Morning Song and Memory

On occasion I like to make note of some of the little things that make me go "oh, well that's rather nifty!" from time to time, and this morning I definitely experienced a bit of random niftiness.

Specifically, I was walking along my usual route to the lab where I volunteer and messing about with a fun ipod touch app called Bebot. Bebot is a surprisingly powerful synthesizer (for music or just random funny sound-effect making) that has a cute animated robot graphic on its main interface. And I was just sort of running my fingers over the surface when I noticed I had inadvertently hit a sequence of notes that sounded really familiar.

When I realized why this sequence sounded familiar, I stopped walking (in front of a restaurant I knew had open wi-fi access) and plugged the phrase "what is the music they play in cartoons during morning scenes?" into Google's search box.

Lo and behold, the very first link that came up in the results answered my question, awkwardly phrased as it was. The link led to a page on a site called Kick Ass Classical, where someone had kindly posted the titles of two possible songs a person entering a query such as mine might be looking for.

Not only that, but they had also included audio samples, which meant I was able to listen to bits of both candidates. Sure enough, the second piece noted was the one I'd been thinking of -- turns out it's called (unsurprisingly) Morning (or Morning Mood), by Romantic-era composer Edvard Grieg.

This probably won't be news to the innumerable folks whose cultural literacy exceeds my own, but I was interested to learn that this song (which I personally associated with animated sunrises) originally appeared in Grieg's incidental music for the Ibsen play Peer Gynt.

Anyway, I've definitely been running into this sort of thing more and more recently...that is, randomly thinking of something, having only a tiny piece of information about it, and yet being able to hack together a search phraase that lets me find out more or just confirm a vague memory or notion about whatever it is I'm thinking of.

Of course this phenomenon doesn't strike me as any sort of Great Grand Harbinger of Impending Technological Utopia, but it's still really neat. It rather amuses me as well that The Internet(TM) is associated for so many people with Progress! and The Future(TM)! and yet one of its most interesting emerging capabilities is that of enabling us to more effectively peer into the past or fill in the missing pieces of an incomplete memory.

Cat Cognition Capers: Knocking Stuff Over Edition

(A sort-of followup to Cats, Dogs, Strings, and Causality and A Small, Informal Cat Cognition Experiment)

Today I tried looking up studies and/or scholarly articles on the phenomenon of Cats Knocking Things Over, but didn't come up with any interesting results. The majority of writing on this subject seems to be in the context of advice on "cat behavior problems", e.g., Dealing With Cats That Knock Things Down, How can I get my cat to stop knocking stuff over?, etc.

(Of course, if anyone has any links to papers on this subject please feel free to share!)

But anyway. It occurred to me, upon seeing Shadow (one of three ex-feral littermates sharing my home) push a container of cat treats off my desk for the nth time earlier today, that (if it was indeed being done deliberately) such an action might represent a fairly well-developed understanding of certain physical principles. I.e., the fact that if one cannot readily access the contents of a treat-containing object, one might be able to gain access via utilizing the tendency of objects to fall over when pushed or similarly manipulated.

(Full disclosure: as a person on the autistic spectrum who is also interested in neuroscience and relevant cognitive research, I must admit it tends to catch my attention whenever I encounter what to me looks like an interesting ability or trait, in any species, being largely written off as a "behavior problem". Often it seems to me something is being missed when this occurs, so I'm driven to investigate in situations like this!)

Certainly the standard "I am not a professional researcher, this was all done completely informally, my home is not a laboratory, etc." disclaimer must be applied to these results. Moreover, I am well aware that interpretation is not data (and vice versa), and in truth the only thing that can be said for sure is that at least one of my cats pretty consistently knocks over objects when is is conceivable that he has reason to believe these objects could contain treats.

The following three videos appear in chronological order. All were filmed on 5 September 2010, in the afternoon, within the space of maybe twenty minutes.

In this first video ("Cats and Gravity I"), Shadow is shown pushing a sealed container of treats off my desk.



He had precedent for doing this, as this particular container is the usual one I put the kitties' daily allotment of treats in. Once, about a week ago, I left the lid part-way off, to see what he would do (seeing as he'd definitely be able to smell the treats within). And in that case he proceeded to nudge the container around with his nose until it fell off the table, scattering treats hither and thither, much to his and his siblings' delight.

Now, I am fairly certain that this first knockdown was an accident. However, since then, Shadow has pushed the treat container off multiple other surfaces (besides the coffee table), on multiple separate occasions. "Cats and Gravity I", then, seems like it could very well represent Shadow's having learned that "if I push this container, sometimes treats fall out!" I don't know that anyone in the cognitive research field actually believes this level of reasoning is beyond the domestic feline (I suspect not) but in any event, it makes for a good "baseline" data point in terms of the variables I am interested in observing.

In this next video ("Cats and Gravity II"), we have an interesting situation involving three cats. You may remember Coraline and Brodie from all those string and zip-tie trials I ran as a rough check of what experimental design conditions might be improved so that cats could better demonstrate their actual cognitive capacities in string-pulling tasks. In the case of that set of puzzles, Cora and Brodie were the only participating felines; Shadow preferred to simply watch.



However, in "Cats and Gravity II", you will observe that Brodie "experiments" with the treat-containing bottle but doesn't succeed in getting anything out of it, whereas Shadow makes one single decisive swipe and sends the thing crashing down. Note that this bottle is different from the treat container in the first video, but it is one that I've put treats in several times prior to this, so the cats would definitely be familiar with it.

(Coraline, meanwhile, is ignoring the whole business and seems more excited about the fact that I've gotten up from my computer chair, giving her an opening to steal it. To me this mainly suggests that at different points in time, different cats may have very different priorities!)

And then we come to "Cats and Gravity III". The outcome of this scenario completely caught me off guard (you may even be able to hear me exclaim "HOLY CRAP!" at one point). In this case I took a treat container that would be new to all the cats (another empty vitamin bottle, this time a dark purple one slightly larger than the white one used in "Cats and Gravity II"). I let them watch me putting treats into it, and then placed this bottle on top of a small end table in the living room (a different surface in a different part of the house than my desk, to control for position habit).



In this case, the video shows that initially none of the cats really showed interest in the new treat bottle when I first placed it on the end table. However, after I went over and shook it a bit, Shadow went over to the table, put his front paws on the top surface, and then proceeded to lift the bottle up with his mouth and throw it down onto the floor. (That's where I exclaimed "HOLY CRAP!", by the way.)

So...what to make of this?

Subjectively speaking (yes, I'm about to offer an interpretation), it looked to me like Shadow spontaneously came up with a really creative way of getting the treats he knew were inside the purple bottle. Which would suggest that he's learned to generalize beyond "if I paw at this maybe it will fall and treats will come out" and now understands that it is not the mechanical motion of pawing or nosing that's important, but rather, the falling of the bottle itself, if one's goal is to get the treats out of the bottle. This, to me, seems pretty significant, and again I'm curious to know if there's any literature out there saying one thing or another about this type of cognition in felines.

However, this was of course a tiny sample set. And I did not do this series of "mini-trials" in response to another study I'd be able to cite and/or comment on -- like I said at the beginning, I couldn't find any studies about cats knocking stuff over. No peer-reviewed references = not "ResearchBlogging". Plus, for all I know, cats' understanding of gravitational cause-and-effect is already well documented and known and I just fail at searching for this documentation.

That said, at the very least, I think anyone who really wants to study cats' understanding of cause-and-effect as it pertains to objects in a broader sense would do well to try out a variety of different scenarios involving different types of objects, and requiring different types of attentiveness and planning on the cats' part.

I find it terribly problematic (and this goes back to my discussion of the string experiments again) when a single particular test is taken (whether by the study authors, the media, or both) as meaning something globally significant about a given population's abilities or lack thereof. In the absence of a single task (or task type) with huge amounts of existing data backing up its ability to test "general" cognitive ability in a given domain, multiple tasks of varying attributes would seem to me required for appropriate levels of rigor.

Also, I have to say that another reason I wanted to post these videos is because now more than ever I am beginning to think it is very important to have as much of an experiment on record (for multiple parties to view and evaluate) as possible. Even though I (hopefully) disclaimered the heck out of my string experiments, I still would rather do things as close to "right" as possible for a layperson -- just because I'm not a real researcher doesn't mean I can't practice holding my informal stuff to higher standards.

Finally, I would just like to say that I would be extremely interested to get people's comments on what it looks like is actually happening in the videos above. As in, if you think Shadow is doing what he's doing deliberately, what aspects of his actions lead you to think that? I'm curious about this because I see my cats doing all sorts of things all the time, some of which (to me) look "deliberate", whereas other things they do look thoroughly "accidental". Only I haven't come up with a good way to describe what "deliberateness" looks like in quantitative terms.

I suspect that in general this sort of issue comes up a lot in animal cognition research, which has me curious as to whether there even exists any kind of objective way to measure something so "internal". Behaviorism (in my opinion) fails miserably to account for everything that could potentially be important (for one thing it often seems to completely fail to account for, say, different sensory and perceptual modalities on the part of the researcher vs. subject), and much of what I hear from "evolutionary psychology" sounds like it's been pulled straight from someone's nether orifice, to put it politely. So I'd be really intrigued to know what other tools or paradigms may currently be out there that might be more promising.

A Real Life Lateral Thinking Puzzle

Note: No insects were actually harmed in the making of this post.

Seeing as I'm on a bit of a nostalgia kick at the moment anyway...one of my favorite growing-up memories is of visiting my grandparents in Vermont, and working out various lateral thinking puzzles (courtesy of my Grandpa Walter) at the dinner table.

Grandpa would give the premise of the puzzle at the beginning of the meal and all the kids present would ponder it as we ate, often ending up staying at the table trying to figure out what, exactly was the significance of the "53 bicycles" or the mysterious puddle of water, etc., etc., until long after the plates had been cleared away.



(click here to access other image sizes)

Now, the explanatory page on Lateral Thinking Puzzles I linked to at the beginning of this post contains the warning that "these puzzles have a tendency to be rather morbid." And this one is no exception, as the scenario began with my coming across a pile of dead bodies -- specifically, those of what appeared to be gnats and other small flying insects.

The image above shows part of the interior of my home. Specifically, it shows an area sort of between the main living room area (to the right) and the kitchen (to the left).

This is where we keep the dining table, a tall DVD cabinet, and (near the floor) a number of boxes that have been claimed by the cats as chewable indoor forts. A wire rack behind the table is used for storing random dry goods (e.g., bread) and sometimes vegetables and/or fruits. There is a large sliding door behind the table and storage rack (only it doesn't actually slide -- it's painted shut). There is one overhead light on the ceiling. There is a bag hanging on one chair, and a backpack on another. The floor is solid oak.

But anyway. The other day I was moving a bunch of art supplies off off the dining table (which seems to get used more often for projects than actual dining...), and as I went to pick up a sheet of scrapbook paper, I noticed a small but non-trivial pile of dead insects -- little gnatlike creatures mostly -- on top of said paper.

This puzzled me greatly as I hadn't recalled seeing a bunch of gnats flying around the house, nor did it make sense that they'd gather together for ritual suicide even if a lot of them somehow had gotten indoors.

So, for now this is where I shall stop describing the scenario. I eventually figured out how the bugs had gotten there, but it took some lateral thinking to do so -- and I am really curious as to whether any readers can figure it out as well based on the image and/or my description of the room above. The red "X" on the table shows where I found the bugs, but this is not a particularly pertinent detail.

Feel free to speculate away! First person to answer correctly wins...the satisfaction of being right!

UPDATE: As of Saturday, 4 September 2010, commenter Blork has successfully solved the puzzle. Others are of course free to try and figure it out for themselves -- just avoid reading the comments before speculating yourself, as they now contain spoilers.

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(Also, this was fun. I'd like to keep posting this sort of thing, though next time I'll try and have it not be something to do with dead things!)

Of Engineers and Princesses

I am quite grateful that when I was a toddler, my parents did not insist on trying to turn me into a Pink Princess.

Observe the following photo (which I recently found in a giant box of old family pictures that I am in the process of attempting to organize):



It also occurs to me that, in looking at the toys I apparently had back circa 1981, they were toys that did stuff. Or that one could do stuff with. I liked parts, and moving parts, and things with levers and switches and strings to pull. And I don't know if this was a mark of the era or what, but it kind of actually amazes me that there's no pink to be seen here.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with pink. In some contexts it's a perfectly serviceable color, and I don't think liking pink says anything bad about a person. But ye gads. I did a Google Image Search for "little girl's room" and got the following:



Of course if someone actually wants a Princess Room far be it from me to suggest their preference is somehow in error. But seriously, it irritates me a lot that so much "geared toward girls" (toys, decor, clothing, etc.) is all so similar and so focused on Prettification.

I got to escape SOME of this growing up. I had a few subversively excellent relatives, like my Grandma June, who loved science and animals and the outdoors and shared these things with me. She also got me camouflage gear:



But of course it wasn't all idyllic all the time. I was extremely lucky compared to girls growing up in previous generations, or in households less geekishly oriented, but the relatively small amount of "you must conform to this stereotype OR ELSE YOU ARE BAD!" I experienced nonetheless had a negative impact on me.

E.g., sometimes I ran into being called "spoiled" or accused of "trying to be special" or "causing a ruckus" for merely preferring the non-girly option in a given situation. I once got sent out into the hall for indicating a preference for the star stickers being given out by my Spanish teacher to the boys over the heart stickers the girls were getting. But I was not trying to be special; I simply didn't realize that I was obligated to only choose the Girly Option in such cases.

I didn't realize until much later that some choices weren't real choices but tests. And I kept failing those tests. And I dearly want to live in a world where young girls never, ever get in trouble for failing to silently acquiesce to the demands of stereotype.

***

Fast forward some years. I've managed to get through college (many, many thanks to my parents for helping me figure out registration, class schedules, etc.). I go to work as an electrical engineer. It's difficult but rewarding. For the most part I don't have a sense of being overtly subject to sexism or discrimination on the gender front. But is it really such a meritocracy?

***

I'm riding in a car with a co-worker. We're going to an offsite meeting. Co-worker admits he doesn't exactly know how to get to the destination. I pull out a map, read it, and inform him which way to go.

"Wow! I'm impressed! I didn't think women were supposed to have the spatial ability to use maps!"

At the time, I am flattered. Later, I am annoyed. The same goes for many other similar situations, wherein I'm told things like "You think like a man! And that's good!"

***

And I still don't know what to do about all this. Aside from, you know, continuing to follow my technical inclinations and avoid getting into too many flamewars about Why There Aren't More Female Engineers. Because honestly I'd rather be DOING engineering than arguing about it.

But at the same time, I know that I can't just completely dismiss "gender stuff". I can't go around acting like just because I "broke into the field" that everything is fine and dandy and that only a troublemaker would bring up the mere possibility of sexism still being real.

Believe me, I'd LIKE to ignore gender issues. Flamewars and endless bicker-fests including copious Caveman Hunter-Gatherer Ev-Psych Stories bore me practically to tears. I just don't think we're there yet as a culture or a species. And we aren't going to get there, in my estimation, until those of us who do end up in engineering and other math and hard-science-heavy fields are acknowledged as actually existing as women, not just as shocking "exceptions" to the Princess Majority.