Smart Economy

Day dreaming can produce great ideas

Why great ideas can come from zoning out

May 22, 2012

Psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have found evidence for the value of mind-wandering.

The researchers presented 145 undergraduate students with two “unusual uses” tasks that gave them two minutes to list as many uses as possible for everyday objects such as toothpicks, clothes hangers and bricks.

After the two minutes were over, participants were given a 12-minute break, during which they rested, undertook a demanding memory activity that required their full attention or engaged in an undemanding reaction-time activity known to elicit mind-wandering. A fourth group of students had no break. All participants were then given four unusual-uses tasks, including the two that they had completed earlier.

Those students who had done the undemanding activity performed an average of 41% better at the repeated tasks the second time they tried them. By contrast, students in the other three groups showed no improvement.

“We’ve traditionally found that rapid-eye-movement sleep grants creative insight. That allowing the mind to wander does the same is absolutely fascinating. I think they are on to something really interesting here,” says Sara Mednick, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside.

Participants who engaged in the undemanding task did not do any better than others on unusual-uses tasks that they encountered for the first time in the second round. “The implication is that mind-wandering was only helpful for problems that were already being mentally chewed on. It didn’t seem to lead to a general increase in creative problem-solving ability,” says Baird.

The upside of zoning out

As well as revealing that breaks on their own do not encourage creative thinking, Baird’s work suggests an explanation for one of psychology’s great mysteries: why we zone out.

From an evolutionary perspective, mind-wandering seems totally counterproductive and has been viewed as dysfunctional because it compromises people’s performance in physical activities. However, Baird’s work shows that allowing the brain to enter this state when it is considering complex problems can have real benefits. Zoning out may have aided humans when survival depended on creative solutions.

“There is a real possibility that mind-wandering is so common because evolution has selected for it over time, but before we can come to that conclusion we have to ascertain whether it’s genetically determined,” says Kounios.

Ref.: Baird, B., et al., Psychological Science, in press

Cognitive Machines capture expertise

Cognitive software captures experts’ performance on flight simulators

May 18, 2012

Navy pilots and other flight specialists soon will have a new “smart machine” installed in training simulators that learns from expert instructors to more efficiently train their students.

Sandia National Laboratories’ Automated Expert Modeling & Student Evaluation (AEMASE, pronounced “amaze”) is being provided to the Navy as a component of flight simulators.

Components are now being used to train Navy personnel to fly H-60 helicopters and a complete system will soon be delivered for training on the E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, said Robert G. Abbott, a Sandia computer scientist and AEMASE’s inventor. The work is sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.

AEMASE is a cognitive software application that updates its knowledge of experts’ performance on training simulators in real time to prevent training sessions from becoming obsolete and automatically evaluates student performance, both of which reduce overall training costs, Abbott said.

“AEMASE is able to adapt and is aware of what’s going on,” he said. “That’s what’s driving our cognitive modeling and automated systems that learn over time from the environment and from their interactions with people.”

Previous flight simulators have not done well with ambiguous or new situations that required time-consuming reprogramming, making it difficult for the military to adapt quickly to changing environments and tactics.

AEMASE bypasses lengthy interviews of instructors and reprogramming once the simulator is running. Instead, instructors fly the simulator themselves to capture their expertise, a feature that works particularly well in ambiguous situations where it’s difficult to program a set of explicit rules, Abbott said.

Melissa Walwanis, a senior research psychologist at the Naval Air Warfare Center’s Training System Division in Orlando, Fla., said AEMASE will give Navy trainees specific ways to improve performance through machine learning, automated performance measurement, and recordings of trainees’ voices during the training sessions.

AEMASE addresses a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Just as search engines find certain words across the Internet, AEMASE scans hundreds of training sessions to find specific actions or scenarios and makes comparisons, Abbott said.

The software is designed for context recognition. It searches until it recognizes a situation it has seen before and determines whether the students are making a desirable decision, Abbott said.

The software recognizes there may be multiple right answers that incorporate different ways of responding to the situation, Forsythe added. For example, AEMASE tracks certain flight parameters — say distance, the angle of the aircraft from the ground and velocity — to create vectors that are treated as points within a multidimensional space defined by the parameters.

Different “right” answers are expressed as points in the space, but will tend to gather in one area, while poor performance can be measured by a point’s distance from the “expert” points.

But for instructors, AEMASE’s interface is simple. They can flag actions by pushing a one-click thumbs-up button to record good behavior or a thumbs-down button when students fly too low or too close together in the simulation, Abbott said.

AEMASE places those flagged events on a timeline display, so instructors and students can review errors in recordings of student performance. Then AEMASE uses that information to recognize other instances of the errors, helping the instructors become more efficient by automatically flagging errors for them to review with other students.

These flags are the seeds for the model’s future development as scenarios and preferred actions evolve over time, Forsythe said.

AEMASE also incorporates speech recognition technology to assess how effectively teams communicate.

Sandia is adapting the software to similar training aids for computer security analysts. Potential applications include driver’s education, automating robots, and many other areas, Abbott said.

 

Zbigniew Brzezinski: National Strategy and US Education

By Leonard Liggio

Foreign Policy magazine (January-February 2012) lists Zbigniew Brzezinski among the five most important living influences on US foreign policy. In the weekend Financial Times (January 14-15, 2012), Edward Luce (FT’s chief US commentator) describes his recent luncheon interview with the former National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter and current trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. After 1981, he continued in Washington as a professor at Georgetown University. Over his Dubonnet, he begins with his disappointment with President Barak Obama: “I’m all in favor of grand important speeches but the president then has to link his sermons to a strategy.” Although he has voted for Republican presidential candidates (such as George H. W. Bush in 1988) he is highly doubtful of the current Republican candidates. Compared to how well informed about the world he considers Chinese leaders: “And then you watch one of our Republican presidential debates …. The GOP field is just embarrassing.”

Brzezinski is 83 years old and was born in Warsaw. His father was a diplomat and Brzezinski spent his first three years in Paris and the next three in Berlin. His father was assigned to the embassy in Canada, so the family remained there when World War II began. He attributes his skills to attending Loyola High School in Montreal. (My graduate professor at Fordham University, Oskar Halecki (who had been secretary of the Polish delegation at the Versailles conference and then dean of Warsaw University) was a visiting professor at Grenoble University when the war began and was fortunate to move to Laval University in Quebec before the invasion of France.)

I first became aware of Brzezinski when I was working for the William Volker Fund assigned to read journal articles or books that might relate to its scholarly program. I extensively reviewed a book of Brzezinski written (c. 1961) (when he was at Harvard University) on the economic system of the Soviet Bloc. I recommended the book as knowledgeable and insightful.

He was appointed a professor of international relations at Columbia University. He became an advisor to Hubert Humphrey’s vice-presidential campaign and defended Lyndon B. Johnson’s war in Vietnam on the basis of the ‘Falling Dominos’ theory (if South Vietnam came under the Viet Cong, then Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia would become Communist.) (That theory arose in the 1950s: that Japan would want to trade with Red China if communists blocked Japan’s markets in Southeast Asia. Japan was trading with China through third countries, so the theory was questionable.)

Brzezinski opposed Republican senators critical of Johnson’s war. Senators Sterling Morton of Kentucky and Mark Hatfield of Oregon led the revival of the Republican party with over forty new Republican congressmen in 1966.

To him, today’s America appears to lack education in world politics. He sees a US failure in history and geography (French education always twined geography and history). “Americans don’t learn about the world, they don’t study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don’t study geography. In that context of widespread ignorance, the ongoing and deliberately fanned fear about the outside world, which is connected with this grandiose war on jihadi terrorism, makes the American public extremely susceptible to extremist appeals.”

Fifty years ago when I began as a college instructor, there was a textbook which combined European and American history. However, as I was teaching fifteen hours a week the course in World Civilizations there was a dilemma. The chairman of the history and government department was a Viennese who had studied Japanese in the US army. He selected a textbook which went beyond European civilization to include: Hindu, Chinese, Japanese , etc. I had no background in those areas and told my five classes to ignore those chapters. American students have a hard enough time with European names, trying to have them or myself master exotic names was not education but chaos. I am reminded of one of my colleagues, a Chinese refugee from Red China, who upset his students of Chinese history when he later explained that the first seven dynasties they had struggled to learn were mythical.

Brzezinski considers America’s greatest national security threat to be the weak US economic situation, especially the political failure to address the government’s economic problems. His strategic advice: “the US should prod Europe to bring both Russia and Turkey into an enlarged west. America should hedge against China’s rise, without explicitly attempting to contain it. Most importantly, the US should revitalize its domestic economy if it wants to stave off further decline. On all counts, Brzezinski seems pessimistic about the likelihood that Washington’s elites will start to act strategically again.”

The advantage of ambiguity --why does human language has so many words with multiple meanings?

Cognitive scientists develop a new take on an old problem: why human language has so many words with multiple meanings.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious — as a way for individuals to exchange information — linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years. Many prominent linguists, including MIT’s Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is, in fact, poorly designed for communication. Such a use, they say, is merely a byproduct of a system that probably evolved for other reasons — perhaps for structuring our own private thoughts.

As evidence, these linguists point to the existence of ambiguity: In a system optimized for conveying information between a speaker and a listener, they argue, each word would have just one meaning, eliminating any chance of confusion or misunderstanding. Now, a group of MIT cognitive scientists has turned this idea on its head. In a new theory, they claim that ambiguity actually makes language more efficient, by allowing for the reuse of short, efficient sounds that listeners can easily disambiguate with the help of context.

“Various people have said that ambiguity is a problem for communication,” says Ted Gibson, an MIT professor of cognitive science and senior author of a paper describing the research to appear in the journal Cognition. “But once we understand that context disambiguates, then ambiguity is not a problem — it’s something you can take advantage of, because you can reuse easy [words] in different contexts over and over again.”

Lead author of the paper is Steven Piantadosi PhD ’11; Harry Tily, a postdoc in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, is another co-author.

What do you ‘mean’?

For a somewhat ironic example of ambiguity, consider the word “mean.” It can mean, of course, to indicate or signify, but it can also refer to an intention or purpose (“I meant to go to the store”); something offensive or nasty; or the mathematical average of a set of numbers. Adding an ‘s’ introduces even more potential definitions: an instrument or method (“a means to an end”), or financial resources (“to live within one’s means”).

But virtually no speaker of English gets confused when he or she hears the word “mean.” That’s because the different senses of the word occur in such different contexts as to allow listeners to infer its meaning nearly automatically.

Given the disambiguating power of context, the researchers hypothesized that languages might harness ambiguity to reuse words — most likely, the easiest words for language processing systems. Building on observation and previous studies, they posited that words with fewer syllables, high frequency and the simplest pronunciations should have the most meanings.

To test this prediction, Piantadosi, Tily and Gibson carried out corpus studies of English, Dutch and German. (In linguistics, a corpus is a large body of samples of language as it is used naturally, which can be used to search for word frequencies or patterns.) By comparing certain properties of words to their numbers of meanings, the researchers confirmed their suspicion that shorter, more frequent words, as well as those that conform to the language’s typical sound patterns, are most likely to be ambiguous — trends that were statistically significant in all three languages.

To understand why ambiguity makes a language more efficient rather than less so, think about the competing desires of the speaker and the listener. The speaker is interested in conveying as much as possible with the fewest possible words, while the listener is aiming to get a complete and specific understanding of what the speaker is trying to say. But as the researchers write, it is “cognitively cheaper” to have the listener infer certain things from the context than to have the speaker spend time on longer and more complicated utterances. The result is a system that skews toward ambiguity, reusing the “easiest” words. Once context is considered, it’s clear that “ambiguity is actually something you would want in the communication system,” Piantadosi says.

Implications for computer science

The researchers say the statistical nature of their paper reflects a trend in the field of linguistics, which is coming to rely more heavily on information theory and quantitative methods.

“The influence of computer science in linguistics right now is very high,” Gibson says, adding that natural language processing (NLP) is a major goal of those operating at the intersection of the two fields.

Piantadosi points out that ambiguity in natural language poses immense challenges for NLP developers. “Ambiguity is only good for us [as humans] because we have these really sophisticated cognitive mechanisms for disambiguating,” he says. “It’s really difficult to work out the details of what those are, or even some sort of approximation that you could get a computer to use.”

But, as Gibson says, computer scientists have long been aware of this problem. The new study provides a better theoretical and evolutionary explanation of why ambiguity exists, but the same message holds: “Basically, if you have any human language in your input or output, you are stuck with needing context to disambiguate,” he says.

Written by: Emily Finn, MIT News Office

Walking through doorways causes forgetting, new research shows

We've all experienced it: The frustration of entering a room and forgetting what we were going to do. Or get. Or find.

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses. "Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," Radvansky explains.

"Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized."

The study was published recently in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Conducting three experiments in both real and virtual environments, Radvansky's subjects – all college students – performed memory tasks while crossing a room and while exiting a doorway.

In the first experiment, subjects used a virtual environment and moved from one room to another, selecting an object on a table and exchanging it for an object at a different table. They did the same thing while simply moving across a room but not crossing through a doorway.

Radvansky found that the subjects forgot more after walking through a doorway compared to moving the same distance across a room, suggesting that the doorway or "event boundary" impedes one's ability to retrieve thoughts or decisions made in a different room.

The second experiment in a real-world setting required subjects to conceal in boxes the objects chosen from the table and move either across a room or travel the same distance and walk through a doorway. The results in the real-world environment replicated those in the virtual world: walking through a doorway diminished subjects' memories.

The final experiment was designed to test whether doorways actually served as event boundaries or if one's ability to remember is linked to the environment in which a decision – in this case, the selection of an object – was created. Previous research has shown that environmental factors affect memory and that information learned in one environment is retrieved better when the retrieval occurs in the same context. Subjects in this leg of the study passed through several doorways, leading back to the room in which they started. The results showed no improvements in memory, suggesting that the act of passing through a doorway serves as a way the mind files away memories.

Cognition> How Do I Remember That I Know You Know That I Know?

How Do I Remember That I Know You Know That I Know?
“I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time,” says the character Aaron in the 1987 movie Broadcast News. He and the woman he’s talking to have a lot of common ground, the shared territory that makes conversations work.  Common ground is why, after you’ve mentioned Great-Aunt Mildred’s 80th birthday party once in a conversation, you can just refer to it as “the party.” In a new study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the authors pinpoint the type of memory required to make common ground work and confirm that people with a particular type of amnesia have trouble making common ground in conversation.

People with declarative memory impairment (amnesia) have good memories of what happened before their amnesia started, but they can’t form new declarative memories. That’s the kind of memory for facts and events, like what they did yesterday or the name of a person they just met. They can still form non-declarative memories, like learning how to ride a bike or other skills, says Rachael Rubin of the University of Illinois. For this study, she worked with five people with declarative memory amnesia and five healthy people. Rubin cowrote the new paper with Sarah Brown-Schmidt and Neal Cohen of the University of Illinois and Melissa Duff and Daniel Tranel of the University of Iowa.

Rubin and her colleagues tested people on whether they could keep up with common ground in conversation. In one condition, the participant and experimenter sat facing each other, looking at back-to-back monitors. Each monitor showed a 3×3 grid, which looked like a real set of cubbyholes between the two people, with objects in each compartment. The participant could see right through the top row of compartments. The middle row was blocked off, and the bottom row was blocked at the back so the participant could see what was in the compartments but the experimenter couldn’t. The experimenter asked the participant: “What object is in the bottom left?” The participant would answer – “an elephant.” After 40 seconds of conversation about something else, the experimenter would say, “Look at the elephant.” The catch was, the participant had two elephants to choose from. Normal people looked to the elephant that had been referred to just previously. But people with amnesia looked equally at the two elephants, showing no benefit from the earlier portion of the conversation.

This suggests that declarative memory is required for keeping track of what’s going on in a conversation, even if it was something that was mentioned less than a minute ago. “Memory and language are related more than people thought before,” Rubin says. And it’s a reminder that people with amnesia don’t just have trouble with memory; their memory problems extend to other parts of their lives, like the ability to connect with other people through conversation.

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For more information about this study, please contact: Rachael Rubin at rrubin2@illinois.edu.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "How do I remember that I know you know that I know?" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Divya Menon at 202-293-9300 or dmenon@psychologicalscience.org.

Tags: Language, Learning, Learning Disabilities, Long-Term Memory, Memory, Mental Health, Psychological Science

Predicting future actions from human brain activity

 

Researchers at The University of Western Ontario from The Centre for Brain and Mind can now determine the action a person was planning — moments before that action is actually executed.

Human subjects had their brain activity scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed one of three hand movements: grasping the top of an object, grasping the bottom of the object, or simply reaching out and touching the object.

“Being able to predict a human’s desired movements using brain signals takes us one step closer to using those signals to control prosthetic limbs in movement-impaired patient populations, like those who suffer from spinal cord injuries or locked-in syndrome,” said Jason Gallivan.

Ref.: J. C. Culham, Decoding Action Intentions from Preparatory Brain Activity in Human Parieto-Frontal Networks, Journal of Neuroscience, 2011; 31 (26): 9599 [DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0080-11.2011]

Social pressure can affect your memory

How your memories can be twisted under social pressure

Listen up, Facebook and Twitter groupies: how easily can social pressure affect your memory?

Very easily, researchers at the Weizmann Institute and University College London have proven, and they think they even know what part of the brain is responsible.

Volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers.

They were later invited back to the lab to retake the test. This time, the subjects were also given supposed answers of the others in their film-viewing group (along with social-media-style photos) while being scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) that revealed their brain activity.

Is most of what you know false?

Planted among these were false answers to questions the volunteers had previously answered correctly and confidently. The participants conformed to the group on these “planted” responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time.

To determine if their memory of the film had actually undergone a change, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab later to take the memory test once again, telling them that the answers they had previously been fed were not those of their fellow film watchers, but random computer generations.

Some of the responses reverted back to the original, correct ones, but get this: despite finding out the scientists messed with their minds, close to half of their responses remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted in the earlier session.

An analysis of the fMRI data showed a strong co-activation and connectivity between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. Social reinforcement could act on the amygdala to persuade our brains to replace a strong memory with a false one, the researchers suggest.

Ref.: Yadin Dudai, et al., Following the Crowd: Brain Substrates of Long-Term Memory Conformity. Science, 2011; 333 (6038): 108-111 [DOI: 10.1126/science.1203557]

Pigeons never forget a face

New research has shown that feral, untrained pigeons can recognise individual people and are not fooled by a change of clothes.

Researchers, who will be presenting their work at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Glasgow on Sunday the 3rd of July, have shown that urban pigeons that have never been caught or handled can recognise individuals, probably by using facial characteristics.

Although pigeons have shown remarkable feats of perception when given training in the lab this is the first research showing similar abilities in untrained feral pigeons.

In a park in Paris city centre, pigeons were fed by two researchers, of similar build and skin colour, wearing different coloured lab coats. One individual simply ignored the pigeons, allowing them to feed while the other was hostile, and chased them away. This was followed by a second session when neither chased away the pigeons.

The experiment, which was repeated several times, showed that pigeons were able to recognise the individuals and continued to avoid the researcher who had chased them away even when they no longer did so. Swapping lab coats during the experiments did not confuse the pigeons and they continued shun the researcher who had been initially hostile.

"It is very likely that the pigeons recognised the researchers by their faces, since the individuals were both female and of a similar age, build and skin colour," says Dr. Dalila Bovet a co-author of this work from the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. "Interestingly, the pigeons, without training, spontaneously used the most relevant characteristics of the individuals (probably facial traits), instead of the lab coats that covered 90% of the body."

The fact that the pigeons appeared to know that clothing colour was not a good way of telling humans apart suggests that the birds have developed abilities to discriminate between humans in particular. This specialised ability may have come about over the long period of association with humans, from early domestication to many years of living in cities.

Future work will focus on identifying whether pigeons learn that humans often change clothes and so use more stable characteristics for recognition, or if there is a genetic basis for this ability, linked to domestication or to having evolved in an urban environment.

How too many options can impair the ability to make skillful choices

Study co-authored by Columbia Business School and University of Chicago Booth School of Business finds that too many choices impairs consumers from making appropriate decisions, including 401k plan selection

A study by Columbia Business School Professor Sheena Iyengar, S. T. Lee Professor of Business, Management, and Emir Kamenica, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, found the more fund options an employee has to choose from when presented with 401k options deters he or she from enrolling in the plan. The professors conducted three experiments in order to determine how increasing the size of a choice set will impact the option the consumer will chose, evolving from earlier studies that have focused on whether increasing the number of choices affects consumers' willingness to participate in the market. The researchers discovered that giving consumers too many options can impair their ability to make skillful choices and erode their ability to determine the optimal choice for them. The study was published by the Journal of Public Economics and its reference number is doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2010.03.006.

In the first study, one group of subjects selected a gamble from the menu of 11 gambles, which includes ten risky options and one less lucrative gamble of five dollars. Another group of subjects was offered a three- gamble subset of the 11 gambles, which included the less lucrative gamble of five dollars. They found that many more subjects chose the simple option (five dollars for sure) from the set with 11 options than from the set with three. In the first experiment, the simplest option was also the least risky option.

The second experiment deviated from this design by making the simplest option the riskiest. Once again subjects were offered either 11 gambles or a subset of three. The set of 11 included ten gambles that yielded a distinct amount of money (between zero and ten dollars) for each outcome of a die toss. The remaining gamble yielded zero or ten dollars, based on the toss of the die. The all-or-nothing gamble was both simpler and riskier than the other 10 gambles. The professors found that, as in the first experiment, the simpler gamble was selected – in this case, the simpler gamble is selected from the larger choice set, versus the smaller choice sets.

The third study examined how the size of the choice set affects people's behavior in context of 401(k) plans: the experimenters tested whether, conditional on participation, the number of funds offered influences asset allocation. Using data from the Vanguard Center for Retirement Research, they analyzed the investment decisions of over 500,000 employees in 638 firms. The data provides information on how individuals allocated their total annual 401(k) contribution in 2001 (including the employer match) across seven different categories: money market funds, bond funds, balanced funds, active stock funds, indexed stock funds, company stock, and other funds (mainly insurance policies and non-marketable securities). Conditional on a host of individual and plan-level controls, with every additional ten funds in a plan, allocation to equity funds decreased by 3.28 percentage points. Moreover, for every ten additional funds, there was a 2.87 percentage point increase in the probability that participants will allocate nothing at all to equity funds. As revealed in the first two studies, the presence of complicated choices caused decision-makers to choose the simpler options, even if they were not as lucrative.

In addition, the data revealed that employees under 30 years of age are as likely as others to allocate no money at all to equity funds and their participation in equities is just as sensitive to the number of funds as that of older employees. The findings are of particular economic significance, as non-participation in the stock market, especially for younger employees, is likely to be detrimental to one's retirement income.

This research joins a growing body of research in psychology and economics that demonstrates why consumers can be better off with a strictly smaller choice set.