Facing off with the universe

I blogged once before about our propensity to see faces in rather mundane arrangements of every day objects. Here's one where Phil Plait, at Bad Astronomy, saw a frowning face in a comet:


In case you don't see it, Plait has circled the key features, right in the middle of the image, to help you out:


Which puzzled the heck out of me, because when I first looked at the comet photo, I saw a face alright. I saw this face:


There's just no way to avoid seeing faces (unless you're autistic, perhaps?). Even a stupid ball of ice provides not one, but (at least) two different ways to interpret it as a face. We're overprogrammed, we are.

Playing Battleground God

I just earned a perfect score on Battleground God*, which puts me in the 92nd percentile on logical consistency, earns a (virtual) TPM Medal of Honour, and seems to come with no cash prize whatsoever.

The secret to my success? I consistently denied that any being who deserves to be called "God" must ipso facto be able to perform the impossible.

* Via Pharyngula

Sexy illusion

This is the most unusual visual illusion I've ever seen, because it is reportedly age-sensitive. Children see dolphins; I don't.

California in text

Here's an interesting map that illustrates a bit of gestalt psychology in its portrayal of California:



The image is created of text, with the name of the each county repeated within its boundaries to create the image. Each letter is colored to represent the land type at its location, and the letters are spaced closely together to represent high elevation and more widely to represent lower elevations. The brain easily picks out these patterns and has no trouble spotting the wide spacing as the low central valley area, the brown deserts, and the wavy "Ocean."

Here's a link to a larger image (warning: large PDF). You can see some other interesting maps at the Bizarre Map Challenge Awards List.

Faces, faces

American Express has this neat commercial where they've created happy and sad faces out of everyday objects:



It's easy to do, of course, because human brains are more or less programmed to identify faces; almost any upside-down triangle arrangement has a chance to trigger this sort of recognition. Amex did a clever job of choosing unexpected objects to represent the faces, but they were able to make them quite clear.

Sometimes you come across a natural arrangement that isn't quite so perfect, yet still triggers recognition - an even stronger indication of just how prone we are to finding faces. For example, this goofy, but happy, tree:

Song, memory, and DON'T be still, my beating heart

One of our staff members emailed this article from CNN:

"Disco Tune Saves Man's Life"

A couple are out hiking, the man suddenly drops to the ground without a heartbeat, and his wife recalls hearing an American Heart Association public service announcement about giving chest compressions to the beat of the Bee Gees song, "Stayin' Alive." She does, and her husband lives.

What's special about the song? Just the fact that it's sung at about 100 beats per minute, which happens to be just how frequently you want to apply your chest compressions. The article quotes another doctor who states that Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" works just as well, but for some reason the AHA preferred the other title.

The magic here, of course, is that incredible power that music has to be memorable. Anyone who knows the Bee Gees song will readily remember the correct tempo. Songs are so memorable that most people would probably notice if the same band sang it in a different key, even if they couldn't quite place what was different. Lesson for today - if you need to remember something, set it to music.

Faces

Here's a great example of the human tendency to see faces in - well, almost anything. Go on - tell me you don't want to laugh:

Traffic

Just before holiday break*, I came across an interesting-looking book in the library catalog, while I was helping a student locate something else for her research. So I spent part of the break reading Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). And lo and behold, suddenly I come cross a blog entry about the same book at Cognitive Daily, complete with this interesting video of Parisian drivers negotiating the ridiculously unorganized intersection at the Arc de Triomphe.


Paris Traffic from Dave Munger on Vimeo.

David Munger describes the book pretty well, so I won't rehash it all here, but I did want to expand on his discussion of the confusing traffic circle. Vanderbilt describes how a cognitive shift takes place when the traffic engineers start adding or removing safety barriers and curbs, or reducing the width of the right of way. Moving buildings and sidewalks farther from the street, for example, would seem to enhance safety, but there is a countering tendency for drivers to think of the street as a highway** and drive as if the surrounding city weren't there. Or more precisely, they are quite aware that the road has been given priority and they drive on the assumption that everyone else agrees.

But when you start moving things back close to the street, maybe even eliminating curbs and crash barriers, the driver becomes more aware of the city and even a little confused. Who has been given priority, the cars or everyone else? Whose turf is he on? And he slows down and pays much closer attention to what's going on around him. Arguably, this is a safer frame of min for the driver to be in, rather than whizzing down the street assuming that everything off to the side can be ignored.

That same sort of cognitive shift was also at the heart of what I always thought was wrong with traffic in Yellowstone. For us employees, the roads were roads, those strips of asphalt that connect the place where I am with the place I would prefer to be. You drive on them. For tourists, though, it always seemed to be a little different. Sure, you drive on these roads, but you also creep down them at ten miles per hour, or stop, or even park in the lane and leave your vehicle. Things you would never do on any road at home, but in the Park it was just different. In the same way that people don't take lane markings seriously in a parking lot, tourists in Yellowstone took all the familiar signs and markings as vague suggestions. I came to believe, for example, that the real definition of intersection was "a place to stop and read your map."

It's a testimony to the power of categorization. The whole category of behavioral rules that go along with roads suddenly disappeared, because the drivers didn't conceive of the Yellowstone roads as roads in the normal sense. As soon as they left the Park, normal behavior returned; you rarely saw the same type of driving in the National Forest lands surrounding the Park. Those had roads, you know, with highway designations and everything***. Totally different.



___________________________
* Christmas break, for those who get worked up about such things.

** And the significance should be evident from the fact that we use two different words, street and road, to decribe the same object in different contexts.

***Technically, there are several US highways running through Yellowstone: 191, 287, 89, 20, 14, and 16. You won't see a sign for any of them inside the Park boundaries, though. I wonder what difference it might make in driver behavior if the signs were there?

Stumbled upon

That's quite the grin there, if you look at it right. More photos of "faces" here, and remember this the next time someone tries to make you believe in faces on Mars or Jesus in the peanut butter or stuff like that. Human brains have evolved to be hypersensitive to the sight of faces, to the point that we think we're seeing them in almost anything that's arranged like an inverted triangle.

Spotless mouse minds

Now this is just freaky:

Memories Selectively, Safely Erased In Mice

Wolves v. dogs

Wolves outperform dogs in following human social cues

Not as popular as pirates v. ninjas, but interesting nonetheless. Previous studies had indicated that dogs could interpret a human gesture better than wolves can, raising the possibility that millenia of domestication might have selected for better social cognition in dogs. This would be at odds with prevailing opinion, which suggests that domestication dulls the wits.

The present experiments suggest that the previous results may have been skewed by experimental bias, mainly by favoring dogs who had longer and more intimate experience with humans. The authors found some wolves that were also habituated to humans and discovered they do somewhat better than dogs. Just as suggestive, it turns out that pet dogs do pretty well at figuring out when a person is pointing at something, but dogs raised in animal shelters do not. Experience seems to count for a lot when it comes to understanding people.

The Turing Test

Machines Edge Closer To Imitating Human Communication

One of the ACEs, the eventual winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize, got even closer to the 30% Turing Test threshold set by 20th-century British mathematician, Alan Turing in 1950, by fooling 25% of human interrogators.

However, the validity of the Turing Test is being reconsidered, now that computers can randomly generate plausible imitations of Sarah Palin's responses to interview questions.

Know your chimpanzee

Butts, Faces Help Chimps Identify Friends

"Many animals look at parts of the body, the voice, the hands, as separate entities and don't wholly integrate them," said study co-author Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Atlanta's Emory University.

"This study shows that they have whole body integration [because], at least if they know the individuals, they can match the faces and the behinds."

I'm a bit curious about that point. So your kitty cat knows your face, and knows your voice, but doesn't really think of them as belonging to a single entity? How would we know that?

Animal training

Operant conditioning at the NC Zoo

"Conservative" support for gay marriage

This is interesting: Support for Calif. gay marriage ban slipping

The interesting part is that the original description of the measure relied on the proposed text of the constitutional amendment: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." But since the Cali Supreme Court has already overturned legislative bans, the state attorney general decreed that the description must be changed to indicate that an existing right would be taken away. This seems to make a difference in how people react to the measure:

Among the 70 percent of likely voters who already were familiar with Proposition 8, the modification appeared to make little difference. Among those who knew about the amendment, 56 percent said they opposed it when they heard the original wording and 53 percent opposed it they were given Brown's revised version.

But among the 30 percent of those surveyed who were not previously aware of the measure, the ballot language appeared to matter. Within that subgroup, 42 percent of the respondents said they were inclined to vote 'no' with the original summary, a share that climbed to 58 percent under the new wording.

Which suggests that voters are suspicious of change, no matter what the buzzword in the Presidential campaign might be.

Baby perception

Escher-themed nurseries? Even four-month-olds can recognize impossible objects

(via Cognitive Daily)

Self-recognition

Magpies pass the mirror test!

These findings not only indicate that non-mammalian species can engage in self-recognition behaviour, but they also show that self-recognition can occur in species without a neocortex.

Books - Nim Chimpsky

I just finished reading Elizabeth Hess's Nim Chimpsky: The Ape Who Would Be Human, the story of one of the earliest attempts to teach chimpanzees to use human language. Nim earned a bit of fame by being raised among humans, as a human baby, and learning to use a small American Sign Language vocabulary to express his needs and desires.

Actually, it would be better to describe the book as the story of the subject of that research; the title does not mislead. Nim was caught in an impossible situation: raised by people who had no experience with apes and the limitations of nurture, in the middle of an under-planned and poorly administered study with unclear goals and virtually no budget. As he grew larger, stronger, and more self-willed, Nim became dangerously impossible for amateurs to handle (he sent many to the hospital, at least once with permanent injuries). Nor did it help that some of the key participants seemed to engage in as much infighting as they did research - Nim had a way of provoking strong feelings, while careers and professional status were on the line for most of the people as well. Few of the human actors come out entirely clean, at least if anyone else in the story has anything to say about them.

As he became older and more difficult to handle (perfectly normal for a male chimpanzee, but intolerable for humans who like to keep their flesh and furniture intact), Nim was transferred back to his birthplace at the Institute for Primate Studies at the University of Oklahoma. The language education continued - under different researchers with different ideas of how it should be done - until the IPS shut down in 1981 amid poor funding and poor conditions. A public outcry, led by animal advocate Cleveland Amory, narrowly saved Nim from a medical research facility (most of the other IPS chimps were not so lucky) and he spent his last years at Amory's Black Beauty Ranch in Texas. Those years were tragically short, as Nim succumbed to a sudden heart attack in 2000, barely middle-aged at only 26 years old.

The language studies themselves were inconclusive, which may have been the inevitable results for the first efforts. In the 1970s, the field was dominated by Skinnerian behavioralism on the one hand, and Chomsky's position that syntax and grammar are the essence of language and only humans can have it. Certainly Nim learned to use signs in a purposeful way, but most of the data was not rigorous enough to stand up to hostile scientific scrutiny; videos of his performance left open the possibility that he was employing the "Clever Hans" effect as his handlers praised his successes.

Much of the discussion, though, has always struck me as misguided. The insistence on grammar and syntax as the litmus test of "language" seems a distraction at worst, although not without offering some insight of its own. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who performed ground-breaking work of her own with the bonobo Kanzi, complained bitterly about grammar as a red herring. For her, the key factor was that Kanzi had grasped the concept of symbolic representation - this symbol stands for that real-world thing. If the version of the water-pump story we've all learned is accurate, this was the essence of Helen Keller's breakthrough, too. Once she understood what a symbol was good for, she rapidly learned to communicate. Neither Skinner nor Chomsky seem to have considered language from this perspective, but it's a vital insight nonetheless.

As far as I know, there isn't a lot of language study going on these days, but no one doubts the essential personhood of apes any more. One of the tragic consequences of Nim's human environment was that he was always caught between people who saw him as a little boy and those who saw him as a research animal. Nim himself couldn't please either group entirely; he was too wild to be fully socialized into human society, but bonded with his handlers at a level that didn't allow them to seem him treated as a lab rat. Nim moved from houses to cages, saw people enter his life and leave suddenly, and surely never understood any of it.

Guarding guns

This is an interesting photo:

I was struck by the effort that someone has gone to keep all these weapons in neat rows and columns, rather than throw them into a compact pile. I may be missing something, but the only reason for it that comes to mind is the need to guard against black market trading. With everything in a neat row, it's harder for the guards or anyone else to snatch a few weapons without it being noticeable. A practical example of how our perception works: no one would notice a hundred rifles missing from a big messy pile, but if you mess up a nice row & column pattern, the gap would be too obvious to overlook.

Flexible behavior without sophisticated cognition

Children Learn Smart Behaviors Without Knowing What They Know

"Children learn implicitly. They don’t need complex conceptual knowledge to show evidence of smart, flexible behavior."