Colloquium (02-27)
# Spatial Context
Animals, including humans, traditionally have a harder time disitinguishing between left-right than up-down or front-back.
2 Hypthoesise that could explain this:
- It’s adventageous for survival that we don’t distinguish left-right. For example, we should be able to identify a predator wether we see its left view or its right view. The same doesn’t apply for up-down since our height is fixed and we usually observe a predator at the same vertical angle. –> I wonder if sea animals / birds are also more left-right agnostic than top-down agnostic, since they are able to traverse a 3D space and observe anything from all angles.
- The left and right side of human body is symmetrical. Hence, we don’t have a good mental model to distinguish between left and right. Ben hypothesize that ambidexterity could be correlated to how left-right agnostic we are. –> I wonder why we are left-right symmetric and not top-down symmetric. Is there biological reasoning behind this?
# False Beliefs
Our confidence in false beliefs is informed by our perception of other people’s stance. Kidd Lab’s research shows that people were more likely to adjust their confidence in believing a misinformation when they were informed that 8 in 10 people believe in the same belief than when they were informed that 2 in 10 people believe in the same belief.
I wonder how the way we present other people’s stance will impact our confidence in false beliefs. (ie., the difference between telling someone 8 in 10 people believe in X vs 80 in 100 people believe in X). This could inform how we design rating systems in social media.
Approaching belief formation from bayesian standpoint
- Observers combine signals from different perceptual senses to arrive at unified percept
- Learners integrate private information and social informaiton to form beliefs
