On Sunday 23 March, Selina Siu wrote:
>I'm having fun thinking about how the experiment should be set up, and
>this is what I would propose. have a number, say 20, of dogs/cats, who
>are fed a treat out of a black bag or a white bag ...
Excellent thoughts, Selina!
Once upon a time, in the great dark prehistory of high school, I did a
series of experiments patterned after J. B. Rhine's ESP/dice rolling
experiments. It was amusing that the most significant outlier came from
the one person in the class who totally pooh-poohed my project. He got
*no* "correct" answers, which as I remember was something like a
three-sigma chance. He was gratifyingly apoplectic when I used him as
my star (though negative) example.
Since there was no evidence of a physical force turning the dice (I used
a faraday cage wired to detect various changes) I postulated that the
mechanism might be a shift in probabilites, rather than a physical
shift. Probability is "supposed" to follow a normal curve. But while
probability theory (and a good deal of modern science) is based on this
empirical observation, there is little theory behind the normal curve
itself. Changing it to an extreme poisson distribution (fish shaped, the
curve steeper on one side) explained my data fairly well. But now I had
an untestable hypothesis and found myself treading more in the realms of
religion (using the term loosely, and no offense meant) than science.
This doesn't mean that the hypothesis will remain forever untestable, not
does it mean that the observed phenomenon does not exist. It just means
it doesn't fall in the realm of what we ncurrently consider 'scientific'.
Parapsychology experiments seem to lead to this quagmire.
In college, when I had gotten 'serious' about scientific research and
knew better than to go near parapsychology, I still had to tinker. I was
an avid player of games in which you played a character and your actions
are largely dictated by the roll of dice. I noticed that certain players
were "lucky", they always seemed to beat the odds. So I began keeping
records. And sure enough, the data was significant. I began tightening
the parameters. Required the use of certain dice, a dice cup; kept stats
on everyone, not just my stars. And found a correlation, not with the
players, but with the characters they played.
Essentially, if the player cared a lot about a character, the character
would make whatever dice rolls were needed to survive. Oops. Now how
do I quantify "caring"? The experiment foundered on subjectivity.
Selina, I think that you will get a higher correlation if the animal
were to somehow care what bag the treat comes out of. Perhaps associate
praise and petting with one color bag, versus only the treat given with
no skin contact from the other bag.
Emotional color very much affects memory in humans, so it would not be
unreasonable for it to be a factor in non-language communication. What
were you wearing when the World Trade Center towers went down? What were
you wearing a year and a day later, on Sept 12 2002? You have a better
chance of remembering circumstances surrounding the emotion-laden event,
even though it occurred long before the other event. Unfortunately for
designing an experiment, we do not have tools yet for objectively
quantifying emotional color in humans, much less in animals.
Of course, there's always the encouraging thought that the 'science' of
economics is based on no firmer a scientific basis ....
--Claire
Sam: "Mom, you gettin' into all that brain-stuff again? I looked at
that computer and it's NOT doing anything interesting, even behind the
monitor, so stop staring at it and give me a raisin!"
Frankie: "Midmorning. Time to nap. Zzzz"
Missy: "Ha! the box is mine!"
Disclaimer: the above conversation snippets were translated on the basis
of body posture, facial expression, and general activity by the subjects.
Psychic input is not postulated and is not required, but cannot be ruled
out. Occam's razor is a principle, not a law. :-)
[Posted in FML issue 4097]
|
