暗微幽光

Thought in Amsterdam

Attending a conference for me is like a mid-term exam, a supply, and a oppotunity to realize who I am. This is my third time I attend CogSci, and its variate approaches has been a normal status for me. The cross-disciplines research approach under “cognition” will generate a variate of research topics in this generation. Being a cognitive scientist must remain this in mind seconds and hours. I also break the root caused my frustration in these months.

The university where I am working is a Buddist university which is built on the medical shcool but is unfamilier with the trend of cogntive science. My arrivial is their first time to open a window for this campus to understand what are the cognitive scientists are thinking on this world. These months I found a mistake I had made since I was applied: I am eager to build my lab and push students toward the core of my research. Most people here are blank paper to the cognitive science which is working to speculate human mind in several sophiscated ways to connect the behavioral data and abstract models. Psychologists have took 100 years develop a standard psycho lab working for this goal. I have take more paitient help the people here to realize the trend of cognitive science have came to them. Putting this goal upon the other personnal research plans will help me expand the space in this campus and whole east Taiwan.

I identy myself a psychologist who criticize each issue according to the connections between the theories and the collected experimental data. This is why only three spoken presentations impressed me in the venue. First is Athanassios Protopapas’ Greek nonword reading, and he is the author of CheckVocal. He has attempted to verify if the orthography-to-phonology rules dominates the behavior of reading Greek nonwords, because almost Greek words are consistent in mapping relations. He assumed the Greek readers will pronunce the nonword by rule if the grapheme-phoneme conversion is the matter. Although I have not realized his detail at this moment, he concluded more alternative factors, such as the neighborhood size, decide the experimental results as well. I am fortune had a talk with him before the end of the conference, and I guess he will be a factor when the day the the Chinese case come to the researchers who care the general othrogray-to-phonology issue.

Seidenberg’s crew brought the second impressed presentation about the inspection of matro behavioral reserach, like ELP. I also made a small test like them: to replicate one published study in terms of factorial design. Like their “virtual experiments” show, no experiments could be perfectly “replicated” by any known behavioral database. Task circumstance should be the matter because every reseracher had the specific arrangement of stimuli list, presentation and response procedure, and the instruction, etc. Their work could be a feedback to the pessimistic view of Balota: the factorial design still has its contribution to theories building.

The third one brought by Laurie Feldman wake my “psychonomic” sense up. She puts her focus on the affection of speaker’s accent on the reader’s/participant’s visual reading.  Reasonably she compared three groups of participsnts from the US, Japan, and China. All of her participants read English target words after the aditory primes presented in the accent of native language (for participants) or in the accent of second language. If the accent affects the participants lexical processing, the participants will show more interference when they hear the accent of second langauge. Her data show more interference occured to the American participants compared to the Japaness and Chinese participants. Based on this trend, I asked her immediately if she controlled the experience of living with second lanague for each group of participants. She admitted she did not and will think more problem behid this control. Furthermore, I assume the phonological neighbors accross languages would be the matter of this issue.

Among the book salesmen/women, I huntted three books being helpful for my current status: “Cognitive and cultural influences on eye movements” edited by Keith Rayner et al., “Clear and to the point: 8 psychological principles for compelling PowerPoint presentations” wrote by Stephen Kosslyn, and “LOT2” worte by Jerry Fodor. Rayner’s articles will establish a plot of eyemovement studies in my mind. Kosslyn’s book is helpful to my poor skill of presentation. Jerry Fodor’s new book updates my knowledge about the debate about concepts among researchers. There will cost me much of time to comprehend and refresh my realization of the recent cognitive science. This is the original motivation I want to learn from congitive scientists: a continuous upgrading research individual and group depending on the open attitude to emerge any benefitial perspectives  for the investigation of human mind.