Research
dmunger | August 27, 2008"Impossible objects" like the etchings of M.C. Escher have fascinated adults for centuries. You can't help but stare and wonder at a drawing like this, which seems to defy the laws of nature:
The drawing seems strange to us because our visual system tells us that when an object or part of an object occludes another, it's in front. Since the parts of the cube are all connected, it's clear that the vertical bar in the "back" of the cube shouldn't be in front of any other bars.
Some research has suggested that young babies don't have the same ability as adults to determine how close objects…
dmunger | August 25, 2008Take a look at this short video -- it's a list of animals. Try to remember as many animals as you can.
If you're like me, you're pretty confident that you will remember the entire list, even after ten minutes or so. In my case, that's not so much because the list names animals that most of us are familiar with. After all, there are plenty of other animals not on my list. How would I remember the precise animals that were included from the thousands of possibilities?
Well, I would remember them -- or think I would -- because they are all names of football teams that play in the NFL. Since I'm…
dmunger | August 21, 2008As a child (and like most children, I imagine) I used to think conducting an orchestra entailed something like what Bugs Bunny does in this video:
Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than actually leading the musicians in any meaningful way. It wasn't until I married an amateur musician that I actually learned that the conductor could have an important influence on the way an orchestra sounds. But as Greta and I moved from place to place and she joined a variety of different ensembles, I…
dmunger | August 18, 2008One of the first things I did after my 90-mile hike with Nora in the North Cascades was play some music on the car stereo. We'd been in the wilderness for seven days, and other than birdsong, we hadn't heard so much as a note for the entire time.
Matching our intuitions about music, researchers have found that music is an important influence on our memories. We associate songs with emotions, people, and places we've experienced in the past. This isn't to say that music is the only influence on memory: the photos I took, the sights I saw, and the words I wrote about my hike will also help to…
terrasig | August 16, 2008CORRECTION: The following was to be a part-sincere/part-serious sendup of my buddy Bora's penchant for monitoring the entire Internet. Bora did indeed host the first edition of Praxis, the new blog carnival of academic life.
However.
The Praxis experimental carnival of "the experience of living the scientific" was established, founded, and otherwise continues to be led by Martin, author of The Lay Scientist blog.
Mini Bio:
Well I'm Martin, I live in Cambridge, England, and this is me on the Amazon in 2007. I did a frankly weird Ph.D. looking at the relationship between models from ecology,…
dmunger | August 14, 2008[This article was originally published in December, 2006]
As parents of a 1516-year-old, Greta and I are very interested in what causes people to behave aggressively. We know a lot about specific causes of aggression -- violent media, testosterone, guns, and personal insults can all lead to aggressive behavior in certain circumstances. But kids and others exposed to one or more of these things don't necessarily become violent. Sometimes it seems that just the presence of his sister in the room can cause Jim to act more aggressively than he would otherwise.
That's one reason we were intrigued…
jane | August 13, 2008Typically, when I want to use a student's work that s/he handed in as an assignment for one of my classes in another context, I email the student to ask for his/her permission. For instance, sometimes I want to use a student's assignment as an example of a particularly well-done assignment, or to illustrate a particular point in lecture, or even just to provide some debugging practice to students. I tend to do this as a courtesy, for sure, but also because frankly, I have no idea what the "rules" are concerning the ownership of student assignments for a course taught by me.
I'm currently…
terrasig | August 13, 2008Most people know of methadone as a long-term substitution therapy for people addicted to heroin, morphine, or other similar drugs called opiates or opioids. A good, free full-text description of methadone maintenance therapy (MMT) can be found in the 15 June 2001 issue of American Family Physician.
Now, in the 1 August 2008 issue of Cancer Research, Claudia Friesen and colleagues at the University of Ulm report that methadone can kill leukemia cells in culture and reverse acquired resistance to other drugs like doxorubicin (Adriamycin). Press reports to this effect appeared at the beginning…
dmunger | August 11, 2008[This article was originally published in December, 2006]
Take a look at these two images. Do they belong in the same category or different categories?
You say the same? Wrong -- they're different! The one on the right is a little blurrier.
What about these two?
These are in the same category. Sure, the one on the right is still blurrier, but now it's rotated a bit, so that puts the two objects back in the same category. My rule for categorizing is complex, involving both blurriness and rotation (I'll explain how it works later on).
How do you think you would do if you were tested on…
dmunger | August 7, 2008[This article was originally published in April, 2007]
There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will have much more social influence over that person than you would if you averted your gaze.
The problem arises when you address a group of people. How do you pick who to engage visually? Most public speakers are encouraged to look around the room, alternating eye contact with individuals in the audience…
dmunger | August 4, 2008[Originally posted in May, 2007]
"I just didn't see him" is a claim that's repeated over and over in accident reports. Drivers earnestly claim that they simply didn't notice the bicycle/pedestrian/motorcycle they crashed into. The claim is made so frequently that certainly there must be a grain of truth to it. Yet it certainly isn't the case that car drivers can't see such obstacles -- after all, they can see traffic signals that are much smaller than a bike or a motorcycle.
What they mean to say is that their attention was otherwise engaged -- perhaps by a phone conversation, perhaps by…
terrasig | August 1, 2008This morning our dear friend and colleague whose wine escapades often fill this spot awoke to the rewards of retirement. My senior cancer research colleague, Erleichda, has just closed the book on 30 years with a single pharmaceutical company, unheard of in today's climate of layoffs and jumping from one company to the next.
My friend began in this industry when it was still considered a noble pursuit and continued to be an ambassador for all that is good about pharmaceutical research & development, with his primary concern the welfare of those stricken with cancer and the cultivation…
dmunger | July 31, 2008[This post was originally published in March 2007]
Earlier today I posted a poll [and I republished that poll yesterday] challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power you sometimes see on graphs. I was quite confident that they wouldn't succeed. Why was I so sure? Because in 2005, a team led by Sarah Belia conducted a study of hundreds of researchers who had published articles in top psychology, neuroscience, and medical journals. Only a small portion of them could demonstrate accurate knowledge of how…
terrasig | July 30, 2008Unlike the blogosphere and some unhinged stakeholders, I've been quietly watching the PZ Myers crackergate episode unfold. My concerns have been less theological than educational, primarily because I am the beneficiary of an arm of the University of Florida public higher education system.
I've been beating my head against the wall as to why the leadership and student government of the University of Central Florida in Orlando would be taking such drastic action against Webster Cook. Cook is the student who took a consecrated communion wafer uneaten from a Sunday 29 June Catholic service at…
dmunger | July 28, 2008One of the key components of "normal" child development is social competence. We expect kids to become gradually better at behaving respectfully towards peers, to comply with requests made by others, to understand the thoughts of others, to play together with kids and adults, to sustain attention, and to be motivated to learn. But what makes the difference between a child who becomes socially competent and one who doesn't? Obviously there are some risk factors, such as whether they have autism, whether both parents are present in the household, and the education and poverty level of the…
dmunger | July 24, 2008Several recent large-scale studies have confirmed a curious finding: Asians are much more likely to have "perfect pitch" than non-Asians. Perfect pitch, more properly called "Absolute pitch," is an extremely rare phenomenon, but it's several times more likely to occur in Asians than in others.
Studies have found that only 1 in 1,500 to 10,000 individuals possess absolute pitch. Part of the ability's rarity is due to the fact that it's really a combination of two abilities: pitch-memory -- the ability to remember what a pitch sounds like, and pitch-labeling -- the ability to name a pitch (A, B…
dmunger | July 21, 2008A number of studies have found that older adults aren't as good at certain visual tasks compared to younger adults. Mental rotation, for example, is both slower and less accurate. But other studies have found that for certain types of mental rotation, older adults do just as well as younger adults. The dividing line, these researchers argued, was based on whether the viewer was rotating or the objects themselves were rotating.
So in a classic mental rotation task like Shepard and Metzler's, older adults don't do as well, but in many other tasks, their performance isn't much different from…
jane | July 17, 2008Where is my summer?? I thought once July hit and the busyness of June subsided that I'd actually have time to, you know, maybe, relax a bit. Ha! This has been a particularly busy week. The good news is that after today, things do get easier and calmer.
(Of course, playing Guitar Hero for 3 hours last night certainly didn't help matters much either. Good for the soul, yes. Good for the work and sleep schedules, not so much.)
So what have I been up to this week that's keeping me so busy?
After a few weeks of not being able to get to the unreviewed article (ok, so maybe, just maybe, I was…
terrasig | July 17, 2008Arachnologist and diplopodologist Dr Jason E Bond at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, is most recently well-known for naming a spider (Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi) after Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Neil Young.
Kristin Day of The Daily Reflector is now reporting that Professor Bond has agreed to name a spider after Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's host of "The Colbert Report."
When news emerged in May that Bond had named a species of trapdoor spider after Neil Young, the biologist could not escape Colbert's web:
"Where's my spider? I have lots of animals named after me: turtles,…
dmunger | July 17, 2008When we're in a crowded space, making visual judgments becomes more difficult. But it doesn't take much to trigger a crowding effect. Clicking on the picture below will take you to a quick movie (QuickTime required) that should demonstrate the effect. Focus on the cross to the left, then start the movie (it may start automatically, depending on your browser). In two seconds, a "T" will flash briefly on the right side of the screen. Your job is to determine whether the T is upright or inverted (upside-down). After another two seconds, three Ts will appear. This time, you must judge only the…