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Quote: "Our proposal is a new type of paper for animal studies of disease therapies or preventions: one that incorporates an independent, statistically rigorous

• mattkrause 10y ago
  Why would this end psychology? It might make it better, but we're nowhere near being able to describe (e.g.) group behavior from first principles or ion channel kinetics. Despite your link, there is a lot of solid psych research. There are (obviously) discredited theories and cranks too, but psychologists characterized rods and cones way before the biologists found them, for one example.
  • lutusp 10y ago
    > Despite your link, there is a lot of solid psych research. Yes, solid, but lacking the dimension of falsifiable theories about the mind. Tax accounting is also solid research. > ... but psychologists characterized rods and cones way before the biologists found them, for one example. Those weren't psychological studies. Psychology is study of the mind and behavior. Rods and cones are neither. When a psychologist studies something biological, it's not psychology any more.
    • mattkrause 10y ago
      Really? Psychophysics and perception research is widely considered to be part of psychology, and has strong, falsifiable theories about how sensory stimuli are encoded and processed. Using purely behavioural methods, psychophysicists figured out that there were three color-sensitive "sensors" and pinned down their properties. I'm not sure it suddenly becomes biology because someone later found the cellular substrate, nor did it become chemistry when someone figured out the structure of opsin. Likewise, I'd argue that a lot of the learning stuff (e.g., reinforcement learning) also describes the mind's operation in testable and falsifiable ways.
      • lutusp 10y ago
        > Psychophysics and perception research is widely considered to be part of psychology ... Not according to the APA, nor how psychology is formally defined. http://www.apa.org/support/about-apa.aspx?item=7 http://www.apa.org/support/about-apa.aspx?item=7 Quote: "Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior." > and has strong, falsifiable theories about how sensory stimuli are encoded and processed. Studies that aren't based on empirical evidence, that aren't based on theories about nature, cannot be falsified. We know a lot about behavior, but we have no empirical theories about it -- for that, we have to wait for neuroscience. > I'm not sure it suddenly becomes biology because someone later found the cellular substrate, nor did it become chemistry when someone figured out the structure of opsin. Of course it becomes biology/chemistry. But the connection between someone's ideas about the mind and biology can only be conjecture until neuroscience produces a physical theory that makes such a connection -- and at that point, mind studies will be abandoned. > ... also describes the mind's operation in testable and falsifiable ways. The mind is not a physical thing, consequently it cannot produce empirical evidence or falsifiability, two of science's fundamental requirements. If one psychological experiment asserts that X is so, and another asserts that X is not so, that's not a falsification, it's a contradiction. The difference? A contradiction can itself be contradicted in another experiment (something often seen in psychology), but a scientific falsification is conclusive. All this talk about empirical evidence, theories and falsifiability may seem overly philosophical until one realizes this is how we keep religion out of science classrooms.
        • mattkrause 10y ago
          Let me give you an example, from visual perception. The "Feature Integration Theory" suggests that low-level image features are processed in parallel: you extract information about the color, orientation, and movement in parallel across the entire visual field. However, these representations are separate, and a second, serial process is needed to combine information across the two areas. This makes a specific, testable predictions. Suppose you're searching for a red triangle. If this shape is embedded in a sea of green triangles, your reaction time shouldn't vary as a function of the green triangles. The same thing should happen if the red triangle is surrounded by red circles--reaction times should be relatively constant regardless of the number of red circles. However, if you need to find a red triangle embedded in a mix of red circles and green triangles, you should a) be slower and b) your reaction time should be a function of the total number of shapes. I'd argue that this theory is empirical (run the experiment, record reaction times) and about as falsifiable as it gets (it's easy to test the difference in RT. vs. item # slopes). I'd also argue that this is a computational theory describing how visual search works, without worrying about the underlying implementation of that process. Clearly, it would be interesting to know that too, but it's certainly not necessary. David Marr proposed that cognitive processes could be studied on three levels: computational (what's the problem), algorithmic (what's a way to solve the problem), and implementation (what do the neurons do to run that algorithm), and each level was largely independent of the ones below.