half-intoxicated on windex fumes
Well, here we are. Midterm and grant-related obligations over. Now, to catch up with everything else. So, I don't know what's been happening in the world for the last, say, 3 weeks, and all I've been thinking about is cognitive science, and you're all sick of hearing about that, so what do I talk about. Well, what am I up to in my life right now? Why, how nice of you to ask. Right now I'm cleaning, because my parents are going to be visiting within a couple of days. So, my apartment of course is all coffee-stained and junky, so directly after frying my brain, I get to fry my nasal lining on the sweet smell of Windex. Uck.
What else. I'm thinking a lot about task-based feedback. My new favorite-cognitive-neuroscientist-of-the-month is this guy at Boston University named Takeo Watanabe, whose main love is motion perception but he's somehow managed to sneak in some incredibly seductive studies on perceptual learning. For the curious, take a look at his publications, in particular look at the 2003 Nature paper as well as the 2001 Nature paper to get some necessary background. As I said, they're seductive, in that they show a lot of naturally appealing sort of phenomena that you really, really want to be true, just because it'd be so cool.
If folks like Watanabe & friends are right, it could be that the implicit feedback that we pick up from our successful execution of simple acts could reinforce a broader kind of learning than we know. So, say you've been struggling to open a novel kind of medicine bottle cap, and after a million iterations of trial-and-error, you finally get it -- or, say that you've been trying and trying and trying to read a sign that's just barely too far away to read, and then you finally pick up on the critical words -- those triumphant moments may lead to reinforcement signals (read as: dopamine!) that bolster learning of anything that was in the context at the time -- so, maybe the exact position of your hand as you finally popped open the medicine bottle, or whatever.
Anyways, these are the moments when I hope no hard core psychologists or neuroscientists are reading this, because it's a big, big fanciful idea, and I'm kind of playing fast and loose with it.
Alright then, I shall go back to my laundry, and my dishes, and my windex. A good night to all.