How not to study perception

The image above appeared in a New York Times blog which can be found here. According to the blog it depicts

"...Adelbert Ames at Dartmouth from 1920-1947. He created
aberrations in the visual world, and then tested subjects.
He concluded that what we “see” is determined by what we
want to see, what we expect to see, and what we have been trained to see. "

and further:

"Ames’s idea is an important one — how we see the world is conditioned by our expectations, cultural and otherwise. Ames’s conclusion: vision is not “stimulus bound.” It is not solely determined by the image on the retina."

But, I think everyone would agree that the photograph does not depict representative design in the study of perception. To what extent do Ames's (inventor of the Ames Room and the window illusion) conclusions result from a research paradigm that excludes important aspects of how we perceive the world?

Brunswik Meeting video

I ended up shooting some video from my seat at the Brunswik meeting in Long Beach November 16 and 17. I spliced the unedited clips together into a 26 minute video. The quality is uneven, but you might find it interesting. I didn't get video of everyone; I tended to focus on people that students in my class might have heard of but not seen. I was sampling haphazardly, and did not shoot a clip based on what people happened to be saying, except for Ken Hammond. I included extended clips of some of his stories, including his story of the development of the lens model equation, his encounter with Kahneman at the 1997 meeting in Philadelphia, and his description of the 1978 meeting photo. Ken will be 91 in January, and it was really heartwarming to see him looking so healthy and chipper.

I offer this with apologies for the videography. If you want a higher resolution version (wmv, 61 mb) click here. I could also send you a better quality file.

I'd be interested in your reaction to the video, and any thoughts about the meeting from those who were there.

The meeting program is available at http://www.brunswik.org/annualmeetings/agenda2007.pdf

How does our brain see reality and what implications does this have?

Recently I watched a presentation by a scientist whose research has fascinated me for some time. He is a neuroscientist by the name of Vilanayur Ramachandran with the Department of Psychology and Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego. One of his areas of research has to do with what he calls "phantoms" in the brain. There are a few kinds of brain "malfunctions" he describes under this heading but one in particular is fascinating and I will try and describe it here. I do not purport to know how this relates to decision making as we study it but I think there must be links since his findings have implications for human cognition- or maybe I'm just plain barking up the wrong tree. You tell us Tom.

All of you have probably heard of people who have lost a limb and still feel sensation in the phantom limb which no longer exists. So for instance, take a guy who went to Iraq and came back with his left arm missing but he senses intense pain from the limb. Dr. Ramachandran has had such patients and hypothesizes that the brain pathways sending signals to the limb are still functional and responsible for this sensation. He devised a simple experiment where he devised a box with a mirror in it. The patient who lost his left arm is asked to put his right arm in the box. The brain sees the mirror image and even while the patient is completely conscious of the fact that it is right hand that is mirrored in the box, he also simultaneously senses the phantom limb respond to brain signals to move the left arm and this relieves the pain. See the talk here.

What gets me going about this experiment is that even as a part of the brain is quite aware and conscious of ground-truths, it is not able to prevent certain automatic responses. It can be retrained but this is not because it is not aware of reality. What does this mean for all those other seemingly minor foibles and cognitive errors that seem a part and parcel of human decision making? Are we wired to certain behaviors even when we might be conscious of their futility or incorrectness? If so, what is our mirrored box that can help retrain us?

I'd love to hear back whether this is way out in the ether and not relevant to this blog.

Explorations of the Mind: Intuition by Daniel Kahneman

Below is a link to Daniel Kahneman's lecture on Explorations of the Mind.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3320420692735050062

NPR series on lie detection

NPR has just finished an interesting series on lie detection. You can listen to it at

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15670581

This series is all about accuracy, and it makes it clear that lie detection is not very good, and will never be perfectly accurate. That means it will always be necessary to set a threshold, and the threshold, of course, will depend on the costs and benefits of various outcomes. I am not surprised that a series like this says nothing about thresholds. But the people who develop and use these methods should certainly be concerned about thresholds.

It is also interesting that there is a reference to mental "systems" in the second segment of the report, which is about the use of fMRI to determine whether people are telling the truth. Although it is not stated explicitly, we can infer that they are assuming that lying requires analytic cognition, and therefore activates "system 2," which can be detected using fMRI.

Task Properties Interactions

So the UConn trip went well I'd say. For those who couldn't make it, I did a short presentation on my dissertation topic - building towards a theory of task properties. By this, I mean using regression analysis to measure the influence of task properties (i.e. surface {display} & depth {statistical})* on dependent variables such as judgment performance (ra), environmental certainty (Re), knowledge (G), and judgmental consistency (Rs).

Because there are ten proposed task properties, it is important to choose wisely which properties to analyze given the constraints of research design (i.e. I don't want to spend five years getting the 1500 subjects a large-scale test would require). I would like to start a discussion with anyone interested in helping me to find clarity in this jumble.

I have been thinking about analyzing the relationship of three properties - number of cues, cue intercorrelations, and time to complete task. Intuitively, it makes sense to me that the interaction of time and number of cues will be strong. If subjects have to assess a large number of cues in a short time, intuitive cognition should be induced.

Other task properties and their interactions may be of equal or greater importance. Kathlea (UConn) pointed out the importance of the property "task decomposition." No doubt she hit the nail on the head. Her suggestion also made me think of the cues in terms of functional relations to one another (i.e. task decomposition = f(number of cues, display, etc) - thus adding more complexity to this already complex puzzle. If anyone doesn't mind brainstorming, look at the list from the Hammond et al. citation below and throw out some ideas.


* For more information on proposed task properties, check out Hammond et al. (1987; p. 756).

**Note: the dependent variables are the parameters of the Lens Model Equation.

Research subjects

Hey y'all,

I just thought that I would get some conversation going on a topic that has floated around occasionally since we started meeting over the summer. It is about time for many of us to start planning on how many/how to persuade research subjects for our dissertation experiments. I know Tom is encouraging us all to apply for dissertation grants through UAlbany. We should also discuss ideas to make this process efficient for all of us (i.e. Team Stewart as I like to call us) - perhaps a common subjects pool. Anyway, let's start throwing out ideas or putting current ideas into action...

Ryan

JDM journals

Prescriptive area

• Management Science
• Decision Sciences

Descriptive area

• Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
• Behavioral Decision Making

Other

• IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics
• Human Factors