On Friday, I was reminded of why I was looking for the phrase “in praise of habit” earlier.  This summer, in July, I started biking to work every day and locking my bike to one of the racks in front of the Psych dept building.  About a week ago, for the first time, I found […]

As I noted in lab meeting, I was somewhat captured by the fact that James and Cajal were doing their seminal works at around the same historical time. I don’t know as much about Cajal as maybe I should, so I was a bit surprised by this bit of bio (from Wikipedia): The son of […]

It used to be that learning a skill required hours of painstaking practice, whereby one would attempt a feat over and over again while making fine-tuned adjustments to one’s performance. If you fell off your bike, you would climb back on. Then we were introduced to training wheels and self-balancing front wheels. Now it’s nigh […]

I found this Gizmodo article, which I found amusing since it was something that was recently brought up. http://gizmodo.com/5645331/why-do-humans-love-spicy-self+torture http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/science/21peppers.html?_r=1 However, after recently being naive to a great deal of wasabi in my soy sauce , I tend to believe that the joy of spice is reserved for people prepared for it.

I was going to note something else, but due to a vague sense of familiarity, I googled the title and re-discovered the truism: the seeds of almost all interesting ideas in psychology were first described by William James. The Principles of Psychology is online and I think we should consider Chapter 4, Habit required reading […]

I wasn’t looking for skill learning examples, I was trying to do some actual skill learning. Specifically, I was thinking about improving my quite lame guitar playing. I picked up an instructional DVD (from a guitar player/teacher I had discovered on youtube) and accidentally discovered an example of how a skill teacher might describe skill […]

Yet another paper that suggests that video game aficionados can become cognitively super-human. (Maybe a bit over-exaggerated, but good news for gamers nonetheless) Improved Probabilistic Inference as a General Learning Mechanism with Action Video Games C. Shawn Green, Alexandre Pouget, Daphne Bavelier Current Biology, 20(17), 1573-1579

Walked past my son watching the Mythbusters episode: No Pain, No Gain.  It includes 3 studies of pain tolerance/perception using holding your hand in ice water as the pain stimulus.  The one that really got my attention is the swearing one — does cursing out loud increase one’s tolerance for pain? They found a positive […]

We are going to be talking about “flow,” I think, in characterizing our sequence learning work.  So, some points of contact for reference: Ericsson & Ward (2007) in their report about capturing expert performance in the lab, include this quote towards the end: “It is clear that skilled individuals can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states […]

Perhaps more random than usual, but I’ve been meaning to collect some snippets of language that stick in my mind.  Language is sequential (of course) and seems to be highly statistical (although there’s debate) but it also seems to sometimes trigger that sense of “flow” we think about in expertise. This is an oldie, but […]