:: The Wendy House ::

was I going to tell you something?

can you remind me what it was?

<Essay warning>

Not distributed within the mind, distributed across people and other things.  The work of Yvonne Rogers in the 1990’s introduced me to the idea of distributed cognition.  Here are some examples from my everyday life:

• placing my empty bottles by the front door to remind me to take them to the bottle-bank when I leave the house (memory distributed between bottles and Wendy’s absent mind)
• going upstairs to get my passport,  when I get upstairs I’ve forgotten why I went there,  going back downstairs and seeing the holiday (excitement level: Amber) details on Darling I remember why I went upstairs. (memory distributed between holiday details on Darling and Wendy’s absent mind)
• At the pub quiz,  trying to name a song title from hearing a snippit of the tune,  I can only hum the continuation of the tune,  another team member can sings the lyrics to my hummed tune,  a third team member can now name the band then the fourth team member can remember the song title (memory socially distributed between team members). 
• I can’t remember my password as letters and numbers,  I can’t remember the layout of a keyboard,   when infront of Darlings keyboard I can reliably produce my password (memory distributed between keyboard layout and Wendy’s absent mind).  The recent move from US to UK keyboards has been a bit password-disruptive.
• I can’t remember how to get from St Nicolas’s market to Clifton,  but when I am in Bristol I can walk the route directly with no trouble whatsoever,  very pleasant it is too  (Memory distributed between the city-scape and Wendy’s absent mind).  Note that the Schrocks recently experienced the way that St. Nicholas market can suprise you by turning out to be exactly where you are wandering.

People, sensibly, strategically delegate the effort involved in constructing some memories to post-it notes,  lists, calendars, address books,  mobile phones, bag-contents, places, blogs, photoalbums, family and friends. 

A die-hard cognitivist might say this is just context-cued recall.  Both paradigms provide the means to describe human behaviour,  but the approaches to psychological  theory building and research are radically different.  The cognitivist would attempt to identify the specific cues that work most effectively and assess them in a lab,  one specific unusual context, rather than analyse everyday activities in commonly meaningful contexts.  These different research techniques would yield different practical,  application, recommendations.

The cognitivists make the research language and approach to understanding human behaviour their domain as specialists,  ‘everyday’ approaches enable results to be readily recognisable, understandable and communicable to people outside of a specialist discourse.  They also afford more meaningful pragmatic applications. 

<Essay warning over>

My next essay will probably be on Reading’s buses…

also known as:  Remembering what to remember

I first encountered the currently popular (in Psychology of memory circles) ‘prospective memory’ as a term to describe remembering what to remember through Baddeley & Wilkin’s 1984 article ‘Taking memory out of the laboratory’ .  The Laboratory, Lab, was typically where British psychologists studied human memory using rigourous exprimental methodologies.  The lab was normally a windowless, beige, unadroned room lest participants, then ’subjects’,  be distracted or inadvertantly influenced by non-experimental phenomena that might undermine the effect of the experimental manipulation.  

I liked Baddeleys work because he’d systematically estabished the positive impact of re-instating memorising context on recall levels through various studies including the influence of alcohol (Vodka) or physically being under water (diving) when memorising,  and recalling.  Both these experimental studies sounded fun,  were themselves memorable, and were even repeatable* in less rigorous forms with colleagues at University during normal studenty nocturnal activities. 

‘Taking memory out of the laboratory’ was published in a book called ‘Everyday memory, actions and absentmindedness’ .  This was ground breaking news to me in 1984.  There I was in the middle of a degree course, approved as official content and jargon by the British Psychological Society, where I had focussed my study on memory research.  I had just about got the hang of the technically specific language of psychological memory research such as retro-interference, auditory-loop, digit-span, recognition vs recall and much more.  Then,  THEN!  Those gosh-darn leading memory researchers sprang some non-technical terms that made sense and weren’t part of the current disciplin jargon.  How cheeky is that?

Absentmindedness? 

Cognitive psychologists study the absense of mind.  It was too much, I had a couple of vodkas and fell in a local canal with my miss spelt revision notes to celebrate. 

PS:  If I remember I’ll tell you why I’m telling you about prospective memory in a later post…

* Actually conducting the experiements makes them more memorable and easier to understand an evaluate than just reading or thinking about them over a cup of tea.

According to get Reading:

“She then fled downstairs and tried to call 999, but he grabbed the phone off her and punched her twice in the face.  She began screaming so he put his arms around her neck so she couldn’t breath“  she was “in fear of her life” and “honestly believed she might die”,

This behaviour is reported as ‘out of his normal character’ and he says

“He is dreadfully upset about what has happened,”

Whether ‘in’ or ‘out’ of character he chose to stop her seeking social support (calling the police),  punch her in the face two times and throttle her when she tries to get support locally by screaming.  He could have chosen to ignore her or do a silly dance.  It was his choice and he did choose extreme violence.  Evidently he ‘lost it’ (self-control?).  Lost it appears to be part of a socially acceptable storyline to excuse violence.  Psychologists label loss of control as a psychological disorder and use it to explain the curiously termed domestic violence.  

“perpetrators of domestic violence rarely receive adequate psychological treatment, because they are viewed as criminals, rather than individuals with psychological problems.“

In the above case the offender got a suspended sentence and fined the cost of a good night out,  60 quid.  No requirement for a psychological assessment or treatment with the fine hardly touching the actual expense of the social services his behaviour drew upon (e.g. Police, NHS). 

How safe do I feel in a society where the legal system thinks I can be justifiably (for 60 quid) be repeatedly punched in the face and throttled when I try to call for assistance if the agressor claims its not habitual and they regret it?    

Since moving to Reading I’ve found lots of familiar strangers,  I see them on the bus everyday during my commute,  in the local cooperative store when I’m picking up milk for my tea,  behind the counters in Jacksons,  in the local internet cafe.

During my 1986 final year degree course Environmental Psychology classes I learned that people are more likely to exhibit altruistic behaviours to familiar strangers (than complete strangers) when meeting those familiar strangers outside of the normal context.  Each will recognise the other easily but have difficulty placing the source of this familiarity. 

This means that when I meet someone who normally rides on the same bus as me everyday,  in Jacksons,  I will think I know them and be nicer than I would be to someone totally unrecognisable.  

Excellent. 

More familiar strangers means more oportunities to be squishy.  Given my natural curmudgeonist tendencies this can only be a good thang. 

I have trouble keeping my categories stable.  Evolving categories.  By using mini-series such as ‘cute accent’ and ‘dreamy cheese’ I’ve tried to curb my tendancies to create categories and re-assign posts.  The Wordpress categories are painfully insufficiently fuzzy for my taste.

The new version of Wordpress (2.3) has support for tagging and tag-clouds.  Tags could easily evolve to replace my categories because they support the natural emergent and fuzzy quality of both my categories and interests.  Hoorah! 

Replacing my categories with tags could clean-up the Wendy House archive navigation for you and me. Tags do not yet offer some of the useful properties of the category system such as hierarchical relationships and hence similarity groupings.   I’m starting to use tags on my new posts but old posts are not tagged. 

Will adding tags to old-posts spam your RSS readers?  I’ve asked the Wordpress support forum to clarify before I start wrecklessly adding tags to past-posts to while away the long winter evenings. 

Waffle Warning

dichotomy in the universe of closed questions

a ‘closed question’ is a question that has a specific answer,  answers like:

• yes please!
• Oskaloosa in Kansas
• 43
• 2 pints of real Ale
• Bling

Lets suppose that in the universe of possible questions there are an infinitie number of closed questions. 

What is the dichotomy in the universe of closed questions?  The dichotomy is between questions that can be answered ‘no’ such as  ‘Wendy,  do you live in an igloo?’,  and questions that can be answered ‘yes’ such as “Wendy do you live in a wooden house?”  Tonight’s beer-induced Wendy-epiphany is that this dichotomy of closed questions may not be equally populated.  I suspect that there are more possible questions to which the answer is ‘no’ than there are questions to which the answer is ‘yes’.  This suspicion is based on the following preliminary analysis:

Take this question structure as an example:  “Wendy, do you live in a  [insert word here]?”

If the inserted word is a physical home-type without counting all possible insertions I am estimating that the answer is more often No than Yes. 

Example physical home-type:  house, bungalo, igloo, TeePee, tent, hotel, skyscraper, apartment, condominium, flat, tree, bath, lake, road 

If the inserted word is some other plausible descriptor of living conditions I suspect there is still an obvious weighting towards no over yes.   

Example plausible descriptor:  mess, illusion, happy place, circus, bubble, dream, fantasy

If the inserted word is not plausible the answer is most likely to be no

Example not-plausible words: pin, parrot, toe-nail, bling, 43

There are more no than yes answers in the range of possible answers.  People tend to produce ‘yes’ answers,  it’s been studied by psychologists so that they can create and understand the results of questionnaires.  Since people tend (bias?) to agree, to provide ‘yes’ answers,  the tendancy has been given the fancy name of  ‘acquiescence bias’.    

People, not psychonlogists, use skill and prior knowledge to help raise the baseline for the production of ‘yes’ answers above that which would be predicted by either a

• model that assumes the answers produced are a proportionally representative subset of all possible answers (More ‘No’ responses), or 
• counter-balanced  (half no, half yes) answers approach normally used in questionnaire design to ‘control’ the bias.  

Some people, and psychologists, are so cunning they minimize asking questions that can be answered no and can effectively use this acquiescence bias to move towards, and gain, a concensus.  People are wonderfully clever like that;  giving each other the opportunity to say yes.

I really like questions where the answer is ‘yes’,  I’ll leave you with this example:

“Wendy would you like another beer?”

Waffle warning over 

thirty-sixth post in a Wednesday series detailing the frightening truth’s behind Wendy’s singleness.

Reason # 36: fear of failure

Friend:  Did you know [Name]* wanted to go-out-with** you?

Wendy: No.  Why didn’t he let me know?

Friend:  he thought he wasn’t good enough for you

Wendy:  a self fulfilling prophecy if ever I heard one

According to Psychology Today corporate Amercia, which employs most of the boys I meet, focuses on rewarding actual success rather than the type of activities that lead to innovation and success, including effectively dealing with inevitable failures.  This puts the social forces in place that enhance fear of failure. 

*Names have been changed to protect the wussy.

** ‘go out with’ is a British euphamism for girlfriend-boyfriend specific type activities.

is not only Premenstrual tension,  its also Periodic Male Tension.  According to The Guardian online:

A study by psychologists from the University of Derby, England, suggests that men may experience cyclical symptoms similar to, or even worse than, those suffered by pre-menstrual women, including moodiness, discomfort and loss of concentration.  Everything, it appears, apart from the bloat.

 The study is based on ’self report’,  they asked people to report experience of symptoms traditionally associated with pre-menstruation.  They asked the women on 3 separate occassions and men just once.  There is no mention of the likely differences between men an women when self-reporting symptoms (example scientific study of gender bias in self-reporting symptoms).

Gosh,  and there’s me thinking girls had a unique experience around menstrual cycles based on hormones and physiological differences.  Silly me,  its just the bloating.  Boys clearly know what it’s like because the experience has been adequately described in answerable questions and measured by someone in Derby. 

The next grumpy boy I encounter will be asked “is it your time of the month then?‘