Objective transdiciplinary analyses of the "conspiracy theory meme" by independent academic experts with integrity.
Apophenia
Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein)) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as “unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness”. He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations. Apophenia has also come to describe a human propensity to unreasonably seek patterns in random information.
The Rorschach test is a projective psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning. It has been employed to detect underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly.[4] The test is named after its creator, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. The Rorschach can be thought of as a psychometric examination of pareidolia, the active pattern of perceiving objects, shapes, or scenery as meaningful things to the observer's experience, the most common being faces or other pattern of forms that are not present at the time of the observation. In the 1960s, the Rorschach was the most widely used projective test.
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„Marsgesicht“, aufgenommen vom Orbiter von Viking 1, 1976. Die schwarzen Punkte, wie zum Beispiel das „Nasenloch“, sind Bildübertragungsfehler.
Relief der Cydonia-Region; oben das „Marsgesicht“, darunter die „Pyramiden“ .
Buetow, S.. (2019). Apophenia, unconscious bias and reflexivity in nursing qualitative research. International Journal of Nursing Studies
“Nurses routinely engage in pattern recognition and interpretation in qualitative research and clinical practice. however, they risk spontaneously perceiving patterns among things that are not meaningfully related. although all people are prone to this cognitive bias of ‘apophenia’, nurses may be at increased risk because they commonly produce or at least use qualitative research that can be highly interpretive. qualitative researchers have been silent on the risk of apophenia and hence on exploring how attention to apophenia could help to indicate and manage such unconscious biases. therefore this conceptual paper suggests how, in disciplines like nursing, researchers could attend to and use reflexivity on signs of possible apophenia to help bring unconscious biases to awareness. within safe communities of professional practice, the researchers could cooperate with trusted peers to reflect on how and why they may each perceive patterned phenomena from different perspectives. if one reason is that the researchers, for example, appear to exhibit particular unconscious biases, then dialogue could help them to become aware of, and reflect on the biases. this expansion of researchers’ consciousness of bias could inform the management of apophenia and enhance the quality of qualitative research and modern nursing practice.”
Blain, S. D., Longenecker, J. M., Grazioplene, R. G., Klimes-Dougan, B., & DeYoung, C. G.. (2020). Apophenia as the disposition to false positives: A unifying framework for openness and psychoticism. Journal of Abnormal Psychology
“Positive symptoms of schizophrenia and its extended phenotype-often termed psychoticism or positive schizotypy-are characterized by the inclusion of novel, erroneous mental contents. one promising framework for explaining positive symptoms involves apophenia, conceptualized here as a disposition toward false-positive errors. apophenia and positive symptoms have shown relations to openness to experience (more specifically, to the openness aspect of the broader openness/intellect domain), and all of these constructs involve tendencies toward pattern seeking. nonetheless, few studies have investigated the relations between psychoticism and non-self-report indicators of apophenia, let alone the role of normal personality variation. the current research used structural equation models to test associations between psychoticism, openness, intelligence, and non-self-report indicators of apophenia comprising false-positive error rates on a variety of computerized tasks. in sample 1, 1,193 participants completed digit identification, theory of mind, and emotion recognition tasks. in sample 2, 195 participants completed auditory signal detection and semantic word association tasks. psychoticism and the openness aspect were positively correlated. self-reported psychoticism, openness, and their shared variance were positively associated with apophenia, as indexed by false-positive error rates, whether or not intelligence was controlled for. apophenia was not associated with other personality traits, and openness and psychoticism were not associated with false-negative errors. findings provide insights into the measurement of apophenia and its relation to personality and psychopathology. apophenia and pattern seeking may be promising constructs for unifying the openness aspect of personality with the psychosis spectrum and for providing an explanation of positive symptoms. results are discussed in the context of possible adaptive characteristics of apophenia as well as potential risk factors for the development of psychotic disorders. (psycinfo database record (c) 2020 apa, all rights reserved).”
“The apophenia project raises curiosity and challenges the way we perceive certain objects that form part of our daily life. to do so, perception is altered through several experimental processes. the idea is to decontextualize the materials, creating different emotions and reconsidering their value, and to guess the origin of the materials, textures, forms and colours we thought we have always known. ultimately, the purpose of the project is to stimulate people’s imagination, inviting them to examine their relationship with daily, intimate objects, thus encouraging reflection. the outcomes will attest to the designer’s intention to question the known applications of the materials, crafts and techniques, thus finding new ways of improving our daily surroundings.”
Ellerby, Z. W., & Tunney, R. J.. (2017). The effects of heuristics and apophenia on probabilistic choice. Advances in Cognitive Psychology
“Given a repeated choice between two or more options with independent and identically distributed reward probabilities, overall pay-offs can be maximized by the exclusive selection of the option with the greatest likelihood of reward. the tendency to match response proportions to reward contingencies is suboptimal. nevertheless, this behaviour is well documented. a number of explanatory accounts have been proposed for probability matching. these include failed pattern matching, driven by apophenia, and a heuristic-driven response that can be overruled with sufficient deliberation. we report two experiments that were designed to test the relative effects on choice behaviour of both an intuitive versus strategic approach to the task and belief that there was a predictable pattern in the reward sequence, through a combination of both direct experimental manipulation and post-experimental self-report. mediation analysis was used to model the pathways of effects. neither of two attempted experimental manipulations of apophenia, nor self-reported levels of apophenia, had a significant effect on proportions of maximizing choices. however, the use of strategy over intuition proved a consistent predictor of maximizing, across all experimental conditions. a parallel analysis was conducted to assess the effect of controlling for individual variance in perceptions of reward contingencies. although this analysis suggested that apophenia did increase probability matching in the standard task preparation, this effect was found to result from an unforeseen relationship between self-reported apophenia and perceived reward probabilities. a win-stay lose-shift (wsls) analysis indicated no reliable relationship between wsls and either intuition or strategy use.”
Bainbridge, T. F., Quinlan, J. A., Mar, R. A., & Smillie, L. D.. (2019). Openness/Intellect and Susceptibility to Pseudo-Profound Bullshit: A Replication and Extension. European Journal of Personality
DeYoung, C. G., Grazioplene, R. G., & Peterson, J. B.. (2012). From madness to genius: The Openness/Intellect trait domain as a paradoxical simplex. Journal of Research in Personality
Fyfe, S., Williams, C., Mason, O. J., & Pickup, G. J.. (2008). Apophenia, theory of mind and schizotypy: Perceiving meaning and intentionality in randomness. Cortex
Supplemental Material for Apophenia as the Disposition to False Positives: A Unifying Framework for Openness and Psychoticism. (2020). Journal of Abnormal Psychology
“Positive symptoms of schizophrenia and its extended phenotype—often termed psychoticism or positive schizotypy—are characterized by the inclusion of novel, erroneous mental contents. one promising framework for explaining positive symptoms involves ‘apophenia,’ conceptualized here as a disposition toward false positive errors. apophenia and positive symptoms have shown relations to openness to experience (more specifically, to the openness aspect of the broader openness/intellect domain), and all of these constructs involve tendencies toward pattern seeking. nonetheless, few studies have investigated the relations between psychoticism and non-self-report indicators of apophenia, let alone the role of normal personality variation. the current research used structural equation models to test associations between psychoticism, openness, intelligence, and non-self-report indicators of apophenia comprising false positive error rates on a variety of computerized tasks. in sample 1, 1193 participants completed digit identification, theory of mind, and emotion recognition tasks. in sample 2, 195 participants completed auditory signal detection and semantic word association tasks. psychoticism and the openness aspect were positively correlated. self-reported psychoticism, openness, and their shared variance were positively associated with apophenia, as indexed by false positive error rates, whether or not intelligence was controlled for. apophenia was not associated with other personality traits, and openness and psychoticism were not associated with false negative errors. findings provide insights into the measurement of apophenia and its relation to personality and psychopathology. apophenia and pattern seeking may be promising constructs for unifying the openness aspect of personality with the psychosis spectrum and for providing an explanation of positive symptoms. results are discussed in the context of possible adaptive characteristics of apophenia, as well as potential risk factors for the development of psychotic disorders.”
“Research summary: this article uses distributional matching and posterior predictive checks to estimate the extent of false and inflated findings in empirical research on strategic management. based on a sample of 300 papers in top outlets for research on strategic management, we estimate that if each study were repeated, 24-40 percent of significant coefficients would become insignificant at the five percent level. our best guess is that for about half of these, the true coefficient is very close to 0. the remaining coefficients are likely directionally correct but inflated in magnitude. we offer several practical individual and field level suggestions for reducing scientific apophenia, that is, our tendency to find and publish evidence of order where none exists. managerial summary: this article analyzes the degree to which statistics in research on strategic management provide meaningful evidence for decision-making. based on a sample of 300 papers, we estimate that 24%-40% of reported results would probably not be confirmed if the study were repeated. our best guess is that about half of the reported results are wrong (ba = 0) and the other half of results too weak to find repeatedly. we conclude that scientific apophenia – the tendency to find evidence of order where none exists – is a serious problem in the literature on strategic management. we recommend replication of empirical studies to insure that they provide evidence for guiding managers. we also provide guidance for avoiding scientific apophenia in empirical research.”
Hanson, N. A., Lavallee, M. B., & Thiele, R. H.. (2021). Apophenia and anesthesia: how we sometimes change our practice prematurely. Canadian Journal of Anesthesia
“Human beings are predisposed to identifying false patterns in statistical noise, a likely survival advantage during our evolutionary development. moreover, humans seem to prefer ‘positive’ results over ‘negative’ ones. these two cognitive features lay a framework for premature adoption of falsely positive studies. added to this predisposition is the tendency of journals to ‘overbid’ for exciting or newsworthy manuscripts, incentives in both the academic and publishing industries that value change over truth and scientific rigour, and a growing dependence on complex statistical techniques that some reviewers do not understand. the purpose of this article is to describe the underlying causes of premature adoption and provide recommendations that may improve the quality of published science.”
Bokhorov, K. Y.. (2021). Algorithmic Apophenia and Aestheticization of Data. Art & Culture Studies
“The article suggests taking a look at the artistic development of ‘artificial intelligence’ not in the aspect of its humanization and challenge to humanism, but as a tool for processing data, the number of which and the features technically exceed the capabilities of human understanding. the influence of dataism on culture is considered. the article analyzes the works of contemporary artists (mario klingemann, zach blas, etc.) working with the phenomenon of ‘algorithmic apophenia’. the thesis is considered that the transformation of data into information in computer neural networks is methodologically comparable to the creative approaches of modernist artists, which allows us to reach a new level of artis-r tic reflection in the culture that conditioned by machine civilization. critical and reflexive models of apophenia in contemporary art are collided.”
Paul, S. T., Monda, S., Olausson, S. M., & Reed-Daley, B.. (2014). Effects of apophenia on multiple-choice exam performance. SAGE Open
“There is a broad literature on the various issues related to effective exam construction applicable to both on-ground and online course delivery. these guidelines tend to support rather close contact between the instructor and the exam. however, to remain competitive, both textbook and course management providers have developed technologies to automate many aspects of exam construction. as test construction becomes automated, the possibility of inadvertently deviating from demonstrated or intuitive guidelines increases. two experiments were conducted to examine the degree to which apophenia (perceiving patterns in random data) might negatively influence multiple-choice exam performance among college students. experiment 1 indirectly demonstrated the extent to which certain answer patterns seemed to be tolerated among students (maximum of three repeated answers) in comparison with what might be expected from randomly generated exams from blackboard. experiment 2 directly examined the effects of answer patterns on exam performance. participants’ performance declined as the underlying answer patterns became more obvious, and this effect appeared to be particularly strong for the upper level psychology students. the importance and implications of these findings with regard to automated test construction were discussed, and a recommendation is provided.”
Jones, P. M., & Martin, J.. (2021). Increasing the reproducibility of research will reduce the problem of apophenia (and more). Canadian Journal of Anesthesia
“‘Technological singularity’ (ts), ‘accelerated change’ (ac), and artificial general intelligence (agi) are frequent future/foresight studies’ themes. rejecting the reductionist perspective on the evolution of science and technology, and based on patternicity (‘the tendency to find patterns in meaningless noise’), a discussion about the perverse power of apophenia (‘the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)’) and pereidolia (‘the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern’) in those studies is the starting point for two claims: the ‘accelerated change’ is a future-related apophenia case, whereas agi (and ts) are future-related pareidolia cases. a short presentation of research-focused social networks working to solve complex problems reveals the superiority of human networked minds over the hardware-software systems and suggests the opportunity for a network-based study of ts (and agi) from a complexity perspective. it could compensate for the weaknesses of approaches deployed from a linear and predictable perspective, in order to try to redesign our intelligent artifacts.”
Papasavva, A., Blackburn, J., Stringhini, G., Zannettou, S., & de Cristofaro, E.. (2020). Is it a qoincidence?: A first step towards understanding and characterizing the qanon movement on Voat.co. ArXiv
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“Conspiracy theories, and suspicion in general, define us as human beings. our suspicion and tendency to create conspiracy theories have always been with the human race, powered by our evolutionary drive to survive. although this evolutionary drive to survive is helpful, it can often become extreme and lead to ‘apophenia.’ apophenia refers to the notion of connecting previously unconnected ideas and theories. unlike learning, apophenia refers to a cognitive, paranoid disorder due to the unreality of the connections they make. social networks allow people to connect in many ways. besides communicating with a distant family member and sharing funny memes with friends, people also use social networks to share their paranoid, unrealistic ideas that may cause panic, harm democracies, and gather other unsuspecting followers. in this work, we focus on characterizing the qanon movement on voat.co. qanon is a conspiracy theory that supports the idea that powerful politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities are closely engaged in a pedophile ring. at the same time, many governments are controlled by the ‘puppet masters’ where the democratically elected officials serve as a fake showroom of democracy. voat, a 5-year-old news aggregator, captured the interest of many journalists because of the often hateful content its users’ post. hence, we collect data from seventeen qanon related subverses to characterize the narrative around qanon, detect the most prominent topics of discussion, and showcase how the different topics and terms used in qanon related subverses are interconnected.”
Meschiari, M.. (2009). Roots of the savage mind: apophenia and imagination as cognitive process. Quaderni Di Semantica: Rivista Internazionale Di Semantica Teorica e Applicata
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“Meschiari, m. (2009). roots of the savage mind. apophenia and imagination as cognitive process. quaderni di semantica: rivista internazionale di semantica teorica e applicata, 30(2), 183-262.”
Di Stefano, G., & Gutierrez, C.. (2019). Under a magnifying glass: On the use of experiments in strategy research. Strategic Organization
“The rate at which experimental studies are published in the field of strategy has steadily increased over the past few years. still, experimental papers account for only a small fraction of strategy papers. this may not come as a surprise given the skepticism surrounding the experimental method, which is often seen as uninterested in establishing external validity, and too ‘micro’ for a field in which the level of analysis is primarily organizational and inter-organizational. is this skepticism founded? to what extent can experiments be a useful tool for strategy research? to answer this question, we start by examining experimental strategy papers published between 1980 and 2016. results from the analysis alleviate doubts about the suitability of experimental methods for the study of questions of strategic interest to firms. we next discuss the main advantages associated with the use of experiments and why they make strategy an exciting field in which to be an experimentalist today.”
Merckelbach, H., Otgaar, H., & Jelicic, M.. (2020). Psychopathological significance of fantasy proneness as measured by the Creative Experiences Questionnaire: A meta-analysis. Tijdschrift Voor Psychiatrie
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“BACKGROUND fantasy proneness has been linked to dissociative symptoms and adverse childhood experiences. aim to review and meta-analyze the empirical literature on fantasy proneness (as indexed by the creative experiences questionnaire) that appeared between 2000 and 2018. method we searched google scholar to identify relevant papers and subjected them to inspection. in doing so, we specifically looked at correlations between fantasy proneness, on the one hand, and dissociative symptoms, magical ideation, depression, anxiety, trauma, and susceptibility to false memories, on the other hand. correlations were weighted using the hunter-schmidt approach. results we identified 97 studies that together included 16.999 research participants. fantasy proneness strongly correlated with both dissociative symptoms and magical ideation. the association of fantasy proneness with depression and anomalistic was moderate. its association with trauma and anxiety was small, albeit significant, and much the same was true for false memories. conclusion the psychopathological relevance of fantasy proneness is broader than just dissociative symptoms. the modest correlation between trauma and fantasy proneness suggests that, apart from trauma, other causal antecedents of fantasy proneness exist. what fantasy proneness, dissociation, and magical ideation have in common is that they are manifestations of apophenia, i.e., the tendency to overinterpret reality.”
Klein, L. W.. (2018). The Apophenia of Interventional Cardiology. Journal of Invasive Cardiology
Blain, S., Grazioplene, R., Julia, L., Ma, Y., Udochi, A., Klimes-Dougan, B., & DeYoung, C.. (2020). PERSONALITY AND NEUROCOGNITIVE CORRELATES OF PSYCHOTIC-LIKE EXPERIENCES…Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS) 2020 Congress. Schizophrenia Bulletin
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“Background: positive symptoms of schizophrenia and its extended phenotype—schizotypy—are characterized by the inclusion of novel, erroneous mental contents. these positive symptoms occur across those with a variety of diagnoses, including schizophrenia, personality disorders, and depression and bipolar with psychotic features. one promising transdiagnostic framework for explaining positive symptoms involves ‘apophenia,’ or the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns where none, in fact, exist. though hallucinations and delusions represent extreme instances of apophenia, it also occurs throughout the population and can include any instance of a false positive cognition, including such benign occurrences as seeing animals in the clouds or hearing your name in noise. importantly, apophenia may be the result of heightened pattern seeking in both perception and belief, a tendency that is, along with apophenia and positive schizotypy, positively associated with the personality trait openness to experience. we propose that pattern detection and associated personality and psychopathological traits are, in turn, underlaid by neural networks associated with experiential simulation and cognitive control, specifically, the default and frontoparietal networks. both of these networks have been implicated in research on psychosis, schizotypy, and openness. methods: despite consistently demonstrated associations among openness, positive schizotypy, and apophenia, few studies have investigated relations between schizotypy and behavioral manifestations of apophenia, let alone the role of normative personality variation or underlying neural substrates. to investigate these associations, we conducted a series of studies (total n > 3000) using self-report questionnaires, behavioral indicators of pattern detection sensitivity, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri). results: across samples, robust positive associations were found among openness, positive schizotypy, and psychotic-like experiences. in turn, all three of these traits were positively associated with general tendencies toward false positive errors, including perceiving social intentions or emotions when none were present, detecting letters in distractor shapes and speech in noise, and picking up on semantic associations between unrelated words. results using resting state functional mri data suggested positive schizotypy, openness, and especially their shared variance, were related positively to conne…”
Goldfarb, B. D., & King, A. A.. (2013). Scientific Apophenia in Strategic Management Research. SSRN Electronic Journal
“Francis bacon, pioneer of the scientific method, noted in one of his aphorisms that ‘human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.’ in this paper, we evaluate the extent to which this tendency encourages scholars to publish erroneous or inflated results in top outlets for strategy research. we provide suggestions for reducing mistaken inference.”
Tagami, U., & Imaizumi, S.. (2020). No Correlation Between Perception of Meaning and Positive Schizotypy in a Female College Sample. Frontiers in Psychology
“We visually perceive meaning from stimuli in the external world. there are inter-individual variations in the perception of meaning. a candidate factor to explain this variation is positive schizotypy, which is a personality analogous to positive symptoms of schizophrenia (e.g., visual hallucination). the present study investigated the relationship between positive schizotypy, and the perception of meaning derived from meaningful and meaningless visual stimuli. positive schizotypy in japanese female undergraduates (n = 35) was assessed by the cognitive-perceptual dimension of the schizotypal personality questionnaire. the participants were asked to report what they saw in noise-degraded images of meaningful objects (experiment 1) and to respond whether the objects were meaningful (experiment 2a) and which paired objects were meaningful (experiment 2b). positive schizotypy (i.e., cognitive-perceptual score) did not correlate with time to detect meaningful objects, and with false-alarm rates, sensitivity, and response criterion in the perception of meaning from meaningful and meaningless stimuli. these results were against our hypothesis and contradicted previous findings. the inconsistencies are discussed in terms of different methods (e.g., stimulus category) and conditions (e.g., paranormal beliefs).”
Hannah, M. N.. (2021). A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization. Social Media and Society
“Seeing is believing, so goes the cliché. in our extremely online world, the particular nexus between visual information and political belief has become one of the thorniest challenges to truth. we live in an extremely visual world in which we navigate social media, search engines, platforms, interfaces, icons, memes, and smartphones. despite the fact that we navigate visual information at an astounding rate, we have not nationally developed literacies to debunk bad information. i argue that we are witnessing a confluence between extremely online, crowd-sourced conspiracies, whose adherents possess a high capacity for online information gathering, and visualization, meant to communicate data about our world effectively and accurately through optical means which has been co-opted for information warfare. deploying such informatics further legitimates bizarre, unhinged theories about political reality. qanon, the extremely online conspiracy theory that has cast its shadow over the internet, relies exclusively on information visualization to communicate its message and is symptomatic of our inability to combat misinformation that mimics the methods of data analysis and information literacy. i argue that qanon’s success—indeed, its very existence—relies on (at least) two principal factors: (1) qanon relies, intentionally or no, on a slippage between data and information that obscures the interventions by q and q’s anons in leveraging information warfare, and (2) qanon supports such a slippage with complex and interactive visualizations of bad information, thereby accelerating apophenia, the tendency to see linkages between random events and data points.”
Sánchez, D. H.. (2021). Present-tense antropology. Tom mccarthy and the pattern recognition. Revista de Filosofia (Venezuela)
“The protagonist of satin island (2015), a novel by british writer, essayist and artist tom mccarthy, is a business anthropologist who is commissioned to generate a strange global report that ‘explains everything’. satin island, thus, is a sort of tristes tropiques of our time where the protagonist becomes a lévi-strauss 2.0 and his work an ‘present-tense antropology’. based on this starting point, the novel gradually takes the form of an investigation on narratives and stories, on trends and ways of managing the tastes of contemporary society, which, in turn, connects in an explicit way with the artistic, aesthetic and literary theories of tom mccarthy, close to the proposals of authors such as simon critchley or hito steyerl. in such theories, pattern recognition, apophenia and communication problems become fundamental keys to a political aesthetics. this article starts from mccarthy’s artistic and narrative theories to answer a concrete question: what is the place of art and the human in a reality dom-inated by pattern recognition.”
Kazemzadeh, M.. (2012). Apophenoetics: Virtual pattern recognition, the origins of creativity and augmenting the evolution of self. Technoetic Arts
Shadrova, A.. (2021). Topic models do not model topics: epistemological remarks and steps towards best practices. Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities
“The social sciences and digital humanities have recently adopted the machine learning technique of topic modeling to address research questions in their fields. this is problematic in a number of ways, some of which have not received much attention in the debate yet. this paper adds epistemological concerns centering around the interface between topic modeling and linguistic concepts and the argumentative embedding of evidence obtained through topic modeling. it concludes that topic modeling in its present state of methodological integration does not meet the requirements of an independent research method. it operates from relevantly unrealistic assumptions, is non-deterministic, cannot effectively be validated against a reasonable number of competing models, does not lock into a well-defined linguistic interface, and does not scholarly model topics in the sense of themes or content. these features are intrinsic and make the interpretation of its results prone to apophenia (the human tendency to perceive random sets of elements as meaningful patterns) and confirmation bias (the human tendency to perceptually prefer patterns that are in alignment with pre-existing biases). while partial validation of the statistical model is possible, a conceptual validation would require an extended triangulation with other methods and human ratings, and clarification of whether statistical distinctivity of lexical co-occurrence correlates with conceputal topics in any reliable way.”
Sultan, A. S., & Jessri, M.. (2019). Pathology is Always Around Us: Apophenia in Pathology, a Remarkable Unreported Phenomenon. Diseases
“People often wonder, “How do pathologists identify the patterns that lead to a diagnosis […]”
Rominger, C., Fink, A., Weiss, E. M., Schulter, G., Perchtold, C. M., & Papousek, I.. (2019). The propensity to perceive meaningful coincidences is associated with increased posterior alpha power during retention of information in a modified Sternberg paradigm. Consciousness and Cognition
“There are ample inter-individual differences in the frequency with which people perceive meaningful coincidences. previous research has identified increased proactive interference, that is a reduced working memory capacity, as one possible mechanism associated with this phenomenon. the present study aimed at extending this finding into the domain of neuroscience, (1) by assessing eeg alpha oscillations during the retention of information, (2) by replicating the behavioral link between meaningful coincidences and proactive interference. in a sample of 52 participants, the behavioral replication was successful. furthermore, participants who perceived more meaningful coincidences showed higher alpha power increases at parietal-occipital sites, and at the same time, displayed lower alpha power increases at frontal areas, during retention of information. this neurophysiological activation pattern further underlines the assumption that participants who perceive more meaningful coincidences show lower working memory capacities, since increased alpha power at parietal areas reflects a higher load on working memory demands.”
Sweitzer, N. K.. (2018). Apophenia and the Crafting of a Circulation: Heart Failure Issue. Circulation. Heart Failure
“The sciences occasionally generate discoveries that undermine their own assumptions. two such discoveries are characterized here: the discovery of apophenia by cognitive psychology and the discovery that physical systems cannot be locally bounded within quantum theory. it is shown that such discoveries have a common structure and that this common structure is an instance of priest’s well-known inclosure schema. this demonstrates that science itself is dialetheic: it generates limit paradoxes. how science proceeds despite this fact is briefly discussed, as is the connection between our results and the realism-antirealism debate. we conclude by suggesting a position of epistemic modesty.”
Rominger, C., Schulter, G., Fink, A., Weiss, E. M., & Papousek, I.. (2018). Meaning in meaninglessness: The propensity to perceive meaningful patterns in coincident events and randomly arranged stimuli is linked to enhanced attention in early sensory processing. Psychiatry Research
“Perception of objectively independent events or stimuli as being significantly connected and the associated proneness to perceive meaningful patterns constitute part of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, which are associated with altered attentional processes in lateralized speech perception. since perceiving meaningful patterns is to some extent already prevalent in the general population, the aim of the study was to investigate whether the propensity to experience meaningful patterns in co-occurring events and random stimuli may be associated with similar altered attentional processes in lateralized speech perception. self-reported and behavioral indicators of the perception of meaningful patterns were assessed in non-clinical individuals, along with eeg auditory evoked potentials during the performance of an attention related lateralized speech perception task (dichotic listening test). a greater propensity to perceive meaningful patterns was associated with higher n1 amplitudes of the evoked potentials to the onset of the dichotically presented consonant-vowel syllables, indicating enhanced automatic attention in early sensory processing. the study suggests that more basic mechanisms in how people associate events may play a greater role in the cognitive biases that are manifest in personality expressions such as positive schizotypy, rather than that positive schizotypy moderates these cognitive biases directly.”
Hobbs, D.. (2019). Faces in the clouds: criminology, epochalism, apophenia and transnational organized crime. In A Research Agenda for Global Crime
“Transnational organized crime is a construct that has emerged from a specific set of converging political economic forces. yet it is rarely critically interrogated. criminology, with few exceptions, sees it as an identifiable malady to be extinguished by the heroic efforts of administrative criminology. this chapter proceeds to critique the tendency towards epochalism in the study of organized crime and suggests that to overplay the notion of organization is a symptom of apophenia, the human tendency to seek patterns in random information. by focusing on the british experience, accessed through a series of conversations that the author carried out with veteran london-based criminals, it is hoped that a more nuanced view of organized crime might be established.”
Franceschi, P.. (2010). A Logical Defence of Maher’s Model of Polythematic Delusions. Journal of Philosophical Research
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“We proceed to describe a model for the formation and maintenance of polythematic delusions encountered in schizophrenia, which is in adequacy with brendan maher’s account of delusions. polythematic delusions are considered here as the conclusions of arguments triggered by apophenia that include some very common errors of reasoning such as post hoc fallacy and confirmation bias. we describe first the structure of reasoning which leads to delusions of reference, of telepathy and of influence, by distinguishing between the primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary types of delusional arguments. these four levels of arguments correspond to a stage the nature of which is respectively instantial, inductive, interpretative at a monothematic level and interpretative at a polythematic level. we also proceed to identify accurately the fallacious steps in the corresponding reasoning. we expose then the role of apophenia in the elaboration of delusional ideas. lastly, we describe the role played by the hallucinations in the present model.”
Boyer, M. M., & Owadally, I.. (2015). Underwriting apophenia and cryptids: Are cycles statistical figments of our imagination?. Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance: Issues and Practice
“This paper re-examines the evidence in favour of the existence of underwriting cycles in property and casualty insurance and their economical significance. using a meta-analysis of published papers in the area of insurance economics, we show that the evidence supporting the existence of underwriting cycles is misleading. there is, in fact, little evidence in favour of insurance cycles with a linear autoregressive character. this means that any cyclicality in firm profitability in the property and casualty insurance industry is not predictable in a classical econometric framework. it follows that pricing in the property and casualty insurance industry is not incompatible with that of a competitive market.”
Ellerby, Z., & Tunney, R. J.. (2019). Probability matching on a simple simulated foraging task: The effects of reward persistence and accumulation on choice behavior. Advances in Cognitive Psychology
“Over a series of decisions between two or more probabilistically rewarded options, humans have a tendency to diversify their choices, even when this will lead to diminished overall reward. in the extreme case of probability matching, this tendency is expressed through allocation of choices in proportion to their likelihood of reward. research suggests that this behaviour is an instinctive response, driven by heuristics, and that it may be overruled through the application of sufficient deliberation and self-control. however, if this is the case, then how and why did this response become established? the present study explores the hypothesis that diversification of choices, and potentially probability matching, represents an overextension of a historically normative foraging strategy. this is done through examining choice behaviour on a simple simulated foraging task, designed to model the natural process of accumulation of unharvested resources over time. behaviour was then directly compared with that observed on a standard fixed probability task (cf. ellerby & tunney, 2017). results indicated a convergence of choice patterns on the simulated foraging task, between participants who acted intuitively and those who took a more strategic approach. these findings are also compared with those of another similarly motivated study (schulze, van ravenzwaaij, & newell, 2017).”
Choupina, A.. (2020). Des yeux qui ne voient pas. Sophia Journal
“I must confess that – due to a broken foot – my enchantment with nature was somewhat faded. staring at these photographs became an almost cathartic experience, serenity washing over in a dream, renewing a passion for the universe that created architecture and that, in turn, is recreated by it. if the boa nova tea house were like saramago’s stone raft, adrift in a vast ocean, then the serralves museum would be like one of cesário verde’s bucolic poems, bathed in idyllic foliage. from the very first page, one discovers the building romantically dressed in seasonal vegetation, enveloped in a curtain of greenery, which drapes leaves as floating water lilies and droplets of rain. distant windows seem to emerge beyond the sumptuous filter, manipulating a type of picturesque nostalgia: the primitive longing for a garden of eden or the simple magic of a child playing outside. having planted an oak tree in serralves, this interpretation might be biased by my own boyish recollections or, perhaps, the landscape architect was just prone to episodes of refined apophenia. joão gomes da silva was invited by álvaro siza to help mediate the relationship with jacques gréber’s 1932 designs, supposedly inspired by the geometries of versailles. having planted an oak tree in serralves, this interpretation might be biased by my own boyish recollections or, perhaps, the landscape architect was just prone to episodes of refined apophenia. joão gomes da silva was invited by álvaro siza to help mediate the relationship with jacques gréber’s 1932 designs, supposedly inspired by the geometries of versailles. when siza’s alhambra project was exhibited here, in 2017, i pointed out that gréber’s octagons and waterlines were connected to granada – like those of luis barragán or louis kahn. in fact, all of serralves can be viewed as a modern-day alhambra and not because of its embellished gardens, protected by a stone wall, but because of its sequencing of spaces, of light and shade. […] ”
Bell, V., Reddy, V., Halligan, P., Kirov, G., & Ellis, H.. (2007). Relative suppression of magical thinking: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study. Cortex
“The tendency to perceive meaning in noise (apophenia) has been linked to ‘magical thinking’ (mt), a distinctive form of thinking associated with a range of normal cognitive styles, anomalous perceptual experiences and frank psychosis. important aspects of mt include the propensity to imbue meaning or causality to events that might otherwise be considered coincidental. structures in the lateral temporal lobes have been hypothesised to be involved in both the clinical and nonclinical aspects of mt. accordingly, in this study we used single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (tms) to stimulate either the left or right lateral temporal areas, or the vertex, of 12 healthy participants (balanced for similar levels of mt, delusional ideation and temporal lobe disturbance) while they were required to indicate if they had ‘detected’ pictures, claimed to be present by the experimenters, in visual noise. relative to the vertex, tms inhibition of the left lateral temporal area produced significant reduced tendency to report meaningful information, suggesting that left lateral temporal activation may be more important in mt and therefore producing and supporting anomalous beliefs and experiences. the effect cannot simply be explained by tms induced cognitive slowing as reaction times were not affected.”
Casane, D., Fumey, J., & Laurenti, P.. (2015). ENCODE apophenia or a panglossian analysis of the human genome. Medecine/Sciences
Wieland, R., Mirschel, W., Zbell, B., Groth, K., Pechenick, A., & Fukuda, K.. (2010). A new library to combine artificial neural networks and support vector machines with statistics and a database engine for application in environmental modeling. Environmental Modelling and Software
Simmonds-Moore, C.. (2014). Exploring the perceptual biases associated with believing and disbelieving in paranormal phenomena. Consciousness and Cognition
“The text reviews the arts and machine civilization international scientific conference. the conference took place on march 30—april 2, 2021, and was organized by the state institute for art studies, gitr film and television school, and the saint petersburg state university. sias has been hosting conferences on contemporary culture, screen art and television for 17 years. this year, for the first time in the history of such forums, the researchers were tasked with analyzing the new things that machines have brought to the arts and, in general, to human life. the conference took its special place among the forums held over the past year in russia and abroad in the following areas: artificial intelligence (artificial intelligence journey, moscow,russia); machine learning (international conferenceon machine learning, vienna, austria; 3rd international conference on machine learning and machine intelligence, hangzhou, china); civilization of knowledge (civilization of knowledge: russian realities, moscow, russia), etc. the novelty of the conference lies in the unification of the seemingly incompatible phenomena: art and machine civilization. as is commonly known, art was traditionally opposed to technology as something alien, sometimes hostile, although the both were born in human mind and created by human hands. until now, the expression ‘machine civilization’ in art has been used mainly in the genre of fantasy and with an emphasis on its negative connotations. the purpose of the conference was to comprehend the artistic practices in the era of machine civilization, get acquainted with current hypotheses, publish new facts and discuss modern terminologies (law of spontaneity, law of semantic uncertainty, algorithmic apophenia, post-opera, artificial life and new vitality). along with the study of new challenges, old issues were raised, which became in demand in the machine civilization: originals and copies of artworks, the boundaries of conventionality and overcoming distrust in new media, narratives and poetics in serious and entertaining screen genres. the conference reports were divided into six blocks: theoretical models, screenarts—cinema, fine arts, music, pc games, and digitalization.”
Palandri, A.. (2014). Apophenia? Data Under-Mining the Volatility Leverage-Effect.. SSRN Electronic Journal
“The inverse relation between stock returns and their volatility, known as volatility leverage-effect (vle), is documented as a strikingly robust empirical regularity. this paper argues that existing explanations of the phenomenon either suffer from logical inconsistencies or have secondary implications that contradict empirical evidence. robustness of the empirical findings is re-examined by conducting a thorough investigation of vle in s&p500 data. combining misspecification analysis with a novel approach to outlier detection reveals that the vle relation is indeed very fragile. implications range from the empirical validity of vle itself to its use as a moment condition for structural models. ”
Sultan, A. S., & Jessri, M.. (2021). Pathology Is Always Around Us: Apophenia in Pathology, a Remarkable Unreported Phenomenon. In Advances in Medical Biochemistry, Genomics, Physiology, and Pathology
Ferencz, Á., Bolló, H., Hidegkuti, I., & Szemán-Nagy, A.. (2014). Absorbed in creation: Psychotic and dissociative experiences in the creative process?. Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle
“Both artists and psychiatric patients can be characterized by the exceptional aptitude that they perceive the world in a way which is different from usual. research on the connection between creativity and psychopathology is turning away from mental disorders as diagnostic categories towards cognitive and affective phenotypes. some traits which are also typical of psychiatric disorders – often in a more benign form and in case of the presence of other factors – play a fundamental role in the creative process, and thus can be adaptive. the aim of our work is to review the literature of the relation between creativity and psychopa-thology. after clarifying the basic concepts of creativity, we delineate the features of the creative personality. among the psychopathological bearings, we cover the relations to schizotypy and dissociative phenomena, particularly absorption in detail. finally, we draw up some general considerations regarding creativity research.”
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