Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category
Quote of the Week – Fisher
“Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, […]
Principal Components of Individual Differences
I have been spending the last few weeks exploring principal components analysis (PCA) of functional imaging data. PCA has been around for over a century, having first been invented by Karl Pearson in 1901. I have always been taught that PCA was a powerful data reduction technique, allowing a handful of components to represent the […]
Summer Teaching: Discover Technology
I always hope that a pause in the stream of weblog posts will be justified. The last several weeks have been pretty quiet around prefrontal.org, but I do like to think that the time went to a good cause. For most of July I have been in Lawrence, Kansas as an instructor for the KU […]
Quote of the Week – Rousseau
“We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being and born a man.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762
Good Science vs Public Awareness (Iacoboni)
In cognitive neuroscience debates are usually quite subdued and people rarely, if ever, point fingers negatively. However, in the last 24 hours there has been a rather dramatic reversal of this norm in a debate that has carried on for several years now: whether Marco Iacoboni and his collaborators overstep the bounds of good science […]
Writing Tools: Scrivener
Writing is one of the most difficult things that I have to do as a scientist. The problem is that writing is a necessary part of both grant applications and article publication, meaning that we really do live and die by the impact our words have on people. That fact is rarely lost on me […]
Quote of the Week – Bohr
“The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.” – To the United Nations, by Niels Bohr, 1950
The minds of robots
The Sage Center sponsored a talk this afternoon by Daniela Rus entitled “Do Robots Have a Mind?”. Dr. Rus is a Professor at MIT in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department. She is also a Co-Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Center for Robotics (CSAIL). Her talk focused mostly on […]
Dissertation: Thesis Online
Most of my dissertation experiments will hopefully have a future in peer-reviewed neuroscience journals. The bad news is that it will take a few years to rewrite each experiment and get it out the door. If you are curious about internal state information processing or want to know more about interoceptive development I thought I […]
Determinants of Free Decisions
I recently went over “Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain” for a presentation during our weekly lab meeting. The article’s first author is Chun Siong Soon, who is an old friend from time he spent at Dartmouth several years ago. I also saw the senior author, John-Dylan Haynes, present the research at […]