David's World

July 30, 2006

Cognitive Science @ Vancouver

People in Canada, at least those in Vancouver, are nice. They don't jaywalk. They're super-welcoming when you're trying to shove your bag collection onto the airport bus. Apart from that, I haven't seen much of Vancouver, which is surprisingly small, with a few high-risers downtown (the view from the 34th floor Presidential Suite in one of the two Sheraton towers is amazing).

An interesting bit from the Cognitive Science conference I'm attending here: I have updated my beliefs (not quite a euphemism for "changed my mind?") on the question of language influencing thought. There is evidence that people change their color judgment (color names, thus concepts, differ between languages) depending on the language that an experiment was carried out in. Bilingual subjects judged different pairs of blue, light-blue and green boxes (IIRC) to be similar, depending on whether they received instructions in Indonesian or in English.

The fact that we come to different concepts and classifications of colors depending on the language that we use to learn them doesn't surprise. But that we can switch between different concept sets with the language we use, that's interesting. Of course, this, by no means, is to say that we are constrained by the structural properties of a language - like syntax. We can still REASON, no matter the language we speak.

But it will still be a difficult endeavor to show that people associate the German "Ärzte" (doctors, male and standard form) with male doctors rather than a female ones, so that only "Ärzte und "Ärztinnen" would be truely neutral. That's because of cultural bias: everyone is exposed to a world where more doctors are male than female. (Is that example still true? Take "pilot" instead, and it'll work for sure.)