Whew!!! Finishing up with David Buller really grabs one by the balls, academically speaking. Fortunately for the other papers I mentioned in the previous post, modularity is the theory argued against. Maybe it would be appropriate for the undergrads to read Buller first to really accentuate the problem, and then read Larry's and Ricardo's papers as an alternative.

I just want to make a few comments. Gil-da-Costa et al., (2004) is a very nice study, and I understand why Larry wanted to comment on it officially. Their article is not too over-the-top in conceding to alternative interpretations, "the distinctions we observed may reflect neural systems for discriminating between conspecific vs. heterospecific vocalizations, biological vs. nonbiological materials, or any meaningful vs. nonmeaningful stimulus." (p17521). From an embodiment standpoint, I protest the last dichotomy. The core notion of grounding vocalizations in multimodal perceptual symbols is that the reason the individual knows what the conspecific means is because of the neural systems becoming differentially activated for coos or screams than for nonbiological sounds. I think that this dichotomy is exactly what is addressed in their article.

I agree with Larry and Gil-da-Costa et al., (2004) that an interesting way of extending this research is to see how other species perform at this task. Also, the problem of the nature of integration looms for embodiment theory, and maybe the answers lie in the McGurk phenomenon, similar to the work done by Ghazanfar and Logothetis (2003).

These are interesting papers that I will share with the lab, and post comments at a later date. Goodnight for now.

What am I reading?

Later on I plan on making similar posts under this title as a separate section, but for now I just wanted to let the few of you know how I am gearing up for my new comparative psychology projects. While updating myself with the journal Trends in Cognitive Science (TICS), I found an update by Larry Barsalou, who comments on Gil-da-Costa et al., (2004) article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Along with those two papers, I found another article in TICS by David Buller. I am interested in getting his new book from MIT Press, called Adapting Minds, and since the title of this article was so alluring (Evolutionary psychology: the emperor's new paradigm) and relevant to the previously mentioned papers, I bundled all three together as sort of an evolutionary psychology primer. These papers in all are pretty short (15 pages total), and it may be nice to distribute these as the beginning readings for the new semester once I have recruited the undergraduates for Owren's lab.

I will follow this post with some theoretical and methodological comments soon.