Research
dmunger | June 14, 2006In many ways, my career has been dominated by efforts to make "work" bear as much resemblance to "having fun" as possible. Today's article only confirms that rule. Yesterday afternoon, I spent an hour watching a World Cup soccer match, and for once I could claim that it was completely relevant to work. I could still remember Diego Maradona's stunning 1986 run through the center of the English defense as vividly as if it happened yesterday, and was hoping to form a similarly vivid memory. Unfortunately, yesterday's lackluster 0-0 tie between France and Switzerland didn't provide me with…
dmunger | June 12, 2006Experiments on change blindness have revealed striking limitations in visual memory. Take a look at the video below, for example (click to play -- and note that the video is contained in a java applet that may take a while to load -- but it's worth it!).
The woman is giving directions to one "construction worker," when two other "workers" carry a door in between them. A new worker (all of them are actually actors hired by the experimenters) is substituted during the hubbub, and the woman continues giving directions as if no change has occurred. This work has been duplicated in a variety of…
dmunger | June 7, 2006Synesthesia -- the ability to experience a sensation like vision in another mode, like hearing -- is thought to be quite rare. Yet all of us have the ability to combine sensory modes, and we do it every day. The modes we combine just happen to be ones we don't think about as often: taste and smell.
While vision gets the lion's share of attention in perception research, research on olfaction and taste has begun to be more prominent. However, though we know that the senses of taste and smell interact, few studies have explored the interaction between the two sensory modes. The problem is that…
dmunger | June 5, 2006I've been an avid skier for over 25 years -- but I didn't start using goggles until very recently. Under the overcast Washington State skies, they didn't seem to be necessary. But now that I live in North Carolina, skiing is usually done under sunny skies on artificial snow; goggles are a must. As a person who also wears glasses, however, the experience can be frustrating -- any time I stop for more than a few seconds, my goggles, glasses, or both will usually fog up -- the goggles rely on airflow to keep from getting foggy. In this situation, I'm left with two choices: proceed with impaired…
dmunger | June 1, 2006Several studies indicate that the brain regions responsible for taste overlap the areas responsible for detecting pain.
However, Dana Small and A. Vania Apkarian noted that little research has been conducted on the relationship to taste sensitivity and pain. They developed a simple experiment to see if there was a relationship.
Eleven volunteers with chronic back pain were matched with 11 normal volunteers, of similar age, gender, and education backgrounds. Each person was tested separately for sensitivity to four different kinds of tastes: bitter, salty, sweet, and sour. They each sampled a…
dmunger | May 30, 2006A recent study about violence and sex in TV advertising got a fair amount of press. "Violence and sex don't sell," the headlines proclaimed. If such a claim is true, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom and the blusterings of ad agencies worldwide.
Advertisers have always used the idea that "sex sells" to generate interest in their products, and television networks have argued that they need to offer lots of violence and sex in their programming in order to attract viewers. But what if sex and violence don't really sell products? Doesn't that turn the whole notion of "sex sells" on its…
dmunger | May 26, 2006Take a look at the following movie. Your job is to identify which ball appeared to make the noise in the final frame. (click to play):
If this seems confusing now, it should be cleared up by the end of this post. You can register your result in this poll:
Synesthesia, as we've discussed before, is a rare condition. Synesthetes are people who perceive stimuli presented in one mode (often corresponding to one of the five senses) with a different mode. It's a remarkable ability, manifesting itself in a variety of different ways -- seeing "auras" around friends, or associating a sound or even…
dmunger | May 24, 2006We've discussed implicit attitudes on Cognitive Daily before, but never in the context of food. The standard implicit attitude task asks you to identify items belonging to two different categories. Consider the following lists. Use your mouse to click on items which are either pleasant or related to Genetically Modified foods (GM foods). (Clicking won't actually do anything, it's just a way of self-monitoring your progress)
Horrible
Good
Transgenic
Nasty
Crops
Wonderful
dislike
GE livestock
Now with this next list, do the same task, only click on items which are either unpleasant or related…
dmunger | May 22, 2006We've had plenty of discussion of the Stroop Effect on Cognitive Daily, and a cool effect it is -- but it's not the only effect with a catchy name. How about the spatial numerical association of response codes effect? Not catchy enough for you? The scholars researching the effect have taken to calling it the SNARC Effect. Now if that isn't an effect named to win a blogger's heart, I don't know what is.
First identified by Dehaene, Bossini, and Giraux in 1993, the SNARC Effect suggests that people represent numbers in the form of an imaginary number line. When asked to indicate if a digit is…
dmunger | May 19, 2006The Stroop Effect was originally just a language effect: we're slower identifying the color text is printed in when the words themselves name different colors. In the 81 years since the effect was first observed, it's been applied to a variety of very different phenomena. In general, the effect is explained by automatic processing: when a process is automatic, it conflicts with the desired goal and so slows processing. In fact, the Stroop Effect is so robust that researchers now use it to determine if a process is indeed automatic.
Much research has focused on the issue of whether racial…
dmunger | May 18, 2006Take a look at this photo:
What emotion would you say I'm expressing here? Let's make this one a poll (make sure you answer before you read any farther):
In 1872, Charles Darwin argued that facial expressions must have evolved just as surely as eyes or noses (you can read an excerpt from his work on emotional expressions in Greta's book The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions). Later research has shown that there are several universally understood facial expressions, and that these expressions can be defined and described specifically so that anyone can imitate them and make their…
dmunger | May 16, 2006The text below will bring up an animation. Just look at it once -- no cheating! A picture will flash for about a quarter of a second, followed by a color pattern for a quarter second. Then the screen will go blank for about one second, and four objects will appear. Use the poll below to indicate which object (#1, 2, 3, or 4) appeared in the picture.
Click here to view the animation!
I'll let you know which answer was correct at the end of the post, but this test approximates the procedure of an experiment conducted by Kristine Liu and Yuhong Jiang, designed to measure the capacity of visual…
dmunger | May 10, 2006Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings.
I've attempted to reproduce the type of display…
dmunger | May 9, 2006The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. The simplest way to see how it works is just to look the following two lists. Don't read them, instead say the color each word is displayed in, as quickly as you can:
If English is your native language, you should be much quicker at naming the colors of the first list than the second list. Why? Even though the task is to identify the colors, proficient readers can't stop themselves from reading the words, which slows color identification in cases where…
dmunger | May 4, 2006Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel's hosting a discussion on who should be on a hypothetical Mount Rushmore of science. There's a fairly broad consensus that Darwin, Einstein, and Newton make the cut, but rather heated debate on who should be the fourth member.
Many of Chad's readers suggest Sigmund Freud. I found that surprising, since the field of psychology has largely moved away from the work of Freud. Freud is still very influential in literary and cultural studies, but not so much in the world of science. Indeed, one of Freud's lasting influences was the attempt to undertake a…
dmunger | May 3, 2006Americans, as any ScienceBlogger will tell you, have a woefully poor understanding of math and science. For the most part, even the most ignorant among us are able to stumble through life, but what happens when we're confronted with a genuine scientific question with a real impact on our lives?
Consider the typical doctor's office scenario: the doctor asks a breast cancer patient to decide on a treatment. "There's a 30 percent chance of recurrence in five years," she tells the patient, "but with chemotherapy, the chance is reduced to 10 percent." If the patient doesn't have a basic…
dmunger | May 1, 2006Family lore has it that my uncle was influential in instituting what is now a fixture in college education: student evaluation of college instructors. He was class president at the University of Washington in the 1960s, when tensions between students and the school administrators were high, and he suggested implementing one of the first student course evaluation systems in the nation as a way to address the problem. Needless to say, the idea caught on.
While college faculty complain unceasingly about the fairness of the now nearly universal student course evaluation system (I did it myself,…
dmunger | April 26, 2006When two athletes are the same size and strength, what makes one better than the other? In many sports, the best athletes are the ones who can react more quickly to game situations than others. Are they just generally better at focusing their attention where it needs to be? Or have they learned some skill set specific to the game at hand?
Attention researchers have made some efforts to learn if athletes perform better in visual tasks than non-athletes, but the results have been mixed. In some experiments, athletes react faster than non-athletes, but in others, there is no discernible…
dmunger | April 25, 2006A number of studies have found cultural differences in visual cognition. For example, Takahiko Masuda and Richard Nisbett found that when Americans watch a short video clip of an underwater scene, they tend to recall the items in the foreground: the fish. Japanese people watching the same clip recall the items in the background: rocks, plants, and their relationship to one another.
A team led by Shinobu Kitayama showed people a frame with a line drawn inside. When asked to duplicate the line in a different-sized frame, Americans were better at drawing it the same size, despite the frame,…
dmunger | April 20, 2006If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there have been comparatively few…