Brandon Has a P300 ... and Lives to Tell

For fun today in the lab, we decided to see whether we could measure EEG activity using our Coulbourn Instruments LabLinc V system.

So poor Brandon Nutting's forehead got scrubbed, we attached some sensors, and collected some data. We don't have a cap yet, so we were limited to the forehead.

Here you see Event Related Potentials to a 100 ms 70 dB audio tone with a 10 ms rise time.

There were 49 trials.

You can see a recognizable P300 component about 300 ms after stimulus offset. You can also see a N100 in the Fp1 component.

The black (F7) and red (F8) locations were collected at the sides of his forehead, and the blue (Fp1) location was collected at the left-center of the forehead.

You can check out the locations of the International 10-20 System here.

Thanks to Justin Keene and Wes Wise for helping this experiment today. In under three hours, we took the equipment out of the box, wrote the collection program, collected the data, reduced the data in MATLAB, and plotted it. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon.

(And, yes, Brandon and I are both wearing Indiana shirts. Go Hoosiers!)

Remember This: Your Brain Is Cool

I spent much of Friday night and Saturday in the office analyzing data for a study we conducted on in-game advertising (the lead author is Harsha Gangadharbatla, now of the University of Oregon).

During the course of the racing (car) game, participants drove under five billboards. They were not told anything about the billboards, and the idea was to check whether they noticed. We measured physiology to determine whether they were subconsciously noticing (they were), and we later measured their memory to see whether they actually stored the brand names.

First, participants were asked to freely recall the brands that they saw. Performance on this task was not especially good (16%). Later, participants were asked to recognize the brands among other brands in the same product category. Performance on this task was about 40%.

The main points of the study are pretty interesting; however, one little observationt that will not make it in the final paper was pretty interesting.

For each of the five brands, participants could either recall it or not. Furthermore, they could recognize it or not. Obviously, some people were more likely to pay attention to the driving (gamers, it turns out), and some people were more likely to pay attention to the billboards (nongamers, it turns out). Harsha knew this would be the case, but I did not.

For each brand, we could examine whether the probability it was recalled was related to the probability that it was recognized. Perhaps participants good at recall were simply good at recognition.

But this was not the case with our data. For each brand, the probability that it was recalled was significantly correlated with the probability that it was recognized. Furthermore, for each brand, the probability that it was recalled was most strongly related to its own probability of recall.

It could be the case that recalling Brand A was most strongly related to recognizing Brand B -- perhaps even by random chance. But this was not the case. In every case, A was most strongly related to A, and so on.

In many ways, this should be the case. But the fact that it was consistently the case suggests that our measurements of recognition and recall were indeed indexing how well these brands were encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved from memory.

One kind of memory for each brand was strongly related to another kind of memory for that same brand and only weakly related (at best) to memory for other brands seen perhaps a minute before or after.

When you're trying to understand this limited-capacity attention and memory system of ours, such data are helpful.

Although this, too, will not make it in the paper, visual inspection of the physiological data (cardiac response curves) suggests that participants had an involuntary reflex associated with sensory intake for the brands the recognized but not as much for those that they did not recognize.

This tidbit is pretty awesome, but it will also not make the final paper due to how we analyze data. Although the most appropriate statistical test backs up the "story" told in the preceding paragraph, the highly specialized nature of that particular test makes it seem as if we are being disingenuous in looking for statistical significance. Thus, it is easier to omit than to justify.

All of this continues my respect and love for the human brain. What an amazing device.

Day 3: Taking Time to Think

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Few people would argue against stepping out of your daily grind from time-to-time.

Yet fewer people actually do so.

Gaining a new perspective motivated my trip to spend a week at Buchanan&associates, an advertising agency in a Columbus suburb.

By midweek the trip already paid for itself. My mind percolates with new thoughts, and my enthusiasm for my job skyrockets.

That said, the benefit of this trip increased exponentially at lunch Wednesday.

Several of us sat around a table at the Burgundy Room contrasting academic and industry research and contemplating future connections between the two. We talked about differences between the time pressures facing academic and those facing professionals.

And then agency head Jack Buchanan said that the benefit of academia is having time to think.

As simple as it sounds, it stopped me in my tracks. I'm not taking enough time to think.

My name will be on five journal publications and another edited book chapter during calendar year 2007. For a communication scholar, this is a great year. I'm proud of this year.

But what was the price? If you're always sitting at the computer pounding out a manuscript, you are thinking. But you're not thinking about the big picture. You're being a practical scholar but not really living up to potential.

During my master's program at Kansas State, Tom Grimes talked about the business of ideas.

And ideas drive me.

And somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that just a little bit.

I still spend a lot of time thinking, don't get me wrong. But my thinking has edged ever-so-slightly toward the model of Henry Ford.

Being a research professor is, hopefully, about thinking entirely new thoughts. That's harder to do when you're too closely focused on the next publication to go out the door. You know, something about the forest and trees.

So I am indebted to Mr. Buchanan for unintentionally reminding me that I was taking the best part of my job for granted.

I've got to run now. It's time to think.

Subliminal Ads: Coolest Video Ever

If you have 6 spare minutes to have your mind blown by Derren Brown:



Thanks to Wes Wise for bringing this to my attention.

Let me also give a shout out to Brown's soon to premiere show on the SciFi Channel, Mind Control with Derren Brown. Watch for it on July 26, 2007. I just added a season pass on my TiVo!

Advertisers Come Around: Brain Matters

If you know anything about advertising, you probably know that television ratings drive advertising costs. The premise is simple, the more people watch, the more a "spot" costs.

But what do ratings really translate to? Eyes on screen. And we've been dissing that measure for years.

Over here in the psychophysiology world, we want to know how much attention you're paying and what is happening with your physiological arousal.

Now advertisers have discovered, kind of, these measures. They're calling it engagement (See the article titled "OMD Claims to Know How Rapt Audiences Stack up Against Your Average Eyeballs" at AdAge.com).

"Completed by OMD and presented to an Advertising Research Federation forum late last month, the research indicates that not only does consumer engagement with media and advertising drive sales, but it also can drive sales more than media spending levels. That suggests even a relatively small media outlay could work wonders should the ads draw keen attention from consumers within media they also find engaging, said Mike Hess, director of global research and consumer insights for OMD."

Well, of course!

Pick any metaphor you want, but it always holds true. Consider teaching. Is it more important to know how many students are in the class or how many students are paying attention to the teacher?

In his book, Lovemarks, Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide Saatchi & Saatchi, said, "I'm looking for research that counts the beats of your heart rather than the fingers of your hand."

Exactly.

And you do not need to pay OMD for their proprietary engagement tool. That's just foolish. Engagement equals:

positive affect + attention + arousal

It's just that simple. It's not what your eyes are doing. It's what your brain is doing. More specifically, it's what the combination of your brain and body are doing.

If all of your physiological signals indicate that you're getting ready to jump out of that chair and smother the television with a big, wet kiss, then the ad probably worked!

Over-regularizing the English Plural

We have three gigantic dice. I don't know where they came from. One is red, one is white, and one is blue.

Today my 3-year-old was playing with them. I grabbed two of them.

"Give me back the dices," she said.

As a cognitive scientist, I was very proud.

It took a lot of processing to apply a rule where it didn't belong.

Seventh grade English be damned!

Quizzing Effect Impacts Memory Interpretations

Every once and a while you read something that changes everything.


The other day I was reading Rob Potter's weblog, and I came across this post about his summer class. In that post, Dr. Potter mentions a Chronicle of Higher Education article on research about the relationship between quizzing and learning.

The underlying study found that the act of quizzing itself impacted learning. It was not that students studied for the quizzes -- it was the thought processes that went on while students tried to answer the quizzes, especially short answer quizzes.

"... Every time you test someone, you change what they know," Washington University psychology professor Henry L. (Roddy) Roediger III told the Chronicle.

The implications are huge.

First, I will likely never teach another undergraduate class that does not employ quizzing. I used to think that it was mean. Now I know that it works.

Secondly, the implications for my research are immediate and direct.

Consider our standard memory testing paradigm. First, we test free recall. That is, we ask participants to recall everything they can remember about the stimulus.

Oops. We already changed them.

Then, sometimes, we test cued recall. We changed them again.

Finally, we test recognition. But we've already changed the memory a lot.

"In the process of retrieving Fact A," said Washington psychology professor Kathleen B. McDermott, "if it takes you a minute to get there, you think, Hmm — what did I learn about this general topic? So in a sense, you're also retrieving Fact B and Fact C, even though that's not what you were directly asked to do."

To his credit, Texas Tech master's student Wes Wise proposed looking at some of his own data to see whether recall predicted later recognition months before the Chronicle story.

I guess that we'll have to run the data now.

Gladwell's Blink: Speedy Cognition

Although I hope to expand upon this in a future post, I am enjoying reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which arrived today from Amazon.com.

As a scientist, I tend to favor academic outlets to mass market ones; however, there is something impressive about the ability to translate complicated works into easy prose.

Since Blink dovetails closely with my research, I am far too late in reading it.

If you haven't read it, I highly suggest that you give it at least two seconds.

Ultimate Playground: The Human Mind

I am mired in the middle of grading a class of 155 people. Ugh. This is truly the ugly part of education.

All the while, however, I never cease to be amazed by the human mind.

Yesterday I was watching television, and the cat walked by, dragging his tail against my foot.

And even though I wasn't looking at it, that touch localized my foot in space. That is, I felt it, and it made me aware of where my foot was.

Keep in mind that all of the cognitive processing was going on in my brain ... some 6 feet from my foot. These kinds of simple phenomena are amazing computational tasks.

How can you feel away from your brain? When you open your eyes, why does the world look as if it is out there instead of inside your head (Walter Lippmann notwithstanding)? Why should your heart slow down when the television changes a scene?

We're working on these questions. Some are full-time pursuits. Some are just fun to ponder.

But they're all reasons why it is more fun to go to work every day as a cognitive scientist.

Teaching Creativity

When I teach writing classes, I try to talk about and foster creativity. This is a subject that is more a part of the art of communication rather than the science of communication in which I am trained. I am not sure whether creativity can even be taught. Perhaps it is only enhanced.

During an advertising class at Kansas State, Charles Pearce talked about his views on creativity. He expressed a view shared by many others that we are creative as children, but society forces its normal mold upon us and we lose this creativity. At the time, I was skeptical.

Photo by Isabel Bradley.

In the five years since this classroom discussion, I have learned a lot about the brain and neural networks, and I have watched my own children grow. When you train an artificial neural network, interesting things happen. It begins to learn. It begins to get things right. The more it learns, the better it gets. However, this learning has an unintended consequence. The more the net learns, the less likely it is to do something off-the-wall. Does off-the-wall have anything to do with creativity? I will let you be the judge. Yet I will argue that creativity has something to do with seeing the same facts in a new light. And as a neural network (and presumably a human brain) learns more about its world, the less able it is to see that world in a new light. This results in a smarter network that makes better decisions but happens to be less creative. No one has to force it to be less creative. It just happens. When the network really learns the "box," it can no longer thing outside of it.

As evidence of this, I offer this photo taken by my 7-year-old, Isabel. This photo is not cropped or altered in any way. It is simply how Isabel saw the canopy of the food court at the Columbus Zoo. Most adults would have not have noticed this. Even though I have had professional training as a photojournalist, I would not have seen this. Yet she did. I owe this creativity to Isabel's grandfather Roger, who turned her loose with his camera. Isabel came up with at least 4 very cool photos from perspectives that would not have occurred to me ... creativity.

Thus, it looks as if Charles Pearce had it right. However, I don't think there is a conspiracy. There is no plot by middle school teachers to drive the creativity out of our minds. It seems merely to happen as we learn more about the regularities of our world.