I AM IN VANCOUVER AND AT A REAL CONFERENCE. Wow. Just had to let you all know. I am in Vancouver. I am staying in a hotel and eating out and strolling up and down Robson's with a fresh crepe in hand looking into the little shops for breakfast. I am going to art galleries and food markets and the shoreline. I am everywhere and it's totally awesome. The downtown here is fantastically different from Edmonton. I think Mayor Mandel and I are going to have to have a heart to heart when I get home about how awesome I think he is but how I think we need to work on being more awesome as a city. On an unrelated note, I guess I should start writing about the conference?
I don't even know how I'm supposed to contain my experience at the conference for you all. It was a crazy mixture of new ideas. Cognitive sciences is so diverse. You get geeks like me, and then linguists and psychologists, and people talking about ethnic differences in brain and the affects of music on the brain and philosophers talking about the way our brain works feeds our philosophy and how our philosophy feeds the way our brain works in some mystical chain. It's absolutely mind blowing. I don't know where to start or what to say, so perhaps it is best if I just tell you about some of my favourite talks.
One of the first talks I went to, that I found absolutely fascinating, was in a group all talking about the Whorfian Hypothesis. For those of you not in the know, the whorfian hypothesis by my understanding is merely that the words we use and the way our language is formed can impact brain development and functionality. All the talks were particularly interesting, though some a little far fetched for my tastes, but there was one that was truly fantastic. It dealt with Russian and English speakers categorizing colours. Colour naming is traditionally recognized as a difficult task for people, judging by the difficult time children have in mastering the task. The expectation of the experiment was that Russians and English speakers differ in how they categorize the colours blue and green. English has two names, ie: Blue and green, where as Russian only has one name for both colours. As anticipated, this lead to Russians having a more difficult time in correctly identifying related colours in the blue and green range and determining which were closer and which were more different.
One of my second favourite talks was given by the same woman who delivered the colour talk. She was in a second session with presentations about cultural differences on cognition. She had gone and encountered an isolated tribe in their home land who has a limited concept of relative direction, they prefer absolute direction like the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west. For example, children in this tribe WOULD say "The bottle is north of the plate". And no matter where they were, what time of day, if you asked for north they would accurately point you there even as young as age 5. While this development of keen directional sense is amazing to a westerner like myself who just always assumes right is East no matter where I am, this wasn't the most interesting part of this experiment. The objective was more to track the spacial relation to time these people had. English speakers will usually associate time as moving from left to right. Timelines go in this direction and when we gesture time seems to flow this way. Arabic speakers, who write from right to left, are reversed in this preference for expressing time passing. This tribe however, would do time going from West to East. Presented with time sensitive images of an apple falling from a tree, they would order them from west to east consistently. If they faced north the pictures went left to right, if facing south they went right to left, if facing east they went away from themselves, and if west towards themselves. They even did diagonals! Always they ran exactly west to east. It was fantastic to see. So many different things people do!
Being a musician and particularly interested in the changing brain development with age, I found one talk about music appreciation altering in developing babies. It was interesting to hear people talking about things like babies appropriately responding to odder time signatures like 6/8 time or 5/4 time more so than babies a few months later. They begin to develop a stronger response to regular times like 4/5 and lessen their response to odder musical rhythms. There were other talks about people who play music responding to things differently. I saw one talk about how well people can detect music that has been altered, ie sped up artificially. There are millions of fascinating things being researched right now.
I am running out of steam trying to relate this all to you. I will also just add that I really enjoyed all the language talks as well. People talking about how we can learn language so well when we're young, as well as a lot of talks about categorization. How we learn to categorize and how categories help us to respond faster and more accurately to stimuli. This is particularly interesting because it may say something about the underlying attachments or layout of declarative memory. I spent a good deal of time thinking about modeling these effects in ACT-R and what it tells us as modelers about what needs to be going on underneath the surface.
Well that's all for now. I'm home in Edmonton and thanking my lucky stars because going to conferences is really tiring. LEARNING is hard work! cheers! see you all next time.