Deric Bownds
These articles, from Deric's MindBlog at http://mindblog.dericbownds.net report new ideas and work on mind, brain, and behavior - as well as random curious stuff.
MY BLOGS
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Deric Bownds' MindBlog
http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/
This blog reports new ideas and work on mind, brain, and behavior - as well as random curious stuff.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 2494 )
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The Wisdom of Crowds for Visual Search.
Juni and Eckstein show that perceptual decisions about large image data sets (as from medical and geospatial imaging) that are made by a group are more likely t... Read more
Posted on 01 June 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Listener Evaluations of New and Old Italian Violins
From Fritz et al.: Old Italian violins are routinely credited with playing qualities supposedly unobtainable in new instruments. Read more
Posted on 31 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Detecting Both Facial and Olfactory Cues of Sickness in Others
From Regenbogen et al.: Significance In the perpetual race between evolving organisms and pathogens, the human immune system has evolved to reduce the harm of... Read more
Posted on 29 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Solitary Discourse Yields Deeper Understanding Than Solitary Description.
Zavals and Kuhn show that imagining a discourse between advocates of two political candidates yields a richer representation than solitary evaluation of the... Read more
Posted on 26 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Optimal Incentives for Collective Intelligence
Mann and Helbing devise a game-theoretic model of collective prediction showing that an antidote to groupthink and conformity is to reward those who have shown... Read more
Posted on 26 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Poor Human Olfaction is a 19th-century Myth
A review from McGann noting work that shows no anatomical basis for supposing human olfaction to be inferior to animals, although variation in the olfactory... Read more
Posted on 25 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
A Moralistic Bias in Our Default Representation of What is Possible.
From Phillips and Cushman: Significance As humans, we think not only about what is, but also what could be. These representations of alternative possibilities... Read more
Posted on 24 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Osteoarthritis Attenuated by Removing Senescent Cells.
Jeon et al. use a model of anterior cruciate ligament surgery to show that senescent cells assemble in the traumatized knee joint and trigger development of... Read more
Posted on 23 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Science of Consciousness
In 1994 I went to the first of what has become an annual gathering, sponsored by the Center for Consciousness Studies of the University of Arizona, of... Read more
Posted on 22 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Our Brains Have an Innate Knowledge of Tools.
From Striem-Amit et al.: Significance To what extent is brain organization driven by innate genetic constraints, and how dependent is it on individual experienc... Read more
Posted on 19 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Invisibility Cloak Illusion - You're Too Focused on What You're Focused On.
Boothy does a summary of her work with Clark and Bargh. Some slightly edited clips: That coffee stain on your shirt, those mismatched earrings you... Read more
Posted on 18 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Increasing Honesty in Humans with Noninvasive Brain Stimulation
Maréchal et al. show that a bit of electricity applied to your right prefrontal cortex makes you half as likely to be dishonest. Hmmm..... Read more
Posted on 17 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
The Fading American Dream in a Nutshell...
From Chetty et al.: We estimated rates of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children who earn more than their parents—by combining data from U.S. Read more
Posted on 16 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Our Spatial Memory is Driven by Perceived Animacy of Simple Shapes.
Chin points to work of van Buren and Scholl who use “wolfpack” animations of dart shapes whose points track the movement of a disc (the prey) to show that... Read more
Posted on 15 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Semantics and the Science of Fear - the Amygdala Doesn't 'cause' Fear.
Here are some core clips from an article in which Joseph Ledoux updates an idea he proposed several decades ago: …that objectively measurable behavioral and... Read more
Posted on 12 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
What We Perceive Depends on How Much It Costs Us.
Interesting work from Hagura et al. showing that our perceptual decisions are biased by the action costs that are associated with our subsequent decisions is... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Has Trump Stolen Philosophy’s Critical Tools?
Casey Williams does an intriguing piece in the NYTimes “The Stone” section on topics in philosophy. I’m sure he is not crediting Trump with any awareness of... Read more
Posted on 10 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Details of Our Brain's Upstairs-downstairs Emotion Regulation.
Morawetz et al. (open source) offer a study probing how our brain's prefrontal upstairs modulates the up-regulation or down-regulation of our emotional... Read more
Posted on 09 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Brain Correlates of Third Person Perspective Improving Interactions with...
Interesting work (open source) from Leitner et al.: Previous research suggests that people show increased self-referential processing when they provide criticis... Read more
Posted on 08 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE -
Histone Variants Promote Vulnerability to Depressive Behaviors
Lepack et al. find that a particular histone protein variant in the nucleus accumbens contributes to stress susceptibility in mice (histones are highly... Read more
Posted on 05 May 2017 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE