June 29, 2006
She Blinded Me with ... fMRIs?
There's an interesting article at Seed right now, which claims that neuroscience-y jargon and functional MRI images are unduly important in academic psychology. The reasoning, and the evidence, are as follows:
Probably because fMRI seems more like real science than many of the other things that psychologists are up to. It has all the trappings of work with great lab-cred: big, expensive, and potentially dangerous machines, hospitals and medical centers, and a lot of people in white coats. In a recent study, Deena Skolnick, a graduate student at Yale, asked her subjects to judge different explanations of a psychological phenomenon. Some of these explanations were crafted to be awful. And people were good at noticing that they were awful—unless Skolnick inserted a few sentences of neuroscience. These were entirely irrelevant, basically stating that the phenomenon occurred in a certain part of the brain. But they did the trick: For both the novices and the experts (cognitive neuroscientists in the Yale psychology department), the presence of a bit of apparently-hard science turned bad explanations into satisfactory ones.Unfortunately, I can't find any of the details of this study on-line. Searching for the name Deena Skolnick returns little more than an unrelated paper, (co-authored, by the way, by the authoer of the Seed piece).
(Via Language Log.)
Posted by todd at 8:57 AM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2006
'Hippocampal Slice' Would Make a Great Rap Name
Here's a neat post at Gene Expression about the roles of three different calcium ion sources in long-term potentiation.
Posted by todd at 8:44 AM | Comments (2)
May 11, 2006
This is Why We Need a Subscription to Neuron
Way cool article posted on neurodudes.
If ever there was a paper that would bring tears to one’s eyes, this is it: a previously hidden mental process has now become subject to experimental study. The mental process is the covert movement of attention, the selective focussing of attention to subregions of the visual field, but without eye movement. The movements of covert attention were hypothesized based on psychophysics, but the authors can now follow it using a vector field derived from a population of neurons in the parietal cortex. The monkey has been trained to use covert attentional shifts to solve a maze task. The major finding is that the vector derived from the population of parietal cells follows in time the path through the maze, as the monkey solves the maze.
Posted by todd at 4:46 PM | Comments (1)