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Typical examples of evidence that are commonly used in cognitive science

Abstract

In this text I discussed examples of evidence that are by various cognitive scientists in their arguments for their models. The main aim is to show that here are simple explanations to what, in many cases, is regard as a signicant observation for or against some models.

Young infants Face recognition

It is common to claim that infants response to faces almost from birth, and show this by looking longer at faces. However, all the research at this age is based on showing the infant highly simplified caricatures of faces, rather than real faces. The reason for this is simple: young infants do not repond to faces at all.

Instead, they respond to some features in the simplify caricatures. The most likely of these features are mirror symmetry and optimal level of information density (amount of details in the picture), but there may be other, like smooth curves compared to sharp corners etc. In the experiemnts that show infants prefer faces to other pictures, the control pictures are always worse in some of these features. In many cases it is the mirror symmetry, but in other cases it is wrong information density, or unequal distribution of information density.

Recalling names compare to other attributes

Adults (but not children) (refer) find it more difficult to remember the name of a person that other attributes. Some researchers spend significant amount of time trying to build models to explain this phenomenon.

However, this phenomenon has a very simple explanation. The name of a person has very low correlation with any other of his/her attributes. Most significanly, all the other attributes of a person put together still gives almost no indication of what his name is. In contrast, other attributes tend to correlate with each other, at least weakly. Thus recalling ay other specific attribute is helped by recalling relating attributes, but recalling the name is not.

Some of the researchers in the area do incorporate this notion in their models. However, these models already assume that there is a specific mechanism for recalling names and other personal attributes, and the special difficulty in recalling names is implicitly used to support this assumption. As explained in the previous paragraph, there is no need for special mechanism. The only required assumption is that recall of a piece of information is aided by recalling related pieces of information, and this assumption is obviously true.

Blindsight

Yehouda Harpaz
yh@maldoo.com
2Nov96
http://human-brain.org