Donald Loritz
Don Loritz stopped by my poster. This was about 3 hours ago at the CogSci 2006 meeting, where Li and I presented the Chinese Counterfactual stuff. A very pleasant guy and we chatted about aspect, counterfactual, and all the nonsense people have said about Chinese language. He seemed to be particularly interested in the ERP study we were about to carry out. He suggested that we look into P300, as it’s a signal for updating and to unexpected events. Don specifically recommended Stephen Grossberg’s papers on P300, and casually mentioned his book How the Brain Evolved Language (1999; review) since it also dealt with P300.
The original paper is:
S. Sutton, M. Braren, J. Zublin, and E. John, (1965) Evoked potential correlates of stimulus uncertainty Science, 150, 1187–1188.
but the accepted theory seems to be Donchin and Coles (1988)
Donchin E, Coles MGH (1988): Is the P300 component a manifestation of context updating? Behavioral and Brain Science 11:355-372.
Back to Don, he is really obscure — on the web. Other than the book, there is not a single picture of him that google can find. A man with no history, he is in LexisNexis doing computational linguistic stuff, but that’s all I know.

September 22nd, 2006 at 11:37 am e
I enjoyed chatting with you, too. I’ll be curious to learn if P300 ever made sense to you. (Most people call my book obscure–not me!
)
Don
September 22nd, 2006 at 4:14 pm e
glad you stopped by. Google typically is pretty generous in providing information about academics. I was surprised how little trace you left on the internet. So long.