9 posts · 2,421 views
At the interface of psychology, neuroscience, and neuropsychology with a focus on computational and statistical modeling.
Dan Mirman
9 posts
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- December 14, 2012
- 04:47 PM
- 204 views
Lateralization of word and face processing
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
A few weeks ago I was at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society where, among other interesting talks, I heard a great one by Marlene Behrmann about her recent work showing that lateralization of visual word recognition drives lateralization of face recognition. Lateralization of word and face processing are among the most classic findings in cognitive neuroscience: in adults, regions in the inferior temporal lobe in the left hemisphere appear to be specialized for recognizing visual (i.e......... Read more »
Dundas EM, Plaut DC, & Behrmann M. (2012) The Joint Development of Hemispheric Lateralization for Words and Faces. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. PMID: 22866684
Nestor A, Plaut DC, & Behrmann M. (2011) Unraveling the distributed neural code of facial identity through spatiotemporal pattern analysis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(24), 9998-10003. PMID: 21628569
Plaut DC, & Behrmann M. (2011) Complementary neural representations for faces and words: a computational exploration. Cognitive neuropsychology, 28(3-4), 251-275. PMID: 22185237
- November 12, 2012
- 01:10 PM
- 248 views
Complementary taxonomic and thematic semantic systems
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
I am happy to report that my paper with Kristen Graziano (a Research Assistant in my lab) showing cross-task individual differences in strength of taxonomic vs. thematic semantic relations is in this month's issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Mirman & Graziano, 2012a). This paper is part of a cluster of four articles developing the idea that there is a functional and neural dissociation between taxonomic and thematic semantic systems in the human brain. First, so........ Read more »
Kalénine S., Mirman D., Middleton E.L., & Buxbaum L.J. (2012) Temporal dynamics of activation of thematic and functional knowledge during conceptual processing of manipulable artifacts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(5), 1274-1295. PMID: 22449134
Mirman D., & Graziano K.M. (2012) Individual differences in the strength of taxonomic versus thematic relations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(4), 601-609. PMID: 22201413
Mirman D., & Graziano K.M. (2012) Damage to temporo-parietal cortex decreases incidental activation of thematic relations during spoken word comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 50(8), 1990-1997. PMID: 22571932
Schwartz M.F., Kimberg D.Y., Walker G.M., Brecher A., Faseyitan O.K., Dell G.S., Mirman D., & Coslett H.B. (2011) Neuroanatomical dissociation for taxonomic and thematic knowledge in the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(20), 8520-8524. PMID: 21540329
- October 29, 2012
- 10:28 PM
- 334 views
Embodied cognition: Theoretical claims and theoretical predictions
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
I'm at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Aphasia (50th Anniversary!) in San Francisco. I like the Academy meeting because it is smaller than the other meetings that I attend and it brings together an interesting interdisciplinary group of people that are very passionate about the neural basis of language and acquired language disorders. One of the big topics of discussion on the first day of the meeting was embodied cognition, particularly its claim that semantic knowledge is grounded in........ Read more »
Barsalou, L. (2008) Grounded Cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 617-645. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639
Carota F, Moseley R, & Pulvermüller F. (2012) Body-part-specific representations of semantic noun categories. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 24(6), 1492-1509. PMID: 22390464
Mahon, B., & Caramazza, A. (2008) A critical look at the embodied cognition hypothesis and a new proposal for grounding conceptual content. Journal of Physiology-Paris, 102(1-3), 59-70. DOI: 10.1016/j.jphysparis.2008.03.004
- September 22, 2012
- 05:00 PM
- 210 views
The power to see the future is exciting and terrifying
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
In a recent comment in Nature, Daniel Acuna, Stefano Allesina, and Konrad Kording describe a statistical model for predicting h-index. In case you are not familiar with it, h-index is a citation-based measure of scientific impact. An h-index of n means that you have n publications with at least n citations. I only learned about h-index relatively recently and I think it is a quite elegant measure -- simple to compute, not too biased by a single highly-cited paper or by many low-im........ Read more »
Acuna, D.E., Allesina, Stefano, & Kording, Konrad P. (2012) Predicting scientific success. Nature, 489(7415), 201-202. DOI: 10.1038/489201a
Liu, Shi V. (2006) Top Journals’ Top Retraction Rates. Scientific Ethics, 1(2), 91-93. info:/
- August 27, 2012
- 09:30 PM
- 225 views
Time course of thematic and functional semantics
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
I am pleased to report that our paper on the time course of activation of thematic and functional semantic knowledge will be published in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. This project was led by Solene Kalénine when she was a post-doc at MRRI working with Laurel Buxbaum and me. Humbly, I think this paper is pretty cool for a few different reasons.First, and most central, we found (using eye-tracking) that the knowledge that two thin........ Read more »
Allopenna, Paul D, Magnuson, James S., & Tanenhaus, Michael K. (1998) Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. Journal of Memory , 38(4), 419-439. DOI: 10.1006/jmla.1997.2558
- August 20, 2012
- 09:50 AM
- 235 views
The translational pipeline
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
Over the weekend I read yet another excellent article by Atul Gawande in the most recent issue of the New Yorker. There are many interesting things in this article and I highly recommend it, but there was one minor comment that really resonated with my own experience. Dr. Gawande mentioned that it's hard to get health care providers (doctors, nurses, clinicians of all types) to accept changes. This resistance to change is one of the obstacles in the translational research pipeline identifie........ Read more »
Whyte J, & Barrett AM. (2012) Advancing the evidence base of rehabilitation treatments: A developmental approach. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 93(8 Suppl 2). PMID: 22683206
- August 16, 2012
- 12:22 PM
- 252 views
Brain > Mind?
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
My degrees are in psychology, but I consider myself a (cognitive) neuroscientist. That's because I am interested in how the mind works and I think studying the brain can give us important and useful insights into mental functioning. But it is important not to take this too far. In particular, I think it is unproductive to take the extreme reductionist position that "the mind is merely the brain". I've spelled out my position (which I think is shared by many cognitive neuroscientists) in a recent........ Read more »
Monterosso, J., Royzman, E.B., & Schwartz, B. (2005) Explaining Away Responsibility: Effects of Scientific Explanation on Perceived Culpability. Ethics , 15(2), 139-158. DOI: 10.1207/s15327019eb1502_4
- August 10, 2012
- 01:58 PM
- 388 views
Treating participants (or items) as random vs. fixed effects
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
Connoisseurs of multilevel regression will already be familiar with this issue, but it is the single most common topic for questions I receive about growth curve analysis (GCA), so it seems worth discussing. The core of the issue is that in our paper about using GCA for eye tracking data (Mirman, Dixon, & Magnuson, 2008) we treated participants as fixed effects. In contrast, multilevel regression in general, and specifically the approach described by Dale Barr (2008), which is nearly identic........ Read more »
Barr D.J. (2008) Analyzing ‘visual world’ eyetracking data using multilevel logistic regression. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 457. DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2007.09.002
Gelman A. (2005) Analysis of variance -- why it is more important than ever. Annals of Statistics, 33(1), 1-33. arXiv: math/0504499v2
Henrich J., Heine S.J., & Norenzayan A. (2010) The weirdest people in the world?. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83. PMID: 20550733
Mirman D., Dixon J.A., & Magnuson J.S. (2008) Statistical and computational models of the visual world paradigm: Growth curves and individual differences. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 475-494. PMID: 19060958
Mirman D., & Graziano K.M. (2012) Damage to temporo-parietal cortex decreases incidental activation of thematic relations during spoken word comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 50(8), 1990-1997. PMID: 22571932
- August 6, 2012
- 09:48 AM
- 325 views
Crawford-Howell (1998) t-test for case-control comparisons
by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain
Cognitive neuropsychologists (like me) often need to compare a single case to a small control group, but the standard two-sample t-test does not work for this because the case is only one observation. Several different approaches have been proposed and in a new paper just published in Cortex, Crawford and Garthwaite (2012) demonstrate that the Crawford-Howell (1998) t-test is a better approach (in terms of controlling Type I error rate) than other commonly-used alternatives. As I understand it, ........ Read more »
Crawford, J.R., & Howell, D.C. (2008) Comparing an Individual’s Test Score Against Norms Derived from Small Samples. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 12(4), 482-486. DOI: 10.1076/clin.12.4.482.7241
Crawford, J. R., & Garthwaite, P. H. (2012) Single-case research in neuropsychology: A comparison of five forms of t-test for comparing a case to controls. Cortex, 48(8), 1009-1016. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2011.06.021
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