LOP = eeeek
I picked up a couple of the books that the Samuels paper pointed me to, but still haven't grabbed the Elman paper. The books are in various locations around campus, hidden in buildings I've never heard of, some of them at the top of annoyingly steep hills. and then the day i was doing all this, it started raining, so i fled home before making it to all the libraries. i have no good excuse for why i still haven't made it there. nor why i still haven't transferred my notes on the samuels paper in here.
nevertheless, i've got a book on brain development and connectionism, and another one on autism.
I've also finally looked at one of the papers from the Modularity book Sandy reviewed.
this paper critiques domain-specificity. I think the developmental cognitive neuroscience people are more into critiquing innateness, whatever that means, but maybe also informational encapsulation. all of these things seem to be quite related anyway...
Velichkovsky
Modularity and Cognitive Organization: Why It Is So Appealing and Why It Is So Wrong
the title seems somewhat misleading, but i just skimmed most of the article, so maybe i missed some parts. seemed like it was mostly about a few kinds of levels of processing (LOP) experiments and a bit about brain imaging of subjects doing the same sorts of tasks. When I took a class with Fergus Craik in undergrad, I thought the LOP idea was wishy-washy to the point of saying almost nothing useful, became indignant, and stopped going to class. we also had to read a bunch of ancient crap about working memory. maybe it was just that i was in 4th year and taking a 2nd year course, so it was a bit too dumbed down. i think i also participated in a study exactly like the ones discussed in the paper. Craik's voice was on the tape they played to me while i did the distracting task, listing words, but his strong Scottish accent made it difficult to tell what he was saying. The student running the experiment knew exactly when he was impossible to understand and automatically repeated some of the words without the accent. One of the formative experiences leading me to believe that the results of psychology experiments should be considered as highly dubious. but i digress...
LOP effects on saccades:
with visual, auditory, or "relevant" stimuli, the time lag before the next saccade is the same? or maybe different? i didn't read it that closely. oops. does this mean that there are cross-modal effects? i wasn't sure.
LOP effects on word memory:
with word memory tasks given after the encoding happened at different levels, differences in how much was remembered. deeper encoding means better memory, as far as i could tell/remember. not sure what the significance of this is supposed to be for domain-specificity either.
EEG results for the same sort of word memory tasks:
the deeper the level of processing (perceptual encoding, semantic emcoding, self-referential encoding), activation was seen farther towards the anterior regions of the brain.
this one does seem kind of relevant to modularity. recalling words seems like a specific task, but it doesn't happen in a well-defined region. several types of processes affect it, from perceptual to self-referential, whatever that means. they say something in the results about "neuroanatomical change". I'm not sure what they mean by that. but they think it's significant that the direction it happens in is in the main direction of evolutionary growth of the cortex. they had a bit near the beginning about what the older vs. newer regions of the brain are responsible for. laid out a hierarchy of levels of processing, basically that correspond to the brain regions and when they emerged in our evolution.
I still don't think it's all that clear what these results say about modularity or domain-specificity. memory isn't the sort of thing that most people call a module, for just these sorts of reasons. But maybe I missed the point because i only skimmed most of it. but i can't bring myself to carefully read a paper about LOP.
nevertheless, i've got a book on brain development and connectionism, and another one on autism.
I've also finally looked at one of the papers from the Modularity book Sandy reviewed.
this paper critiques domain-specificity. I think the developmental cognitive neuroscience people are more into critiquing innateness, whatever that means, but maybe also informational encapsulation. all of these things seem to be quite related anyway...
Velichkovsky
Modularity and Cognitive Organization: Why It Is So Appealing and Why It Is So Wrong
the title seems somewhat misleading, but i just skimmed most of the article, so maybe i missed some parts. seemed like it was mostly about a few kinds of levels of processing (LOP) experiments and a bit about brain imaging of subjects doing the same sorts of tasks. When I took a class with Fergus Craik in undergrad, I thought the LOP idea was wishy-washy to the point of saying almost nothing useful, became indignant, and stopped going to class. we also had to read a bunch of ancient crap about working memory. maybe it was just that i was in 4th year and taking a 2nd year course, so it was a bit too dumbed down. i think i also participated in a study exactly like the ones discussed in the paper. Craik's voice was on the tape they played to me while i did the distracting task, listing words, but his strong Scottish accent made it difficult to tell what he was saying. The student running the experiment knew exactly when he was impossible to understand and automatically repeated some of the words without the accent. One of the formative experiences leading me to believe that the results of psychology experiments should be considered as highly dubious. but i digress...
LOP effects on saccades:
with visual, auditory, or "relevant" stimuli, the time lag before the next saccade is the same? or maybe different? i didn't read it that closely. oops. does this mean that there are cross-modal effects? i wasn't sure.
LOP effects on word memory:
with word memory tasks given after the encoding happened at different levels, differences in how much was remembered. deeper encoding means better memory, as far as i could tell/remember. not sure what the significance of this is supposed to be for domain-specificity either.
EEG results for the same sort of word memory tasks:
the deeper the level of processing (perceptual encoding, semantic emcoding, self-referential encoding), activation was seen farther towards the anterior regions of the brain.
this one does seem kind of relevant to modularity. recalling words seems like a specific task, but it doesn't happen in a well-defined region. several types of processes affect it, from perceptual to self-referential, whatever that means. they say something in the results about "neuroanatomical change". I'm not sure what they mean by that. but they think it's significant that the direction it happens in is in the main direction of evolutionary growth of the cortex. they had a bit near the beginning about what the older vs. newer regions of the brain are responsible for. laid out a hierarchy of levels of processing, basically that correspond to the brain regions and when they emerged in our evolution.
I still don't think it's all that clear what these results say about modularity or domain-specificity. memory isn't the sort of thing that most people call a module, for just these sorts of reasons. But maybe I missed the point because i only skimmed most of it. but i can't bring myself to carefully read a paper about LOP.
posted by cs at 3:19 PM
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