Familiarity Breeds Recognition

In a recent Science Daily article, we learn that people appear to use a different part of the brain to infer the thoughts of familiar people than they use when estimating the thinking of unfamiliar people. The article says that Harvard researchers watched the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vPFC), known as an area involved in introspection, while subjects speculated about the views and thoughts of people described as a lot like them or quite different (based on cultural details like location, religion and schooling.) They found that the vPFC lit up when subjects speculated about the "like-me" target, but did not light up when they speculated about the "not-like-me" target. Researchers suggest that this means we think differently about unfamiliar people.

It occurs to me, however, that if we view this study in light of Hawkins' theory about brain structure described in On Intelligence, we might draw a different conclusion. Hawkins proposed a hierarchical brain structure devoted to pattern recognition, with low layers devoted to recognizing bits of patterns, and higher levels responsible for integrating the bits into larger patterns. As long as the pattern remains recognizable, the layers manage the perception more or less automatically. Repeated recognition of unfamiliar patterns trains the lower levels and expands the repertoire of patterns we can recognize without effort. When successive layers fail to report a familiar pattern, the attention centers are activated to bring conscious attention to the evaluation of the perception.

In the case of the Harvard study, we might conclude that the subject could not automatically evaluate the thoughts of the target with the unfamiliar background using lower levels of pattern recognition, so the evaluation was moved to some more conscious, executive area of the brain.

I would have liked to know if the researchers identified what other part of the brain lit up when the subject considered the unfamiliar target. Such information would add greatly to the interest of this study.

A Boost for Novelty Search

Recent research reported by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania provides new support for the importance of novelty search in human cognition. In short, they found that "a lucky win seems to be retained better than a probable loss." Unexpected results drew more of the brain's attention and resulted in more learning than expected results.

This would seem to suggest that when searching for a solution, it makes much more sense to try anything, in hopes of triggering an unexpected result, than to plot a path and stick to it regardless of the feedback available.