The research may show that the mice are responding to stimuli, but how can anyone honestly claim to know what the experience is like, or whether the "memories" are truly recalled as negative and induce actual "fear".
I mean, it's not like mice can verbalize their experience. They don't use words to tell us how they "feel" about these memories on the inside.
And in the article, it states that no new memories were actually created. Only the nature of existing memories were augmented to be negative.
From the article:
...whether they could create a new, negative association
by flipping the switch on an old, neutral memory while
giving the mouse a negative experience.
So they took an existing memory of a location, and made the mice scared of the location. That's a lot different from the claim in the headline.
Just for the sake of inane semantic pedantry, I have to ask: How do the words "honest", "humane" or "civil" correlate to "affordance" in this context?
In the book, the term "affordance" refers to any kind of opportunity for a user to exert leverage on a designed object or system. So, a hair brush has a handle, and that handle is the point at which the object (the hair brush) affords any use by the user, because the person can grab the handle and orient the bristles when the dragging the brush through their hair. Hence the book's cover design, depicting the coffee pot with the misplaced handle, demonstrating a misplaced affordance, which results in the user getting burned when they try to pour hot coffee. The mouse is an affordance on a computer, because it's the device used for pointing. The keyboard is the affordance for typing. The video monitor is the affordance for observing output. The "submit" button on a web form in an HTML page is the affordance for sending data to the web server.
When would you ever use the words "honest", "humane" or "civil" in place of "affordance"? Those are adjectives, but the word "affordance" is a noun.
I mean, it's not like mice can verbalize their experience. They don't use words to tell us how they "feel" about these memories on the inside.
And in the article, it states that no new memories were actually created. Only the nature of existing memories were augmented to be negative.
From the article:
So they took an existing memory of a location, and made the mice scared of the location. That's a lot different from the claim in the headline.