Framing the Debate

In 2014 we published a book chapter with Eric Charles in which we argued that the most important thing psychology and neuroscience needed from people like us was a new language in which to talk about the problems we are trying to solve. Our Ecological Representations paper is part of this, and we have a much larger paper in development laying out the more complete set of conceptual tools needed to do ecological psychology across a wider range of problems.

One reason why this is important is a simple fact; we are asking psychology to change and it is up to us to clearly articulate what we want it to change into, or else nothing can happen. A related reason is that without a clear framework, we can't reformulate the questions in a useful way and we're left stuck because we can't explain something like 'theory of mind' because the actual solution is that ToM doesn't exist or need explaining. Ecological neuroscience, for example, will look very different to cognitive neuroscience.

A final reason is that the language in which psychology frames it's understanding of behaviour drives popular understanding of behaviour too. I recently came across my favourite example of this in a tweet by Alice Dreger;

My dominant eye is very blurry so my left eye has come online (it rarely does) and now I'm seeing 3D. 3D is SO WEIRD. How do you stand it?

— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) July 19, 2016

Dreger, for some reason, spends most of her life only using her right eye, even though her left is perfectly functional. She blogged about it here. Every now and again, something makes her left eye kick in and she suddenly has stereo vision.

What caught my eye here is her description of her experience is grounded in the myth that you need two eyes in order to perceive in 3D (I bug my students about this in class every year too). The myth is based in the standard image-based analysis of vision which I'll lay out below; but the point I want to make here is that people still describe their experience of monocular vision as 'not being able to see 3D/depth' even though this is inarguably, demonstrably not what is happening in their visual experience. It's like blind echolocators talking about how the sound creates 'an image in their minds'; this is just not the case, but this is the language psychology has provided them for talking about the perceived experience of spatial layout. What fascinates me is that it's trivial to demonstrate that monocular vision allows for 3D perception, but everyone lets the framing override their own experience. This, to me, is a big part of why our work right now is important - we will never make progress until we can reframe the debate.

On "The poverty of embodied cognition" (Goldinger et al, in press)

A new paper in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (Goldinger, Papesh, Barnhart, Hansen & Hout, 2015) has taken a swing at the field of embodied cognition, claiming that it is vague, trivial and unable to add anything scientific to the investigation of cognition.

...our goal is to zoom out from specific empirical debates, asking instead what EC offers to cognitive science in general. To preview, we argue that EC is theoretically vacuous with respect to nearly all cognitive phenomena. EC proponents selectively focus on a subset of domains that work, while ignoring nearly all the bedrock findings that define cognitive science. We also argue that the principles of EC are often (1) co-opted from other sources, such as evolution; (2) vague, such that model building is not feasible; (3) trivially true, offering little new insight; and, occasionally, (4) nonsensical. 

My basic take is a) I actually agree with a lot of the criticisms in the context of the kinds of 'embodied' cognition we critique for similar reasons, but b) there is nothing new to any of these critiques, none of them are compulsory failings of the field and nothing about them makes embodiment an intrinsically empty notion. 

It's Time to Relabel the Brain

Another day, another study finds that 'visual' cortex is activated by something other than information from the eyes:

A research team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recently demonstrated that the same part of the visual cortex activated in sighted individuals when reading is also activated in blind patients who use sounds to “read”. The specific area of the brain in question is a patch of left ventral visual cortex located lateral to the mid-portion of the left fusiform gyrus, referred to as the “visual word form area” (VWFA). Significant prior research has shown the VWFA to be specialized for the visual representation of letters, in addition to demonstrating a selective preference for letters over other visual stimuli. The Israeli-based research team showed that eight subjects, blind from birth, specifically and selectively activated the VWFA during the processing of letter “soundscapes” using a visual-to-auditory sensory substitution device (SSD) (see www.seeingwithsound.com for description of device).

There's lots of research like this. People are excited by mirror neurons because they are cells in motor cortex that are activated by both motor activity and perception of that motor activity. It's incredible, people cry - cells in a part of the brain that we said 30 years ago does one thing seem to also do another thing. How could this be??

I would like to propose a simple hypothesis to explain these incredible results and that is that we have been labeling the brain incorrectly for a long time. The data telling us this has been around for a long time too and continues to roll in, but for some reason we still think the old labels are important enough to hold onto. It's time to let go.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a bit more complicated than this

Psychology's real replication problem: our Methods sections

Replication has been a big topic in psychology recently as a) we've suddenly realised we need more of it and b) because there have recently been several high profile replication efforts published (e.g the Many Labs effort; see Ed Yong's summary). Last week Simone Schnall, one of the authors whose work failed to replicate in that project, wrote a blog about her experiences getting replicated. She has issues with the replication (specifically that their data had a ceiling effect on the morality measures which would obscure any differences) but one particular comment caught my eye:

Of course replications are much needed and as a field we need to make sure that our findings are reliable. But we need to keep in mind that there are human beings involved, which is what Danny Kahneman’s commentary emphasizes. Authors of the original work should be allowed to participate in the process of having their work replicated. (emphasis mine)

This idea that there is somehow a requirement to involve authors in efforts to replicate their work. This is nonsense; once you have published some work then it is fair game for replication, failure to replicate, criticism, critique and discussion. In other words, we're all allowed to science the hell out of your work any time we like. We don't need either your permission or your involvement: the only thing we (should) need is your Methods section and if you don't like this, then stop publishing your results where we can find them.

Of course, getting the original authors involved can be very productive; you can chat experimental details, make sure you have covered everything, and generally be collegial about the whole thing instead of adversarial. But there is no obligation to do this, and I'm surprised that people think there is one.

Connecting the conceptual dots in embodied cognition

UPDATE 9 June 2015: We published this critique. 

Around about the time we published our embodied cognition paper, we also reviewed a paper for that research topic, which happened to be an example of the conceptualisation hypothesis  style of 'embodied' cognition we aren't all that impressed by.

We had serious reservations about the paper (detailed below) and did not think it should be published. After several rounds of trying and failing to get the authors to acknowledge the problem, we withdrew from the review and the editor, Dermot Lynott then decided to side with the other reviewers (who had identified the same problem we had but who didn't think it was a fatal flaw). The paper (Dijkstra, Eerland, Zijlmans & Post, 2012) was therefore published.

A while back I drafted a commentary laying out the problems with this paper; the full text is here. The motivation for a comment was the same as for the one I wrote for Soliman et al (2014); this style of embodiment does not tackle the hard questions about mechanism that are crucial for an embodied account and this is a big problem. I cannot decide if the commentary is worth publishing; this paper is not that important, although it is a good example of this major issue for 'grounded' embodied cognition. Any thoughts on this would be welcome.

Psychological Science...meet me at camera 3

Psychological Science, I think we need to talk. I was reading this farewell from your outgoing editor, and it would all be nice enough if I hadn't also just read your latest offering to the altar of 'embodied' cognition. Frankly, it made me wonder whether you actually read all the things you publish.

Robert Kail, the outgoing editor, had this to say about the ideal Psychological Science paper:

...the ideal Psychological Science manuscript is difficult to define, but easily recognized — the topic is fundamental to the field, the design is elegant, and the findings are breathtaking.

There are a few problems here; 'breathtaking' results have the tendency to be wrong, for example, and while I'm all for elegant design, sometimes, to make a breath taking claim, you need to run those 4 control conditions. But my main problem is less with these criteria and more with the papers that apparently meet them.

Leaning to the left makes you believe odd things about embodied cognition

Embodied cognition is not what you think it is. But I do understand why people think differently; it's because of the depressingly endless stream of papers published in Psychological Science that claim to have found that body posture somehow influences the contents of some cognition about the world. The latest "exciting" new finding claims that estimates of magnitude (size, amount, etc) are affected by your posture. The paper is well summarised at the Guardian for those without access to the paper (UPDATE: I am also talking to Rolf Zwaan, lead author of this paper, in the comments section there.)

It's a terrible paper, so it's apparently time for another in what might have to become a more frequent series, In which I am a bit rude about a rubbish paper and worry about how to kill papers like it. At the end, I've also talked a little about the role science journalism plays in maintaining the momentum for papers like this, via their own version of the file drawer problem. I'd be interested in people's thoughts.

Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Psychology has a problem. We have no core theory to guide our research; no analogue to the theories of evolution or relativity. When particle physicists recently found that some neutrinos had apparently travelled faster than light, it never actually occurred to them that this is what had happened. On the basis of the extraordinarily well supported theory of relativity, everyone went 'huh, that's weird - I wonder what we did wrong?', and proceeded to use that theory to generate hypotheses they could then test. It would take a lot of fast neutrinos to disprove relativity.

Psychology, though, when faced with an empirical result that violates the laws of physics, can't find any principled reason to reject the result and instead spends a lot of time squabbling about whether Bem's result might possibly be true because 'quantum'. Worse, when people do replicate the experiment and fail to support the original result, they can't get their 'null result' published. It's a bit embarrassing, really.

One of the problems of having no core theory is that you can't simply rule things out as options. Psychologists almost all consider this a strength: we can pick and choose from a variety of mechanisms which enables us to cope with our messy and erratic subject matter. Can't imagine how perception can explain a result? Just hypothesise a mental representation to fill the gap. After all, no single theory is going to account for the opportunistic and idiosyncratic behaviour of people, so why limit ourselves? We tried that with behaviourism, and it got us nowhere. Let's stay flexible.

Rates of learning and the dynamic pattern approach

One of the interesting features of coordinated rhythmic movement is that people start out with a particular pattern to their performance - there is pre-existing structure to our attempts to coordinate these movements. This structure affects our ability to learn new coordinations, and the pattern of the effects reveals a lot about the cause of this pre-existing structure. 

However, the literature is split into two incompatible accounts of learning, and trying to fix this is part of my ongoing interest in this task. The first account is the dynamic pattern approach, which was pioneered by JAS Kelso, and championed by modelling (Gregor Schöner) and behavioural studies (Pier Zanone). I'm more interested in the latter aspect, because it's the motivation for the former. I've already reviewed how this account fails, but it's still alive and well thanks to some creative history, and needs to be tackled again. The second account, which I prefer, is the perception-action account (Bingham) which developed from empirical work on visual and proprioceptive perception as well as action measures, and embodied in a model.

We haven't explicitly tackled the rate of learning issue, although we will and there is already support for our account in the literature (Wenderoth et al, 2002). But it comes up regularly in the dynamic pattern behavioural work, so it's time to work out what's going on in their data.

Chemero (2009) Chapter 8: Neurophilosophy Meets RECS

Chemero's book finishes with two chapters on some philosophical consequences of taking a radical, embodied approach to cognitive science. Chapter 8 is about the mind-body problem, and how various attempts to reduce cognitive science to, say, neuroscience, can be vigorously resisted via the RECS approach, without being dualist about the mind. There are many people who think cognitive science can be reduced to neuroscience (intertheoretic reduction), but one plank of any embodied approach is that this won't work. RECS is particularly committed to a more extended notion of cognition and so a strategy for resisting reduction is critical. Chemero's plan won't rely on the usual philosophical manoeuvres such as Martian pain mechanisms or zombies. Like me, Chemero is concerned that these create the impression that philosophers aren't tackling real problems; he wants the philosophical conclusions of RECS to be grounded in data, and I thoroughly endorse this approach.

A brief rant about waist-to-hip ratio

This is a bit off topic, but it's a good illustration of William James' notion of the psychologist's fallacy and it addresses a pet peeve of mine.

Evolutionary psychology is becoming more and more popular and the media is one of its biggest fans.One thing that annoys me is how quickly and uncritically people latch on to these stories and use them to justify the status quo. One of the most popular stories is that men prefer women with small waists and big hips. This is measured using the Waist to Hip Ratio (WHR). The WHR is the circumference of your waist divided by the circumference of your hips. The links below will tell you that men are irresistibly drawn to women with WHRs of .70. This number is apparently imbued with evolutionary significance because prepubescent girls have WHRs close to 1 (their waists are the same size as their hips), while post-pubescent girls have WHR less than 1 (waists smaller than hips); and also because low WHRs are associated with a good hormonal balance. One thing that makes this idea attractive is that it conforms to our modern, western experience - many women who are considered to be extremely attractive have low WHRs and it's difficult to generate examples of women who are famous for their beauty, but who have high WHRs. This evolutionary angle legitimizes our society's standard of attractiveness. We assume that everyone else basically shares our own preferences (the psychologist's fallacy), so, rather than this result simply telling us something about modern, western mens' judgments of attractiveness, there is the irrisitable pull to generalise this preference to ALL men.

"Moving Through Time" and embodied cognition

In which I am a bit rude about a rubbish paper and worry about how to kill papers like it.

The term 'embodied cognition' has been checked out of the library by a lot of different people, all of whom use it to mean something different. My least favourite definition comes from the cognitive literature, which considers embodiment to be about how internal, abstract cognitive function can be 'revealed' motorically (the Barselou (2008) version of embodiment). This definition is rooted firmly in the assumption of mental representation. For me, embodiment is only interesting if it contributes in a meaningful way to what cognition is, and thus I define embodied cognition in the other direction - embodied cognition is about how cognition is shaped by the kind of perceiving-acting organism we are.

On why fMRI is bullshit

If you want to really confuse a psychologist, tell them you don't think there are mental representations mediating behaviour. Try it - they will simply assume you must be joking, because it has never occurred to them that it might be true. This, unfortunately, is the single biggest stumbling block in talking about Gibson to cognitive psychologists, because one of the radical ideas in ecological psychology is that there isn't any need to invoke representations.

The most common counter argument comes from modern neuroscience (specifically, neuro-imaging, and in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)). There must be representations, your cognitive friend will cry - we've seen them via fMRI! If I present a stimulus to a person in a magnet, you can literally see the brain light up. Clearly, the triumphant cognitive type will claim, Gibson is wrong when he says there are no representations because the brain is obviously up to something.