Meeting of the Mind

You have important questions to research. Why let those loudmouth gregarious go-getter types snag all your potential subjects? The StudyResponse Project will distribute your call for participants to its list of pre-screened adult volunteers, for mere pennies per participant (minimum $79 charge–see their rate calculation on the Researcher Registration page.) It’s run out of the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. As you contemplate mental images of homogeneous populaces of upstate white people, remember not only that the university is as diverse as any major university, but also that Syracuse has been a favorite “average North American” city for market researchers for a couple of generations.

You need evidence of institutional review board (human subject research) approval, and they’re set up to take your grant money. :-{)}

The bleeding edge can be ragged and messy sometimes. Two ways to advance cognitive science have been taking fMRI images of brains doing various things, and brain-based education. The former is a popular activity almost everywhere, including at my university. How much has it turned up? Still not much detailing complex cognition—the whole brain lights up for a lot of tasks, or the phenomena studied are emotions. A promising area, though: social psychology of agreeableness, consensus, and collaboration (the opposite of conflict, which is, of course, a major topic of psychological study). See the work of Jared Kenworthy, for example. Now if we could only get them to study people’s agreement about concepts, instead of more primal urges.

Brain-based education still has a ways to go, too. A look through the databases suggests the idea ran out of steam by 2005.

A visit to the miniature model circus at the Ringling museum evokes questions about evocation and representation of mental representations. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) This is a long post, but doesn’t fit into any one category. (That’s the central ideal of the blog, so maybe it is time for a new category structure?)

First of all, to get vocabulary (schemata, mental models) out of the way, there are two lecture notes, one from Clark Quinn at University of Colorado and one from Ruth Byrne at Trinity College Dublin.

At the estate of John and Mable Ringling (home to their art collection and circus museum) is the Tibbals Learning Center housing Howard Tibbals’s creation, the Howard Brothers Circus, a miniature model of an entire circus arriving and setting up in a town. It takes up 3,800ft² (353m²). The figures, apparently carved from wood with fabric clothing and metal implements added, are extremely detailed–most of the 1,300 human miniatures show all ten fingers. The entire project took decades to complete, starting in 1956. The installation (behind glass, with captions) is in a building with a sound system playing circus music, and displays of actual circus equipment and costumes.

As a side note, it is interesting that the inspiration was catalyzed (Tibbals had been interested in circuses since the age of 3) by an article on the logistics of circus setup, “Here comes the circus,” in a 1952 issue of Popular mechanics. What an interesting psychobibliometric study it would be to trace the timelines and spans or reaches (geographic, disciplinary) of the projects born from reading that magazine, a North American boyhood pastime in the earlier part of the last century.

Nowadays, we would construct a virtual reality. Virtual realities are cheaper than physical spaces to maintain, and don’t require replenishment of materials. Yet their development can be at least as painstaking, even if not as physically demanding. Tibbals made 15,000 rail plates, 33,000 railroad spikes, and 2,164 individually turned wooden tent stakes 3 inches [7.6cm] in length (real-world tent stakes are 4 feet [1.2m] long). Virtual images can be made once and cloned repeatedly, which saves “tedious” labor (ignoring the value of tiny individual variations, assuming those can’t be built into the image editor), but the original creation involves careful observation and whatever else it takes to create a mathematical model of each curve, angle, and texture. Fortunately, many templates are available for copying and importing into one’s project. Building on the shoulders of others is one form of collaborative knowledge work. Of course, if the found model doesn’t suit one’s particular needs exactly, there is still the work of searching further for a better model, or modifying one and fitting it into the project. How does all this compare to the experience and manual dexterity of handcraft? How similar are the demands on visualization and spatial perception centers in the brain?

This installation stimulates several of the senses (visual display, verbal captions, music, realia nearby in the building). In what ways are miniature wood carvings surrogates? How different are they, in detail level, from avatars? How much do the carvings rely on the viewer’s general knowledge and (what we now call, fuzzily) context? How much, in each case, do we supply to construct a mental representation–an engram in working memory, so to speak–of that they represent? How much overlap is there between cues for constructing a mental representation and cues for believability, or cues for agreement with the claim of accuracy?

Cognitive neuroscience references may be helpful to draw from Episodic Model Imprinting Theory (EMI) by Peter J. Patsula (”Jakob Nielsen’s evil twin”), although it focuses on episodic representations in working memory, and learning.

Information science references may be inferred, with some stretching, from the work of Shelly Turkle. The first work that came to mind while considering the above questions was Life on the screen: Identity in the Internet (1995), but her other publications look even more interesting. She received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Her latest book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With and Objects in Mind: Falling for Science, Technology, and Design,is about to be released, but her recent work emphasizes robotics; so it may be more about evocation in a higher, less neurophysiological, sense.

Information and discovery in neuroscience at the Information Systems Research Lab at UIUC GSLiS is more about information and discovery than actual neuroscience, but it’s one of the most relevant sites to watch.

The 2006 annual meeting of ASIST, the American Society for Information Science & Technology, featured several sessions on information visualization, interaction interfaces (nonverbal), and information behavior which had, or could have, neuropsychological elaboration or explanation. More detail as soon as time permits.

No question mark after the phrase, because it’s actually a Web page on the Cognitive Neuroscience Arena site.

The CII blog out of UIUC is a little reminiscent of what Alan Shaw was trying to do twenty years ago with MUSIC (Multi-User Sessions In Community). MUSIC didn’t seem to take off—people thought, why log into a computer (pre-Web) when they could just pick up the phone. (Kind of like workers presented with wikis to collaborate on—why fool with that unituitive interface when they could just exchange dozens of e-mail messages, but I digress.) Actually, the “community” of CII refers more to online communities organized around specific goals. To quote their site, “The core of the CII is community inquiry: collaborative action to create knowledge and technology connected to people’s values, history, and lived experiences; the development of models of engagement that are just, democratic, participatory, and open-ended; and the integration of theory and practice in an experimental and critical manner.”

Citation mapping

(Other essays on that site are worthwhile as well.)

Kohonen self-organizing maps

Ben Shneiderman’s information visualization work

He is actually an HCI (human-computer interaction) scientist. Now that he has shaved his beard, he is of less interest; but he continues to contribute to the psychology of interfaces.
One of his exciting projects, because it provides means for thinking and expression using visualization: OLIVE: On-line Library of Information Visualization Environments. Examples of visualization environments include Geographic information services (GIS) (including Arc software), computer chip design, newspaper layouts, and photography (Photoshop). Unfortunately, OLIVE is now about ten years old. Note to self (you know who you are): check projects page for citations and continued work.

Cognitive work analysis

Great work by Raya Fidel et al. at a great school, the Information School (iSchool) of the University of Washington . See also
From information behaviour research to the design of information systems: the Cognitive Work Analysis framework from Information research (an excellent journal, from Sweden, but no RSS feed).

Cognitive neuroscience arena, the Science news of cognitive neuroscience–or maybe it’s more like Popular science. It’s brightly colored with short paragraphs. Actually it’s a book promotional site, but the flow of new titles is one way to keep up with the field.