neuromorphogenesis:

Study: Is Complex Problem Solving Distinct From IQ?

The idea that skills other than traditional IQ might matter more than testable intelligence in the real world of messy, ever-changing problems isn’t a new one. But what is new is the developing alternative of testing complex problem solving. An article just published in the journal Intelligence tries to pick apart the difference: instead of answering questions about trains leaving stations, vocabulary and block stacking patterns to measure IQ, the researchers propose “computer-based problem-solving scenarios called microworlds” to assess higher-order thinking skills. Designing these microworlds requires looking inside what makes higher-order thinking and, in fact, what goes on inside complex problem solving itself.

See, questions on IQ tests have answers: donkey and horse are to mule as lion and tiger are to liger. But in the real world, problems can consist of many, interconnected variables whose relationships are obscured and change over time, and goals can be unclear or even competing and contradictory – factors the authors of the Intelligence study cite as central to complex problem solving.

But pulling apart these ideas – traditional definitions of intelligence from complex problem solving – is tricky. As you’d expect, there’s significant overlap: people who are intelligent are generally good at CPS and vice a versa. But in what ways do these skills diverge? How is the intelligence measured by IQ and trained in school different from the skills of complex problem solving needed in the real world?

To answer that question researchers stuck 563 Luxembourgian high-schoolers in a genetics lab – or, at least in front of a free, downloadable microworld called Genetics Lab, which you should definitely check out if you have time. In GL, test-takers turn on and off “genes” and then click “next day” to discover how the combinations affect a fictional creature’s traits like IQ, Inventions and Ideas. It turns out to be a bit of a mish-mash and sorting out which genes create which abilities is a strange and complex soup.

Like many problems in the real world, GL not only requires manipulating information on the way to a goal, but sallying forth into the microworld to discover this information in the first place and using the information to create a mental model of how the system works. So Genetics Lab is scored three ways: Do students manipulate Genetics Lab in a way that creates unambiguous rules? Can they understand the relationships between genes and characteristics? And only finally, can they manipulate genes to get target characteristics?

Students were studious. Researchers researched. And then the researchers compared students’ three GL scores to their IQs, grades and whole bunch of other measures. What they found is cool, but only when you look at it with a bit of nuance. See, they found that Genetics Lab measures the same thing as the reasoning section of the standard IQ test. D’oh!

But, “Although they might not measure something different from reasoning scales, they measure it differently,” the authors write. And by measuring this reasoning or problem solving or whatever you want to call it differently, the researchers were able to see not only the endpoints but the waypoints that led there – they could measure problem solving process and not simply its product, and so answer not only the question of who is and is not good at reasoning/problem-solving, but what got them there.

Gathering information, making a mental model of how information drives results, and finally putting this model to work to get the results you want: that’s the process of complex problem solving. At this point, it ‘aint yet been pulled as a skill distinct from IQ-like reasoning. But a peek inside this process shows how results happen — and as a parent or teacher know this process may allow you to help your kids learn this complex and important skill.

I’ve written a lot about how to create such a Kobayashi Maru scenario to test problem-solving ability. Soon we may be using video games to test complex problem solving in virtual environments that better simulate real-world problems.

stellar-indulgence:

Pretty awesome poster…

Principal subjects of science appear in this poster as geological strata.  Psychology rests atop biology because—as far as we know—psychological events are a special class of biological events.  So, psychology is “grounded” in biology.  Biology, in turn, is grounded in chemistry.  And chemistry is grounded in physics.  Finally, all these branches of science rest on the deepest stratum, philosophy.  Each major subject reveals three substrata that describe “structures” of differing scale, large to small.  Each such structure refers laterally to a crucial scientific theory that underlies our understanding of the universe at that level.

Source: http://wonderfest.org/

A science is only as good as its foundation.

thedailywhat:

Troll Science of the Day: George Orwell’s Eco-Friendly Power Generator

At this pace of Orwellian dystopia becoming a reality, we might as well replace the fossil fuels with his self-perpetuating outrage six feet under the ground.

I bet we could double the rate of infinite energy collection if we wired up Aldous Huxley, too.

neurosciencestuff:

What The Human Face Might Look Like 100,000 Years From Now

The human face might look very different in the future.

Artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm from U.K. discount site MyVoucherCodes.co.uk collaborated with a genomics expert to create pictures that show the evolution of the human face 20,000, 60,000, and 100,000 years from now.

In one possible future scenario, humans will have full control of human genome engineering. That is, they will be able to eliminate hereditary genetic disorders, or select desirable genetic traits like straight teeth and natural blonde hair.

Natural human evolution is still at work — the head will get bigger to make room for a larger brain — but most facial features will be molded to reflect what the majority of us perceive as attractive: big eyes, a straight nose, and facial symmetry.

We’re all going to turn into one big anime if we’re not careful?

Got it.

heythereuniverse:

Needle playing a record | Victrola Coffee Roasters

Coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of the needle (stylus) of a record player in a groove on a record. A record is used to store sound. It is produced by a machine with a head which vibrates in time to the sound being recorded. This cuts a groove in the record which varies according to the vibrations. A needle can then reproduce these vibrations as it runs along the groove and these, when amplified, produce the original sound.

neuromorphogenesis:

How Similar Are the Gestures of Apes and Human Infants? More Than You Might Suspect

 Psychologists who analyzed video footage of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species.

This is the first time such data have been used to compare the development of gestures across species. The chimpanzee and bonobo, formerly called the “pygmy chimpanzee,” are the two species most closely related to humans in the evolutionary tree.

“The similarity in the form and function of the gestures in a human infant, a baby chimpanzee and a baby bonobo was remarkable,” said Patricia Greenfield, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and co-author of the study, published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Gestures made by all three species included reaching, pointing with fingers or the head, and raising the arms to ask to be picked up. The researchers called “striking” the finding that the gestures of all three species were “predominantly communicative,” Greenfield said.

To be classified as communicative, a gesture had to include eye contact with the conversational partner, be accompanied by vocalization (non-speech sounds) or include a visible behavioral effort to elicit a response. The same standard was used for all three species. For all three, gestures were usually accompanied by one or more behavioral signs of an intention to communicate.

Charles Darwin showed in his 1872 book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” that the same facial expressions and basic gestures occur in human populations worldwide, implying that these traits are innate. Greenfield and her colleagues have taken Darwin’s conclusions a step further, providing new evidence that the origins of language can be found in gestures and new insights into the co-evolution of gestures and speech.

The apes included in the study were named Panpanzee, a female chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), and Panbanisha, a female bonobo (Pan paniscus). They were raised together at the Language Research Center in Atlanta, which is co-directed by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a co-author of the study. There, the apes learned to communicate with caregivers using gestures, vocalizations and visual symbols (mainly geometric shapes) called lexigrams.

“Lexigrams were learned, as human language is, during meaningful social interactions, not from behavioral training,” said the study’s lead author, Kristen Gillespie-Lynch, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the City University of New York and a former UCLA graduate student in Greenfield’s laboratory.

The human girl grew up in her parents’ home, along with her older brother. Where the apes’ symbols were visual, the girl’s symbols took the form of spoken words. Video analysis for her began at 11 months of age and continued until she was 18 months old; video analysis for the two apes began at 12 months of age and continued until they were 26 months old. An hour of video was analyzed each month for the girl, the chimpanzee and the bonobo.

Overall, the findings support the “gestures first” theory of the evolution of language. During the first half of the study, communicating with gestures was dominant in all three species. During the second half, all three species increased their symbol production — words for the child and lexigrams for the apes.

“Gesture appeared to help all three species develop symbolic skills when they were raised in environments rich in language and communication,” said Gillespie-Lynch, who conducted the research while she was at UCLA. This pattern, she said, suggests that gesture plays a role in the evolution, as well as the development, of language.

At the beginning stage of communication development, gesture was the primary mode of communication for human infant, baby chimpanzee and baby bonobo. The child progressed much more rapidly in the development of symbols. Words began to dominate her communication in the second half of the study, while the two apes continued to rely predominantly on gesture.

“This was the first indication of a distinctive human pathway to language,” Greenfield said.

All three species increased their use of symbols, as opposed to gestures, as they grew older, but this change was far more pronounced for the human child. The child’s transition from gesture to symbol could be a developmental model of the evolutionary pathway to human language and thus evidence for the “gestural origins of human language,” Greenfield said.

While gesture may be the first step in language evolution, the psychologists also found evidence that the evolutionary pathway from gesture to human language included the “co-evolution of gestural and vocal communication.” Most of the child’s gestures were accompanied by vocalization (non-language sounds); the apes’ gestures rarely were.

“This finding suggests that the ability to combine gesture and vocalization may have been important for the evolution of language,” Greenfield said.

The researchers conclude that humans inherited a language of gestures and a latent capacity for learning symbolic language from the last ancestor we share with our chimpanzee and bonobo relatives — an ancestor that lived approximately 6 million years ago.

The evolution of human language built on capacities that were already present in the common ancestor of the three species, the psychologists report.

“Our cross-species comparison provides insights into the communicative potential of our common ancestor,” Gillespie-Lynch said.

neurosciencestuff:

Researchers Discover How Brain Circuits Can Become Miswired During Development

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have uncovered a mechanism that guides the exquisite wiring of neural circuits in a developing brain — gaining unprecedented insight into the faulty circuits that may lead to brain disorders ranging from autism to mental retardation.

In the journal Cell, the researchers describe, for the first time, that faulty wiring occurs when RNA molecules embedded in a growing axon are not degraded after they give instructions that help steer the nerve cell. So, for example, the signal that tells the axon to turn — which should disappear after the turn is made — remains active, interfering with new signals meant to guide the axon in other directions.

The scientists say that there may be a way to use this new knowledge to fix the circuits.

“Understanding the basis of brain miswiring can help scientists come up with new therapies and strategies to correct the problem,” says the study’s senior author, Dr. Samie Jaffrey, a professor in the Department of Pharmacology.

“The brain is quite ‘plastic’ and changeable in the very young, and if we know why circuits are miswired, it may be possible to correct those pathways, allowing the brain to build new, functional wiring,” he says.

Disorders associated with faulty neuronal circuits include epilepsy, autism, schizophrenia, mental retardation and spasticity and movement disorders, among others.

In their study, the scientists describe a process of brain wiring that is much more dynamic than was previously known — and thus more prone to error.

Proteins Sense the Environment to Steer the Axon

During brain development, neurons have to connect to each other, which they do by extending their long axons to touch one another. Ultimately, these neurons form a circuit between the brain and the target tissue through which chemical and electrical signals are relayed. In this study, researchers investigated neurons that travel up the spinal cord into the brain. “It is very critical that axons are precisely positioned in the spinal cord,” Dr. Jaffrey says. “If they are improperly positioned, they will form the wrong connections, which can lead to signals being sent to the wrong target cells in the brain.”

The way that an axon guides and finds its proper target is through so-called growth cones located at the tips of axons. “These growth cones have the ability to sense the environment, determine where the targets are and navigate toward them. The question has always been — how do they know how to do this? Where do the instructions come from that tell them how to find their proper target?” Dr. Jaffrey says. The team found that RNA molecules embedded in the growth cone are responsible for instructing the axon to move left or right, up or down. These RNAs are translated in growth cones to produce antenna-like proteins that steer the axon like a self-guided missile.

“As a circuit is being built, RNAs in the neuron’s growth cones are mostly silent. We found that specific RNAs are only read at precise stages in order to produce the right protein needed to steer the axon at the right time. After the protein is produced, we saw that the RNA instruction is degraded and disappears,” he says.

“If these RNAs do not disappear when they should, the axon does not position itself properly — it may go right instead of left — and the wiring will be incorrect and the circuit may be faulty,” Dr. Jaffrey says.

RNAs have Tremendous Power over Brain Development

The research finding answers a long-standing puzzle in the quest to understand brain wiring, says Dr. Dilek Colak, a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Jaffrey’s laboratory.

“There have been a series of discoveries over the last five years showing that proteins that control RNA degradation are very important for brain development and, when they are mutated, you can have spasticity or other movement disorders,” Dr. Colak says. “That has raised a major question — why would RNA degradation pathways be so critical for properly creating brain circuits?

“What we show here is that not only does RNA need to be present in growth cones to give instructions, it then also needs to be removed from the growth cones to take away those instructions at the right time,” she says. “Both those processes are critical and it may explain why there are so many different brain disorders associated with ineffective RNA regulation.”

“The idea that control of brain wiring is located in these RNA molecules that are constantly being dynamically turned over is something that we didn’t anticipate,” Dr. Jaffrey adds. “This tells us that regulating these RNA degradation pathways could have a tremendous impact on brain development. Now we know where to look to tease apart this process when it goes awry, and to think about how we can repair it.”

(Image: Chad Baker)

neuromorphogenesis:

Breastfeeding benefits babies’ brains

A new study by researchers from Brown University finds more evidence that breastfeeding is good for babies’ brains.

The study made use of specialized, baby-friendly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to look at the brain growth in a sample of children under the age of 4. The research found that by age 2, babies who had been breastfed exclusively for at least three months had enhanced development in key parts of the brain compared to children who were fed formula exclusively or who were fed a combination of formula and breastmilk. The extra growth was most pronounced in parts of the brain associated with language, emotional function, and cognition, the research showed.

This isn’t the first study to suggest that breastfeeding aids babies’ brain development. Behavioral studies have previously associated breastfeeding with better cognitive outcomes in older adolescents and adults. But this is the first imaging study that looked for differences associated with breastfeeding in the brains of very young and healthy children, said Sean Deoni, assistant professor of engineering at Brown and the study’s lead author.

“We wanted to see how early these changes in brain development actually occur,” Deoni said. “We show that they’re there almost right off the bat.”

Deoni leads Brown’s Advanced Baby Imaging Lab. He and his colleagues use quiet MRI machines that image babies’ brains as they sleep. The MRI technique Deoni has developed looks at the microstructure of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that contains long nerve fibers and helps different parts of the brain communicate with each other. Specifically, the technique looks for amounts of myelin, the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and speeds electrical signals as they zip around the brain.

Deoni and his team looked at 133 babies ranging in ages from 10 months to four years. All of the babies had normal gestation times, and all came from families with similar socioeconomic statuses. The researchers split the babies into three groups: those whose mothers reported they exclusively breastfed for at least three months, those fed a combination of breastmilk and formula, and those fed formula alone. The researchers compared the older kids to the younger kids to establish growth trajectories in white matter for each group.

The study showed that the exclusively breastfed group had the fastest growth in myelinated white matter of the three groups, with the increase in white matter volume becoming substantial by age 2. The group fed both breastmilk and formula had more growth than the exclusively formula-fed group, but less than the breastmilk-only group.

“We’re finding the difference [in white matter growth] is on the order of 20 to 30 percent, comparing the breastfed and the non-breastfed kids,” said Deoni. “I think it’s astounding that you could have that much difference so early.”

Deoni and his team then backed up their imaging data with a set of basic cognitive tests on the older children. Those tests found increased language performance, visual reception, and motor control performance in the breastfed group.

The study also looked at the effects of the duration of breastfeeding. The researchers compared babies who were breastfed for more than a year with those breastfed less than a year, and found significantly enhanced brain growth in the babies who were breastfed longer — especially in areas of the brain dealing with motor function.

Deoni says the findings add to a substantial body of research that finds positive associations between breastfeeding and children’s brain health.

“I think I would argue that combined with all the other evidence, it seems like breastfeeding is absolutely beneficial,” he said.

Image: MRI images, taken while children were asleep, showed that infants who were exclusively breastfed for at least three months had enhanced development in key parts of the brain compared to children who were fed formula or a combination of formula and breastmilk. Images show development of myelization by age, left to right. Credit: Baby Imaging Lab/Brown University.

We’ve known breastmilk is good for babies, but these results appear solid evidence for how much.

imagineatoms:

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

By Sean Carroll | September 1, 2011 10:58 am

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewardingmultidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]

1. Time exists. Might as well get this common question out of the way. Of course time exists — otherwise how would we set our alarm clocks? Time organizes the universe into an ordered series of moments, and thank goodness; what a mess it would be if reality were complete different from moment to moment. The real question is whether or not time is fundamental, or perhaps emergent. We used to think that “temperature” was a basic category of nature, but now we know it emerges from the motion of atoms. When it comes to whether time is fundamental, the answer is: nobody knows. My bet is “yes,” but we’ll need to understand quantum gravity much better before we can say for sure.

2. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at anymoment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”

3. Everyone experiences time differently. This is true at the level of both physics and biology. Within physics, we used to have Sir Isaac Newton’s view of time, which was universal and shared by everyone. But then Einstein came along and explained that how much time elapses for a person depends on how they travel through space (especially near the speed of light) as well as the gravitational field (especially if its near a black hole). From a biological or psychological perspective, the time measured by atomic clocks isn’t as important as the time measured by our internal rhythms and the accumulation of memories. That happens differently depending on who we are and what we are experiencing; there’s a real sense in which time moves more quickly when we’re older.

4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms. (Via conference participants Kathleen McDermott and Henry Roediger.)

6. Consciousness depends on manipulating time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness, and we don’t yet have a complete picture. But it’s clear that the ability to manipulate time and possibility is a crucial feature. In contrast to aquatic life, land-based animals, whose vision-based sensory field extends for hundreds of meters, have time to contemplatea variety of actions and pick the best one. The origin of grammar allowed us to talk about such hypothetical futures with each other. Consciousness wouldn’t be possible without the ability to imagine other times. (Via conference participant Malcolm MacIver.)

7. Disorder increases as time passes. At the heart of every difference between the past and future — memory, aging, causality, free will — is the fact that the universe is evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is increasing, as we physicists say. There are more ways to be disorderly (high entropy) than orderly (low entropy), so the increase of entropy seems natural. But to explain the lower entropy of past times we need to go all the way back to the Big Bang. We still haven’t answered the hard questions: why was entropy low near the Big Bang, and how does increasing entropy account for memory and causality and all the rest? (We heard great talks by David Albert and David Wallace, among others.)

8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.)

9. Aging can be reversed. We all grow old, part of the general trend toward growing disorder. But it’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. (Otherwise it would be impossible to build a refrigerator.) Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility. And we’re making progress on a few fronts: stem cells, yeast, and even (with caveats)mice and human muscle tissue. As one biologist told me: “You and I won’t live forever. But as for our grandkids, I’m not placing any bets.”

10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)

Pseudoscience alert!

This is so riddled with incorrect information I’ll just point to the brilliant comments written under the article and save my time, but to keep it short and sweet, the existence of time isn’t supported empirically or otherwise. Arguing for time’s existence is controversial, and is only supported de facto. (We use it, but that doesn’t make it real. Think of how we used constellations to navigate the seas, but there weren’t really any astrological beings up there.) We know more about the perception of phenomenal time and the convention we use to measure change (time), but not the supposed universal property of time. Time only exists in that we define it, unlike matter which exists no matter how we define it.

2020:

Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

Great, can’t wait to see how this is used. It has a lot of potential, both good and bad.

neurosciencestuff:

Never forget a face? Researchers find women have better memory recall than men

New research from McMaster University suggests women can remember faces better than men, in part because they spend more time studying features without even knowing it, and a technique researchers say can help improve anyone’s memories.

The findings help to answer long-standing questions about why some people can remember faces easily while others quickly forget someone they’ve just met.

“The way we move our eyes across a new individual’s face affects our ability to recognize that individual later,” explains Jennifer Heisz, a research fellow at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences and newly appointed assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University.

She co-authored the paper with David Shore, psychology professor at McMaster and psychology graduate student Molly Pottruff.

“Our findings provide new insights into the potential mechanisms of episodic memory and the differences between the sexes. We discovered that women look more at new faces than men do, which allows them to create a richer and more superior memory,” Heisz says.

Eye tracking technology was used to monitor where study participants looked—be it eyes, nose or mouth—while they were shown a series of randomly selected faces on a computer screen. Each face was assigned a name that participants were asked to remember.

One group was tested over the course of one day, another group tested over the course of four days.

“We found that women fixated on the features far more than men, but this strategy operates completely outside of our awareness. Individuals don’t usually notice where their eyes fixate, so it’s all subconscious.”

The implications are exciting, she says, because it means anyone can be taught to scan more and potentially have better memory.

“The results open the possibility that changing our eye movement pattern may lead to better memory,” says Shore. “Increased scanning may prove to be a simple strategy to improve face memory in the general population, especially for individuals with memory impairment like older adults.”

How much of this is just a product of culture?

Research findings on sex differences always gets people excited, but pretty much everything that gets followed up on shows negligible sex differences that aren’t explained away by culture. (Meaning the results are only replicated within a certain culture, so it isn’t a human trait as much as it is just socially learned.)