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Posts

February 18, 2013

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11:01 AM | Hello World, Do You Speak Science?
  Words. We all use them, in one form or another. Science. We all use it, in one form or another. I'm here to join the dots, to make connections between scientific concepts and the way they are expressed. I'm very excited to be starting this blog to share my passion for science and languages with the world. It all starts with the question: Do you speak science? There are many ways to answer this, and I will cover several... Read more
Do you speak science?
Language

February 15, 2013

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3:36 PM | Catching Fly Balls is not Reading Dostoyevsky
In 2001and 2002, my students and I published two papers on mental simulation in Psychological Science. I warned my students that these experiments might draw a lot of attention and possibly criticism. I was about to make full professor, so I was not worried about myself but I was worried about my students. I was […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

February 14, 2013

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1:03 PM | In case of Neanderthal uprising…
Recently there’s been quite a bit of news about Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School wanting an adventurous woman to give birth to a Neanderthal baby. Though the quotes are now being said to be completely fabricated. However, this cropped up on Adam Van Arsdale’s blog today and I thought it funny enough to read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 12, 2013

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1:31 PM | The New Pluralistic Approach
There has been a lot of talk round these parts recently of the merits of pluralistic approaches to problems in language evolution, and condemning the assignment of too much explanatory power to statistical correlations away from other forms of evidence, such as cultural learning experiments. Sean and James recently published a paper about this here which includes some read more...

Selten, R. & Warglien, M. (2007). The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (18) 7361-7366. DOI:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

February 11, 2013

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5:52 PM | Behind the Eiffel Tower
In a previous post I alluded to the fact that I had produced an amusing title a few years ago for an articlethat was published in Psychological Science (it was intended as a parody on the article titles in that journal). I also mentioned that that article won the Ig Nobel Prize for psychology last year. This prize is awarded […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

February 07, 2013

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11:53 PM | Sexually selective understanding of evolutionary psychology and its political implications
There is a “Skeptics In The Pub” event in Glasgow on March 4th, where Dr Thom Scott-Phillips will be discussing the perceptions and misconceptions of evolutionary psychology, in light of the public backlash against evolutionary psychology that seems to be increasing all the time. This kind of public engagement is very sorely needed if we read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
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11:53 PM | Sexually selective understanding of evolutionary psychology and its political applications
There is a “Skeptics In The Pub” event in Glasgow on March 4th, where Dr Thom Scott-Phillips will be discussing the perceptions and misconceptions of evolutionary psychology, in light of the public backlash against it that seems to be increasing all the time. This kind of public engagement is very sorely needed if we are read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 06, 2013

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11:41 AM | Bruce Springsteen and Lazy Susan: The Logic of Experimentation
Many papers have more than one experiment. How do researchers string together experiments?When I was a beginning assistant professor, I would tell my students The difficult part is not Experiment 1, it is Experiment 2 (when saying this, I would always picture myself as a grizzled war veteran, smoking a pipe and using […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

February 05, 2013

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8:48 AM | Chimp Challenge at Edinburgh Zoo
We’re used to thinking of ourselves as smarter than other animals, but sometimes it looks like even chimpanzees can outsmart us. A while ago, Justin Quillinan and I set up the Chimp Challenge. We were interested in a study by Inoue & Matsuzawa which demonstrated the amazing visual processing abilities of a chimpanzee named Ayumu. read more...

Inoue, S. & Matsuzawa, T. (2007). Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees, Current Biology, 17 (23) DOI:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation
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8:22 AM | 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, 14th – 17th April 2014, Vienna: Call for Papers
The 10th International Conference on the Evolution of Language will take place in the beautiful capital of Austria, Vienna, from April 14th to April 17th 2014. The plenary speakers are: “Plenary Speakers Michael Arbib Rob Boyd Bill Croft Chris Knight and Jim Hurford Ann Senghas Joan Silk Kenny Smith“ The Call for Papers can be found here (Deadline for paper read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

February 04, 2013

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8:10 PM | Toward a Taxonomy of Article Titles
In previous posts I have talked quite a bit about amusing titles (I promise that my next post will be on something else). I borrowed this term from an article that looked at the effects of such titles on citations and found that “highly amusing titles” were cited 30% less than other titles. The authors of the article were […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

February 03, 2013

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2:04 PM | The Actual Results are in!
Good thing I called the previous update “preliminary results!” I discovered later that many subjects had “clicked through” the descriptions, merely reading the titles and spending only a second or so on the descriptions. In my preregistration I had said that I would exclude the data from subjects if their viewing […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

January 28, 2013

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7:59 PM | The Preliminary Results are in!
Update February 3, 2013, I removed the figure for reasons explained in my next post. However, I wanted to keep the text of this post to provide a documentation of the process. I'm trying to be open as well as accurate.Holy cow! The data are in already! As I explained in my previous post, I was interested to see what the […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

January 26, 2013

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10:48 PM | Framing and constructions as a bridge between cognition and culture: Two Abstracts for Cognitive Futures
I just found out that both abstracts I submitted to the Cognitive Futures of the Humanities Conference were accepted. I was really only expecting one to get through but I’m looking forward to talking about the ideas in both. The first first talk has foundations in a paper I wrote almost 5 years ago now about [...]
Metaphor Hacker
Language | Philosophy

January 23, 2013

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10:15 AM | Proposing a study on the effects of amusing titles
Update 1 after feedback from @hansijzerman on TwitterUpdate 2 after comments from Thomas Schubert (see below) and Steve Fiore (via Facebook)Final update after comments from Eefje Rondeel and Michał Parzuchowski (see below) as well as some further thinking on my part.Final final update. After a test-run, I decided […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

January 22, 2013

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1:30 PM | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GamesWithWords/~3/E8TXXDpAEFA/chemistry-has-its-own-problems-with.html
Chemistry has its own problems with replication, according to Nature: Scrounging chemicals and equipment in their spare time, a team of chemistry bloggers is trying to replicated published protocols for making molecules. The researchers want to check how easy it is to repeat the recipes that scientists report in papers ... Among the frustrations [chemists] have experienced with the chemical literature ... are claims that reactions yield products in greater amounts than seem reasonable, and […]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology
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3:31 AM | What makes psychology and neuroscience hard
Explained by today's XKCD: Ambrose Bierce pointed out the same problem in his 1911 satyrical dictionary (The Devil's Dictionary): Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with. 
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

January 21, 2013

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5:07 PM | Amusing Titles in Psychological Science II: What is your PAT?
 It may only be a matter of time before the pun rises again says the BBC. Is that time already upon us in psychological science? Let’s see.In my previous post, I provided a qualitative analysis of amusing titles in Psychological Science. Here is the quantitative part. I counted the number of amusing titles per year in […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

January 20, 2013

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1:48 PM | Amusing Titles in Psychological Science
I recently wrote a post about amusing article titles, pointing to  a tendency in the current psychological literature (and proposal as well in […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

January 18, 2013

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3:32 PM | Language Evolution 101: Gene’s Eye vs. DST
Broad hypothese are better than narrow ones as they can be applied to a wider range of things. That’s probably a controversial thing to say, but it’s certainly true that the beauty of most evolutionary theory lies in its simplicity, and therefore its ability to be applied to more than just biology. So how do read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

January 17, 2013

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2:00 PM | Fractionating IQ
Near the dawn of the modern study of the mind, the great psychological pioneer Charles Spearman noticed that people who are good at one kind of mental activity tend to be good at most other good mental activities. Thus, the notion of g (for "general intelligence") was born: the notion that there is some underlying factor that determines -- all else equal -- how good someone is at any particular intelligent task. This of course fits folk psychology quite well: g is just another […]

Hampshire, A., Highfield, R., Parkin, B. & Owen, A. (2012). Fractionating Human Intelligence, Neuron, 76 (6) 1225-1237. DOI:

Games with Words
Language | Psychology
Citation
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1:23 PM | Most important paper on cultural evolution that includes acacia trees published
Last month saw the publication of a paper by James and I (our first paper!) on the so-called ‘nomothetic’ approach to links between language structure and social structure.  In it we review the recent trend of using large-scale cross-cultural statistical analyses to find links between cultural traits and social structures (e.g. Lupyan & Dale, 2010).  read more...

Sean Roberts & James Winters (2012). Social Structure and Language Structure: the New Nomothetic Approach, Psycology of Language Learning, 16 (2) 89-112. Other: 10.2478/v10057-012-0008-6

Lupyan G & Dale R (2010). Language structure is partly determined by social structure., PloS one, 5 (1) PMID:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

January 15, 2013

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3:58 PM | Evolution in a Changing Environment
Following on from the Baronchelli et al paper a couple of months ago, PLOS ONE has published  ”Evolution in a Changing Environment” by the same authors. The conclusions of the 2 papers both argue that if language is rapidly changing (and it is), then generalist, neutral genes, rather than specialist ones, are advantageous. This argues that language is read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

January 12, 2013

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5:59 PM | Overly Amusing Article Titles
As the recent hashtags #overlyhonestmethods […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology
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11:15 AM | Berwick, Friederici, Chomsky, Bolhuis (2013): Evolution, brain, and the nature of language
Noam Chomsky, who infamously stated that the field of language evolution research is “a burgeoning literature, most of which in my view is total nonsense” (see, e.g. here), has a new paper on the topic in press (together with linguist Robert Berwick and neuroscientists Angela Friederici and Johan Bolhuis) called Evolution, brain, and the nature of language (here, read more...
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

January 09, 2013

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3:58 PM | Professor -- The Easiest Job in the World
There has been a small kerfuffle over Susan Adams's article at Forbes, titled "The least stressful jobs of 2013": University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year's and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don't sped too many hours in the classroom ... Working conditions tend to […]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

January 08, 2013

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5:59 PM | Opening the Floodgates?
Well, here it is, our call for proposals regarding pre-registered replication studies on cognition. When I say “our” I hasten to add that we stole and adapted the text of this call, with their permission, from Brian Nosek and Daniël Lakenswho are guest editing a special issue of Social Psychology. Their original […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology
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3:00 PM | http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GamesWithWords/~3/WNmaD_DKI_0/my-brother-was-just-in-town-and-we-had.html
My brother was just in town, and we had our usual argument about Old Man's War, which he loves and about which I'm less enthusiastic (it was a fun read, but...). Perhaps one issue that keeps me from enjoying it fully is that whenever I think about it I think about an early scene, in which a character's consciousness was transferred from an old body to a new body. This is presented in the book as just one more futuristic miracle, but I can't stop thinking about the deeper questions it […]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

January 07, 2013

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7:45 PM | Pre-registration at the journal desk
I was recently asked to co-guest-edit a special issue of Frontiers in Cognition on “failures to replicate.” I liked the idea of a special issue. I just didn’t think it had the right angle. What if someone had “successfully” replicated a study, would they not be allowed to submit? I was worried this would create a […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology

January 05, 2013

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4:05 PM | What shall we do with the drunken subject?
Early in the morning a research assistant is preparing for her first subject. She is a little nervous and quietly rehearses the instructions she is about to give. In walks the subject. His gait is a little unstable and it sure looks like he hasn’t had a shower in a long time. His eyes have trouble focusing as she starts […]
Rolf Zwaan
Language | Psychology
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