Metaphors and Oscillatory Dynamics at SPP

This weekend I attended my first conference of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. I had some wonderfully creative interactions with very interesting people:

1.Michael Anderson of Franklin and Marshall presented very innovative work on the functional architecture of the brain using graph theory. Our later discussions lead to a number of unique insights, including the connection between the spatial/topological social organizations that favor the spread of defection and neural organizations that promote the spread of entrained neural firing (leading to epilepsy). We also discussed various manufacturing and transportation metaphors for information processing in the brain. Briefly, sensory input (raw materials) are often locally processed, becoming value added products (parts) which are then transported to more central areas along the corpus callosum where they are combined with other products, then outputted to the rest of the body (exported). These ideas both originated from some interesting new data on the white matter pathways in the brain that are soon to be published in PLOS Biology.

2.Tony Chemro, also of Franklin and Marshall, had many interesting things to tell me about oscillators and entrainment, two of my favorite topics. In addition to a very stimulating conversation about whether you can do anything (including complex social cognition and behavior) with enough responsive oscillators, he pointed me to the work of Richard C. Schmidt, Doug Eck, Mari Jones and others who work on rhythmic behavior and oscillatory dynamics.

3.George Ainslie, a specialist in the area of intertemporal choice (decision making about the future), and I discussed the oscillatory dynamics underlying addiction, in particular the speeding up of the period of the oscillators underlying approach behavior. He also described the delicate balance that must be achieved in imagining of positive future outcomes: too little (not reinforcing enough) or too much joy (so reinforcing that the individual only daydreams) can both lead to decreased motivation to engage in the actual pursue that of that goal. We discussed the importance of properly yoking the positively reinforcing ‘images’ of success to process of making progress towards that final goal.

4.Richard Samuels suggested to me an interesting parameter to add to my SIMPLE model (described in the first chapter of my dissertation, downloadable from my research page). In the present model, agents can store energy inside their somatic boundaries, where they are unavailable to others, or in their local environment, where they are partially available to others. Dr. Samuels suggested that an interesting modification to make would be to create a parameter that specified the accessibility (to others) of somatically stored resources. In other words, this parameter could specify the likelihood that other entities can ‘take’ energy belonging to another agent. This kind of approach could be used to model many kinds of predator/prey, host/parasite and intraspecies exploitation interactions in SIMPLE.

Turing machines and parallel computation in the SIMPLE model

In my trip to Reed a few weeks ago, I was asked a very clever question after my talk on my SIMPLE model (a general model of social behavior that I developed for first chapter of my dissertation, downloadable from my research page). Greg Jenson, Allen Neuringer’s very smart Research Assistant, asked me “Have you ever thought about this model as a turing machine with multiple heads?” The answer was then no, but I have since thought about this almost daily and have been speculating that SIMPLE might be even more general than I had previously thought. In addition to being a general model of social interaction, it builds on the most general principles of computation.

In SIMPLE (Simulation of agent Interaction through Movement and Production in a Local Environment), agents move along a ring made up of several hundred unique cells, changing the energy level on those cells as they produce and consume energy. This is analogous to a turing machine which has a tape (in SIMPLE, the environment) with multiple squares containing information (energy), a head that can read the tape and alter it (adding or taking away energy) , a table which specifies how the tape is altered and how the head should move based on what is read and current state of the head (decision rules for movement, production and consumption), and a state register which tracks the present state of the head (read more about turing machines on Wikipedia).

It can easily be demonstrated that a turing machine with multiple heads is equivalent to one with just one head. I suspect that the ability of heads to replicate, mutate and terminate themselves (as they can in the SIMPLE model) leads to surprising dynamics that might be difficult to intuit from considering a turing machine with just one head (even though they are analytically equivalent).

Reminiscing and representing at Reed College

My undergraduate thesis advisor, Allen Neuringer, a wonderfully creative, personable, and highly renowned Psychologist is retiring this coming year. In his honor, the Psychology Department at Reed held a conference-style reunion for academic and non-academic Psychologists from all graduating years. Allen has done tremendously interesting work on the reinforcement of variable behavior and is a proponent of self-experimentation. He has been an extraordinary mentor to me and to generations of Reed graduates.

On the first day of the associated conference, I presented my new work on the “SIMPLE” model, a general model of social behavior (see the research page of my website) and had the opportunity to meet a number of researchers with unconventional approaches to scientific inquiry. Among the highlights were:

1) meeting and developing a potential collaboration with Jon Schull of Rochester Institute of Technology on innovation and agent-environment interaction

2) talking with Seth Roberts, self-experimenter, author of the book “The Shangri-La Diet,” and professor emeritus at Berkley, about the potential importance of oscillations in resource availability (and other environmental inputs) in shaping eating and social behavior, and

3) hearing Michael Owren’s talk on laughter and speaking with him afterwards about the relationship between his theoretical approach to signaling and the passive/active signaling distinction I developed in the final chapter of my dissertation.