Results for “michelle dawson”

194 found

They titled the piece "Older but not Wiser."  Here is the summary result:

Michael Callaham, editor-in-chief of the Annals of Emergency Medicine in San Francisco, California, analysed the scores that editors at the journal had given more than 1,400 reviewers between 1994 and 2008. The journal routinely has its editors rate reviews on a scale of one to five, with one being unsatisfactory and five being exceptional. Ratings are based on whether the review contains constructive, professional comments on study design, writing and interpretation of results, providing useful context for the editor in deciding whether to accept the paper.

The average score stayed at roughly 3.6 throughout the entire period. The most surprising result, however, was how individual reviewers' scores changed over time: 93% of them went down, which was balanced by fresh young reviewers coming on board and keeping the average score up. The average decline was 0.04 points per year.

"I was hoping some would get better, and I could home in on them. But there weren't enough to study," says Callaham. Less than 1% improved at any significant rate, and even then it would take 25 years for the improvement to become valuable to the journal, he says.

I thank Michelle Dawson for the pointer; I wonder when the editor who ran the study, Callaham, thinks he should resign.  He's totally gray.

Michelle Dawson (without endorsing it) directs my attention to this paper:

The evolutionary status of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is central to assessments of whether modern society has created it, either physically or socially; and is potentially useful in understanding its neurobiological basis and treatment. The high prevalence of ADHD (5–10%) and its association with the seven-repeat allele of DRD4, which is positively selected in evolution, raise the possibility that ADHD increases the reproductive fitness of the individual, and/or the group. However, previous suggestions of evolutionary roles for ADHD have not accounted for its confinement to a substantial minority. Because one of the key features of ADHD is its diversity, and many benefits of population diversity are well recognized (as in immunity), we study the impact of groups’ behavioural diversity on their fitness. Diversity occurs along many dimensions, and for simplicity we choose unpredictability (or variability), excess of which is a well-established characteristic of ADHD. Simulations of the Changing Food group task show that unpredictable behaviour by a minority optimizes results for the group. Characteristics of such group exploration tasks are risk-taking, in which costs are borne mainly by the individual; and information-sharing, in which benefits accrue to the entire group. Hence, this work is closely linked to previous studies of evolved altruism.

We conclude that even individually impairing combinations of genes, such as ADHD, can carry specific benefits for society, which can be selected for at that level, rather than being merely genetic coincidences with effects confined to the individual. The social benefits conferred by diversity occur both inside and outside the ‘normal’ range, and these may be distinct. This view has the additional merit of offering explanations for the prevalence, sex and age distribution, severity distribution and heterogeneity of ADHD.

Overall the argument is weak because it relies too much on group selection.  An alternative tack is to admit that ADHD, and correlated traits, can have cognitive advantages and thus survival and mating advantages.  One simple story is that many people with ADHD can use their "jumpiness" to propel themselves to sample and learn extra new pieces of information.  The current distribution of identified cases from the ADHD population likely suffers from selection bias, namely that it identifies ADHD cases associated with greater life problems.

Addendum: Jerry Fodor has a recent paper challenging common applications of evolutionary psychology; Razib defends Darwin.

The always-interesting-and-still-underrated Michelle Dawson points me to this batch of work.  Here is one of the papers, by Keith E. Stanovich and Richard F. West:

In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. These thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, “less is more” effects, affect biases, omission bias, myside bias, sunk-cost effect, and certainty effects that violate the axioms of expected utility theory. In a further experiment, the authors nonetheless showed that cognitive ability does correlate with the tendency to avoid some rational thinking biases, specifically the tendency to display denominator neglect, probability matching rather than maximizing, belief bias, and matching bias on the 4-card selection task. The authors present a framework for predicting when cognitive ability will and will not correlate with a rational thinking tendency.

Even more interesting, in my view, is that higher-IQ people are more likely to behave rationally when they are told that a rationality issue is on the table, but less so otherwise. 

If you are interested in issues of IQ, or for that matter overcoming bias, you should read Stanovich's work.  As noted above, higher-IQ people seem to be just as guilty of "myside bias."

Stanovich has a new book summarizing some of the results, namely What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought.  It is more idiosyncratic than the articles (he overcommits to one very particular model of the mind; cognitive laziness, without regard for margin) but recommended nonetheless.  For those who care about these issues, a must.

You may have heard about the recent study by Mark Kishiyama et.al. described by USA Today as follows:

A new study finds that certain brain functions of some low-income 9-
and 10-year-olds pale in comparison with those of wealthy children and
that the difference is almost equivalent to the damage from a stroke.

Here is more detail:

…[they] rigged up the noggins of 26 kids — with an average age of 9.5 years —
with probes that sense the ebb and flow of electrical current in
different regions of the brain. Then, they put them through a battery
of neuropsychological tests. Half of the kids came from families with
annual incomes that averaged just over $27,000 and generally had low
levels of parental education; the other half came from families where a
primary caregiver had completed at least four years of college and in
which annual household income averaged a little more than $97,000.

The paper is here.  Who better to ask about this than Michelle Dawson?  Michelle wrote to me:

I read the poor vs rich
kids brains study (Kishiyama et al.). It’s a very small study (13 in
each group) and the groups aren’t matched on ethnicity. In the major
task (the one which got media attention), where the authors looked at
ERPs [TC: here is a link on ERP], the performance of the two groups was the same. The performance
of the two groups on a Stroop task, a classic test of what the poor
kids are said to be incapable of, was also the same. The major
performance difference between groups was on vocabulary (the WISC-III
vocabulary test), but only a few tests were used. There was no attempt
to match the groups on IQ.

Just to repeat two key points: a) the observed difference in electrical current patterns may depend on IQ differences, not poverty, and b) on the actual major task the poor kids did just as well.  There are tasks where the poor children do less well but this is hardly news.

Popular science reporting on neuro issues is very often not to be trusted.

Addendum: There is more from Michelle Dawson in the comments.