The Mouse And The Rectangle | Hacker News Reader

The Mouse And The Rectangle

dustincurtis.com

62 pointsarjunlall23 comments

The Ramachandran referred to in the article is a brilliant neurologist/neuroscientist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_Ramachandran). You should watch his TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl2LwnaUA-k), it's pretty amazing.

He wrote a book titled "Phantoms in the Brain." It is fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone here who is curious about a little bit of psychology.

wow. That was amazing.

I was fortunate enough to hear him speak at my college graduation. We are both from the same town in India :-)

This article is sort of a teaser/trailer for this one: http://www.imprint.co.uk/rama/art.pdf [V S Ramachandran & William Hirstein: The Science of Art]

How do they know the mouse didn't just associate the square with the lack of reward?

Presumably because avoiding the square alone wouldn't explain the preference for the third option over the second.

Could that be just curiosity? The article didn't say how much they preferred them or for how long. Maybe mice are just gamblers by nature.

Gambling doesn't seem to serve a species well in terms of my evolutionary biological thought process.

Then why are we where we are? We're the gamblingest species of all.

Maybe mice are just gamblers by nature.

Heh. Can we think of an experiment to test that?

Sure, same experiment as this one, but instead of introducing another rectangle for the third object, introduce a circle. If they favor that over the rectangle they're clearly gamblers.

Actually, I have a snake that eats one mouse per week. Maybe I'll slowly try this over the course of a year or so.

Reward-driven behaviors are modulated by a reward center, i.e. the dopamine circuit, which gives you the happy chemicals when you get something good.

While there is a pain evasion mechanism, there isn't an analogous lack-of-reward-center.

The dopamine is triggered by the cheese it gets right? At the time when the mouse is making the decision, it knows it'll get the cheese and dopamine from the old rectangle, yet it doesn't go there.

So what does this have to do with anything? Why is the mouse preferring something new and unknown over a known cheese/dopamine event?

My statement is that the mouse may be gambling, not that it's afraid. It knows the square is no cheese, the rectangle is one piece, and thinks maybe an unknown object of any shape is 10.

You asked why the learning is not taken as an aversion response to lack of reward. My interpretation is because your baseline (square) is zero: that in itself is not aversive; it's just nothing.

I think the new rectangle is evidence of hyperstimulation, where a stronger response is elicited when features are exaggerated. To establish this case, we'd have to test how strongly the rat perceives prototypes of squares vs. rectangles; my guess is square-ness vs. rectangle-ness is easily discernable. That is to say, I am pretty convinced this is just hyperstimulation, in which case a random shape would not do. It would have to resemble a former stimulus X but exhibit features that are even more X-like than the previous Xs. If perception of a rectangle is encoded as "right-angled shapes where height != width" (a plausible encoding, because our shape detectors operate on angles and lines, while curves utilize different detectors), then when height !!!=== width, then you get BAM!

An analogous example in humans? Tomb Raider :-)

I think the idea of "impossible ideals" is very important tool. For example, when you decide you'll crack down and never have another bug again, on the one hand you're obviously doomed to fail, perfection is unobtainable, but on the other it can direct you towards the bug free end of the spectrum. The idea of reaching for ever more "rectangular" shapes seems to fit that mind set, as you approach the "most rectangular" shape.

Does anyone have thoughts on the applicability of this article in terms of UI and UX?

Ha, what a coincidence (or not): I wrote the article, and I'm a UI designer.

I've been trying to figure out a way to use peak shift in UI design for a while. Mainly, I have been wondering if the same principle occurs not only to things someone favors in a pavlovian sense (as has been proven), but also to things someone expects or wants.

If it does work this way, then it might be possible to hack it into an interface and get people to do things subconsciously by exaggerating certain triggers.

So far, I haven't found the perfect way to do this yet.

I think the tricky part is that peak shift relies on generalizations (like "rectangleness") being made about a whole set of objects or experiences, so you first need some kind of foundation (like Pavlovian training) from which a generalization can be constructed.

When I'm designing an interface I try to make sure it has a visual vocabulary that's pervasive and consistent enough for the user to learn it from very little experience. So for example, the opacity of visual elements can be used to represent their importance; important stuff is brighter and clearer while unimportant stuff fades into the background. Once the user picks up on that, they can use it to make decisions about the importance of what they see: they'll focus extra attention on the text that's 100% opaque and ignore the text that's half-transparent.

Simple rules like this have existed in design for hundreds of years -- it's why newspapers give 72-point headlines to "big" stories. What's interesting now is that interfaces are becoming increasingly dynamic, and the tools we're using are letting us broaden the design vocabulary beyond just size and placement and typography.

I always found Pavlov's experiment thoroughly boring. I could never understand why it was such a big deal - it just seems obvious. But this rectangle thing is really subtle and interesting.

The year was 1890. Only 15 years ago did Koch prove for the first time that diseases were caused by germs. Most of the world still believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The scientific consensus was that "ether" pervaded all of space. Men of stature made confident pronouncements that nothing man-made would ever fly.

Almost everything is obvious in retrospect. And being boring is not a strike against a scientific hypothesis.

Your list seems to me to affirm my point. None of the things you mention strike me as boring and obvious, and I have a lot of respect for 1890. Lectures in scientific piety, not so much.

But as long as we're butting heads about this, perhaps you can clear up something I was wondering. The article says:

[Pavlov] showed that a physical connection can be created between a stimulus (the bell sound) and the following behavior (the dog's salivation) with no cognitive interaction.

My question: is that last bit - "with no cognitive interaction" - the received interpretation of Pavlov's result, or was it just added by the author?

Great article, and to be honest I have nothing to add that wasn't said but can I say -- The site design is very neat! Love how you switch themes on each article.

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