Scientists Predicting Intentions

An anonymous reader writes to tell us German scientists claim to have the means of predicting decisions of high level mental activity. "In the past, experts had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements in advance. But researchers at Berlin's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people's decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity _ in this case, adding versus subtracting."

Comments

Re:Suspicion

[yali]

Here's how this stuff works. Step 1, scientist do incremental, meaningful, but boring (to those outside their specialty) work. Step 2, media picks up on story and puts overreaching spin on story. (Alternatively, the scientists, the journal, or the university's PR office puts out a press release supplying overreaching spin to credulous journalists.) Step 3, everybody sits back in wonderment at a finding that essentially establishes what we already knew: that mental processes take place in the physical brain.

Parent poster is right about the special demands of individual prediction. The basic science might be incrementally useful - trying to ultimately understand how future planning/intentions take place in the brain. (And given the breadth of mental operations that could be considered "intentions," there are probably hundreds of more studies that need to be done before that question can begin to be answered.) But going from a scientific explanatory mode, where you have potentially large samples and budgets and cooperative subjects, to prediction of individual behavior is a huge leap. Just look at a much older psychometric approach, the TAT, which is okay for research but lousy for individual prediction. Brain scanning may well turn out to be the next TAT, for precisely the same reasons.

Part of the problem is that a lot of this work is being done by medical researchers and neuroscientists who have no basic training in psychometrics. They're just reinventing old mistakes (but wasting a hell of a lot more money this time around).