and development in the graduate school of education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the cognitive and motivational processes that underlie reading ability and the cognitive consequences of reading skill and engagement. Keith E. Stanovich is professor of applied psychology at the University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. His recent awards ...

The executive resource hypothesis assumes a positive relationship between resource availability and mind wandering. Under the assumption that different modalities of information delivery differentially tax resources, we compared mind wandering across different modalities during the presentation of The Red Headed League (Experiment 1 and 2) and Walden (Experiment 3). An Audio only condition prod...

The regularized logistic regression classifier has shown good performance in problems where feature selection is critical, including our recent winning submissions to the ICANN2011 MEG mind reading challenge [Huttunen et al. 2011; Huttunen et al. 2012], and to the DREAM 6 AML classification challenge [Manninen et al. 2011]. The benefit of the method is that it includes an embedded feature selec...

We present a fully-automated person-independent approach to track mind wandering by monitoring eye gaze during reading. We tracked eye gaze of 84 students who engaged in an approximately 30-minute self-paced reading task on research methods. Mind wandering reports were collected by auditorily probing students in-between and after reading certain pages. Supervised classifiers trained on global a...

Neural mind-reading studies, based on multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) methods, are providing exciting new studies. Some of the results obtained with these paradigms have raised high expectations, such as the possibility of creating brain reading devices. However, such hopes are based on the assumptions that: (a) the BOLD signal is a marker of neural activity; (b) the BOLD pattern identifie...

Reading Mother Nature's Mind I wonder how Dennett and I, both firm naturalists and believers in the relevance and importance of natural selection for understanding the human mind, should have come to such different conclusions about holism in the theory of meaning. I try to focus our differences by examining the relation between what Dennett has termed "the intentional stance" and "the design s...

The most fundamental solution concepts in Game Theory – Nash equilibrium, backward induction, and iterated elimination of dominated strategies – are based on the assumption that people are capable of predicting others' actions. These concepts require people to be able to view the game from the other players’ perspectives, i.e. to understand others’ motives and beliefs. Economists still know lit...

Baron-Cohen [Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997] has suggested that the interpretation of gaze plays an important role in a normal functioning theory of mind (ToM) system. Consistent with this suggestion, functional imaging research has shown that both ToM tasks and eye gaze processing engage a similar region of the posterior superior temporal s...