Both of my daughters play team sports. Club sports, recreational leagues, competitive leagues, and high school teams. It’s part of the fabric in our community and it’s also a bit of cultural heritage as well. Team sports are part of growing up for many middle class Canadians and Americans. And of course I played a lot of different sports in high school and my wife did as well. So we probably passed that on to our own kids.

Benefits of team sports

Team sports have a lot of obvious benefits. There’s the physical activity aspect for sure and team sports can be a fun way to stay in good physical condition because you’re often with your friends. But there’s also a benefit to being a part of a group that has a shared goal. And sports like baseball/softball, soccer, and football have multiple problem solving components too. Each play in a baseball game requires fast decision making and might depend on a quick access to the probability of various outcomes (and don’t get me started on the physics of baseball). Team sports offer the potential to work on social skills, like how to achieve things with people who might not be like you. And of course, how to win and lose effectively and with some dignity.

The downsides

There are some down sides to many team sports, however. Risk of injury in general and concussions in particular are a major concern. I played youth football from the late 1970s through late 1980s. Ten years of getting hit on the offensive / defensive line. If a player sustained a bad hit, the coach might say “it’s just a concussion, shake it off”. I remember those words, just a concussion. We now know that this is a major concern for long term brain heath. Growing up in Western PA in the 70s and 80s, the Steelers were a huge presence. Mike Webster, one of the greatest centers to play the game, suffered greatly because of the severe brain damage he sustained as a result of playing the game. It’s a truly harrowing story. I don’t think I’d let my own kids play football because of the risks to brain health.

Lack of access

Team they are not available to everyone, including people with limited mobility. There are financial constraints for club sports, though many organization subsidize the participation. Some sports, hockey in particular, can cost several thousands of dollars per year for competitive players. High school sports programs offer a way to reduce that disparity. By using school funds, which are essentially public, the cost to play can be lower. Of course, in some regions, funding for school is inequitable and so the disparity is still there. It’s why I cringe when I hear that a school or a district has to cut funding for some of their athletic programs, especially low cost sports like soccer, track, or wrestling.

Wrestling as a unique sport

Wrestling was one of the many sports I tried in high school. It was not my best sport (that was football) but I recognized it as being a terrifically demanding sport and one with incredible transformative power. Wrestling is somewhat unique among youth sports. For one, it’s very low cost. It’s available to individuals from diverse backgrounds, and it also a sport in which people of many different ability can compete. I once wrestled against a boy without legs who might not have been able to complete in baseball, football, or track but was able to compete in wrestling in the same divisions as everyone else. Wrestling is one of the most egalitarian sports I know.

It’s also brutal to lose a wrestling match. There’s a technically a team (your school and the people you train with) but when you compete it’s just you and the other person. It’s not a team loss when you lose the match. It’s just you losing. And when you lose, it’s not just a matter of not scoring enough points, or failing to get a goal, it’s that you were beaten by another person. Most sports can teach you how to lose. Wrestling can teach you how it feels to be beaten. It’s not a good feeling. You can’t shift the blame.

I was talking with my dad the other day, about my daughters on their softball and hockey teams and he mentioned that he loved watching me play football but could not bear to watch me wrestle. I won a few matches, but mostly had a losing record. It’s not fun to watch your son struggle against another boy, only to be pinned down. Of all the sports I’ve participated in those 3 years as a wrestler probably affected me the most. The intensity, the competition, and the combativeness are things I still remember even 30 years later.

I only wrestled for a few years, and did not compete much my senior year. I started running in university (a habit, by the way, that I developed as an offshoot of wresting conditioning practice) and decided that the individual nature of running middle and long distance appealed to me most. I still run, almost every day. It’s a sport that can be competitive or not, solitary or with friends. I can dial back the competitive aspect or ramp it up as things change.

Conclusion

The sports I played, football, wrestling, running, softball, were only a small part of what I did growing up. But I’m glad I had the opportunity. It’s why we encourage our girls to participate, now. It’s why I still run. It’s why I volunteer to coach and convene programs.

In my view, the benefits outweigh the costs, and as improvements are made in safety protocol, the costs can be reduced further.

“Correlation does not imply causation” is a well-worn phrase, an expression used to explain things, and (often) to smugly shut down an argument. There’s a meta effect in which the phrase has some causal power: it can cause an argument to be discarded.

Of course, though, correlation often does imply causation. Cause and effect are most definitely correlated. Pearson even designed his correlation coefficient as an index of the strength of causation. It’s just that correlation is not enough to allow a valid causal inference to be made.

Causality and the Cat

Sometimes, even direct causal links are not even enough to infer causation. My cat has an annoying habit that illustrates this.

Every morning at around 5:00am, without fail, she carries out a complicated routine in my bedroom. She starts by meowing loudly and then begins picking at the door to the closet. This reverberates loudly, enough to wake me. She will rattle the window blinds and sometimes open and slam the door to the room, and then start picking at that door. These are all loud enough, and unrelenting enough to cause me to get up, at 5:30, and head downstairs where I feed her. And today, she might have even caused me to write this essay.

These events, picking at the door and me getting up, are highly correlated. But are they causally linked? I like to imagine the cat thinks they are. That somewhere in the recesses of her dusty little cat-mind, she believes that she and she alone caused me to get up and feed her. This, I believe anthropomorphically, causes a sense of independent agency in the cat. She has purpose. She has power. Certainly, there is strong behavioural association and that’s why she continues to engage in the behaviour.

What is the candidate for causality?

Did the cat actually cause me to wake up, though? That’s not clear. There are many mediators that are outside her control that are also candidates for the cause. My own desire to wake up early is a cause. The motivation is already there and in fact I’d probably wake up around the same time anyway (though without the irritation that may have been caused by her routine). Another candidate is my desire to stop her from making noise that would wake others in the family. And I have to use the washroom. And I want to make coffee.

So the question I asked this morning was: Did she cause me to wake up or did she simply contribute to a larger causal model?

Or, did I actually cause her behaviours by getting up and reinforcing her actions, thus establishing and contributing to the symphony of slamming, picking, and pestering that seems like the cause but is actually the effect of my early rising habit? There really is no simple answer.

We are all creatures of habit

Casual reasoning, thinking about cause and effect and attempting to determine the cause, is not easy to do but yet we tend to do it anyway, almost without trying. Even in a fairly mundane scenario like the cat waking me up (or me waking up while the cat does behaviours) it’s easy to think about what is causing things, but it’s hard to establish casualty.

Like my cat, we too are creates of habit. We have a habit to look for causality in the world. These tendencies are reinforced by the correlations we observe. And because of that, we can’t stop from believing in causes that are correlated and easy to observe.

The sunrise at Western University, as seen from my 7th floor lab.

November 30, 2017

I feel very unfocused lately, and I think I know why. When I was writing my two grant proposals in October, I really felt like I had control of my ideas. I felt like I knew what I was working on and what I wanted to be doing with my research program, my graduate student, and trainees. This is a great feeling and I was filled with the satisfaction of not only working hard on the proposals but also of having so many ideas and projects that I wanted to pursue. I could not wait to get started on some of the new projects.

But right after they were submitted, I rested. This seems natural, for course, for I’d worked hard and wanted to celebrate a job well done and relax a bit. Also I had just undergone a minor surgery, so some recovery time was needed. But a week later, I needed to turn to other things that Required my attention, and before I realized what had happened, I was overwhelmed with our departmental job searches and my office and lab’s move to the new building. My research ideas, having been developed and nurtured in the NSERC and SSHRC proposals, languished from the inattention.

That is, I worked. I seemed to have it together, I rested, and it all seemed to slip away.

It was like the 7th day.

In the creation myth in Genesis, God worked hard to create the universe and then he rested. And then right after that, right after sitting back, looking with satisfaction at what he’d done, and cracking open a divine beer, he seems to lose focus…humans took over, they started killing each other, and he can’t really seem remember why he created us in the first place, or what his plan is. He takes it out on us. He starts to clearly resent his work…he keeps coming back to it every so often, but the magic is gone. He rested and lost focus.

I think this is a metaphor that is often unexplored in the Bible (or maybe it is interpreted this way, I’m really not up on Bible scholarship). The creation myth can be seen as a story about what happens when you rest on your laurels and stop working on something. You step back and get caught up in other things and you lose you train of thought. The ideas fade, they take a back seat, and it can be so difficult to get back in control, that you risk starting to resent the ideas.

I think that’s the underlying theme in Genesis: God rested and the universe took a back seat. It got out of hand and he never quite got it back the way he wanted. He started to resent the work and even tried to destroy it.

The inevitability of forward motion.

I’m not trying to say I’m God here, but I am supposed to be in control of my research program. And there are times when I’m in the middle of working on a project, or paper, or grant that I really think I can see the big picture. I can glimpse a bigger vision for my research on cognition, concepts, and categories. I think I’ve created something worthwhile. But damnit, if I step way for a week and get caught up in a PhD defence, or faculty hiring, committee work, or the like, it can be so hard to put things back together.

And the lesson in Genesis seems to be: you can’t. You can’t put it back in that pristine state. But you can’t give up either. You have to let the ideas work themselves out. You have to come back and not be afraid to admit you made a mistake. Sometimes you start over or learning new skills. You may have to look at things from a new perspective while realizing that you can’t ever get back to the garden.

I’m not a religious believer… but I think there’s still a good lesson here: Even the divine creator has trouble keeping it together after a break.

The newest salvo in the psychology’s “reproducibility crisis” is not in social psychology, but is hitting the field of psycholinguistics. In this case, the evidence is mounting that the so called “bilingualism advantage” may not be an advantage after all. Worse, it may be something like the Mozart Effect for psycholinguistics…That is, an effect that is plausible and desirable enough (and marketable) that we all believe it and ignore reputable counter evidence.

Full disclose, our children have attended a French Immersion school, and as we live in a country with two official languages, I think it’s important to know some of both. But I’m not bilingual myself (6 years of German in high school and university, but I no longer speak it). So I like the idea of a second language. And I like the idea of the bilingual advantage too. I’ve assumed that this advantage is present and measurable, but now I’m not so sure. This controversy is worth paying attention to.

The Bilingual Advantage

The story goes like this. People who speak two languages fluently are constantly switching between them. They have to inhibit one language in order to respond in the other. And because switching and inhibition are two of most well-known and well-studied aspects of the cognitive control system known as the executive functions, it’s assumed that bilinguals would be especially adept at these behaviours. And if they are good and switching and inhibiting within language, they may have a general executive functioning advantage for behaviours as well.

Ellen Bialystok at York University and others have investigated this claim and have produced quite a lot of data in favour of the idea that general executive functioning abilities are superior in bilinguals relative to English speaking persons. The advantages might also persist into old age and the may guard against cognitive decline in aging. Dr. Bialystock’s work is extensive has relied on many different measures and she’s arguably one of the towing figures in psycholinguistics.

Does this work Generalize?

An article in Feb 2016 in The Atlantic has suggested that recent attempts to replicate and generalize some of this work have not been successful. Specifically, the work of  Kenneth Paap, at San Francisco State has argued that there is no general advantage for bilinguals and that any advantages are either very local (confined to language) or are artifacts of small sample size studies with idiosyncratic groups. Systematic attempts to replicate the work have not been successful. Reviews of published studies found evidence of publication bias. And other psychologists have found the same thing. In other words, according to Paap, whatever advantages these groups might have shown in early studies, they can’t really be attributed to bilingualism.

The Battle Lines

By all accounts, this is a showdown of epic proportions. According to the Atlantic article, Paap has thrown the gauntlet down and said  (paraphrased) “Let’s work together, register the studies, collect good data, and get to the bottom of it.” Even a co-author of one of the most well-cited bilingualism advantage papers is now questioning the work. My colleague at Western, J. Bruce Morton, is quoted as saying:

“If people were really committed to getting to the bottom of this, we’d get together, pool our resources, study it, and that would be the end of the issue. The fact that people won’t do that suggest to me that there are those who are profiting from either perpetuating the myth or the criticism.”

But proponents of the advantage are not interested in this, suggesting that the Paap and others are not properly controlling their work and also pointing to their recent work with brain imaging (which gets away from the less than idea executive functioning tasks but also could fall prey to the Seductive allure of Neuroscience…which is another topic for another day).

This is, I think, a real scientific controversy. I think we should get to the bottom of it. If the advantage is robust and general, then it’s going to show up in these newer studies. If it’s not, then it becomes an outmoded idea (like so many in psychology and in science). That’s progress. There is the risk that inherent appeal of the advantage will allow it to persist even if the science does not back it it, and that’s problematic.

I’m writing this to crowdsource and to get advice on course design, so this might not be the most interesting blog entry I’ve ever written. But if this is the kind of thing that intrigues you…read on!

I teach a graduate seminar on cognition every two years. It’s one of the required courses for our cognition graduate students (Master’s and PhD) and covers the fundamental issues in the field, and also to help prepare students for the PhD exams. I usually have a few students from other areas in psychology (e.g. social psychology) as well as student from other departments (philosophy, neuroscience, and business). I’ve run this class since 2007, and I’m thinking of overhauling some of the topics for the Fall 2015 session. An example of the most recent syllabus can be found HERE.

The basic course

The official description of the course as it stands now is as follows.

“This course aims to provide graduate students with exposure to classic and current research in cognitive psychology. We will read and discuss articles on the major topics in the field, including high-level perception, categorization, attention, working memory, knowledge, language, and thought. The readings will encompass theoretical approaches, behavioural research, computational modelling, and cognitive neuroscience. Meetings will follow a seminar format, in which students will discuss the readings for each class. To frame the discussion for each meeting, the instructor will provide background and any needed tutorials. Marks will be based on participation and written work.”

The class has a midterm, a final paper, and discussion papers. I cover topics like:

• “Viewpoint Independent vs. Viewpoint Dependent Theories of Object Recognition“
• “Theories of Working Memory”
• “Inductive Reasoning: Similarity-based or Theory-based?”
• “Categorization: Prototypes vs. Exemplar models”

This is all pretty standard graduate seminar material. But I’m thinking of updating some topics and in particular  updating the way the course is run. I’m not sure the standard format is the best, and the last time I ran a seminar (not this one, but a class on “Concepts and Categories” ). I felt that it was not working well. Discussion did not flow, I talked too much, there was a lack of enthusiasm. This was not due to the students, but I think was a result of my not leading it well, and the limitations of the standard seminar format.

A new format

I’m planning to keep some the topics, but add in new newer ones that could be challenging or debate-worthy. For example

• “The Dual-Process Approach of Thinking”
• “What are Mental Representations and Are They Needed for a Theory of Cognition?“
• “Cognitive Heuristics: Helpful or Harmful”.
• “Is Vision Strictly Visual: Vision as Action, Evidence from Blind Echolocation, and Visual imagery“

Each class would have around 4-5 papers assigned which would be a mix of classic, standard papers, and new perspectives on that issue. If possible, I will assign readings that cover two sides to an issue. In the past, there are usually 10-15 people in people in this seminar, and it meets for three hours, typically two 1:15 sections and  short break.

Here are four possible ways to run a class. I’ve usually used  the first two…Sometimes it works well, sometimes it works less well.

1. The Standard Seminar. Each class is a discussion of the central issues. I provide 3 or 4 central questions (or maybe a brief outline) that students can prepare for. Rather than discuss each paper in detail, we will try to answer the central questions but will use the assigned readings as a guide.

2. Student-led Discussions. Each class can have one student assigned to be the discussion leader. Alternatively, I act as discussion leader, but there is one student assigned to present each paper.

3. The Debate Team. Each class is framed around a debate and there will be two teams. Each team consists of a leader and two panelists. They will face off and the remaining students will asses and judge the winner and provide feedback. A three hour class could have one or more debates. Throughout the course of the class, there will be several opportunities to be on an debate team.

4. The Shark Tank. This format is like a debate, but one team is selling the idea and the other team is an antagonist. Students make a 10 min presentation of the paper, theory, or idea and then defend the ideas in the paper, and the the sharks question and critique the ideas. Sharks decide to accept the idea and invest, or pass. The rest of the class participates by assessing the performance of the sharks an the presenters.

Ideas?

So if you were taking a course like this, which if these formats would you enjoy most? Which format do you think might promote the best mastery of the material, the best engagement? Are there other ways to run a graduate seminar that I have not tried?

Maybe I should use a mix of formats? Some classes will be standard discussion while others will be debates?

I’d welcome and appreciate any suggestions, critiques, and ideas.