Extremely Belated Con Report: Part II
Feb. 3rd, 2007 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashnistrikeI'm trying to get this in some sort of vague chronological order. This is awkward because my notes are undated and written on the back of poster hand-outs. Also, occasionally, in the margins of the program book. Some highlights:
First up on Friday morning, Kareev and Avrahami try to explain why not gathering all possible data may sometimes be beneficial. They were trying to draw connections with voters not being complete policy wonks during elections, but I'm not entirely convinced. An election here is one example of a type of situation in which people try to choose between "competing, adaptive agents, eager to be selected." If the agents know that people are only going to be taking a small sample of their behavior, they have to perform well all the time if they want to be sure of being caught at it. With full scrutiny, an agent who assumes they're stronger will figure that it'll be obvious whatever they do, and an agent who assumes they're weaker will figure they don't have a chance anyway, and neither will put extra effort into their performance. This worked very nicely K&A's experiment, which if I recall correctly involved a competition in math problem solving over the course of a single session. I assume that under longer-term conditions, anyone who thought they were the weaker agent would try and improve their performance. And under actual real-world political conditions, there are too many ways to game the system so that decision-makers' "small sample" looks at your best points and your opponent's worst points. Yet another triumph for sordid reality over a beautiful model.
It's easier for bilinguals to remember information that is studied and tested in the same language (Marian & Kaushanskaya). This is probably not particularly interesting to you, but relevant to a study I'm doing. Putting it here is one more way for me to externalize my memory.
A talk on using interactive technologies to improve elder cognition got canceled, damn it. I will now remember to write the author and ask if he has data anyway.
I see at least two nifty talks in here that I missed because humans need food.
I got up at 7 AM Saturday morning to be at the embodiment talk reported in Part I. Then I walked very quickly to the other side of the huge conference complex to catch a talk on working memory capacity and memory suppression. Working memory is the amount of information that you can hold active in your mind at once--your desktop, basically. Memory suppression does not usually involve repressing a memory entirely, but being able to control how much of your working memory it takes up. When you lie awake at night with the latest financial crisis running in circles in your head, that's a failure of memory suppression. Ability to control this well is associated with useful things like crisis management and not getting PTSD. Bell and Anderson see it as a special case of executive control, in which you have to override the first thing your brain tries to do, and deliberately do something else. They have some neuro support for this--greater activation in areas associated with executive control predicts ability to inhibit a memory. Put that way, it makes sense that better working memory would improve your ability to not remember something, and they had data to support that as well. I have some notes at the bottom of this talk, idly wondering whether working memory really ought to be called "memory," or some more neutral term like "available resources." Or it could be that increased working memory improves suppression because it makes it easier to call up distracting and competing memories...
Nameseeker is poking at me to come have breakfast. Part III later.
First up on Friday morning, Kareev and Avrahami try to explain why not gathering all possible data may sometimes be beneficial. They were trying to draw connections with voters not being complete policy wonks during elections, but I'm not entirely convinced. An election here is one example of a type of situation in which people try to choose between "competing, adaptive agents, eager to be selected." If the agents know that people are only going to be taking a small sample of their behavior, they have to perform well all the time if they want to be sure of being caught at it. With full scrutiny, an agent who assumes they're stronger will figure that it'll be obvious whatever they do, and an agent who assumes they're weaker will figure they don't have a chance anyway, and neither will put extra effort into their performance. This worked very nicely K&A's experiment, which if I recall correctly involved a competition in math problem solving over the course of a single session. I assume that under longer-term conditions, anyone who thought they were the weaker agent would try and improve their performance. And under actual real-world political conditions, there are too many ways to game the system so that decision-makers' "small sample" looks at your best points and your opponent's worst points. Yet another triumph for sordid reality over a beautiful model.
It's easier for bilinguals to remember information that is studied and tested in the same language (Marian & Kaushanskaya). This is probably not particularly interesting to you, but relevant to a study I'm doing. Putting it here is one more way for me to externalize my memory.
A talk on using interactive technologies to improve elder cognition got canceled, damn it. I will now remember to write the author and ask if he has data anyway.
I see at least two nifty talks in here that I missed because humans need food.
I got up at 7 AM Saturday morning to be at the embodiment talk reported in Part I. Then I walked very quickly to the other side of the huge conference complex to catch a talk on working memory capacity and memory suppression. Working memory is the amount of information that you can hold active in your mind at once--your desktop, basically. Memory suppression does not usually involve repressing a memory entirely, but being able to control how much of your working memory it takes up. When you lie awake at night with the latest financial crisis running in circles in your head, that's a failure of memory suppression. Ability to control this well is associated with useful things like crisis management and not getting PTSD. Bell and Anderson see it as a special case of executive control, in which you have to override the first thing your brain tries to do, and deliberately do something else. They have some neuro support for this--greater activation in areas associated with executive control predicts ability to inhibit a memory. Put that way, it makes sense that better working memory would improve your ability to not remember something, and they had data to support that as well. I have some notes at the bottom of this talk, idly wondering whether working memory really ought to be called "memory," or some more neutral term like "available resources." Or it could be that increased working memory improves suppression because it makes it easier to call up distracting and competing memories...
Nameseeker is poking at me to come have breakfast. Part III later.
