New thing today? What about be a member of Star Alliance, and... think about social cognition from computational modeling way?

Let's push it a little bit forward... Agent File? Hey, isn't this idea cool?
I need some time to digest this new perspective. But it is gonna be an revolutionary reading experience...
I can still remember my excitement of reading my first Ullman's paper. A new world quitely opened its door.

Liszt "at" Brown! My first concert on campus! And hear from an organ for the first time! So cheerful!

Highlight of the Day:

I went to my first on-campus concert tonight -- Lisztomania! A Bicentennial Festival Concert. It was truly breath-taking... just magnificent!! 

What we had are:

Prelude and Fugue on the name B-A-C-H (organ)

Anima Christi (organ)

Ossa Arida (organ)

Consolations, No.4 

Hosannah for Trombone and Organ (organ, trombone)

The beatitudes from Christus (baritone: Andrew Garland)

Ave Verum Corpus

Pater Noster from Christus (chorus)

Orpheus (Symphonic Poem No.4) (orchestra)

Totentanz (orchestra; pianist: Kenneth Hamilton)

The Bells of Strasburg Cathedral (orchestra, organ, baritone)

Among all the music they played, I was especially impressed by Totentanz (with orchestra) -- the appearing and reappearing chant Dies Irae with rich variations, the explosion of giant power, the unbelievable skills of the pianist, and the excellence of this Brown orchestra! I played it on loop on Youtube after the concert!

And Orpheus is also impressing, which is so cheerful and lovely, just like Alice in wonderland... a huge contrast to Totentanz!


Link of the Day:
1. Enrico Pace playing Liszt's Totentanz. I don't know whether there're some better versions out there. But this is definitely fabulous!
2. Check this out! MIT Brian&Cognitive Science has an amazing video archive of their lectures. MIT is so cool (esp. in technology)!!!

First Talk at Lab Meeting! Two Interesting Lectures on the same day! Floral Water Tasting with Good Music!

Highlight of the Day:
1. Yes! I finally gave my first talk in the lab meeting today, bringing my first project to the table! I didn't know I was gonna talk about it until 2 hours before the meeting. Somehow, I just felt that it should be in the next week, or in the last week. Consequently, I got less than one hour to make my PPT...
But yes! I made it! And it went on great! Several lab members showed good amounts of interests in the project, coming up with lots and lots and lots of cool ideas -- more than I can handle at this moment! And my advisor is super supportive and helpful, as always!

2. My Ayala's herbal water has arrived today. The most delicate, poetic, flowery, and pricy water I've ever tried (I know there's Bling H2O... but do you really want to spend $60 on a bottle of water?) I got 6 different blends and enjoyed a 40-minute water-tasting with Scarborough Fair as my selected background music -- there is the lyric of "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme" in it.
The crispy refreshing clearness with deep smooth sweetness in the aromatic water (and in the music) caresses my palate like a soft, warm breeze. Truly a delightful and natural experience!

3. And I had two good lectures (both with free food) today! By the way, I can never imagine this at ZJU. That's why it is so intellectually stimulating to do research here!

One lecture at Brain Science Program is delivered by William Fifer at Columbia University (Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics), titled "Fetal Roots of Child Neurodevelopment". It was about the knowledge we have about infants beyond they can sleeping, sucking, and defecating (mostly done by EEG research). And what we know about fetus... not psychologically, of course, but physically measurable "behaviors" like heart rate and beyond.
Though the lecture is not easy to follow, the lecturer did show some great taste of humor. I like the following three points in his lecture:
i) "In the next study, we went to South Africa. We had a great time there, watching cheetahs watching us". This saying suddenly remind me of the days when I was in S.Africa. I didn't go on any Big Five safari, though.
ii) When he was showing how animal could (or couldn't) learn from past experience, he played and re-played the very funny, and sort of well-known, video clip in which one penguin waddled by the other one standing pretty still, but all of a sudden, the second guy slapped the first guy with his wing and the poor guy fell onto the ground! It was just so appropriately entertaining at that point!
iii) At the end of his lecture, after presenting a good variety of different studies in recent years and intensive progress at his lab, he showed a piece of jig-saw puzzle on the slide, and circled a smaaaaaaall corner of the piece, modestly saying that he was just working on a tiny piece of the field, but hopefully that one day, research can shed light on the whole piece. Another pretty well-used picture with a pleasing tone.

Another lecture at CLPS is delivered by Todd Gureckis at NYU, titled "Follow Your Own Path: Exploring the Impact of Self-Directed Information Sampling on Learning". It was even more difficult to follow. Instead of examining "passive" learning by limiting participants’ control over the information they experience at each point in time (and do Bayesian analysis or connectionist or whatever), the current study explores how people gather information in "self-directed" learning environments. In other words,  the primary aim of this research is to characterize the information sampling strategy that participants use to reduce their uncertainty, and to examine how self-directed learning influences acquisition. Guided by this idea, researchers have found that learning is faster when they can select and sequence learning episodes themselves, depending on the abstract structure of to-be-learned concepts and the space of hypotheses that the learner considers.

So, that's it about today! Well, I don't really want to mention that there are too many emails coming in which sort of troubles me, and that I'm having more and more problem falling into sleep in recent days and feel a little bit tired (probably because I am too excited by current research?) As you see, I like to KEEP POSITIVE THINKING in life, because life is truly a gift!


Link of the Day:
Since I just mentioned about Ayala's Herbal Water, please click on this link to get a better idea of what it is and what different herbs are used for.

Quotation of the Day:
As you may know, I'm reading David Thoreau's Walden to (hopefully) give myself a better understanding of the rhythm and thyme of the language called English. I encountered a very well-known paragraph today, which is probably among the earliest ones I happened to read long ago. I want to quote it for today's quotation, especially because it can also serve as an excellent footprint of my "One New Thing A Day"!

"Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did. They say that characters were engraven on the bathing tub of King Tching Thang to this effect: "Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again." I can understand that."

这里也附上我早先读到的中文翻译版，正是这一段文字让我对《瓦尔登湖》产生了兴趣：
“每一个早晨都是一个愉快的邀请，使得我的生活跟大自然同样地简单，也许我可以说，同样地纯洁无瑕。我向曙光顶礼，忠诚如同希腊人。我起身很早，在湖中洗澡；这是个宗教意味的运动，我所做的最好的一件事。据说在成汤王的浴盆上就刻着这样的字：‘苟日新，日日新，又日新。’我懂得这个道理。”

Mac back with Windows. Book from Bertram. And lots of conversations about CAPE and Youth Development

Reading Bertram's Other Minds, a collection of different papers on "mindreading" or mental states inference.
And thinking about setting up a Theory of Mind and Social Cognition Journal Club!

Lots of indigents to cook...
Halloween party tomorrow! Yes!

Sight seeing in New England! Lots and lots and lots of new papers coming in!

We got a perfect afternoon, driving across MA to see the leaves, beach, state forest, ponds... a beautiful New England! And to celebrate RK's birthday!
My first fall in New England!
I love you CLPS guys! More pictures at renren.com and Facebook!

I just realized how much I have to read before I get a good whole picture of the field!

Meeting with Karen Wynn from Yale today!

Highlight of the Day:

Karen Wynn, PI of Infant Cognition Lab at Yale, came and gave a talk at CLPS today. The talk was called "Mapping the Social Terrain, or Early Social Evaluation: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly". She basically talked about recent research at her lab, which are:

Claims:

Social assessment...

that goes social, behavioral, emotional...

can guide thoughts, actions, ...

Very early...

Part 1: The Moral Baby

about +/- value

Study 1: Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, 2007&2010

Measurement: Reaching (elder) & Looking (super young)

2007: Helping & Hinding

2010: Giving & Taking

2011:Opening a box

So, what work do baby's judgment do?

Who deserves good & bad treatment?

Condition: Giving a treat to; taking a treat away from.

How should others treat nice&mean guys?

5, 8, 19 month old

Social extension: Antisocial

Part 2: The discriminating baby

social evaluation; attractive, race, language, etc.

10 month old: baby prefer characters with more resources (bananas), but not inanimate things like boxs.

babies prefer ones who are similar to them (like the same type of food)

As a summary, babies understanding of a group:

Baby don't like:

Antisocial

Different from them.

Later on in our half-an-hour one-on-one conversation, we talked about my current research and future interests, which can be partly summarized as "stepping out of the egocentric frame of reference", and how I chose to step into my area (a little bit about AI and it's developing direction in decades which is to understand human social interaction). 

(By the way, the spot I chose to have this meeting was awesome! Beautiful view of Lincoln Field in sunset. I also bought Latte for us to enjoy our meeting more)

We also talked about her research. She was really interested when I mentioned the following two points:

1. The study she did which shows that babies emulate the following behaviors of the good character rather than the bad.

2. Physical coercion and mental coercion.

And there is one point that I forgot to mention, which is:

But both Bertram and I questioned whether it is because they ACT similarly, or they have similar GOAL/TARGET. This is rather different, I believe. But they haven't tried to tease it apart.

And she also mentioned a paper on perspective taking and a AI (related with ToM) at Yale that worth visiting.

Basically that's it!

Link of the Day:

1. MATLAB Webinar is definitely cool! Today they had a webinar on computer vision. I wonder whether you can download the video afterwards somewhere...

The only disappointing thing is, no one in my lab has any interests in MATLAB (you "moral" and "free will" guys!), but I don't what to waste my programming skills...

2. Karen recommended Brian Scasselatti at CS Dept at Yale. His research is definitely cool, and I'll explore later!

地址：

http://xuan-littleworld.blogspot.com/2011/10/meeting-with-karen-wynn-from-yale-today.html

New Baby in the Lab... an EYE TRACKER!

Highlight of the Day:
So today, I met the new baby in our lab -- the EYE TRACKER! I'm glad to have him in our lab, because I'm no more the youngest!
The first time I learn about a head-free eye-tracker so systematically!

Lots of reading going on...

Another exciting day with lots of projects going on!

Too lazy to write... I've been reading tons of papers for my research. Chinese readers click here for more details.

Learn some new words such as preppy... and find out that the research project I'm about to carry out was just published!

Highlight of the Day:
Tonight, during working hours in the office, I learned some new words and concepts such as liberal vs conservative, preppy, prep, hippie, hipster, metrosexual... from Jason, Patrick and David on
(Hey! What on earth are you guys chatting about!)

And, my "perceiver effect" has already been published... sad but luckily I still have a handful of ideas to put into practice!

Links of the Day:
1. The Weirdest People in the World. A fundamental challenge to the psychological discoveries that we all agree on! Jump out off our perspective to scrutinize the world!
2. A wandering mind is not a happy mind. One page paper published on science by Daniel Gilbert, who is well-known for his happiness research at Harvard. The methodology rocks!!! Can we apply the real-time recording iPhone App to moral psychology research and more questions in social interaction?
3. Jonathan Haidt made a talk on THE BRIGHT FUTURE OF POST-PARTISAN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY on edge.
The basic idea is:
"This how we like to see ourselves. We social psychologists are supertolerant free thinkers. We celebrate diversity and non-conformity. We boldly follow our science wherever it takes us, and no matter whom it offends. We care only about truth! 
But in reality, we are a tribal moral community. In support of that claim, I made three arguments. I said that, because we have sacred values other than truth, we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don’t share those sacred values. If these statements are true, then I think we must begin some serious discussions about how to turn off the magnet." 

Singing in MetCalf... and reading EDGE starting from Argumentative Theory

I'm gonna start this post with OFFICE ANTICS and turn to very serious discussion on a potentially influential, relatively new, mind-related idea called Argumentative Theory.

I somehow was really elated and felt ecstatic after eating subway and chatting with Xiaotong, my Chinese friend around 6 p.m. So we went to MetCalf 354, where David was working, to look for some fun. I soon started pulled David's hair, sang Chinese songs, and made faces to the camera -- he took a good number of pictures and videos of me, actually! He threatened me that he was gonna post them on Youtube, which was definitely a terrible idea, but I somehow love those very hilarious videos quite a lot!

So let's calm down and talk about serious psychological theory... a BIG IDEA on mind, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology called ARGUMENTATIVE THEORY!

So how important is this idea? See words cited from EDGE:

"Jonathan Haidt digressed to talk about two recently-published papers in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which he believed were "so important that the abstracts from them should be posted in psychology departments all over the country."

So what is AT?

It was intuitively assumed by Western culture that the purpose of reasoning is to make the right decision. But AT challenged this idea by asserting that instead of designed to pursue the truth, reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. Reasoning is to help us justify our beliefs and actions. Therefore, reasoning can be detrimental to rationality in a variety of cases, causing confirmation bias, logical mistakes, statistical failures, etc.

To put it more clear, we can contrast the traditional idea with AT.

The idea that reasoning is for individual purposes has never been challenged for centuries. It seems natural that reasoning helps us to get better beliefs and make better decisions. However, reasoning is a evolutionarily social function. The reason it evolves is to help us to convince others and to evaluate their arguments. 

One evidence is Confirmation Bias, a robust cognitive bias in which when people get an idea and start to reason on that idea, they are mostly likely to gather more information but never challenge themselves. They finally reach to crazy ideas and terrible decisions sometimes. It has long been a mystery, but it becomes understandable with AT -- when people are trying to convince someone, they are always trying to find argument for their side. People are just good at reasoning for arguing. 

Another example is "reason-based choice", in which when people try to reason to make the best decision, they always reach to the choice that they can justify, but is not necessarily good. Again, according to AT, since the goal of reasoning is to find arguments, the one choice that is best supported, not necessarily best, will win. 

Some suggestion implied by AT are: to put yourself into a group to reason better; application in education; deliberative democracy in politics.

At the end of the paper, the author also talked about why evolutionary ideas are also scientific and falsifiable. They also clarified the concept of reasoning by teasing apart conscious reasoning from automatic, spontaneous reaction. I would not go further on these less important points here.

To sum up, there are two fundamental perspectives this theory takes: 

evolutionary psychology 

a social perspective towards reasoning, a cognitive process

And according to AT, reasoning is a motivated, interactive mental activity.

Hope that I have articulated this theory enough.
Some other comments I want to make here:

1) Edge is an amazing place. I'm gonna read one entry per day!
2) Besides, I was also reading on egocentric vs. allocentric spatial representation these days. I think I've kind of digressed from social interaction. I'm considering of going back to social area after I finish these papers on mental rotation and spatial perception.

Starting writing my FIRST Research Proposal after an Exciting Meeting with My Advisor!

For details, see here (Chinese readers)

I didn't know that this is the last waterfire in this year... what a pity!

Know more about your officemates... EXCITING!

Highlight of the Day:
As I've mentioned in my previous posts, our office is a very exciting place. We have got people from areas such as social, moral, neuro, vision, computational, linguistic, etc., and I can imagine how exciting it is to talk with and learn from each other!
So here, I have a good example.
Before I moved to the new office, I always felt kind of lonely, as a social person who is more cognitive. I was quite excited on seeing a neuroanatomy book on J's bookshelf, but it was just the beginning of this story. Somehow J and I started a chatting this evening, probably because I asked him how to pronounce the name "Stephen Kosslyn", and he just commented that this was a famous guy in vision. I found out that J also did some MOT research, and I could even find their papers on Brain Scholl's MOT paper collection! with backgrounds in neuroscience as well as psychology, he's doing some executive control research now. And he has recommended me some people (post-docs and faculty members), and some classes (such as fMRI class by David and Joo-Hyun's seminar) that I should probably take. Ect. ect.
Isn't that great? Just to explore around as a first-year baby in the department!


Links of the day:
As someone interested in big questions, you should definitely check out EDGE!
The idea is, to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

Some other web pages which may not be necessarily interesting in your PERSPECTIVE...
Saxe's lab has a pretty interesting reading list for ToM.
And Kosslyn definitely has some good ideas on mental image.
And about books, I got a atlas on facial expression from evolutionary perspective. Quite light, but interesting and informative, to read!

Being a Subject at CLPS... more than pocket money!

Highlight of the Day:
This is my first night working in the new office. Amazing place! I love it so much! The only thing is, I'm alone in a 7-people office!
I became a subject of Dima's Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab today! I didn't know that we had such a lab! There research on how attention influence short-time memory shows very interesting result! I'll definitely go to the cog seminar tomorrow to hear more!
I want to spend half a week at Harvard as a “PH.D. student” as well. I'm interested how different institutes works... maybe sometime in November!

FIRST Time in MetCalf... Our New Building!!!

Highlight of the Day:
So today is the first day I ever stepped into MetCalf, the new building of our department! I've been holding this trip as a surprise for me for half a month... and now the magic box is finally opened!!!
I fell in love with the new building on first sight! Walking around and seeing so many labs and so many people, knowing that so many interesting things are going on in our department, I know that I should take avantange to explore the fun of psychology and cognitive science!
Isn't it awesome!!!

No link today...
In case you haven't try out Brain Voyager... Do it now!

The FIRST winter break... back in China!

Highlight of the Day:
On finding that the round-ticket from NYC to Shanghai costs only $835 on studentuniverse.com, I let out a scream and rushed out of the office to get my check redeemed... Yes, so the first winter break, no more traveling but back in China. And what is more exciting, I'm gonna celebrate the Spring Festival, the biggest Chinese festival for families to get together, with my parents! I haven't been able to do so for 2 years!

When I was thinking what I should do earlier in September, I feel that I'm obliged to travel to somewhere, eg. Florida, or Colorado, or Seattle, etc. But I soon realized that 1) I have been traveling to so many countries in the past 12 months that the idea of traveling just doesn't appeal to me at all, and 2) the meaning of traveling is not only experiencing new world and interacting with local culture -- I've done enough on Semester At Sea -- but to stay with your loved ones. So I want to go back to China, very much.

Links of the Day:
My knowledge on brain is just horrible... I wonder how I went through all those neuroscience and neurophysiology classes... and it becomes even more challenging for me to understand those terminology in ENGLISH! So I played with Brain Voyager today, relearning about frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, temporal lobe, lateral fissure, central fissure, etc. etc.
I wish I could find a introduction paper explaining the relative positions of the brain areas and fissures... anyone any idea?

This world is BLOWING MY MIND...

Highlight of the Day:
So I had a web-surfing day today, reading on a variety of information from moral psychology to the recent quantum theory and heated discussion on the speed of light.
And what I found on our lab page is my advisor's photo gallery. I don't mean to flatter him (because my advisor won't know about this blog, hopefully), but some of the photos are just breath-taking... I've heard about his good taste for wine, but his good taste, and skills, in photography, is just blowing my mind...
This is my favorite photo.
I feel so stressful for being a grad student of his, haha. But so good to know about his photography :)

And it's not only his photo gallery that blows my mind. Yisha Peng, a senior student at Zhejiang University who attended Stanford University and dropped off school later has started her business in new media with other four team members... So good to know that she's still unbelievably energetic and cheerful!
Besides, I also found a good number of psych blogs, one of them written by a faculty member in CLPS! See Links of the day.

And... for the first time I became the Star of Zhejiang University on renren.com today... Come on! What's that!?? Why don't you guys visit my very serious blog instead!

And... before the end of the day I received an invitation letter from the China Education Symposium @ Harvard to give a talk... how exciting! I know that we're gonna have lots and lots of things to share!

Links of the day:
1. So many psychology blogs here!
2. I found Fiery Cushman's presentation (the same as his first presentation in lab meeting) on the Internet. It was about causation (outcome backward inference) vs. intention (mental state forward inference), or punishment vs. wrongness, and how evolutionary ideas give explanation to these phenomena (punishment to regulate other's behaviors largely regardless of intent vs. wrongness to regulate one's own behaviors). As one of his major ideas, more details can be found on his lab website.
The other thing mentioned in his lab "research" page is the Knobe Effect, in which we infer the intentionality of people's behaviors on moral judgment, esp. we are more likely to ascribe causal responsibility for harm to morally bad agents than good agents, and more likely to describe morally bad behaviors as active rather than passive! This is quite opposite to our gut feeling that we derive moral judgment from whether the agent intended to do so or not. Wired!
3. Seriously, Thomas Serre has got a really wonderful course website for his Computational Vision!

Meet a New Person in My Academic Life

Highlight of the Day:
A little meeting with Joo-Hyun at her place in the afternoon! She is so supportive and cheerful! Bertram, Joo-Hyun and I have long been discussing about doing collaborative research on vision & social cognition (maybe intentionality), and I'm so glad that we finally got time to meet each other! Joo-Hyun and I had a nice talk for the graduate school interview when I was in Ghana, but it was so good to meet her in person!

It was great to find us holding the same research philosophy towards
1) comparing theories in crowded fields vs. creating new big questions
2) be BRAVE! Try your ideas out!
3) Find your true love during PH.D. study.

I'll definitely come back to her and know more about what is going on in vision science -- I miss vision a lot!

A little background information --
Joo-Hyun is a newly arrived faculty member at CLPS, Brown, who does research on visual perception, cognition, and action.
I could meet Joo-Hyun earlier in this semester, if only she has not been injured by a traffic accident! She plans to give us a seminar on visual cognition & perception, attention, consciousness/unconsciousness, etc. in this semester -- how exciting the discussion seems to be!
But now, her doctor urges her to take good rest at home and don't do mental work. What a pity!
Fortunately, she's getting much better. Best wishes to her recovery :)

Links of the day:
I played for a good while with the Neuroscience Academic Family Tree today. An interesting website to track people's academic genealogy .
I found the Human Motion Recognition Database today on Serre's lab page. There're lots of human interactive behaviors as well. Just FYI.
Speaking of behavior database, I found earlier that Bertram also has a quite interesting database with lots of high-quality, mostly human-interaction, intentional/unintentional behavior video clips. Besides, I used to play around at CMU's Motion Capture Database, which is sorted by action category. Hongjing Lu at UCLA also did some research on action understanding with this database, and the paper is recently published. I read it in last December and find this research quite interesting!