How does the trick work?

In one of my favourite books of the last decade, Daniel Dennett describes "the tuned deck", based on an account from John Northern Hilliard's 1938 book "Card Magic". This nifty scheme by a certain Ralph Hull confounded professional magicians. Hull would perform one of the simplest tricks in the book. He would ask someone to pick a card from a standard deck of playing cards and place it back in the deck without showing him. Then Hull would produce the correct card that they had picked.

What frustrated his rivals, most of whom could no doubt do this kind of trick in their sleep, is they couldn't work out how he did it. A key aspect of this scheme was that Hull would perform the tuned deck multiple times in front of the same audience, which is generally a no-no for an audience of lay people, let alone other magicians. As far as Hull could make out, no one else ever worked out how to perform the tuned deck.

So how did he do it? The "pick a card, put it back in the deck and I find it" trick is very simple in terms of input and output, but there are multiple mechanisms through which the magician achieves it. The fact that Hull did multiple performances in front of an audience of skeptics was actually key to performing the tuned deck. He would perform the trick one way-(for example, a classic method is glimpsing the card that goes on top of the unseen, chosen card). The other magician would reckon that Hull had used the glimpse, and so when Hull performed the tuned deck again, Hull's rival(s) would act in such a way as to spot or frustrate this method. But this time, they would not be able to catch Hull at glimpsing, because instead of using the glimpse, he would use another method- say, a sleight of hand method for tracking the chosen card by touch. "The tuned deck" was only ever "one" trick in the sense of the input and the outcome, not the mechanism for how it was achieved.

I love this story. Before I could articulate it, I could sense how this could be an analogy for so many blind alleys we lead ourselves down. Dennett uses the tuned deck as an analogy for our understanding of consciousness; the various "easy" problems of consciousness (how do we pay attention, how we remember) are the tuned deck of making up the overall subjective experience of consciousness, thereby explaining the "hard" problem of consciousness, i.e. how we have a general, "unified" stream of consciousness - see work by David Chalmers. (Dennett is not a great fan of Chalmers, as parodied in this enjoyable Philosophy Comic).

Another example we could take is that of major depression and psychotherapy. This is kind of the psychological equivalent of "pick a card, any card". The input and output are relatively simple - person feels down, goes to talk to a professional, hopefully feels better. But there are various schools of therapy - psychodynamic, cognitive behavioural, narrative therapy etc. Many people have pointed out that there are commonalities to most talking therapies (e.g. articulating what's bothering you to an experienced listener), and so the specifics of the particular talking therapy may not be the key mechanism. Furthermore, even a given school of therapy may have a different means of improving mood within different individuals. Maybe it improves self-esteem, maybe it changes your view of the world around you as being fundamentally dangerous, maybe it helps you to view difficult life circumstances in a more positive light.

I can't help but wonder how often those who seek to explain how therapy works fall for the tuned deck.

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Conferences and carbon

With much of the world in lockdown, many of us have more time on our hands for reflection. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have indicated that carbon emissions must peak this year. No doubt many countries are inadvertently going to have emissions well below last year's, but will they come back heavier than ever once relative normality returns? (Albeit with a likely economic recession if not depression).

I've recently been trying to make a bid for a US conference to come to Dublin for its once-every-five-years jaunt to Europe. International conferences conferences are a great opportunity for junior and more established researchers and clinicians to build new collaborations. But such events are also wont to chomp up a lot of carbon, with delegates flying the oceans to present their posters, give their talks, and watch the grand dons give their TED talks. Is it really worth the earth?

However, carbon neutral conferences are not only possible, but should be the norm. The article at the link (and cited below) gives a number of clear steps towards reducing emissions. We are all getting more used to virtual meetings, so the number of delegates who travel the world can be reduced, and those who do travel can offset their emissions with carbon credits (less face it, we need carbon capture if we're ever going to beat climate change). Teams should have low-emission options as the default, where people have to "opt-in" to less environmentally friendly choices (carnivore option, anyone?) The supplementary materials in the article also give an estimate of CO2 emissions per activity at a 2018 carbon-neutral conference the authors organised.

Zotova, O., Pétrin-Desrosiers, C., Gopfert, A., & Van Hove, M. (2020). Carbon-neutral medical conferences should be the norm. The Lancet Planetary Health, 4(2), e48-e50.

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What next?

"If you want to help people, you've come to the wrong place."

Words from a fellow volunteer at a mental health charity. Maybe a lot of psychologists are hung up on trying to change the world, while still ignoring the elephant in the room of global inequity.

A recent tweet has accused mainstream psychology by and large of individualising a largely social phenomenon (i.e. the spread of coronavirus). (It has the near-obligatory reference to ab/using mindfulness as a means to calm the masses down, when they could be energised to change their material conditions). Coronavirus might not care how much money you have, but you're more likely to catch it if you're sharing a rented three-bedroom house with four other lodgers. Indeed, there's been some debate online about the role of behavioural science in general at this time.

Nonetheless, we are all individuals, and practical advice on not touching your face with your hands, reducing cabin fever etc. etc. has utility. But at least we should be careful about trying to save the day when this is a chance for other disciplines (epidemiology, respiratory medicine) to shine.

For those of us who aren't embroiled in the frontline of dealing with the fallout, there's more time for reflection. A re-tweet of the tweet mentioned above suggests that mainstream psychology has not only internalised neoliberalism, but ignored the material conditions around us. When we're all stuck indoors, seeing how our environment conditions can change quite rapidly, this could be a time to consider how we can take more ecological approach to psychology. This need not just apply to critical social psychology, but is relevant for mental health, cognition and other facets of the study of ourselves.

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Detecting dementia in people with intellectual disability

When people hear "dementia", what often springs to mind is a decline in memory in a neurotypical older adult, with this person becoming increasingly dependent upon others as dementia progresses. At the same time, there is a considerably higher prevalence of dementia in people with intellectual disability (ID). Furthermore, the average age of onset of dementia is lower in people with ID.

Cognitive screening assessments for dementia are generally geared towards people without intellectual disability. Even though a patient may have never undergone a cognitive assessment before, typical screening assessments aim to detect a deviation from a presumed baseline level of cognitive performance within an average range. However, this approach is usually inappropriate in ID settings. A plethora of specialised assessments have been produced, and there is now interest in trying to reach some consensus for assessment of dementia in ID. Nonetheless, it is easier to pick up on a decline in cognition if a baseline assessment is conducted with a person with ID prior to any decline.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that many other conditions that associated with ID may lead to worsened performance on cognitive assessments. These include sensory problems and adjustment to life events. There is also a higher prevalence of depression in people with ID. Interestingly, prevalence rates vary according to whether depression is self-reported or rated by a proxy. Depression tends to be lower in the former case; this may be due to proxies overestimating depression levels, but could also be due to other factors that explain both heightened depression and a proxy completing the measure instead of self-report.

People with ID live in the community and also a variety of long-term care settings. Whether or how issues with dementia will be picked up depends upon who the person with ID is interacting with on a daily basis and their level of training. Specialised training has been devised for working with people with ID and dementia, but it is not necessarily received by everyone who will be working with this cohort.

If you're interested in reading more, a handy blog post challenges some of the myths around ID in general and dementia in ID in particular.

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Recall exhibition: Memory, History, Mind

Exciting times-Memory, History, Mind is a new exhibition at the Illuminations gallery at Maynooth University. This exhibition arose out of a multidisciplinary project funded by the Irish Research Council I was working on between 2017 and 2019.

The exhibit draws on reminiscences included in the online archive at the Digital Repository of Ireland. A small selection of highlights from the archive are showcased at the exhibition. We combined stories and photographs provided by research participants with publicly available images of the times and places discussed.

The launch for the exhibition was 29th January. It was great to see so many participants from the research project at the evening. As there were different groups participating in the study, it was a chance for participants to meet others who had taken part in different groups and take in some of the other memories that had been shared throughout the project.

The exhibit wouldn't be possible without these people who shared their memories with us, as well as Dr Caoilainn Doyle who assisted in running the project. Dr Richard Roche put a lot of effort into bringing this all together, and we've had a lot of help from Derek Walsh at the Department of Psychology at Maynooth University in creating the audiovisual material for this exhibit. Thanks are also due to Professor Colin Graham for hosting this exhibition at Illuminations.

The exhibition will run at the Illuminations gallery, Iontas building, Maynooth University, until the 8th March 2020.

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Stereotype threat and performance effects: are they REALLY REAL?

Stereotype threat is a situation where an individual feels that may confirm stereotypes about a group to which they belong. Anxiety around confirming the stereotype may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the person starts to perform badly due to the ensuing nervousness. Much has been written on the topic, and a lot of research in this area has been conducted. The extent of its effect has been under some discussion, with a particular caveat being that stereotype threat should not be treated as the primary cause of observed group differences in performance.

A recent large study found that evidence was lacking that girls aged 13-14 were affected by stereotype threat on mathematics performance. The researchers either gave students an instruction to heighten stereotype threat (being informed that there was a gender difference in performance on the test), or told there was no previous observed difference. The kids were then required to solve mathematics problems. They also completed measures of gender identification and math anxiety. Long story short, despite a large sample size and a careful design, this study did not find evidence for an effect of stereotype threat on maths performance.

A cursory reading of these results could be taken as evidence that stereotype threat is either no longer a thing, or if it is, that it does not impair performance. However, a negative effect of stereotype threat is no doubt something which at least some people have experienced at least some point in their lives. Like consciousness, it's just one of those things that you have to have to feel, man. The fact that something exists does not mean that it is easy to demonstrate reliably in a sample of individuals.We can take this as a cautionary note about using psychology experiments as hard evidence that something does or does not exist when the concept itself is slippery.

And slippery it is! Because there are so many different kinds of stereotype, there are a corresponding wide variety of forms for stereotype threat to take. It's thus a moving target of a concept, one that can change between different demographics, probably morph intersectionally, and change over time as different stereotypes fade or become more widespread. Stereotype threat may impair performance through heightened anxiety, but of course it can also motivate people to perform harder to defy stereotypes.

Flore, P. C., Mulder, J., & Wicherts, J. M. (2018). The influence of gender stereotype threat on mathematics test scores of Dutch high school students: a registered report. Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 3(2), 140-174.


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What's leading to burden in dementia carers?

For the second half of my time with University College Cork, I was involved in a project researching carer burden in people caring for family members with dementia. As part of this project, I had the opportunity to sit in on a specialist memory clinic, as well as a parallel old age psychiatry clinic. Although some people (usually with less severe problems with memory) attended the clinic by themselves, the large majority of patients would have family members with them.

Over the space of two years we collected caregivers' responses to a series of short questionnaires assessing carer burden, as well information on challenging behaviours (e.g. shouting), levels of help required for activities of daily living (e.g. getting dressed) , cognitive performance, and patient safety (e.g. driving, risk of falling). Driving can be a particularly thorny issue for older people living in rural areas, where stopping driving represents a major loss of independence.

The results indicated that patient age, cognition, and level of dependence were associated with carer burden, and even after controlling for these factors, safety issues and challenging behaviours were associated with further increases in burden. We also followed up a subset of carers at 6 months and 12 months, and changes in patient safety seemed to be the most powerful predictor of changes in carer burden. I should note this data was only available for those who had follow-up data from repeat visits, so it is likely these carers could differ in systematic ways from those who did not attend again. Nonetheless, I would speculate that those who do not attend the clinic again within a year are probably likely to have experienced less change in the care situation than those who attend again (the latter are likely to have some change, leading to greater motivation to attend).

One reviewer of a draft of the paper suggested that safety could be highlighted and discussed in greater detail. It was one of those occasions when a peer reviewer suggested that a manuscript might be underselling an aspect of the findings. The literature in this area has tended to focus more on behaviors that can challenge caregivers or increased dependency of patients. However, safety issues are a major source of anxiety for carers, and can be the decisive factor in whether a person with dementia will go into long-term care home. Carer training programs and easily available information on how to address or minimize problems around safety can save carers a lot of distress.


Allen, A.P., Buckley, M.M., Cryan, J.F., Ní Chorcoráin, A., Dinan, T.G., Kearney, P.M., O'Caoimh, R., Calnan, M., Clarke, G., Molloy D.W. (in press). Informal caregiving for dementia patients: The contribution of patient characteristics and behaviours to caregiver burden. Age & Ageing. doi: 10.1093/ageing/afz128

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He ain't heavy, he's my carer

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