‘what are the chances that I could have got this difference of means if the two distributions are not different?’). For people who prefer to think in code, the corrected bootstrap is at the end of this post.

Using the correct bootstrap method, this is what you get:

So what you can see is that, basically, the bootstrap is little improvement over the t-test. Perhaps a marginal amount. As Cosma pointed out, the ex-gaussian / reaction time distributions I’m using look pretty normal at lower sample sizes, so it isn’t too surprising that the t-test is robust. Using the median rather than the mean damages the sensitivity of the bootstrap (contra my previous, erroneous, results). My intuition is that the mean, as a statistic, is influenced by the whole distribution in a way the median isn’t, so it a better summary statistic (statisticians, you can tell me if this makes sense). The mean test is far more sensitive, but, as discussed previously, this is because it has an unacceptably high false alarm rate which is insufficiently penalised by d-prime.

Update: Cosma’s notes on the bootstrap are here and recommened if you want the fundamentals and are already degree-level comfortable with statistical theory.

Corrected boostrap function:

function H=bootstrap(s1,s2,samples,alpha,method)

difference=mean(s2)-mean(s1);

for i=1:samples
    
    sstar=[s1 s2];
    
    boot1=sstar(ceil(rand(1,length(s1))*length(sstar)));
    boot2=sstar(ceil(rand(1,length(s2))*length(sstar)));
    
    if method==1
        a(i)=mean(boot1)-mean(boot2);
    else
        a(i)=median(boot1)-median(boot2);    
    end
    
end

CI=prctile(a,[100*alpha/2,100*(1-alpha/2)]);

H = CI(1)>difference | CI(2)
Categories
books politics

More on Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 years

“The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—and often vindictive—power of the state.” (p.332)

Our attitude to debt is a symptom of this erosion of social economies by currency economies. Mutually agreed, honour, credit is replaced by state-backed, economic credit. Loans which inexorably grow due to interest are enforced by brutal laws against debtors. This is the context for the rapacity of European colonialists – they were driven on by the tyranny of interest.

“All this helps explain why the church had been so uncompromising in its attitude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question; it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise. Even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly, this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds they set out to conquer” (p. 319)

It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor. The conquest of the Americas began with mass enslavement, then gradually settled into various forms of debt peonage, African slavery, and “indentured service” (p.350)

This is a scandal not just because the system occasionally goes haywire, as it did in the Putumayo, but because it plays havoc with our most cherished assumptions about what capitalism really is—particularly that, in its basic nature, capitalism has something to do with freedom. For the capitalists, this means the freedom of the marketplace. For most workers, it means free labor. Marxists have questioned whether wage labor is ultimately free in any sense (since someone with nothing to sell but his or her body cannot in any sense be considered a genuinely free agent), but they still tend to assume that free wage labor is the basis of capitalism.

Our dominant image of the origins of capitalism continues to be the English workingman toiling in the factories of the industrial revolution, and this image can be traced forward to Silicon Valley, with a straight line in between. All those millions of slaves and serfs and coolies and debt peons disappear, or if we must speak of them, we write them off as temporary bumps along the road. Like sweatshops, this is assumed to be a stage that industrializing nations had to pass through, just as it is still assumed that all those millions of debt peons and contract laborers and sweatshop workers who still exist, often in the same places, will surely live to see their children become regular wage laborers with health insurance and pensions, and their children, doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs.”(p351)

With this framing, Graeber repaints Adam Smith’s economic account – “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” etc – as a purely moral account, a utopia utterly unlike the actual economic conditions Smith lived in.

To understand the history of capitalism, however, we have to begin by realizing that the picture we have in our heads, of workers who dutifully punch the clock at 8:00 a.m. and receive regular remuneration every Friday, on the basis of a temporary contract that either party is free to break off at any time, began as a utopian vision, was only gradually put into effect even in England and North America, and has never, at any point, been the main way of organising the production for the market, ever, anywhere.
This is actually why Smith’s work is so important. He created the vision of an imaginary world almost entirely free of debt and credit, and therefore, free of guilt and sin; a world where men and women were free to simply calculate their interests in full knowledge that everything had been prearranged by God to ensure that it will serve the greater good. (p.354).

For some critical commentary see here: http://onthespiral.com/review-reactions-debt-first-years, the Crooked Timber seminar (ht Alex)

Update 30/12/12. There’s an important point about rights being conceptualised as property, which Gemma summarises well:

Our freedom is defined as a right, which we own, as opposed to Graeber’s view that rights are actually obligations on others (e.g. our right to free speech is actually others obligations to allow my free speech). Rights have been defined in this way to justify debt-peonage or even slavery – if we own our rights, like property, then we are free to give them away or even sell them (p206).

Categories
psychology science

Bootstrap update

Update: This post used an incorrect implementation of the bootstrap, so the conclusions don’t hold. See this correction

Mike suggested that I alter the variance of the underlying distibutions. This makes total sense, since it matches what we are usually trying to do in psychological research – detect a small difference in a lot of noise. So I made the underlying distibutions look a lot like reaction time distributions, with a 30ms difference between them. The code is

    t0=200;
    s1=t0+25*(randn(1,m)+exp(randn(1,m)));
    s2=t0+25*(randn(1,m)+exp(randn(1,m)))+d;

Where m is the sample size, and d is either 0 or 30. For a very large sample, the distributions look like this:

After a discussion with Jim I looked at the hit rate and false alarm rate separately. For the simple comparison of means, the false alarm rate stays around 0.5 (as you’d predict). For the other tests it drops to about 0.05. The simple comparison of means is so sensitive to a true difference, however, that the dprime can still be superior to that of the other tests. Which suggests dprime is not a good summary statistic to me, rather than that we should do testing simply by comparing the sample means.

So I rerun the procedure I described before, but with higher variance on the underlying samples.

The results are very similar. The bootstrap using the mean as the test statistic is worse than the t-test. The bootstrap using the median is clear superior. This surprises me. I had been told that the bootstrap was superior for nonparametric distributions. In this case it seems as if using the mean as a test statistic eliminates the potential superiority of bootstrapping.

This is still a work in progress, so I will investigate further and may have to update this conclusion as the story evolves.

Categories
books quotes

Debt: The first 5,000 years

David Graeber traces a line from Roman property law, through Cartesian dualism and Hobbes’ state of nature, to the foundational myth of the free market:

At this point we can finally see what’s really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty – not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of “use and abuse” over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man’s household – to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts.

David Graeber (2011) ‘Debt: The First 5000 years’, p209-210.

Graeber uses an anthropologist’s view of history to argue that markets are brought into existence by the state, and particularly by an expansionist military state which wishes to force all social actors to be intermediaries in the war machine. By obliging everyone to accept state currency a state-coinage-slavery complex is created. This dynamic drives the creation of slaves, which are, by definition, people ripped from all social context. The collision of market economies with social economies (which are about interaction as much as obtaining goods) creates a moral dilemma which we can trace written in the texts of all the ancient religions (you’ll have to read the book for details). The dominant modes of human relation in historical time have been three: exchange, hierarchy and communism (not in the Marxist sense). The dominion of the exchange mode, and its perversion into being primarily market exchange, reduces the primacy of the other modes in the models of liberal/market thinkers, and so our conception of our selves (individually and politically) is contaminated by contradictory notions of debt and ownership (again, you’ll have to read the book). Ultimately this finds expression in a vision of ourselves as separate from our own bodies, and in the foundational myth of economics in which we markets come into being de novo among an asocial but equal status collection of isolates who can begin to trade to satisfy their wants.

It’s an extremely rich book, which is also very disorganised in its arguments. I’m still digesting what I’ve read so this is a poor summary. Most importantly for me, and separate from the specifics of the argument, the anthropological and historical material does the job of expanding our conception of what we and our society could be.

Pro-tip: on the final pages (p384-387) Graeber offers his own summary of the thesis of the book.

Categories
science

Testing bootstrapping

Update: This post used an incorrect implementation of the bootstrap, so the conclusions don’t hold. See this correction

This surprised me. I decided to try out bootstrapping as a method of testing if two sets of numbers are drawn from different distributions. I did this by generating sets of numbers of size m from two ex-gaussian distributions which are identical except for a fixed difference, d

    s1=randn(1,m)+exp(randn(1,m));
    s2=randn(1,m)+exp(randn(1,m))+d;

All code is matlab. Sorry about that.

Then, for each pair of numbers I apply a series of different tests for if the distributions are different.
1. Standard t-test (0.05 significance level)
2. Is the mean(s1) 3. Bootstrapping using mean as the test statistic (0.05 significance level)
4. Bootstrapping using the median as the test statistic (0.05 significance level)

I used Ione Fine’s pages on bootstrapping as a guide. The bootstrapping code is:

function H=bootstrap(s1,s2,samples,alpha,method)

for i=1:samples
    
    boot1=s1(ceil(rand(1,length(s1))*length(s1)));
    boot2=s2(ceil(rand(1,length(s2))*length(s2)));
    
    if method==1
        a(i)=mean(boot1)-mean(boot2);
    else
        a(i)=median(boot1)-median(boot2);    
    end
    
end

CI=prctile(a,[100*alpha/2,100*(1-alpha/2)]);

H = CI(1)>0 | CI(2)<0;

I do that 5000 times for each difference, d, and each sample size, m. Then I take the average answer from each test (where 1 is 'conclude there distributions are different' and 0 is 'don't conclude the distributions are different'). For the case where d > 0 this gives you a hit rate, the likelihood that the test will tell you there is a difference when there is a difference. For d = 0.5 you get a difference that most of the tests can detect the majority of the time as long as the sample is more than 50. For the case where d = 0, you can calculate the false alarm rate for each test (at each sample size).

From these you can calculate d-prime as a standard index of sensitivity and plot the result. Sttest, Smean, Sbootstrap and Sbootstrap2 are matrices which hold the likelihood of the four tests giving a positive answer for each sample size (columns) for two differences, 0 and 0.5 (the rows):

figure(1);clf
plot(measures,norminv(Sttest(2,:))-norminv(Sttest(1,:),0,1),'k')
hold on
plot(measures,norminv(Smean(2,:))-norminv(Smean(1,:)),'r')
%plot(measures,norminv(Smedian(2,:))-norminv(Smedian(1,:)),'c--')
plot(measures,norminv(Sbootstrap(2,:))-norminv(Sbootstrap(1,:)),'m')
plot(measures,norminv(Sbootstrap2(2,:))-norminv(Sbootstrap2(1,:)),'g')
xlabel('Sample size')
ylabel('sensitivity - d prime')
legend('T-test','mean','bstrap-mean','bstrap-median')

Here is the result (click for larger):

What surprised me was:

  • The t-test is more sensitive than the bootstrap, if the mean is used as the test statistic
  • How much more sensitive the bootstrap is than the other tests if the median is used as the test statistic
  • How well the simple mean does. I suspect there's so nuance I'm missing here, such as unacceptably high false positive rate for smaller differences

Update 28/11/12
-Fixed an inconsequential bug in the dprime calculation
-Closer inspection shows that the simple mean case gives a ~50% false alarm rate, but the high sensitivity offsets this. Suggests dprime isn't a wise summary statistic?

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tweets

Tweets New paper: “Memory enhances the mere exposure effe…

New paper: “Memory enhances the mere exposure effect” onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ma… in the marketing literature, this is contra received wisdom

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links

Links for autumn 2012

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tweets

Tweets Kent Berridge of “wanting vs liking” fame comments…

Kent Berridge of “wanting vs liking” fame comments on Ainslie’s hyperbolic discounting ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… (2008)

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tweets

Tweets Research in Progress – still got it http://t.co/YJ…

Research in Progress – still got it researchinprogress.tumblr.com

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tweets

Tweets Why is it so hard to give good directions? http://…

Why is it so hard to give good directions?
mindhacks.com/2012/11/12/bbc… my latest @BBC_Future column now up on mindhacks.com

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tweets

Tweets Against distributed representations: “On the biolo…

Against distributed representations: “On the biological plausibility of grandmother cells” ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19159155 Bowers, 2009

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tweets

Tweets Ninja Standing Desks: http://t.co/z6mNcKCD And you…

Ninja Standing Desks: ninjastandingdesk.com And you can pay in Bitcoins. Made in the Bay Area, of course

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tweets

Tweets Belgian electro rock band Goose perform their song…

Belgian electro rock band Goose perform their song “British Mode” on board a giant rotating Ames window youtube.com/watch?v=16fYml…

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tweets

Tweets Do You Know What I’m Thinking? http://t.co/TKZxJdo…

Do You Know What I’m Thinking? youtube.com/watch?v=xmLP55… featuring all your favourite U of Manchester psychologists, from @Psy_File

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tweets

Tweets Tetris skills after 10,000 hours practice: https:/…

Tetris skills after 10,000 hours practice: youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544… my article on the psychology of tetris mindhacks.com/2012/10/29/bbc…

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tweets

Tweets Time resolution of clocks: Effects on reaction tim…

Time resolution of clocks: Effects on reaction time measurement—Good news for bad clocks onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.…

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academic Me

New academic website

I have made myself a new website for my day job. I used wordpress, and it was fantastically convenient. I’m also pretty happy with how it looks. Feedback welcome.

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tweets

Tweets for 2012-10-11

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academic

Notes for undergraduates

This has been in my email signature for the last year or so.

If you email me, please say your full name, level and, if relevant, which course(s) you are referring to. Although you know what “the lecture” or “the coursework” refers to, I may not. If you refer to an article, book or a webpage, please give the full reference and/or URL so that I know what you are talking about. Similarly, if you include a citation (surname, date) in a piece of writing, please include the full reference (in APA style) at the end.

It is important that you leave the University of Sheffield in the habit of writing formally to people. I may not be bothered by you not including an introduction to your email, or by you not signing it, but many people you write to will be. You should also make an effort to capitalise, punctuate and spell correctly in your email. Again, although I may not judge you negatively if you fail to do this, many people will, so you should practice the habit of taking care over these things when you write.

If you are a PSY241 student, please read this before emailing me
http://psy241.group.shef.ac.uk/psy241wiki/index.php/FAQ

If you need a response by a particular time, it helps if you mention this in the email. If you have an urgent query (i.e. requires a response within 48 hours) email is not appropriate. Please call instead.

I do not read my email over the weekend, or after 5pm.

Answers to most of the questions I get asked are readily available, either in the Undergraduate Handbook or on the Departmental or University webpages. If you write to me with a question like this I will probably write back and ask you where you have looked already for the information. If you want to avoid this, please say in your email how you tried searching for the information you required before emailing me.

If we make an appointment to meet you must turn up on time. If you are late I may not be able to begin a meeting with you because it will infringe on other commitments. If you are unable to make an appointment, or are going to be late, please call to let me know, so that I am able to do other things with my time and am not waiting around like a lemon.

Finally, congratulations on reading this far. Here’s some good advice: “The way to get a first class mark is to answer a specific question by making arguments about theories and supporting those arguments with evidence”. Even if you aren’t aiming for a first class mark, you can still avoid getting a lower mark than you should by ensuring that you answer the question. We cannot give you marks for providing correct information which does not answer the question.

Bonus advice for 2012: If you want to get answers from busy people, ask simple direct questions. “Is today’s lecture at 12 o’clock?” is better than “When are the lectures?”, and may be more in line with what you really want to know anyway. Both of these options are better than something like “What do I need to know about the course?” which is so poorly specified that you are unlikely to get a swift and helpful answer.

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tweets

Tweets for 2012-10-04

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Tweets for 2012-09-27

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psychology quotes

Quote #291: Sutherland on Consciousness

Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.

Stuart Sutherland, in The International Dictionary of Psychology entry on Consciousness

Categories
psychology

An accommodation with the authority of common sense

In Science in Action, Bruno Latour talks of the birth of the modern science of geology, triumphed by Charles Lyell. He discusses Lyell’s attempt to professionalise and win respect for geology, and the need to find funds to support research in the new discipline. One solution to the need for funds it to appeal directly to the public, in Lyell’s case by writing a book that the landed gentry might read and so be convinced to donate to the cause of Geology:

If geology is successful in reshaping the earth’s history, size, composition and age, by the same token, it is also extremely shocking and unusual. You start the book in a world created by God’s will 6000 years ago, and you end it with a few poor Englishmen lost in the eons of time, preceded by hundreds of Floods and hundreds of thousands of different species. The shock might be so violent that the whole of England would be up in arms against geologists, bringing the whole discipline into disrepute. On the other hand, if Lyell softens the blow too much, then the book is not about new facts, but is a careful compromise between commonsense and the geologists’ opinion. This negotiation is all the more difficult if the new discipline runs not only against the Church’s teachings but also against Lyell’s own beliefs, as is the case with the advent of humanity into earth history which Lyell preferred to keep recent and miraculous despite his other theories. How is it possible to say simultaneously that it is useful for everyone, but runs against everyone’s beliefs? How is it possible to convince the gentry and at the same time to destroy the authority of common sense? How is it possible to assert that it is morally necessary to develop geology while agonising in private in the meantime on the position of humanity in Nature?

(p.149)

Replace 19th century geology with ‘cognitive sciences’, and gentry with ‘public’, and the essential tension is still there. The new brain science seeks attention and kudos, and in doing this must reach an uncomfortable accommodation with the ‘authority of common sense’. Psychologists and neuroscientists want to be heard in the public domain, but they will get so much more attention if they flatter received wisdom rather than attempt to overturn strongly held intuitions about human freedom, reasoning and morality.

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quotes

Quote #290

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Anaïs Nin, volume 3 of her diaries (apparently)

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tweets

Tweets for 2012-09-20

  • Can anyone spare me $9k so I can buy a fibre optic keyboard for use in the scanner? #
  • Really?! RT @frabcus Genius. Plugin that tells you which scientific paper was source of bad newspaper journalism. http://t.co/9LlKXnKD #
  • The advertising dollar makes its own judgement of the future of the newspaper business http://t.co/FeYpWeV1 #
  • My colleague Danielle Matthews is on Radio Sheffield at 11am talking about her study into early language development http://t.co/yQPtPzPb #
  • Cancel that, she's been bumped. But she's still looking for parents of young children to take part in the study http://t.co/yQPtPzPb #
  • Okay, so what's a fun saturday night in NYC for a week saturday? #
  • A good popular science book makes you part of the scientific conversation. http://t.co/SmanoW1F @MarkChangizi in 2010 #
  • Auction psychology http://t.co/nXm7TGbV My latest for @BBC_Future now up at http://t.co/85RrPPSd #
  • "Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric" What it's like to be stung by a Tarantula Hawk Wasp, courtesy of the http://t.co/PK6cN9Qu #
  • This is your brain on twitter #
  • "let’s not be too hard on phrenology while taking out the neurotrash." says @stevenpoole http://t.co/U0Ekt6k8 #

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tweets

Tweets for 2012-09-13

  • Wsj: 'This Isn't Candid Camera, It's a Science Project' http://t.co/Hkdv8jsr that'd be me in Berlin then. #
  • Buy the New Statesman so you can read @stevenpoole being cruel, so cruel – but fair – about neuroscientism #
  • Virtue ethics is due a major comeback IMO #
  • Psychology in the Pub on Sleep, Learning and Memory, Oct 11, Showroom, #Sheffield Maybe this link'll work: https://t.co/ocgylD26 #
  • This link is considerably useful if you are coming to study at the University of Sheffield this month http://t.co/aus3vIPP #
  • My next column for @BBC_Future problematises drawing clear conclusions from psych research. Tricky. It's hard to be liked for problematising #
  • Why you pay more: auction psychology http://t.co/QEAZaJTt my latest for @BBC_Future (UK readable link) #
  • "Nonconscious activation of placebo and nocebo pain responses" http://t.co/eVbRZNkX #
  • The 'subliminal' nature of the stimulus presentation is suspect – they use a yes/no recognition test (the expt DV reqs. only 2AFC discrim) #
  • Myths in the way of clear academic prose http://t.co/YbzrfU1i Helen Sword in @timeshighered #
  • Teaching questions rather than answers #
  • What scene from any play/movie/book best exemplifies the moment where someone comes to the alarming realisation that the game has changed? #
  • To clarify: I'm not interested in the feeling that the pieces have moved, but that the very rules of the game are different from before #
  • This is more than just surprise. #
  • The greatest hits…of Cognitive Modelling http://t.co/vYBRjsDB provided by Gary Cottrell #
  • Our @FestivalMind event: the public votes which research gets funded http://t.co/Lwl0pKhg now on twitter as @MindsInvestors #Sheffield #

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