The #Tolman "sunburst maze" results (from 1946) are often used to demonstrate shortcut ability in rats... but do they really? More on this later!
For now, would you know of any #ComputationalModels that were tested in this protocol (whether they replicate the original results or not)? We know of a few (well... 4) but would like to make sure we are not missing any.
#BehaviouralNeuroscience #SpatialCognition #Shortcuts #CognitiveMap #Neuroscience (kind of)
I'm so fed up* with articles about the widespread use of LLM chatbots by university students that only interview students who use them intensively and teachers who have no idea how to encourage students to think by themselves.
Aren't there any stories out there of students who refuse to use them because they realize how detrimental to learning this can be (I'm less interested in those who refuse out of ethical/environmental/geopolitical concerns, not that those aren't valid) or of educators who have found how to effectively encourage students to do their own work, because the point is not the final product but the process?
(Yeah, my Introduction to Data Science course is starting in a few weeks and I'm not looking forward to the time we're going to waste on grading projects written by an algorithm.)
* by which I mean, excessively upset and having difficulty sleeping at night. The despair they induce has even been seeping into some of my dreams.
Hey everyone,
My lab will be recruiting a PhD student, fully funded, in the coming year to study the intersection of visual attention working memory, and imagery. Reach out at [email protected] if interested!
How can we fix academic publishing? I just wrote a new article outlining my thoughts on this based on all the attempts I've seen, what has worked and what has failed, and finishing with the strategy we developed for @ScholarNexus. I'd love to hear your feedback!
https://thesamovar.github.io/zavarka/how-do-we-fix-publishing/
New paper! People often do not remember information they just searched for (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-023-01465-9).
Subjects were asked to draw the contents of their memory immediately after searching for a target in a natural scene
Experiment 1: For 43 trials, subjects searched for wall-arts or pillows, remember their locations, and draw the locations on a blank canvas. Then they were unexpectedly asked to actually draw the room they had just viewed. Subjects could also draw an X to indicate no memory. 2/
A group of raters evaluated each drawn image to see if they could match it to the source image, with two similar images as foils. Result: the drawn images from the surprise trial could not be matched, but those from the following trials could be reliably matched.
In experiment 2 we asked a new set of subjects to draw the target they had just located (a piece of wall art) instead of the whole scene – we wondered if perhaps they also had poor memory of the target itself, which previous work on Attribute Amnesia suggests.
Again, raters couldn't match the sketches from the surprise trial, but sketches from later trials were better. This was true for both gist and exact match probes! Thus, subjects can locate a target without building a memory that can be recalled just 1 second later.
Note that we used the same canvas for the presurprise and surprise trials so that subjects already knew how to use the drawing tool when the surprise question was first asked. To test if this poor memory was just due to the interruption of the unexpected question we ran a control.
In Experiment 3, we had subjects draw the target scene periodically so that they knew to expect it, and then provided an interrupting popup prompt to see if this would damage their memory, and it didn’t! Thus we conclude that the poor memory on the surprise reflects not an effect of cognitive interference from being surprised, but rather a weaker encoding of the scene and the target. The implications are that we can engage in a search task without building a memory of either the scene or target.
This is a generalization of the attribute amnesia (AA) phenomenon, which dissociates attentional selection from memory encoding. It is the first time that AA is shown for visual recall rather than recognition, which is important because >
Prompts like “draw what you remember” are very easy to process in an unexpected prompt whereas a recognition probe requires subjects to project memory into a discriminative space that is (perhaps) hard to do on-the-fly.
Thanks to everyone who worked on this, especially the lead author Nicolas Cardenas-Miller, a student who is going on to study language for the rest of his undergraduate education.
Searching within natural scenes can induce incidental encoding of information about the scene and the target, particularly when the scene is complex or repeated. However, recent evidence from attribute amnesia (AA) suggests that in some situations, searchers can find a target without building a robust incidental memory of it’s task relevant features. Through drawing-based visual recall and an AA search task, we investigated whether search in natural scenes necessitates memory encoding. Participants repeatedly searched for and located an easily detected item in novel scenes for numerous trials before being unexpectedly prompted to draw either the entire scene (Experiment 1) or their search target (Experiment 2) directly after viewing the search image. Naïve raters assessed the similarity of the drawings to the original information. We found that surprise-trial drawings of the scene and search target were both poorly recognizable, but the same drawers produced highly recognizable drawings on the next trial when they had an expectation to draw the image. Experiment 3 further showed that the poor surprise trial memory could not merely be attributed to interference from the surprising event. Our findings suggest that even for searches done in natural scenes, it is possible to locate a target without creating a robust memory of either it or the scene it was in, even if attended to just a few seconds prior. This disconnection between attention and memory might reflect a fundamental property of cognitive computations designed to optimize task performance and minimize resource use.
In peer review, so much time is spent dancing around the power of the reviewer.
You often can't say what you really think and you have to go to extraordinary lengths to appease hypothetical opinions, which are often inaccurate anyway. I support peer review but not like this.
Also the power dynamic between the reviewer and the editor creates an additional layer where the reviewer cannot always speak their true opinion, for fear of hypothetical decisions by the editor.
For example being critical without triggering a rejection
My ambitious solo paper reviewing our field is now online!
"Mapping visual working memory models to a theoretical framework" published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (@psychonomic_soc): https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-023-02356-5
#psychology #science #cognition #cognitivepsychology #visionscience #visualworkingmemory
The body of research on visual working memory (VWM)—the system often described as a limited memory store of visual information in service of ongoing tasks—is growing rapidly. The discovery of numerous related phenomena, and the many subtly different definitions of working memory, signify a challenge to maintain a coherent theoretical framework to discuss concepts, compare models and design studies. A lack of robust theory development has been a noteworthy concern in the psychological sciences, thought to be a precursor to the reproducibility crisis (Oberauer & Lewandowsky, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 1596–1618, 2019). I review the theoretical landscape of the VWM field by examining two prominent debates—whether VWM is object-based or feature-based, and whether discrete-slots or variable-precision best describe VWM limits. I share my concerns about the dualistic nature of these debates and the lack of clear model specification that prevents fully determined empirical tests. In hopes of promoting theory development, I provide a working theory map by using the broadly encompassing memory for latent representations model (Hedayati et al., Nature Human Behaviour, 6, 5, 2022) as a scaffold for relevant phenomena and current theories. I illustrate how opposing viewpoints can be brought into accordance, situating leading models of VWM to better identify their differences and improve their comparison. The hope is that the theory map will help VWM researchers get on the same page—clarifying hidden intuitions and aligning varying definitions—and become a useful device for meaningful discussions, development of models, and definitive empirical tests of theories.
We are starting a new review and curation platform (so not quite a journal, but something that we see as moving beyond traditional journals https://fediscience.org/@alexh/110813165018548270) for the field of metascience, and looking for examples of good journal governance policies.
By "governance policy", I mean things like policies on editorial board membership and nominations and (possibly) chief editor term limits, and relationship between chief editor(s) and associate editors and the editorial board.
Our plan for a diamond open access platform to share STS and other metaresearch more efficiently and transparently. Metascience doesn't really have a journal or platform yet, does it? (There is a journal called Metascience, but it publishes only book reviews I think) https://www.easst.net/article/metaror-a-new-form-of-scholarly-publishing-and-peer-review-for-sts/ with @[email protected] @[email protected] #openaccess #metascience
El Duvelle Neuro
Chloé Azencott
Dan Goodman
William Ngiam | 严祥全
Alex Holcombe
Dgar