mind

A recent paper in Cognitive Science by Nuñez and Sweetster has evoked several interesting strains of blog commentary. The paper is about the cognition of time as a function of conceptual metaphor with space.

That's pretty abtruse-sounding, and the Wikipedia entry on conceptual metaphor is fairly informative. The basic idea is that we may understand one class of relationships (a conceptual domain) in terms of the relationships that we know apply to another analogous domain.

All the talk about the new article seems to have come from the attention from a New York Times article, which is imprisoned behind TimesSelect, so I'll quote the interesting Savage Minds post instead:

The New York Times is running an article on a recent article in Cognitive Science by Nunez and Sweetser which demonstrates that Aymara speakers imagine the past to be in front of them and the future behind them -- reversed, in other words, from the spatial metaphors we use in English. The Times article notes "If they are right, this is bigger than anything the 60's tossed up. Is it possible that human concepts of time can vary this much because of language and culture? And what would it be like to think this way? Do I have the rest of my life behind me? And how can I let bygones be bygones if they're right in front of me?" Nunez and Sweetser also makes a to-do about the rarity of this pattern, since, it claims that "so far all documented languages appear to share a spatial metaphor mapping future events onto spatial locations in front of Ego and past events onto locations behind Ego."

The flavor of the SM comment is that cognitive scientists often ignore cultural variability that anthropologists hold as common knowledge:

Cognitive Science produce attention-grabbing headlines much more frequently than anthropologists, and this article is a prime example of how they manage to do so: ignorance.

Have Nunez and Sweetser actually conducted some sort of exhaustive examination of 'all documented languages'? No. In fact their citations reveal that they have examined a grand total of seven: English, Wolof, Chagga, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, and American Sign Language (to be fair one of the articles they site has 'more cross cultural data').

If Nunez and Sweetser had looked a little bit further -- for example to the Pacific -- they would have found that these sorts of metaphors are quite common.

After the original post, there is a discussion in the comments at Savage Minds with links to elsewhere, including a Language Log entry on the paper:

I feel a need to address recent controversy regarding the uniqueness of the Aymara conceptualization of time-as-space. I cannot respond to everyone who says that their language of choice also has a "back to the future" metaphor, nor will I attempt to reconstruct all of the linguistic (metaphor-based) arguments involved. However, many of the objections that I have heard (and that I am sure the researchers of Aymara asked themselves) are based on a misconception that if a language has a single word that is polysemous between "front/past" or "back/future", then it automatically makes Aymara non-unique.

The short post then discusses why the Aymara case may be different from many others, which centers on the use of gesture as another communicative mode that redundantly includes the front:back::past:future axis.

Chris at Mixing Memory gives some commentary on the entire subject:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: conceptual metaphor theory sucks. Why does it suck? Well, because there's no experimental evidence for it (and plenty of evidence against it). Except, that is, in one domain: time. Specifically, the work of Lera Boroditsky, along with Dedre Gentner and her colleagues, has provided interesting demonstrations of the influence of the way we talk about space on the way we conceptualize time. I've talked about their work before, and now Dave's talking about Gentner's work over at Cognitive Daily, so I won't go into a lot of detail. Instead, I'll give you an idea of what's going on with the time-space metaphors in their work, and then discuss some recent work by Rafael Nu–ez and his colleagues which introduces new types of time-space metaphors. The conclusion generally drawn from this work is that time is conceptualized metaphorically through mappings onto space. At the end of this post, I'm going to argue that no current evidence actually supports that position.

The critique involves the troublesome problems of irrelevant meanings and priming effects -- essentially, although languages may be constructed by applying metaphoric meanings to words, there is little evidence that the mind constructs concepts using these metaphors, and testing the cognitive treatment is very difficult considering the linguistic entanglements.

I don't particularly have any opinion, but it has been interesting reading much of these exchanges, which illuminate one present-day aspect of the Sapir-Whorf language-shaping-cognition paradigm.

References:

Nuñez RE, Sweetser E. 2006. With the future behind them: Convergent evidence from Aymara language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time. Cognitive Science 30:1-49. Abstract

On the subject of taboos, Susan Oyama has a discussion of taboo in The Ontogeny of Information.

The topic is canalization, and Oyama discusses the ideas of Harold Fishbein, in his book, Evolution, Development and Children's Learning. Fishbein discusses behavior as more or less genetically determined, invoking canalization as a mechanism leading to more rigid genetic control over behavior. Oyama points out that this is a backward reading of Waddington, whose concept of canalization was not about genetic control but instead more closely similar to developmental robusticity.

At length, Oyama comes to Fishbein's discussion of incest avoidance, in which he argues that the lack of mother-son incest in many primates is a biological reason why Freud was wrong about the development of the incest taboo in human societies.

Since [Fishbein] equates incest taboos, which sould seem a peculiarly human phenomenon involving certain types of forbidden conduct, with a simple absence or infrequency of behavior in other primates, one wonders why he seems to find the chimpanzee and macaque data more damning to Freud's ideas than the human pattern itself. That is, if relative frequency of various kinds of matings is given equivalent motivational significance in all the species under consideration, then infrequent mother-son copulation in humans surely counts against Freud at least as much as infrequent mother-son copulation in chimps... (Oyama 2000:112-113).

I would suggest that the point of the primate comparison is that the frequency of the behavior in humans alone is insufficient to falsify Freud's idea that the mother-son attraction is an aspect of human nature, which human societies suppress. If presumably non-taboo-bearing hominoids also lack mother-son mating, then the idea that such a desire is part of human nature would seem false on phylogenetic grounds.

But I included the first part as context for the next paragraph, which I think is fairly important:

The problem, of course, comes from impoverishing the concept of taboo, which has to do not with frequency of events per se but with their meaning. But this is precisely the kind of impoverishment that is necessary to this kind of "biological" reasoning. There is a persistent playing with levels of analysis in such treatments. Distinctions between the level of individual motivation and that of institutions or customs are ignored as the social, the cultural, and ultimately the psychological are collapsed to the biological. At the same time, a new level is created -- a phantom plane of genetic reality, which is not observed as such but deduced (or assumed). From this perspective, the observation of living, breathing animal-machines is of value only insofar as it gives access to the ghostly forms and causal agencies within them (Oyama 2000:113).

It seems to me that the real problem is identifying appropriate units of reductionism for cultural entities and behaviors. For the most part, biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists are all alike in treating "culture" as a single level phenomenon interpolated between "human biology" (or "human nature") and human behavior.

This leads to two interpretive approaches. In one, anything that is manifested in behavior that is not easily explicable in terms of genetic adaptation is consigned to "culture". In this perspective, culture is the inexplicable residue of biological evolution. Moreover, it is viewed as coming complete with its own evolutionary system -- a full epicycle upon the biological evolution that governs everything else. In this interpretation, culture is a bit like "consciousness" -- humans may be adapted to it, but we have a lot of trouble saying just what "it" is or how that adaptation has come about. But its essence is informational: culture is a layer of information that comes between genes and behavior.

The other approach holds that culture just is behavior. To be sure, not every behavior qualifies; the behavior has to be patterned among individuals in certain ways to be "cultural". But it exists just to the extent that individuals can perceive and act on patterns in behavior. The individual's role in culture is purely reactive in this view: individuals behave in cultural ways because their environment is patterned in cultural ways, not because they necessarily have special genetic adaptations to culture. We might term this a "constructivist" view, in that the individual's behavior is constructed by cultural patterns, rather than being merely conditioned on cultural information. Culture is a single layer in this view also -- a layer of environment that individuals perceive and act within.

Both these accounts of culture are essentially similar. They differ as to the locus of culture -- does it exist within individuals or societies? But they agree about the structure of culture -- it exists as a "complex whole". Thus, they do not lend themselves easily to reductionism, explaining in part why holistic interpretation is applied so broadly within cultural analysis.

It is within this context that the "meaning" of taboos has such importance. The "meaning" implies certain obligations on the part of individuals who detect violation of taboos. It implicates those individuals in enforcement not only because the taboo behavior is amoral, but because the taboo explicitly links morality to other kinds of undesirable or repugnant natural and supernatural consequences. Explaining a taboo against incest avoidance is at a different level than explaining incest avoidance itself.

The problem is that taboos and other cultural phenomena are themselves generally confined to a single "phantom plane" of explanation. Cultural phenomena and entities must exist insofar as they clearly shape behavior. We generally recognize that they have complex histories that may themselves be intrinsically interesting. But their role in shaping the development of individual behaviors is formless -- individuals either pass through a "cultural filter" or they take in "cultural information", but in either case all of culture is drunk from the same well.

References:

Oyama S. 2000. The Ontogeny of Information. Second edition. Duke University Press, Durham NC. Amazon

I wrote earlier about a paper by Eduardo Ottoni and colleagues examining social learning and expertise in nutcracking capuchins. That paper referenced another paper by Joseph Henrich and Francisco Gil-White introducing and discussing the relevance of "prestige hierarchies" in the context of the evolution of culture.

In the introduction, Henrich and Gil-White contrast the behaviors that maintain dominance hierarchies in mammals from those that maintain prestige hierarchies in humans:

Although nonhuman status is still poorly understood, a single process appears at least strongly predominant: agonism (aggression, intimidation, violence, etc. -- that is, force or force threat) The resulting social asymmetries are referred to as "dominance hierarchies" in the ethological and behavioral ecology literatures. The privileges that accrue to dominant individuals are (1) in males, preferential reproductive access to females, food, and spaces, as well as a disproportionate amount of grooming from others; (2) in females, preferential access to food and spaces, and disproportionate grooming. Despite some controversy, the evidence suggests that dominance correlates with fitness (Cowlishaw and Ellis). The stability of dominance is often reinforced through "reminders": submissive behaviors (e.g., grooming, submissive displays, yielding space, etc.) from subordinate to superior, whether or not induced through intimidation by the latter.

In humans, in contrast, status and its perquisites often come from nonagonistic sources -- in particular, from excellence in valued domains of activity, even without any credible claim to superior force. For example, paraplegic physicist Stephen Hawking -- widely regarded as Einstein's heir, and current occupant of Newton's chair at Cambridge University -- certainly enjoys very high status throughout the world. Those who, like Hawking, achieve status by excelling in valued domains are often said to have "prestige."

In human societies, both kinds of hierarchies may be in evidence:

In the Amazon, several researchers have observed two avenues to status and leadership in small-scale societies: "force" and "persuasion" (Krackle, 1978). "Forceful" leaders are domineering headmen who maintain their position through fear, threat, and compulsion (see also Maybury and Maybury). "Persuasive" leaders depend on their influence and the consent of their followers and lack the force to obligate (see also Arvelo de JimÂŽnez, 1971; Clastres; Goldman; Huxley and Levi). These two styles of leadership, involving either persuasion or force, correspond to our two types of status: prestige and dominance.

The connection of this paper to the capuchin learning paper is the idea that learning can be made more efficient by preferentially copying individuals who have "better-than-average information." The argument is that selection should favor an ability to assess who has information relevant to fitness, and to copy the behavior of individuals who have this information.

Culture, information, and behavior

I am a bit hesitant about the form of this argument, because in a sense it deliberately confuses two distinct bases for the definition of culture: culture as information and culture as behavior.

Individuals can have information, but this information cannot be observed directly -- at least not without a mind-reading device. Information can only be inferred from its effects on behavior. But those effects are indirect and possibly inconsistent -- an individual need not behave in ways that optimally reflect the information the individual has.

For humans, at least it is possible to directly observe certain kinds of information transfer. In particular, we can keep track of what somebody is told, or we can ask subjects to tell us what they observed. But even this is imperfect -- an individual may not have ostensive knowledge about what he or she has seen, or what aspects of an observation are important and will ultimately shape his or her own behavior. For nonhuman animals, there is no direct way to poll information at all; indirect polls are possible only in experimental settings, and wild animals are observed mainly by way of their natural behaviors.

So operationally, many ethologists define culture as transmitted behaviors. Now, this is problematic because there is actually no way to "transmit" a behavior without transmitting information about the behavior. And there are many aspects of human culture that are purely informational and have only the most indirect of links to any behaviors.

For instance, most readers of this sentence can clearly understand and remember its information content, but it is rather doubtful that the sentence will alter the behavior of most of its readers in any perceivable way.

I guess the bottom line of this problem is this: If individuals have information about a prestige hierarchy, then they must infer the presence of information that contributes to fitness-enhancing behaviors from the observation of valued behaviors. If an individual could simply alter his or her behavior pattern to obtain the valuable information, then there would be no need to maintain a prestige hierarchy -- everyone would quickly share the valuable information. So a prestige hierarchy presupposes that:

(a) Information is time-consuming to obtain by observation. If information were trivial to obtain by observation, then there would be no need to keep track of who had the information. Consider students cheating on a test. If there were no disincentive to cheat -- that is, if they could just ask the entire class when they didn't know an answer, or if they could browse a large sample of exams, then there would be no need to sit next to a student likely to know the answer. The difficulty in the exam is the proctor, who tries to prevent information transfer. The difficulty in most circumstances in nature will be that observation is time-consuming.

(b) Information is even more difficult to obtain without observation. If there were a way to easily find the right answer to exam questions by guessing, no one would ever cheat. In natural settings, the problem will be that behaviors are highly context-dependent and may require careful sequencing or orienting substrates to work.

(c) An individual has the opportunity to observe prestigious individuals. Again, there is the exam proctor. But moreover, students who know the right answers on an exam may closely monitor those around them to make sure there is no cheating off them -- otherwise, the curve may be blown! In natural settings, the problem will be aggression -- it may be impossible to approach other individuals for a sufficient time to observe their behavior.

Henrich and Gil-Stein note this opportunity as the most important difference between dominance and prestige hierarchies. In particular, they note that selection should favor the evolution of "deference":

Cultural transmission is adaptive because it saves learners the costs of individual learning. Once some cultural transmission capacities exist, natural selection favors improved learning efficiencies, such as abilities to identify and preferentially copy models who are likely to possess better-than-average information. Moreover, selection will favor behaviors in the learner that lead to better learning environments, e.g., gaining greater frequency and intimacy of interaction with the model, plus his/her cooperation. Copiers thus evolve to provide all sorts of benefits (i.e., "deference") to targeted models in order to induce preferred models to grant greater access and cooperation. Such preferred models may be said to have prestige with respect to their "clients" (the copiers).

On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense. Sure, if you want access to another individual, you should defer to them -- otherwise, she may be annoyed by you and drive you away.

On the other hand, the "all sorts of benefits" seems pretty limited in practice. The capuchins don't give anything at all for the chance to learn. Children give deference to parents, but it's limited, and partly enforced by dominance mechanisms. The authors go this far:

In order to gain this kind of preferential access, infocopiers become valuable interactants by "kissing up." Infocopiers have evolved to do all sorts of things that models were already adapted to like or seek in potential interactants, such as being especially trustworthy, offering all sorts of help without expecting anything in return, deferring to the model's judgment, being nice and helpful to the model's children, exempting the model from certain obligations vis-à-vis the copier, etc.

I'm on the fence about this. The "benefits" conferred on a good teacher ought to be quite a bit lower than those given as a matter of course to genetic relatives, so maybe these kinds of activities are exactly in that range.

(d) The information can be learned. Since nearly all information might be possible to learn, another way to say this is that the valued commodity is really information as opposed to something else.

Predictions

The predictions of the model are interesting. There is this:

The distribution of deference is a reliable and honest signal of relative model worth because such signals are costly to fake. Sycophants cannot deceive their competitors by deferring to someone they would rather not copy without increasing their total deference costs and losing some access to their preferred models. Sycophants also cannot easily conceal deference directed to the desired model, for this entails a bias for private deference and therefore a reduction in total deference, and hence in less access. Moreover, models should prefer public displays of deference in order to broadcast their prestige and attract more clients.

This leads to the hypothesis that "infocopiers" should seek out models that have large prestige followings, and thereby high status.

And:

Some further implications of our theory arise from considering the coevolution between copiers and models. In prestige, clients choose whom they defer to, so a kind of "market" results. Like "firms," models compete for "customers" (the copiers) who shop around for the best deal. Models should be sensitive to how "profit curves" change with added clients, for these "firms" can have too many customers. A hunter's fitness initially increases as more clients raise total deference. So the hunter may prefer having 3 sycophants to 1, but would he want 20? Large hunting parties may scare off potential prey. Thus, good hunters should raise the cost of access by acting more arrogantly as clientele size approaches the optimum. On the other hand, if no practical limit on optimal clientele size exists (e.g., great storytellers), or if means other than arrogance will limit clientele-size (e.g., bodyguards), then increases in arrogance should not accompany growing prestige. Alternatively, if one's benefits do not come directly and primarily from client deference, the prestigious may learn that arrogance is not too costly (e.g., some sports stars). Finally, models should prefer above-average learners because they advertise the model's quality and provide a potential source of valuable information.

For clients, the benefits of access diminish rapidly with increasing clientele size. Competing with more clients may mean less individual attention from the model, so copiers may prefer less popular, lower-quality models with cheaper prices of access.

This does raise the question of whether "prestige" can be distinguished from "entertainment value". We may listen to great storytellers, but that doesn't mean that we want to be great storytellers. Is our listening a passive side effect of our ability to pick out models for learning?

If it isn't, then that would imply that prestige hierarchies may be maintained for other reasons besides learning value. These may range from the nebulous (like "cultural cohesion") to the particular (like "beer-selling ability"). Considering that social interactions themselves require some skill to navigate, and we learn to interact by watching other people interact, this has many possible levels of complexity.

In any event, there are lots of predictions and descriptions of possible complexities in the paper that provide much food for thought when thinking in terms of human social interactions relevant to learning and experience.

References:

Henrich J, Gil-White FJ. 2001. The evolution of prestige: freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evol Hum Behav 22:165-196. DOI link

Ottoni EB, de Resende BD, Izar P. 2005. Watching the best nutcrackers: What capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) know about others' tool-using abilities. Anim Cogn 24:215-219. DOI link

I've been keeping a few articles on my desktop that seem to follow a theme -- the notion of using technology to communicate visual signs through other senses.

For example, this AP article details military research that uses electric sensations on the tongue to navigate underwater:

The device, known as "Brain Port," was pioneered more than 30 years ago by Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a University of Wisconsin neuroscientist. Bach-y-Rita began routing images from a camera through electrodes taped to people's backs and later discovered the tongue was a superior transmitter.

A narrow strip of red plastic connects the Brain Port to the tongue where 144 microelectrodes transmit information through nerve fibers to the brain. Instead of holding and looking at compasses and bulky-hand-held sonar devices, the divers can processes the information through their tongues, said Dr. Anil Raj, the project's lead scientist.

In testing, blind people found doorways, noticed people walking in front of them and caught balls. A version of the device, expected to be commercially marketed soon, has restored balance to those whose vestibular systems in the inner ear were destroyed by antibiotics.

The military wants to be able to transmit nav information to divers without distracting their sight or needing additional bulky goggles.

Also, there are some articles on brain-computer interfaces. This one from Wired talks about brain-wave "pass-thoughts":

A pass-thought could be anything from a snatch of song, the memory of your last birthday or even the image of your favorite painting. A more achievable alternative might present you with predetermined pictures, music or video clips, to which you would think "yes" or "no" while the machine monitors your brain activity.

"It is known there are differences between people's brains and their signals," says Carleton researcher Julie Thorpe, who's working on the project with Anil Somayaji and Adrian Chan. "Can we observe a user-controllable signal encoding hundreds or thousands of bits of information in a repeatable fashion? That's the real question. We think it may be possible."

It depends on using EEG-like devices to measure brain activity, which some game companies are trying to apply as game controls:

San Jose's NeuroSky has been testing prototypes of its system that uses a sensor-laden headband to monitor brain waves, and then uses the signals to control the interaction in video games. They hope that such games are just the beginning of a mind-machine interface with many different applications.

"Research on brain waves is well known," said NeuroSky Chief Executive Stanley Yang. "But we have worked on a way for detecting them with a low-cost technology and then interpreting what they mean. We think this will have broad applications."

Sensors in the head gear -- whether headbands, headsets or helmets -- measure electrical activity in the brain that scientists have studied for decades. Using NeuroSky's chip technology, the system can distinguish whether a person is calm, stressed, meditative or attentive and alert. Beyond games, the system might be useful for determining whether drivers are so drowsy that they need an alarm to awaken them.

You may be wondering why this would be any fun. Well, there is this:

Aside from any medical uses, both companies hope their tools could one day be used to create true "Jedi" effects in games set in a Star Wars universe. The player could use mind control to lift objects in video games and toss them at enemies in ways that resemble the action in the George Lucas films.

This along with the effects of magnetic fields on mood would make a techno-equipped sixth sense possible, or maybe more. I don't know if I could stand it, though -- especially all the headgear. Or tongue-gear.