Christian’s posted a great summary on the BPS Research Digest of a recent study that examined factors in jury death penalty decisions, some of which are quite surprising.
It seems to reflect an increasing focus on the psychology of court room and jury interactions. It will be interesting to see these sort of findings will ever lead to additional rules in court room to try and eliminate the effects.
Wired has a short piece on researchers from Carleton University who are attempting to use EEG signals in place of a password – so you can think ‘pass thoughts’ to get to your data.
“It is known there are differences between people’s brains and their signals,” says Carleton researcher Julie Thorpe, who’s working on the project with Anil Somayaji and Adrian Chan. “Can we observe a user-controllable signal encoding hundreds or thousands of bits of information in a repeatable fashion? That’s the real question. We think it may be possible.”
The system has the potential to become a new kind of biometric security tool that — in contrast to fingerprint readers, iris scanners or facial recognition — would allow users to change their pass codes periodically.
Maybe this will lead to a new generation of hackers who train themselves to simulate others mental states in an attempt to forge ‘pass thoughts’?
Link to article ‘Your Thoughts Are Your Password’.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Scientific American investigate the neuroscience and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease in a new feature article.
Researchers devise software that tracks the mood swings of 150,000 LiveJournal users.
The New York Times examines the neuropsychology of investor behaviour – christened neuroeconomics.
The New Atlantis Magazine takes an in-depth look at the trouble with the Turing Test (via 3quarksdaily).
In light of the first ‘female viagra’ The Observer discusses whether it will be a substitute fix for emotional problems in couples.
The New York Times examines evidence about the role of the gene neuregulin in the risk for schizophrenia.
Physicists devise mathematical model to simulate how sensory neurons operate.
UK nurses back harm-reduction scheme to supervise chronic self-harmers.
A curious case-vignette of a person with depression is published in The New York Times.
BBC News reports that female ovulation makes men more wary of ‘rival’ masculine males, according to a new study.
I take it Spring has truly sprung, as this week’s New Scientist keeps the theme of love alive by devoting a special issue to that most curious of human behaviours.
There’s feature articles on everything from the psychology of finding (and keeping) the perfect partner to the darker side of obsession and stalking.
Unfortunately, the articles are only available if you stump up hard cash, except for a one-off personals page that has adverts from scientists around the world wanting to meet potential partners. Some are quite poetic:
60’s CHILD (F), thrives on serendipity and chaos, globally involved, healthily skeptical. Curiously awaits nice guy with nourishing bio-psycho-social alternative to flaming hot cheetos for perspectives sharing. Los Angeles. Reply number: 134
Keep an eye out for any hypocoristics.
Link to this week’s table of contents.
Link to New Scientist personals page.
Online science and humanities e-zine LabLit has an article about one guy’s experience of ‘luring the ladies’ with smooth talking neuroscience chit-chat (and presumably it works well for luring men too).
So, next thing I know, I’m actually chatting away with three beautiful young ladies in a bar in Baltimore. And we’re chatting about signal transduction mechanisms and the implications of cerebral ischemia! Not in strict scientific terminology of course, but in decent general terms. I explain about signal transduction by using the band as an example. The signal leaves the guitarist‚Äôs hand as he makes the strings vibrate. This is transmitted to the pick-ups in the guitar, and turned into a signal that travels along his cable to his amplifier (or amp, as we rock stars say). There the signal has to be transduced into a sound…
Link to article ‘How to lure in the ladies with your PhD’.
Link to LabLit (via MeFi).
The Fast Artificial Neural Network Library is a programming library that takes much of the pain out of constructing artificial intelligence and cognitive modelling projects.
It is free software, incredibly professional, well documented, fully supported, and available for a number of programming languages both mainstream and obscure.
There’s also a concise introduction to neural networks (pdf) which covers some of the operating principles for those wanting to know how they work.
Neural networks are used both as software tools for completing otherwise difficult tasks, and in cognitive science for simulating cognitive processes.
In neuropsychology, neural networks are often created to simulate a certain cognitive task, and then the network is ‘damaged’ to see whether the network can predict the effects of brain injury or impairment.
This connectionist approach to cognitive science was made particularly popular by the 1986 book Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (ISBN 0262631121) by David Rumelhart and James McClelland.
Link to Fast Artificial Neural Network Library.
pdf of ‘Neural Networks Made Simple’.
Link to Wikipedia page on ‘connectionism’.
Technology and society magazine The New Atlantis has a comprehensive article on ‘neuroelectronics’ – the science of interfacing digital components with neural wetware.
The potential merging of mind and machine thrills, frightens, and intrigues us. For decades, experiments at the border between brains and electronics have led to sensationalistic media coverage, vivid science fiction portrayals, and dreams of cyborgs and bionic men. But recently, this area of science has seen remarkable advances—from robotic limbs controlled directly by brain activity, to brain implants that alter the mood of the depressed, to rats steered by remote control. Adam Keiper explores the peculiar history and present directions of this research, and considers the challenges of staying human in the age of neuroelectronics.
Link to article ‘The Age of Neuroelectronics’.
YouTube has the fantastic clip of Ali G interviewing legendary Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky.
’nuff said.
Link to video clip on YouTube.
Science News has got an excellent article on one of psychology’s most recent developments – the Implicit Association Test – a computerised task that claims to measure hidden or unadmitted biases.
The test involves reacting to (usually) words as they appear on-screen by classifying them into categories. The categories are altered to draw out differences in reaction time, which supposedly relate to the difficulty of associating certain concepts with each other.
The idea is that the measure of reaction time makes it particularly difficult to fake, and the association should be detectable even if it is usually over-ridden by the conscious mind.
The IAT has been used for everything from detecting hidden racial prejudices to examining violent associations in psychopaths.
It is still controversial, however, because it is not clear exactly what is being measured, other than some general concept of an ‘association’.
Whether this is predictive of explicit beliefs or attitudes, or future action and risk (such as violence – particularly importantly in forensic psychology) is still an open question.
If you want to try the test yourself, there’s an online version at Project Implicit.
Link to ‘The Bias Finders’ from Science News.
Link to Project Implicit.
The Society for Neuroscience publishes monthly Brain Briefings that explain how basic neuroscience discoveries lead to clinical applications.
The newsletters cover recent advances in neuroscience research and are intended for a lay audience so are jargon free and easily digestible.
The webpage versions (rather than the pdf files) are referenced so you can also follow up any of the briefings by getting deep into the science if you get inspired.
Link to SfN Brain Briefings.
Link to Society for Neuroscience.
I’ve never understood
what it is I’m not supposed to feel
like a bird on the wing in a swollen sky
my mind is torn by lightning
as it flies from the thunder behind
From the play 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane.
Kane suffered from intense periods of depression throughout her life. 4.48 Psychosis was published after her suicide and was probably meant to be published posthumously.
It relates her experiences of depression, psychosis and hospitalisation. Kane is considered one of the most important British playwrights of the late 20th century.
PBS has streaming video and a careful analysis of the case of Eric Michael Clark, who at 17 and while mentally ill, shot and killed a police officer in Arizona. His case is currently the basis for a Supreme Court review of the insanity defence in US law.
Clark had reportedly been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was psychotic at the time of the offence, and was under the delusion that his town was being controlled by aliens.
Before the Supreme Court, Clark’s lawyers argued that the insanity defence is so difficult to prove in his home state of Arizona as to make it unjust.
The criteria for the insanity defence varies wildly among US states, with some not allowing the plea, some following the M’Naghten rules and others having a more strict version.
The M’Naghten rules state that for a person to be sane (and therefore responsible), they must be aware that such an act is wrong, and that they were aware of the “nature and quality of the act” at the time.
If it can be established that mental illness had impaired either of these two conditions, the person can be declared legally insane.
However, Arizona only has the first of these conditions as the test for insanity. So even if a person is not aware of the nature of the act they are committing – if they have an abstract understanding that this act would be wrong – they can be held legally responsible for the act.
In Clark’s case, his lawyers are arguing that although he knew killing a police officer was wrong, he believed the person to be an alien, and so was not able to apply his understanding to the situation owing to his mental impairment.
If the Supreme Court agree that Arizona’s criteria for the insanity defence is unjust, other states might have to implement the M’Naghten rules.
If they rule that Arizona’s criteria are adequate, other states may adopt this more strict criteria and reject the M’Naghten rules.
Link to video and analysis from PBS.
Link to coverage from The Washington Post.
Link to editorial on the case from the The Washington Post.
Link to coverage from CNN.
The Royal Institution are running an event on Thursday 27th April in London entitled Who’s the greatest? Minds that changed our minds where the greatest contributors to modern psychology and psychiatry will be debated.
The four luminaries being championed include inventor of psychoanlaysis Sigmund Freud, philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, psychologist and intelligence researcher Hans Eysenck, and inventor of cognitive behavioural therapy Aaron T. Beck.
The debate will be hosted by King’s College London. Tickets cost ¬£8, with a discount for RI members and students. See you there!
Link to details of Who’s the greatest? event.
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
People who experience ‘near-death experiences’ are also more likely to experience ‘REM intrusion’ – the mometary presence of sleep or dream-like states during wakefulness (see also here).
A study reports that racial diversity within a group of jurors improves deliberation and group decision making.
The New York Times looks at the psychology of bias, promotion and drug company influence.
Artificial intellgience robot football competition won by students from Plymouth University.
Mind grenade t-shirt!
Areas of the prefrontal cortex related to the self are silenced during intense sensory processing according to brain-scanning study.
Cognitive Daily examines an intriguing study of the effect of Barbie dolls on the body image of young girls.
Neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield was featured on Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning [realaudio] arguing that children are being medicated for ADHD when the problem might be caused by the over-use of ‘electronic media’ leading to short attention spans.
One of the difficulties with this argument is that an attention problem in children with ADHD has yet to be reliably pinned down.
Current theories tend to emphasise more general processes like behavioural inhibition, inhibitory control and executive dysfunction.
Some researchers are so unimpressed that they argue that ADHD is just a vague label for the outcome in any number of different behavioural and emotional problems.
Therefore, even if ‘electronic media’ did lead to short attention spans, this probably has little to do with ADHD as it is diagnosed in the clinic.
Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether the constant use of ‘electronic media’ does lead to a short attention span. In fact, it probably has the reverse effect.
A study published in Nature in 2003 reported that people who play video games have better visual attention than people who do not.
A 2005 study reported that children diagnosed with ADHD perform no worse than other children on standard computer games, and on a neuropsychological test of attention designed to be more ‘game-like’ to keep children’s interest.
At a recent conference preliminary data was presented from a study that suggested ADHD could be helped by getting affected children to play Dance Dance Revolution!
Perhaps the point about ‘electronic media’ has clouded a more important ethical issue that Baroness Greenfield addresses – the widespread medication of children with amphetamines or amphetamine-like drugs to treat behavioural problems.
A hundred years ago ADHD-like behaviour was undoubtedly dealt with by corporal punishment. This raises the question of whether medicalising and medicating this behaviour is just a more expedient, or a genuinely more humane approach to dealing with problematic children.
UPDATE: There’s a short piece in The Guardian about the topic and the subsequent political debate.
realaudio of interview with Baroness Greenfield.
According to recent news reports, the sight of lingerie or a sexy woman significantly impairs male decision making. Unfortunately, the details have got a little blurred in the re-telling from the original research paper – to the point where most reports flatly contradict the study’s conclusions.
The study involved a well-researched financial task known as the ultimatum game where one participant is given a sum of money (10 euros in this study) and has to decide how to split it with another. If the other participant accepts the split, both get to keep the money. If they don’t, no one gets anything.
Researchers Bram van den Bergh and Seigfried Dewitte asked heterosexual male participants to play the game in pairs.
Before they started the game, they were variously shown pictures of sexy women in bikinis, landscapes, older women, younger women, or given t-shirts or lingerie to handle.
When participants saw gratuitous pictures of bikini-clad girls (like the one on the right), lingerie and the like, they were more likely to accept unfair splits than in the other conditions.
Although the average difference in the lowest accepted offers between ‘sexy’ and ‘unsexy’ conditions was pretty small (only 0.39 euros), the researchers could be statistically confident that the difference was reliable.
One frequently repeated claim in the news stories is that men with higher levels of testosterone were particularly likely to be affected in this way.
This was never actually measured in the study, however. What was measured was the difference in length between the second and fourth finger (digit ratio) which is thought by some to indicate the amount of testosterone the person was exposed to as a developing child in the womb.
This is one subtlety that many news reports left out, as firstly, it’s controversial as to whether digit ratio does relate to testosterone exposure in the womb, and secondly, it’s not clear how this relates to current levels of testosterone at all. In fact, immediate levels of testosterone can fluctuate wildly.
Probably, the study is best thought of as an interesting but preliminary finding, as there are many questions that could be asked about the study design and experience of the participants that might have affected the results.
Petra Boynton has a good analysis of some of these, including why the story has proved so popular with the media.
The best write-up of the study’s details I’ve found is from Nature, who do the study justice and point out that the results actually contradict the idea that sexy images makes men less rational. In the study, they actually made men more rational.
If you’re being offered money in the ultimatum game, for each offer, the single most rational thing to do is accept money every time, no matter how low the offer is, because if you don’t, you get nothing. You’re given the choice between something and nothing – a no brainer.
In reality, people don’t do this, a sense of fair play stops most people accepting paltry offers. Actually, this probably makes sense in everyday life (who wouldn’t want to enforce fairness in society) but in terms of the experiment, it can be self-defeating.
The fact that men who saw sexy images were more likely to accept lower offers rather than reject them and get nothing at all, suggest that their short-term rationality was actually enhanced.
Perhaps it is no co-incidence that the bikini celebrated its 60th birthday this week. I shall be monitoring the economy carefully for any signs of change.
Link to write-up of study from Nature.
Link to analysis from Petra Boyton.
Link to abstract of original research paper.
Mind Hacks 