A key couple of paragraphs from the article (Slashdotted this afternoon):
42 students listened to instructions to click on pictures of different objects on a computer screen. When the students heard a word, such as "candle," and were presented with two pictures whose names did not sound alike, such as a candle and a jacket, the trajectories of their mouse movements were quite straight and directly to the candle. But when the students heard "candle" and were presented with two pictures with similarly sounding names, such as candle and candy, they were slower to click on the correct object, and their mouse trajectories were much more curved. Spivey said that the listeners started processing what they heard even before the entire word was spoken.
"When there was ambiguity, the participants briefly didn't know which picture was correct and so for several dozen milliseconds, they were in multiple states at once. They didn't move all the way to one picture and then correct their movement if they realized they were wrong, but instead they traveled through an intermediate gray area," explained Spivey. "The degree of curvature of the trajectory shows how much the other object is competing for their interpretation; the curve shows continuous competition. They sort of partially heard the word both ways, and their resolution of the ambiguity was gradual rather than discrete; it's a dynamical system."
Now I'm not sure anyone actually believes that minds are digital at this level of input: hell, I can write a Perl script that takes input in chunks and responds to it as it goes. And so the really interesting part of this to me is this quotation, attributed to Michael Spivey:
"More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."
I'm not sure this is all that 'recent'--it really doesn't feel different from what Hofstadter has been arguing for a long time and /seems/ to reflect the theory behind neural nets and even projects like Cog. But what a cool recognition.
Emergence.
(a tangent: been thinking about emergence in terms of social justice work and activism. need more processing, but hmmm. this idea has eaten my brain.)
EDIT: Just read the slashdot response to the article. Lots of "Well, Duh"s. One of my favories:
"The idea that our brains might work like biological organisms is a real breakthrough.
Next week's research topic: Do farts stink?"
