暗微幽光

January, 20, 2009 is a day remarked the coming of new era for the American people. This year I also experienced the change within the research society I am contacting. At the day after the inaugural day, the top science journal “Nature” published a paper that will challenge the basic assumption accepted by every researchers depending on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Dr. Sirotin and Dr. Das proposed the evidence that, in addition to the neural activity, a novel preparatory mechanism in the primates brain bring additional change to blood volume. I wonder the respond of my friends using fMRI as their research responds to this study. This news, in my opinion, is not totally bed for the future of cognitive neuroscience. This is the other opportunity for us to admit the complicated nature of the brain and to think of the bold but naive intention to build the link between brain and mind. The novel mechanism revealed by this study might be a caution for the optimistic views of building the link between behavior and brain function without sufficient understanding of behavioral facts.

The other change I am watching is the raising of the new perspective to the psycholinguists’ analytic tools. In the psycholinguistic studies, the generality of the empirical evidence is constrained by the variation of participants’ performance and the variation of stimuli property. For a group of stimuli with the same property according to a experimental definition, each stimuli usually generate a random effect within a wide variation. This situation increases the difficulty to conclude the effect of stimuli property based on the collected data. For a very long time, psycholinguists like to use by-item analysis for the confirmation of the observed effects. With the thousands of data accumulated, more and more psycholinguists have a thought if this analytic tool is really helpful to make conclusions. We might be expanding the frontier with an inaccurate compass. Keeping this awareness is what we should take care hour and hour in doing the psycholinguistic studies. Further reading about this issue is in the last volume of journal of memory and language, 2008.