How are the meanings of words, events and objects represented and organized in the brain? When we think of a dog, what representation are we invoking? Is there such thing as an abstract dogness—the doggiest of all dogs—or do we merely remember one of many stored exemplars of dogs that we have encountered in our lives? (If […]
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In his influential book, Understanding the New Statistics, Geoff Cumming makes the case that psychologists should change the way they report their statistics. Psychologists, he argues, would be far better off if they stopped reporting p-values and started reporting confidence intervals. When I read his book I was struck by the information presented about p-value misconceptions based on a survey in […]
In yesterday’s post, I showed that conventional frequentist confidence intervals are far from straightforward and often do not permit the inference one wants to make. Typically, we would like to use confidence intervals to infer something about a population parameter: if we have a 95% confidence interval, we would like to conclude that there is a […]
What could be more straightforward than the confidence interval? I compute the mean shoe size of a random sample of first-graders and surround it by whiskers that are roughly twice the standard error of that mean. Presumably I can now have 95% confidence that the “true” value of first-graders’ shoe size, in the population at […]
This post was co-authored by Manish Singh of Rutgers University and Chetan Prakash of California State University, San Bernardino. A new theory in science, like the new offspring of an altricial species, needs an initial phase of development under the care of its progenitors. With the wane of this phase, its fitness must be tested in the rough and […]
In their Interface Theory of Perception, Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash argue for the role of evolution in human perception. This is a claim that is undoubtedly true and with which few modern perceptual scientists would disagree. But neither is it particularly novel. But then they follow this claim so its logical extreme, ending in solipsism (the […]
In 1625, the astronomer Christopher Scheiner confirmed Johann Kepler’s hunch that images projected to the retina through the crystalline lens of the eye, much like images passed through telescope lenses, were inverted. Up was down, down was up. This observation stymied many philosophers and scientists into the 20th century. Why, if the images formed on the retina of […]
Hoffman and colleagues propose the Interface Theory of Perception (ITP), which asserts that perceptions evolved to render organisms sensitive to the objective world in terms of payoffs, or fitness functions, not truth. According to ITP, “…perception is about having kids, not seeing truth”, so evolution ensures that perceptual representations simplify an organism’s search for survival/reproduction-relevant dimensions. Accordingly, […]
If you believe in evolution, you must then believe that the world we perceive is not the world we actually inhabit. Not even close. The objects we see or hear or touch do not exist independently of the mind that constructs them. Our perception is nothing more than a useful fiction. This is the core […]