Very young children think animals are just like us

Douglas Medina, Sandra Waxman, Jennie Woodringa and Karen Washinawatokb, Human-centeredness is not a universal feature of young children's reasoning: Culture and experience matter when reasoning about biological entities, Cognitive Development, in press. Available online 29 March 2010.

Abstract: We consider young children's construals of biological phenomena and the forces that shape them, using Carey's (1985) category-based induction task that demonstrated anthropocentric reasoning in young urban children. Follow-up studies (including our own) have questioned the generality of her results, but they have employed quite different procedures and either have not included urban children or, when urban samples were included, have failed to reproduce her original findings. In the present study of 4–10-year-olds from three cultural communities, our procedures followed Carey's more closely and replicated her findings with young urban children. However, they yielded quite different results for young rural European American and young rural Native American children. These results underscore the importance of a complex interaction of culture and experience – including both day-to-day interactions with the natural world and sensitivity to the belief systems of the communities – in children's reasoning about the natural world.

You can download a PDF here. Press release here.

The Japanese and Robots

Any one who’s spent much time reading through manga and watching anime will soon realize that, while the Japanese are fascinated by robots, their fascination has a different character from the Western sci-fi fear of the robot that becomes destructive through hyper-rationality, such as HAL in 2001. They’re more concerned about robots as social beings, a concern one find’s, for example, in Tezuka’s Astro Boy stories, many of which are, in effect, about civil rights for robots.

Frederik Schodt has written an informal history of Japanese robots, Inside the Robot Kingdom (Kodansha America 1990). He traces the story back to dolls and automata and then tells of how, for example, robots were treated in the early days of industrial robotics. A new robot would be welcomed to the production line by a blessing ceremony officiated by a Shinto priest.

The newest manifestation of this fascination is called I-Fairy, a four-foot high robot that officiates at weddings (stories here and here, but sure to check out some of the related stories linked to the right at both sites). I’m not sure whether this is a commentary on the capabilities of robots or the nature of fixed rituals, or both.

They Killed This Tree Three Days Ago

Trees being what they are, I suppose it isn’t really dead yet. The leaves are still green. Sap still flows. But the tree won’t survive. No one’s going to sit it upright, no one’s going tend to it.

The killing wasn’t personal. I’m sure they didn’t have any special animus toward this particular tree, nor toward any other tree, or plant, or animal that was killed, nor even for discarded trash that got moved around when they came through. They had a job to do, clear a path to the construction site, and they did it. This tree just happened to be in the way and so it was uprooted.

Seeing the tree like that made me sad. Though I had no deep attachment to the tree, I was attached. I knew it as a specific tree, an individual. I thought of it as the “Y” tree because of the way it branches. This is my oldest photo of the tree, taken on 6 July 2007:

You can just barely see the “Y” tree on the right, just beyond the mouth of the tunnel, all but hidden among the foliage. You can see its form more distinctly in this photo, taken on 9 December 2007:

Here’s what it looked like on 7 October 2007:

There’s some graffiti on the rock wall just behind the tree:

If you look to the left, just below the center, you’ll see some white marking on the rocks. It says “Free Werds”:

I know nothing about Werds except that he’s a graffiti writer, and a good one, who’s respected among his peers. There’s a fair amount of his work in this area – in and around the Bergen Arches in Jersey city – and much of it has been left untouched in the three or four years I’ve been photographing local graffiti. That other writers do no go over Werds’ work is a sign of respect. As for why Werds was in prison, I heard it had something to do with drugs, which is plausible.

World Music Still Thriving After All Those Years of Rock and Roll Imperialism

Fernando Ferreira & Joel Waldfogel have published "Pop Internationalism: Has A Half Century of World Music Trade Displaced Local Culture?" through the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER Working Paper No. 15964, Issued in May 2010):

Advances in communication technologies over the past half century have made the cultural goods of one country more readily available to consumers in another, raising concerns that cultural products from large economies – in particular the US – will displace the indigenous cultural products of smaller economies. In this paper we provide stylized facts about the global music consumption and trade since 1960, using a unique data on popular music charts from 22 countries, corresponding to over 98% of the global music market. We find that trade volumes are higher between countries that are geographically closer and between those that share a language. Contrary to growing fears about large- country dominance, trade shares are roughly proportional to country GDP shares; and relative to GDP, the US music share is substantially below the shares of other smaller countries. We find a substantial bias toward domestic music which has, perhaps surprisingly, increased sharply in the past decade. We find no evidence that new communications channels – such as the growth of country-specific MTV channels and Internet penetration – reduce the consumption of domestic music. National policies aimed at preventing the death of local culture, such as radio airplay quotas, may explain part of the increasing consumption of local music.

Cultural Evolution 2: A Phenomenological Gut Check on Gene-Culture Coevolution

In my previous post in this series I argued that, while Peter Richerson and Joseph Carroll disagree on the relationship between cultural evolution and biological evolution, the nature of that disagreement is obscure, limited as it is by the conceptual “affordances” (to borrow a term from J. J. Gibson) inherent in gene-culture coevolution theory. I now want to take a look at those limitations, albeit a deliberately naïve look. I’m pursuing, not a strong argument, but a weak one. I’ll end with a similarly weak motivation for Dawkins’ concept of the meme.

First, however, I want to introduce the notion of a phenomenological gut-check by considering an argument on a related matter that Carroll offered in his recent theoretical article in Style, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study” (2008). Carroll is discussing the adaptive function of literature. After considering an argument advanced by Steven Pinker, Carroll takes an the idea put forward by Geoffrey Miller (pp. 119-120):

Miller argues that all displays of mental power, including those of the arts, might have had no adaptive value but might have served, like the peacock’s tail, as costly signals indicating the general fitness of the person sending the signal. Miller’s hypothesis identifies virtuosity in overcoming technical difficulty as the central defining characteristic of art (281). Since Miller grants that the arts and other forms of mental activity, once they got started, might have been co-opted or “exapted” for adaptively functional purposes, his argument reduces itself to an argument about the original function of the arts. Miller’s wider argument about the origin of all higher cognitive powers has an obvious and, to my mind, decisive weakness: it requires us to suppose that the enlarged human brain—so costly, so complex and functionally structured, and so obviously useful for so many practical purposes in life—evolved primarily as a useless ornament for the purposes of sexual display.

I agree with Carroll on this. It seems to me that the purposes of competitive sexual display could have been achieved though a much simpler and lest costly means than the development of a large and metabolically expensive brain. I don’t, however, regard this as a strong argument. The point is implicitly a quantitative one, but no actual measurements are being offered. Just how large is “too large”? How complex is “too complex”? Just what are the necessary and sufficient requirements of effective sexual signaling?

Carroll goes on to advance a more interesting objection: “Even if we overlook the weakness in Miller’s broader hypothesis about the adaptive utility of the higher cognitive powers, his hypothesis about the arts says so little about the qualities and features that are specific to art that it has little explanatory value.” He is now focusing our attention, not on whether or not Miller is correct, but whether being correct is useful for some intellectual purpose. I agree with this as well.

Carroll then recalls Pinker (p. 120):

Pinker’s hypothesis is more challenging. He might be right that humanists object to his arguments at least in part because those arguments seem to diminish the dignity of the arts, but I think many of these objections come from a deeper and more serious level—from a feeling that Pinker’s hypothesis, like Miller’s, fails to give an adequate account of his subject. Those who have sought to counter Pinker’s hypothesis have a strong personal sense of what art and literature mean for them, and they have an intuitive conviction that their own experience of the arts cannot adequately be reduced to didactic lessons and pleasurable fantasy.

Again, I’m inclined to agree with Carroll. What of it, however, if many of us “have an intuitive conviction that their own experience of the arts cannot adequately be reduced to didactic lessons and pleasurable fantasy.” What kind of an argument is that? An argument from strong personal conviction? This is an intuitive judgment; call it a phenomenological gut-check.

Reality Anyone?

Roland Greene has now posted the second in a series of posts at ARCADE about the current state and future of literary criticism, A Quantum of the Real. His penultimate paragraph:

I don't believe in the educated general reader. I think that such a label names a purely imaginary figure not grounded in any actual knowledge, interests, or passions. I believe only in real readers, who choose what to read out of their unpredictable inclinations; and I'm convinced that if we expect to write for real readers, we have to start by renegotiating our contract with reality, which means writing again for historians, philosophers, and other humanists. This means writing not attenuated history or philosophy, but a literary criticism that speaks again to culture in the broadest terms. The rest of the humanities tethers us to the only version of the real we can rely on—the realities with which most of them have continued to negotiate, while we have turned inward to talk with ourselves.

Urban Geometry 2: chaos and repose

All photos are of the lower West Side of Manhattan, roughly just below mid-town, and were taken from Hoboken, NJ. All are available in the Urban Geometry set at my Flickr site.

The Hollywood Version: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

This is the fourth in a series of five posts dealing with the symbolic deployment of racial difference. The first was about Shakespeare’s Caliban; the second was about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the third dealt with A Passage to India and Light in August.

Cross-posted at The Valve.

Robert Zemeckis's 1989 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit uses cartoon characters in roles which Hollywood had assigned to blacks back in the thirties and forties--suggesting that Disneyland is basically the Cotton Club in which black performers have been replaced by mice, ducks, dogs and other cartoon characters. The basic technical gambit, and triumph, of the film is to mix animated characters with live actors. This technical wizardry is thematically important.

In the film's Los Angeles there are two worlds, that of people, and that of Toons, classic cartoon characters from Betty Boop through Dumbo to Elmer Fudd. The Toons and their world are consciously modeled on white stereotypes of blacks. That is to say, they enact the symbolic role which whites have developed for blacks. The Toons are born entertainers: they sing, they dance, they tell jokes—the few positive roles which American popular culture has, until recently, allowed to blacks. One of the settings for the action is a night club where the entertainers and staff are Toons, but the clientele is strictly human, a setting modeled after those clubs, such as Harlem's Cotton Club, where the performers and staff were black while the patrons (and owners) where white.

One could imagine the same story being made using blacks instead of Toons. However, that film would surely, and properly, have been attacked for its blatent racism. While racism is alive, and altogether too well, in contemporary American society, sensitivities have changed. Hollywood no longer allows itself to indulge in stereotyping as blatent as it once enjoyed. The film Zemeckis made replaces racism with the technical virtuosity needed to mix animated characters with live actors. Instead of reviling the film for its racism, we can revel in its virtuosity. This basic structural device allows Zemeckis to create a film which shows that there are things the human characters need to do to live their lives, or, at least, to live them well, which those humans cannot do for themselves. They depend on Toons to complete their emotional lives.

Nothing like grit and determination to keep worry stoked

Notice how Paley constructed Mimi's mouth in the right-most panel. She made the outline with a single stroke that started just to the left of Mimi's left leg, then went up and over to the left, around down and under, moving back to the right and then up, to rejoin itself and terminate. Then she added three strokes for the teeth. Were they downward strokes? And notice the changing eyes, from left to right. Nice.

Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.

Cultural Evolution 1: How “Thick” is Culture?

This is the first in a set of posts in which I take up the nature of cultural evolution. I’m using these posts as a medium to think-through my ideas in preparation for a presentation on cultural evolution at the Forum in On the Human, a project of the National Humanities Center. That is presently scheduled for 5 July 2010.

There is no more pressing area of inquiry in the human sciences than those having to do with the relationship between biology and culture. One issue is whether or not culture itself constitutes an evolutionary arena and, if so, how does it work? Specifically, what is the relationship between cultural evolution and biological evolution?

I believe that culture does constitute an evolutionary arena and have published on the subject for almost two decades (cf. Benzon 1996). But I do not want to start there, not quite. Rather, I want to start with a discussion between Peter Richerson and Joseph Carroll in a recent issue of Politics and Culture (an online journal). Richerson (2010a) presented a short essay, “Culture is an Active Part of Human Biology” to which Joseph Carroll (2010) responded. Richerson then wrote a rejoinder (2010b). (Diana Kornbrot also participated in this conversation, but not in a way that bears on the issues that interest me.)

Both Richerson and Carroll are proponents of gene-culture coevolution – in fact, Richerson is one of the major developers of the model. Gene-culture evolution is grounded in the observation that cultural generation and transmission of traits from one generation to another can be more rapid than genetic origination and transmission. What gives the model its “teeth” is the further assertion that culture provides an environment for genetic evolution and can, indeed, influence it. Lactose tolerance is a standard example. While human infants can drink cows’ milk without difficulty, adults differ widely in their ability to do so. Adults from a population with a long history of dairy farming are much more likely to be able to digest cows milk than adults in populations lacking such traditions, suggesting that dairy-farming constitutes an environment that has influenced population biology (Laland and Brown 2002, 260-262).

While both Richerson and Carroll are proponents of gene-culture coevolution, they differ in how they think of the relationship between biology and culture. But, precisely because both are adherents of gene-culture coevolution, characterizing their difference is difficult. To re-purpose a metaphor from Clifford Geertz, who famously talked of thick description of culture (1973), Richerson clearly views culture as being thicker than Carroll does. On this I agree with Richerson. But I don’t believe that the gene-culture coevolution model contains adequate means for justifying that difference. Thus, their dialogue is beside the point.

Eat right, be active, have fun

Bits about Biology, Brains, and Us

1. Artificial computation on an organic substrate

From the article in XXI Century:

Researchers from Japan and the Michigan Technological University have succeeded in building a molecular computer that, more than any previous project of its kind, can replicate the inner mechanisms of the human brain, repairing itself and mimicking the massive parallelism that allows our brains to process information like no silicon-based computer can.

A relatively new technology, molecular electronics is an interdisciplinary pursuit that may very well prove the long-term solution to validate Moore’s law well into the next century. A molecular computer is made of organic molecules instead of silicon. Chips built this way are not only potentially much smaller but also, because of the way they can be networked, able to do things that no other traditional computer, regardless of its speed, can do.

The original article: Anirban Bandyopadhyay, Ranjit Pati, Satyajit Sahu1, Ferdinand Peper & Daisuke Fujita, Massively parallel computing on an organic molecular layer, Nature Physics 6, 369 - 375 (2010):

Modern computers operate at enormous speeds—capable of executing in excess of 10¹³ instructions per second—but their sequential approach to processing, by which logical operations are performed one after another, has remained unchanged since the 1950s. In contrast, although individual neurons of the human brain fire at around just 10³ times per second, the simultaneous collective action of millions of neurons enables them to complete certain tasks more efficiently than even the fastest supercomputer. Here we demonstrate an assembly of molecular switches that simultaneously interact to perform a variety of computational tasks including conventional digital logic, calculating Voronoi diagrams, and simulating natural phenomena such as heat diffusion and cancer growth. As well as representing a conceptual shift from serial-processing with static architectures, our parallel, dynamically reconfigurable approach could provide a means to solve otherwise intractable computational problems.

2. A woman's touch: Physical contact increases financial risk taking:

A woman's touch is all it takes for people to throw caution to the wind. That's the conclusion of a new study published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. If a female experimenter patted a participant on the back, they'd risk more money than if she just talked to them, or if a man did the patting. The researchers think this comes from the way that mothers use touch to make their babies feel secure.

I think that "explanation" needs a bit more work.

3. British Indian children have substantially better mental health than British Whites

Anna Goodman, Vikram Patel, and David A. Leon, Why do British Indian children have an apparent mental health advantage? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Published online 26 April 2010. Abstract:

Background: Previous studies document a mental health advantage in British Indian children, particularly for externalising problems. The causes of this advantage are unknown.

Methods: Subjects were 13,836 White children and 361 Indian children aged 5–16 years from the English subsample of the British Child and Adolescent Mental Health Surveys. The primary mental health outcome was the parent Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Mental health was also assessed using the teacher and child SDQs; diagnostic interviews with parents, teachers and children; and multi-informant clinician-rated diagnoses. Multiple child, family, school and area factors were examined as possible mediators or confounders in explaining observed ethnic differences.

Results: Indian children had a large advantage for externalising problems and disorders, and little or no difference for internalising problems and disorders. This was observed across all mental health outcomes, including teacher-reported and diagnostic interview measures. Detailed psychometric analyses provided no suggestion of information bias. The Indian advantage for externalising problems was partly mediated by Indian children being more likely to live in two-parent families and less likely to have academic difficulties. Yet after adjusting for these and all other covariates, the unexplained Indian advantage only reduced by about a quarter (from 1.08 to .71 parent SDQ points) and remained highly significant (p < .001). This Indian advantage was largely confined to families of low socio-economic position.

Conclusion: The Indian mental health advantage is real and is specific to externalising problems. Family type and academic abilities mediate part of the advantage, but most is not explained by major risk factors. Likewise unexplained is the absence in Indian children of a socio-economic gradient in mental health. Further investigation of the Indian advantage may yield insights into novel ways to promote child mental health and child mental health equity in all ethnic groups.

4. Top 10 Visual Illusions of 2010

From the 6th annual Best Illusion of the Year contest at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples. Have fun looking at the videos.

Windows

Morning Ferry

Musician’s Journal: Awareness and Balance

I’ve been a musician most of my life. Though I’ve never made my living as a musician, there have been times when it’s put food on the table, though not paid the rent. And there have been times when I’ve hardly picked up the horn.

That’s how it’s been for the past three or four years. I’ve jammed every week or three with some friends, and maybe play the horn for a minute or three every other day. But I’ve not played enough to keep my chops in shape – and the trumpet is a physically demanding instrument.

I’m now getting back to a routine of daily practice. And I’m finding, almost for the first time in my life, that technical exercises are no longer quite so boring. You know, the same scales and arpeggios, repeated time and again, and again, and ... again. Same old same old.

Nothing like it to get the fingers and lips moving in concert. But, it’s not like a hot blues in the early morning when the lights are low and spirits high. No sirree, not like that at all. The exercises are necessary, but ...

If you pay attention, those repetitive exercises can be interesting too. It’s about awareness, mindfulness. What you’ve got to pay attention to is what’s not so repetitive. You must pay attention to your body, while also hearing the sound. What you’re attending to, above all else, is the relationship between what you’re hearing and what you’re doing.

Sounds simple, no? Not so simple.

 

It’s easy to think that the trumpet is about lips and fingers, because it is. But not only. The lips do two things: 1) they vibrate and thus produce the sound, 2) they act as a valve to regulate the air flow. The air flow, in turn, is produced by the respiratory system, which involves the lungs and the large muscles of the trunk. Those muscles, in turn, are supported by the pelvis and legs and their musculature. So, the lips are connected to all that, and you need to be aware of all that when you practice – when you perform, of course, you don’t want to be aware of any of that.

I find that, in particular, I am aware of my buttocks. They affect tension in the trunk and thus the air stream. Sometimes I relax my buttocks, sometimes I tense them. All according to what the situation requires.

Then there’s the fingers. The muscles controlling your fingers are in your arms, forearms mostly. The big issue, of course, is the independence of the fingers for the second and third valves (ring finger and middle finger). Training them to move independently of one another is a bitch. When the fingers don’t move where they should when they should, you tend to tense up, which makes things worse.

And not just the muscles in your arms. The tension can easily spread to your whole body. This came home to me with particular strength when I was watching a young boy who’s taking occasional lessons from me. When he has to concentrate on finger movements his whole body gets tense and jerky and his lower legs start flailing about (he’s sitting on a chair) with the effort of bringing his fingers into line. Why is that? Why should concentrating on finger movement recruit the entire body?

I don’t know, though I suppose I could guess at an explanation if I wanted to. The point is simply that telling your fingers what to do will activate your whole body if you’re too insistent.

In that situation my immediate objective is to get the fingers to move properly without, however, inducing tension throughout the body. That requires active relaxation, being aware of overall tension, but not forcing it. And that while you are regulating your breath, another whole body activity. It’s all a matter of balance, of loosening up, of differentiating one’s movements so that each component of one’s effort can move freely on its own, rather than being strapped to everything else.

You play simple repetitive patterns so you don’t have to think about what notes you’re going to play. Put that on autopilot so you can be aware of your body and of the sound itself. As your body functions more efficiently the sound becomes cleaner and more even. Sound and body, body and sound.

Or is it body and soul?