You'd Better Believe It!


There are two types of dogs in this world, companion dogs and working dogs. Man has had working dogs for a very long time, but also quite likes having them around.  For their part, dogs mostly prefer having people around rather than other dogs. At a very early age, they learn visual cues from our voice, face and general body language for what we want from them. Of course, some of us are better at communicating than others, and we have dogs to match.

The sniffer dog has emerged over the last thirty years as a common sight in many public locations. That’s where we see the ones with small teeth like beagles or spaniels. The ones with big teeth, like Belgian malinois are more likely to be found with the military or police.

Explosives and drugs are the common target for the connoisseur’s nose, although diabetes and cancer are bringing them into the medical field. The problem is that they want to please us and a great way making us happy is to confirm our prejudices.  Lit et al (1) made a study of how the beliefs of the handlers affected their dog’s performance.

They took a church and used eighteen trained noses, with their handlers of course, to check out some side rooms for drugs or explosives. You and I know that there would be neither in such a place, but the handlers and dogs didn’t. Some rooms had decoys for the dogs consisting of Slim Jim sausages and a tennis ball, while decoys for the handlers were less interesting. These were little squares of red paper. The decoys were mixed and matched, and some rooms had neither.

Well, only 15% of the runs indicated that there were no drug or explosive caches in the church. The bits of red paper were a great attraction.  The sausages were also a bit of a distraction. Only one team got it right on two runs through.

Although sausages were difficult to resist for both parties, the bits of red paper were only important to the handlers and made them believe that there were illicit goods hidden somewhere. Wittingly or unwittingly, that belief was transmitted to their dog, which did it’s best to please.

The unwitting transmission of information is called the “Clever Hans Effect” after Wilhelm van Osten and his grumpy horse, Hans, who would do counting tricks for money back in the early 1900s (2). Professor Pfungst checked the horse out and found it only got the right answer if the questioner already knew the answer and the horse could see the questioner. He, the horse Hans, got very grumpy if he got it wrong and bit the poor Professor Pfungst for his pains.

  1. L.Lit, J.B.Schweitzer & A.M.Oberbauer, Animal Cognition, 14, 387, (2011).
  2. The New York Times. 1904-09-04

Woozled!


Scientific papers that appear in peer-reviewed journals are all carefully argued and documented with relevant citations with an objective discussion of the data. Aren’t they? Less and less so apparently. An international congress in Amsterdam pointed out the flaws that have crept into biomedical publications. Gambrill and Reiman of U Cal, Berkely have just published a study in which reviewers reviewed some papers twice. The first time was done as they would normally, but then they were given a “propaganda index” and asked to review them again.

The results were staggering. They noticed lots of phrases such as “everyone knows” or “it is generally agreed” in place of real data, but also a tendency to medicalize problems, so that common life-problems were presented as illnesses with them being underdiagnosed and undertreated.

So when you and I devour these pages, we believe weasel words such as “common” and start to feel the woozle effect. We are usually starting to worry about large frightening woozles and not smaller things like wizzles and end up in a Winnie the Pooh-like state with no Christopher Robin to point out reality.

An egregious example quoted by Gembrill and Rieman (1) particularly caught my eye: “Generalized social anxiety disorder is a chronic and insidious psychiatric disorder that first received widespread attention during the 1980′s. Social anxiety disorder has an early onset, typically between 14 and 16 years of age, and subsequently follows a chronic course that persists well into adulthood. Spontaneous recovery is possible, but it occurs gradually and only in about half of all sufferers.” That was scary enough to set me googling frantically.  At one time or another most of us would be considered candidates for treatment by the enthusiasts as we get nervous about going on a new date or giving a public speech.

That is just being normal though. Few of us are so shy that we lock ourselves away. I was picturing what would happen if the next time we feel embarrassed about making a mistake in public, we all rush of for a successful course of treatment, would we all turn into a version of Alexander the Great and march out to conquer the world? But it wouldn’t happen. Christopher Robin pointed out there aren’t enough psychiatrist’s couches to go round.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019516#s4

Barbie or Bigfoot – Size Matters


Most of us, whether we admit it or not, have played with dolls at some time in our lives. When we did this, we thought our way into that small world, but we rarely stopped and tried to imagine what our world would look like to Barbie and her friends. As an adult, we may have visited a house or a school that we haven’t seen since we were very small. The usual impression is that it’s much smaller than we remembered.

As we sit around philosophizing in our armchairs, we say of course, we were small then, but we know better now that we have rulers to measure things properly. Now we know exactly how big something is. That horse over there is 16 hands, for example. But whose hands? My delicate, skinny ones or those belonging to that big guy over there whose hands are wider by at least half as much again?

Our size still effects our perception as van der Hoort et al from the Karolinska Institutet have shown (1). They took nearly two hundred willing and naïve participants and convinced them by using cameras and TV screens that their bodies were any size from Barbie to Beanstalk Giant size. I stress here that naïve is used in the psychological test sense and not in the sense that my Mom used when I bought my first car for twice as much as it was worth. These participants were all between twenty-five and thirty, so weren’t likely to be fooled by any used car salesman.

How were they convinced of their new body size? The cameras showed them the lower half of their bodies, that is, jeans and sneakers, while the experimenters were touching their ankles. The TV screens showed different size objects touching their ankles, thus convincing them that they were either from Lilliput or from Brobdingnag. The participants then had to judge the size and distance from them of a box-like object.

The results? In Barbie-mode the participants thought that the box was larger and farther away than it actually was. If in Beanstalk Giant-mode the box was thought to be smaller and closer than in the real world. The authors go on to indicate how this could have important applications in the field of tele-robotics. They ask us to imagine being a surgeon and having the full body illusion of being a microrobot inside their patient and hacking away at that person's internal organs. Anyone who has dug through a water main in the garden by mistake will shudder at the prospect of hitting a capillary.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020195


Chatterboxes


Deep in the bowels of the U of Queensland there are little robots running around and chatting to each other. They have a nice playroom with lots of offices around their main laboratory where they spend their time telling each other where to go. These little fellows are Lingodroids and they are too hoity-toity to speak English, or Australian, or anybody else’s language, come to that. Their game is to develop their own.

They have started by giving names to parts of their playroom. With a bit of give and take, they have come to an agreement on the location names. They have been assembled in a parliamentary democracy, so arriving at a consensus needed some debate.

This is the first step in settling on their Toponymic Lexicon. The next step is for them to do the Twitter thing and tersely text their topographical territories to each other with directions and distances. Some of their peregrinations and tweets, with Dr. Schulz’s translations of course, can be found at the link below.

So now these little droids can run around and tell each other about the place and even indicate that there is somewhere that they can’t get to because somebody has locked the door. If the door is subsequently opened and a different droid is asked to check it out, they will happily run off and get the job done.

At the moment we can listen in and so can keep up with their language development. But imagine what could happen at weekends or during a vacation. They could get together and abandon droid 1 as their primary language and develop droid 2.0. Imagine how uncomfortable it would become to have your droids gossiping about you without you being able to understand what they were suggesting that you do with your program!


  1. http://itee.uq.edu.au/~ruth/Lingodroids.htm

A Hand To Mouth Existence


Last Thursday, my post reported on some studies of the effects on the facility with mental arithmetic of clenching our teeth when faced with difficult sums. The conclusion was that it didn’t help our calculations. But now the plot thickens. Lets come back to the picture of our trying to draw something and our tongue surreptitiously starts to poke out of the side of our mouth as we concentrate.  Maybe what we are doing with our mouth may not improve our math, but does it improve what we are doing with our hands?

The movements of our hands are effected by those of our mouth, and vice versa, according to the new work by Gentilucci and Campione of the Italian Inst. Of Tech. at Parma (1). They had some participants grab candies with their mouths while they were doing things with their hands, as well as doing things with their mouths while the were grasping with their hands. Their results showed a clear interaction between the mouth and hand actions. 

The idea follows that speech and gestures are unconsciously correlated. Italians are well known for doing a lot of “talking with their hands,” especially when something important is being discussed. It would be interesting to see if the results are the same with other cultures, perhaps, with a group from a more dour culture from cold, northern climes.

An interesting subsidiary finding was that vocalization did not correlate with foot motion. I guess this is pointing to the origin of the “foot in mouth” problem.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019793


Betting On Certainties


The link between science and superstition is interesting. We often say, “I believe this to be why such a thing happens.” Does this mean that we have clear, incontrovertible evidence for the event? Or does it mean that it’s our best guess? Well, it usually means the latter, based on the evidence that we have currently at our disposal. At some point, we will have made the decision as to how much evidence to gather.

Abbott and Sherratt of Carleton U discuss this rather nicely in their recent paper (1) titled “The Evolution Of Superstition Through Optimal Use Of Incomplete Information.” Our decision-making is like tackling the ‘two-armed bandit problem’ where we have a gambling machine with two levers. We first think that we see a causal relationship. Then we have to decide if we are going to exploit that effect to get a big pay-off (one lever), or investigate things further to be more certain (other lever).

Having lucky mascots, lucky shirts or lucky socks are all examples of us trying to exploit a non-existent causal relationship. For example, “I hit a hole in one wearing these socks, so I always wear them in golf competitions. And I won’t wash them” is the type of superstition that takes hold when the pay-off is large. Hit a hole in one again wearing those socks and that belief is written in stone.

It is particularly sad that we are so easily tempted by the possibility of a big pay-off that we carry out very little enquiry into cause and effect. Many times it seems that we are terrible gamblers. The bigger the potential pay-off, the fewer questions we’ll ask.  Of course, it should be the other way round. We should carry out more detailed research to ensure that we maximize the bigger pay-off.


  1. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.04.002

The Sweet Smell Of Success


Sweet Smell of Success

Two papers were published this week on the brains of early mammals – of our mouse-like ancestors. CT scans revealed the exciting development of the sections of the brain that we associate with the smelling of roses.

The thesis is that as our odorant receptors improved, we required bigger brains to process the data efficiently. So to enhance the olfaction satisfaction of noseworthy information, the head cases had to become bigger to house the fast growing data storage and faster processing equipment.

Dr. Rowe put it more eloquently: "The origin of crown Mammalia saw a third pulse of olfactory enhancement, with ossified ethmoid turbinals supporting an expansive olfactory epithelium in the nasal cavity, allowing full expression of a huge odorant receptor genome."

It is important to remember that these were small creatures who had to share the planet with lots of carnivores and herbivores with large feet. Hence, it was much better to be on the night shift to avoid being eaten or stepped on.

Sensitive whiskers may help to find food when you are very close to it, but a good odorant receptor is a longer range device. Of course, its not just food that is important to young creatures. It is also finding a mate, and if you have chosen to have four little legs instead of wings, screeching and making a spectacle of yourself in order to advertise to your partner, is not a good idea. A good nose means that a stealth approach is possible under cover of darkness, almost as good as a smart phone.

When I look at my dog and see the size of her nose, I can know see why she thinks that she is brighter than I am as I run to the store for dog-food and  after her in the park with a plastic bag.

  1. T.B.Rowe, T.E.Macrini & Z-X Luo, Science, 332, 955, (2011)
  2. R. Glenn Northcutt, Science, 332, 926, (2011)