Minding the Brain

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9 posts · 2,405 views

At the interface of psychology, neuroscience, and neuropsychology with a focus on computational and statistical modeling.

Dan Mirman
9 posts

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  • August 10, 2012
  • 01:58 PM
  • 384 views

Treating participants (or items) as random vs. fixed effects

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

Connoisseurs of multilevel regression will already be familiar with this issue, but it is the single most common topic for questions I receive about growth curve analysis (GCA), so it seems worth discussing. The core of the issue is that in our paper about using GCA for eye tracking data (Mirman, Dixon, & Magnuson, 2008) we treated participants as fixed effects. In contrast, multilevel regression in general, and specifically the approach described by Dale Barr (2008), which is nearly identic........ Read more »

  • October 29, 2012
  • 10:28 PM
  • 333 views

Embodied cognition: Theoretical claims and theoretical predictions

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

I'm at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Aphasia (50th Anniversary!) in San Francisco. I like the Academy meeting because it is smaller than the other meetings that I attend and it brings together an interesting interdisciplinary group of people that are very passionate about the neural basis of language and acquired language disorders. One of the big topics of discussion on the first day of the meeting was embodied cognition, particularly its claim that semantic knowledge is grounded in........ Read more »

  • August 6, 2012
  • 09:48 AM
  • 323 views

Crawford-Howell (1998) t-test for case-control comparisons

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

Cognitive neuropsychologists (like me) often need to compare a single case to a small control group, but the standard two-sample t-test does not work for this because the case is only one observation. Several different approaches have been proposed and in a new paper just published in Cortex, Crawford and Garthwaite (2012) demonstrate that the Crawford-Howell (1998) t-test is a better approach (in terms of controlling Type I error rate) than other commonly-used alternatives. As I understand it, ........ Read more »

  • August 16, 2012
  • 12:22 PM
  • 251 views

Brain > Mind?

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

My degrees are in psychology, but I consider myself a (cognitive) neuroscientist. That's because I am interested in how the mind works and I think studying the brain can give us important and useful insights into mental functioning. But it is important not to take this too far. In particular, I think it is unproductive to take the extreme reductionist position that "the mind is merely the brain". I've spelled out my position (which I think is shared by many cognitive neuroscientists) in a recent........ Read more »

  • November 12, 2012
  • 01:10 PM
  • 246 views

Complementary taxonomic and thematic semantic systems

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

I am happy to report that my paper with Kristen Graziano (a Research Assistant in my lab) showing cross-task individual differences in strength of taxonomic vs. thematic semantic relations is in this month's issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Mirman & Graziano, 2012a). This paper is part of a cluster of four articles developing the idea that there is a functional and neural dissociation between taxonomic and thematic semantic systems in the human brain.  First, so........ Read more »

Mirman D., & Graziano K.M. (2012) Individual differences in the strength of taxonomic versus thematic relations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(4), 601-609. PMID: 22201413  

Schwartz M.F., Kimberg D.Y., Walker G.M., Brecher A., Faseyitan O.K., Dell G.S., Mirman D., & Coslett H.B. (2011) Neuroanatomical dissociation for taxonomic and thematic knowledge in the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(20), 8520-8524. PMID: 21540329  

  • August 20, 2012
  • 09:50 AM
  • 235 views

The translational pipeline

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

Over the weekend I read yet another excellent article by Atul Gawande in the most recent issue of the New Yorker. There are many interesting things in this article and I highly recommend it, but there was one minor comment that really resonated with my own experience. Dr. Gawande mentioned that it's hard to get health care providers (doctors, nurses, clinicians of all types) to accept changes. This resistance to change is one of the obstacles in the translational research pipeline identifie........ Read more »

  • August 27, 2012
  • 09:30 PM
  • 223 views

Time course of thematic and functional semantics

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

I am pleased to report that our paper on the time course of activation of thematic and functional semantic knowledge will be published in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. This project was led by Solene Kalénine when she was a post-doc at MRRI working with Laurel Buxbaum and me. Humbly, I think this paper is pretty cool for a few different reasons.First, and most central, we found (using eye-tracking) that the knowledge that two thin........ Read more »

  • September 22, 2012
  • 05:00 PM
  • 207 views

The power to see the future is exciting and terrifying

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

In a recent comment in Nature, Daniel Acuna, Stefano Allesina, and Konrad Kording describe a statistical model for predicting h-index. In case you are not familiar with it, h-index is a citation-based measure of scientific impact. An h-index of n means that you have n publications with at least n citations. I only learned about h-index relatively recently and I think it is a quite elegant measure -- simple to compute, not too biased by a single highly-cited paper or by many low-im........ Read more »

Acuna, D.E., Allesina, Stefano, & Kording, Konrad P. (2012) Predicting scientific success. Nature, 489(7415), 201-202. DOI: 10.1038/489201a  

Liu, Shi V. (2006) Top Journals’ Top Retraction Rates. Scientific Ethics, 1(2), 91-93. info:/

  • December 14, 2012
  • 04:47 PM
  • 203 views

Lateralization of word and face processing

by Dan Mirman in Minding the Brain

A few weeks ago I was at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society where, among other interesting talks, I heard a great one by Marlene Behrmann about her recent work showing that lateralization of visual word recognition drives lateralization of face recognition. Lateralization of word and face processing are among the most classic findings in cognitive neuroscience: in adults, regions in the inferior temporal lobe in the left hemisphere appear to be specialized for recognizing visual (i.e......... Read more »

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