My dad also salted his food before he tasted it, and my mom‘s reaction was the same as your aunt’s. I will never forget the dinner at which my mom put a plate of food to which she'd already added salt in front of my dad and watched him salt it heavily. He then spit out the first bite and complained that it was too salty. My mom just laughed. He never again pre-salted her cooking.
I’d be interested to hear how this statistical mechanism contributes to how languages evolve. Whether a neologism needs to meet a predictable statistical threshold within a particular temporal window to be adopted by the speakers. What strength or intensity of statistical signal is needed over what period?
Good question! My understanding is early language is really hard to make inferences about since it doesn't currently exist and left no trace, so I'm not sure how much is known
Took a class with him on language acquisition, though I was not in Brain & Cognitive Sciences but the interdisciplinary Neuroscience program at the medical school.
I'll check out the paper (though I managed to avoid working with monkeys the whole time I was doing research).
Very interesting piece Tommy. My Grandfather always did the same when it came to salting and my Mum would always pull him up. I always thought the same as you, it makes sense to taste it first. Thanks for the new perspective, it’s really interesting.
I listened to an interesting podcast recently with AI pioneer Geoff Hinton. It’s fascinating to see how these models learn.
My dad also salted his food before he tasted it, and my mom‘s reaction was the same as your aunt’s. I will never forget the dinner at which my mom put a plate of food to which she'd already added salt in front of my dad and watched him salt it heavily. He then spit out the first bite and complained that it was too salty. My mom just laughed. He never again pre-salted her cooking.
I’d be interested to hear how this statistical mechanism contributes to how languages evolve. Whether a neologism needs to meet a predictable statistical threshold within a particular temporal window to be adopted by the speakers. What strength or intensity of statistical signal is needed over what period?
Good question! My understanding is early language is really hard to make inferences about since it doesn't currently exist and left no trace, so I'm not sure how much is known
This is why I'm always telling students that all of our perceptions are half-imagined.
Jenny Saffran was at the U of R while I was there, and I heard several talks from that group.
Hah, small world--you must know Dick Aslin, then? He was on my thesis committee (and we were recently co-authors on a paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2022.0144)
Took a class with him on language acquisition, though I was not in Brain & Cognitive Sciences but the interdisciplinary Neuroscience program at the medical school.
I'll check out the paper (though I managed to avoid working with monkeys the whole time I was doing research).
Very interesting piece Tommy. My Grandfather always did the same when it came to salting and my Mum would always pull him up. I always thought the same as you, it makes sense to taste it first. Thanks for the new perspective, it’s really interesting.
I listened to an interesting podcast recently with AI pioneer Geoff Hinton. It’s fascinating to see how these models learn.
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/podcasts/naked-scientists-podcast/titans-science-geoff-hinton
Great post Tommy. I enjoyed it. I’m increasingly guilty of aggressive salting before tasting too. It’s an age thing I reckon!
As I am typing this out the computer is trying to suggest what to say next.