Comments on: On female intuition

By: tom

tom — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 09:20:23 +0000

Firstly, invoking striatal dopamine to explain female intuition seems to me unnecessary and unlikely – if there is a gender difference can’t we just say that paying more attention to social cues and being less bullish allows greater opportunity for intuition to play a role?
Secondly, if striatal dopamine was encoding stronger predictor-reward relationships we would expect a greater frequency of erroneous, or superstitous, responses being learnt (you can’t just tune the striatum to say “make learning better” – if it was that simple evolution would already have done it). Is there any reason to think this is in fact the case?

By: Vaughan

Vaughan — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 08:41:43 +0000

This one’s a typo (now been fixed). It should be ‘Predictor’, which should hopefully make it clearer.

By: Neville

Neville — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 00:53:43 +0000

“…stronger representations of P [Preditor] -> R [Response] relationships…”
Could you explain exactly what a Preditor is? It doesn’t seem to be in the dictionary and google results are clogged with misspellings of “predator”. I would guess it was some sort of chemical feedback type thing? Or is it a typo?