Graffiti found this morning in Medellín which seems to uncannily illustrate the practice of cognitive science.
Found on Carrera 63A (‘La Paralela’) by the metro station Acevedo. I’ve found myself in many risky situations in Colombia but few compare to running out into two lane traffic to try and take this photo.
Forgetting why you entered a room is called the “Doorway Effect”, and it may reveal as much about the strengths of human memory, as it does the weaknesses, says psychologist Tom Stafford.
We’ve all done it. Run upstairs to get your keys, but forget that it is them you’re looking for once you get to the bedroom. Open the fridge door and reach for the middle shelf only to realise that we can’t remember why we opened the fridge in the first place. Or wait for a moment to interrupt a friend to find that the burning issue that made us want to interrupt has now vanished from our minds just as we come to speak: “What did I want to say again?” we ask a confused audience, who all think “how should we know?!”
Although these errors can be embarrassing, they are also common. It’s known as the “Doorway Effect”, and it reveals some important features of how our minds are organised. Understanding this might help us appreciate those temporary moments of forgetfulness as more than just an annoyance (although they will still be annoying).
These features of our minds are perhaps best illustrated by a story about a woman who meets three builders on their lunch break. “What are you doing today?” she asks the first. “I’m putting brick after sodding brick on top of another,” sighs the first. “What are you doing today?” she asks the second. “I’m building a wall,” is the simple reply. But the third builder swells with pride when asked, and replies: “I’m building a cathedral!”
Maybe you heard that story as encouragement to think of the big picture, but to the psychologist in you the important moral is that any action has to be thought of at multiple levels if you are going to carry it out successfully. The third builder might have the most inspiring view of their day-job, but nobody can build a cathedral without figuring out how to successfully put one brick on top of another like the first builder.
As we move through our days our attention shifts between these levels – from our goals and ambitions, to plans and strategies, and to the lowest levels, our concrete actions. When things are going well, often in familiar situations, we keep our attention on what we want and how we do it seems to take care of itself. If you’re a skilled driver then you manage the gears, indicators and wheel automatically, and your attention is probably caught up in the less routine business of navigating the traffic or talking to your passengers. When things are less routine we have to shift our attention to the details of what we’re doing, taking our minds off the bigger picture for a moment. Hence the pause in conversation as the driver gets to a tricky junction, or the engine starts to make a funny sound.
The way our attention moves up and down the hierarchy of action is what allows us to carry out complex behaviours, stitching together a coherent plan over multiple moments, in multiple places or requiring multiple actions.
The Doorway Effect occurs when our attention moves between levels, and it reflects the reliance of our memories – even memories for what we were about to do – on the environment we’re in.
Imagine that we’re going upstairs to get our keys and forget that it is the keys we came for as soon as we enter the bedroom. Psychologically, what has happened is that the plan (“Keys!”) has been forgotten even in the middle of implementing a necessary part of the strategy (“Go to bedroom!”). Probably the plan itself is part of a larger plan (“Get ready to leave the house!”), which is part of plans on a wider and wider scale (“Go to work!”, “Keep my job!”, “Be a productive and responsible citizen”, or whatever). Each scale requires attention at some point. Somewhere in navigating this complex hierarchy the need for keys popped into mind, and like a circus performer setting plates spinning on poles, your attention focussed on it long enough to construct a plan, but then moved on to the next plate (this time, either walking to the bedroom, or wondering who left their clothes on the stairs again, or what you’re going to do when you get to work or one of a million other things that it takes to build a life).
And sometimes spinning plates fall. Our memories, even for our goals, are embedded in webs of associations. That can be the physical environment in which we form them, which is why revisiting our childhood home can bring back a flood of previously forgotten memories, or it can be the mental environment – the set of things we were just thinking about when that thing popped into mind.
The Doorway Effect occurs because we change both the physical and mental environments, moving to a different room and thinking about different things. That hastily thought up goal, which was probably only one plate among the many we’re trying to spin, gets forgotten when the context changes.
It’s a window into how we manage to coordinate complex actions, matching plans with actions in a way that – most of the time – allows us to put the right bricks in the right place to build the cathedral of our lives.
This is my BBC Future column from Tuesday. The original is here
If you want a crystal clear introduction to the role genetics can play in human nature, you can’t do much better than an article in The Guardian’s Sifting the Evidence blog by epidemiologist Marcus Munafo.
It’s been giving a slightly distracting title – but ignore that – and just read the main text.
Are we shaped more by our genes or our environment – the age-old question of nature and nurture? This is really a false dichotomy; few, if any, scientists working in the area of human behaviour would adhere to either an extreme nature or extreme nurture position. But what do we mean when we say that our behaviours are influenced by genetic factors? And how do we know?
It will be one of the most useful 20 minutes you’ll spend this week.
Link to excellent introduction to genetics and human behaviour.
The reproducibility crisis in Psychology rumbles on. For the uninitiated, this is the general brouhaha we’re having over how reliable published psychological research is. I wrote a piece on this in 2013, which now sounds a little complacent, and unnecessarily focussed on just one area of psychology, given the extent of the problems since uncovered in the way research is manufactured (or maybe not, see below). Anyway, in the last week or so there have been three interesting developments
Despair
Michael Inzlicht blogged his ruminations on the state of the field of social psychology, and they’re not rosy : “We erred, and we erred badly“, he writes. It is a profound testament to the depth of the current concerns about the reliability of psychology when such a senior scientist begins to doubt the reality of some of the phenomenon upon which he has built his career investigating.
As someone who has been doing research for nearly twenty years, I now can’t help but wonder if the topics I chose to study are in fact real and robust. Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years?
Don’t panic!
But not everyone is worried. A team of Harvard A-listers, including Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert, have released press release announcing a commentary on the “Reproducibility Project: Psychology”. This was an attempt to estimate the reliability of a large sample of phenomena from the psychology literature (Short introduction in Nature here). The paper from this project was picked as one of the most important of 2015 by the journal Science.
There project is a huge effort, which is open to multiple interpretations. The Harvard team’s press release is headlined “No evidence of a replicability crisis in psychological science” and claimed “reproducibility of psychological science is indistinguishable from 100%”, as well as calling from the project to put effort into repairing the damage done to the reputation of psychological research. I’d link to the press release, but it looks like between me learning of it yesterday and coming to write about it today this material has been pulled from the internet. The commentary announced was due to be released on March the 4th, so we wait with baited breath for the good news about why we don’t need to worry about the reliability of psychology research. Come on boys, we need some good news.
UPDATE 3rd March: The website is back! No Evidence for a Replicability Crisis in Psychological Science. Commentary here, and response
…But whatever you do, optimally weight evidence
Speaking of the Reproducibility Project, Alexander Etz produced a great Bayesian reanalysis of the data from that project (possible because it is all open access, via the Open Science Framework). This take on the project is a great example of how open science allows people to more easily build on your results, as well as being a vital complement to the original report – not least because it stops you naively accepting any simple statistical report of the what the reproducibility project ‘means’ (e.g. “30% of studies do not replicate” etc). Etz and Joachim Vandekerckhove have now upgraded the analysis to a paper, which is available (open access, natch) in PLoS One : “A Bayesian Perspective on the Reproducibility Project: Psychology“. And their interpretation of the reliability of psychology, as informed by the reproducibility project?
Overall, 75% of studies gave qualitatively similar results in terms of the amount of evidence provided. However, the evidence was often weak …The majority of the studies (64%) did not provide strong evidence for either the null or the alternative hypothesis in either the original or the replication…We conclude that the apparent failure of the Reproducibility Project to replicate many target effects can be adequately explained by overestimation of effect sizes (or overestimation of evidence against the null hypothesis) due to small sample sizes and publication bias in the psychological literature
Mind Hacks 