Mental Doping: The future is here

From an article in The Economist (pdf):

For thousands of years, people have sought substances that they hoped would boost their mental powers and their stamina. Leaves, roots and fruit have been chewed, brewed and smoked in a quest to expand the mind. That search continues today, with the difference only that the shamans work in pharmaceutical laboratories rather than forests. If asked why, the shamans reply that they are looking for drugs to treat the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, attention-deficit disorder, strokes, and the dementias associated with Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia—and that is the truth. But by creating compounds that benefit the sick, they are offering a mental boost to the healthy, too.

Such drugs are known as cognition enhancers. They work on the neural processes that underlie such mental activities as attention, perception, learning, memory, language, planning and decision-making, usually by altering the balance of the chemical neurotransmitters involved in these processes. This week a report from the Academy of Medical Sciences, a British learned society, says that a large number of such brain-affecting drugs are likely to emerge over the next few decades.

This was likely inevitable. Many diseases of cognition, such as Alzheimer’s, are treated by enhancing cognitive processing. In patients with a disease, this brings them closer to normal cognition. For those who are already functioning normally, the drugs seem to increase their cognitive abilities even further. Alzheimer’s drugs pinpoint memory centers of the brain, Ritalin focuses attention, and the list goes on.

Already, a poll of readers of the journal Nature showed that 20% of readers take some kind of brain-boosting drug. In the highly competitive “publish-or-perish” world of academic research, will taking these drugs be vilified like steroid use, users branded as cheaters? Will scientists need to go through drug testing? Or will this become commonplace so that every professor needs to take them in order to make tenure?

Vision Science: Reaching across disciplines

I am back from Vision Sciences, and it was a great conference. There were lots of good talks and posters, and I found some research that is relevant to my dissertation. Thankfully, nothing actually scooped my dissertation, so I don’t have to start over. Whew.

What I’ve noticed in the past few years is how broad the research has gotten at VSS. It used to be primarily behavioral research. Participants performed a task that involved some aspect of visual cognition, and accuracy, reaction time, and sometimes eye movements were recorded and analyzed. There is still a lot of this kind of research today, and it is still valuable.

In the past few years, though, there has been an explosion of neuroscience and computational modeling. A huge portion of psychological research is veering towards neuroscience, and this is the next logical step in understanding the mind and brain. Also, it gives psychological research an air of legitimacy, since we can tell our friends and family we’re neuroscientists, not psychologists. But studying the brain in conjunction with the mind makes sense.

Additionally, developing computer models to mimic and understand how visual processing takes place makes sense towards developing artificial intelligence and being able to test various theories about different phenomena. Psychologists are often not computer scientists as well, so it is promising to see links being forged between these two disciplines.

As a whole, the field has broadened beyond psychology, so the term “Vision Science” is apt. This is analogous to some schools offering a Cognitive Science program, which looks at cognition from not only a psychological standpoint, but also from philosophical, computational, and biological ones as well. Before we know it, graduate training will expand from learning experimental design to programming in MATLAB and analyzing fMRI data.

Vision Sciences 2008

I am at the Vision Sciences Society conference right now in Naples, FL. It’s my fourth VSS, and the presentations are of high quality and the beaches are of the same high standard. I’m presenting two posters at the conference.

The first is a study I’m doing with my labmates and Carl Smith (Evaluating Design) looking at eye movements in experts and novices while they view a movie of the first-person shooter Quake 4 and have to detect targets. The big picture is that more experienced players make fewer eye movements for longer periods of time. This reflects previous research that suggests experts have a larger functional field of view, so they can extract more information from the periphery than novices.

The second poster are a series of studies I worked on with my advisor and another faculty member at George Mason University. We examined the effect of holding similar and dissimilar items in working memory to determine how the capacity of visual working memory changed when you had to remember sets of items from different categories. The interesting result is that remembering 2 objects from 2 separate categories (4 total object) led to higher working memory capacity than 4 objects from a single category, but only if faces were part of the two-category set. This is not due to a general “faces are special” effect, as memory capacity for two or four faces alone was never greater than memory for other object classes.

As I attend other interesting talks and posters, I hope to write about them here. Stay tuned!

Is your research boring? Just add neuroscience!

There’s a great new study from the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Non-experts were asked to read explanations of psychological phenomenon with and without neuroscience explanations in them, such as “This was thought to be due to the involvement of frontal lobes on executive control.”

What is comforting was that with good, conclusive explanations of these phenomenon, non-experts were satisfied with explanations whether or not they contained neuroscience. However, bad explanations were rated differently by non-experts. Bad explanations that included neuroscience were rated more highly than bad explanations that did not have any neuroscience in them.

So the next time your results aren’t quite up to snuff? Add in a dash of neuroscience and get that paper published!

Link to the writeup: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/when_we_see_a_brain_light_up_o.php

The paper citation: Weisberg, D.S., Keil, F.C., Goodstein, J., Rawson, E., Gray, J.R. (2008). The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(3), 470-477.

Dueling Monitors

A study out of the University of Utah and written up in the Wall Street Journal’s Business Technology Blog showed that bigger monitors led to faster completion of document editing and spreadsheet tasks. There were three screens used: an 18-inch monitor, a 24-inch monitor, and two 20-inch monitors. Versus the 18-inch monitor, people were 52% faster with the 24-inch monitor and 44% faster with the two 20-inch monitors.

Now this is expected - bigger is better. But what I’m interested in is the 6% improvement moving from two 20-inch monitors to a 24-inch monitor. Two 20-inch monitors provide much more screen space, but it’s not just size that matters.

Egly, Driver & Rafal (1994) were the first researchers to show the existence of object-based attention. That is, attention does not just form a spotlight (or zoom lens) that illuminates a particular portion of the visual field. Instead, attention can also mold itself to encompass a specific object, and there is a cost in switching between objects. The methodology they used was particularly ingenious.

The task was simply to detect a block that would appear in one corner of either rectangle (see below). That was it - press a button when you see the block (right most panel). Before the block, though, other things happened. In the second panel, you see that one corner of one object was also cued - it suddenly turned red. Participants did NOT have to respond to the cue - only to the block. So participants started a trial, received a red cue, waited, and then a block would flash. Reaction time was the primary measure; how long it took participants to press a button after the block flashed.

The red cue served to prime attention to a certain location. In the example above, the red cue and the block target were in the same location, and reaction time was fastest. However, sometimes, the block could appear elsewhere. There are two critical conditions:

1. The block was at the other end of the same object to where the cue was.
2. The block was at the same end of the other object to where the cue was.

What is critical to note is that, in these two conditions, the block and cue are the exact same distance apart. If attention was purely spatial and did not care about objects, reaction times in both conditions should be the same. This was not the case, though. Instead, participants were faster at detecting the block when it was located at the other end of the same object as the cue. The cue brought attention to that location, then attention spread to the entire object. Therefore, when the target appeared on the same object, reaction time was faster. When the target appeared on the other object, attention had to be switched, and this lead to slower reaction times.

So what does this all mean for the research at hand? Two 20-inch monitors are two separate objects. Even if they are both placed perfectly in your field of view, you will have to make eye movements and shift attention between the two monitors. This is going to slow you down more than if you had a single object (a single 24-inch monitor) in front of you. In this case, you don’t have to switch your attention between objects.

This does beg the question, however: what exactly constitutes an object? Two separate physical monitors are certainly an object. But if you have two spreadsheets open and are copying data from one to another, does that count as switching between objects? Would it be better to copy and paste inside one spreadsheet and then make one large copy and paste to the new spreadsheet right at the end? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they are certainly worthy of research.