Research
dmunger | January 6, 2006My son Jim loved his bottle when he was a baby. By about 15 months of age, he loved baby formula so much that he was going through over a hundred dollars' worth a week -- more than the rest of the food budget for the entire family! (Yes, we were buying the powdered stuff, not pre-made formula.) There were weeks when we completely exhausted the local grocery store's supply.
Needless to say, soon his pediatrician pointed out he was gaining weight too quickly, and we should cut his rations down to, say, three bottles a day. It was a painful transition. Previously, all Jim would have to do was…
dmunger | January 4, 2006Much of the research on violent video games, like a vast proportion of all psychological research, has focused on college students. This shouldn't be surprising, since most college psychology departments require students to participate in experiments as a part of the Introduction to Psychology course. It's an easy way for researchers to find human participants, and a great way for students to learn how real research is done. Research results for college students often are equivalent to the population as a whole, and even when they aren't, college students can establish a baseline to compare…
dmunger | January 3, 2006Kids love robots. I have a three-year-old friend who can identify the 1950s cult icon Robbie the Robot at 20 paces. My own son Jim could do an impressive multi-voiced impression of R2D2 by age five. Now that real robots are beginning to be everyday household items (when I was a kid, if I'd known I'd be able to buy a vacuum-cleaner robot from Sears when I was a grown-up, I'd be ashamed to learn that I never actually bought one!), one wonders how real kids will respond to them.
When, for example, might a child begin to believe that a robot has a conscious mind, and that humans might…
dmunger | December 30, 2005What is your mind doing when you think about something? For decades, the prevailing wisdom was that when you imagine, say, the scent of a flower or your lover's perfume, your mind is doing something different from when you actually smell those things. The metaphor was a computer: The hardware for sensing things was distinct from the software for thinking about things.
More recent evidence suggests that the way we understand concepts relies on the sensorimotor system. When you think of the sound of a dripping faucet, the same parts of your brain are activated as when you are actually hearing a…
dmunger | December 27, 2005Toddlers learn new words at an astonishing rate—an average, according to Steven Pinker, of over a word every two hours. Yet attempts to drill children to improve vocabulary are often frustrating. Kids seem to learn words better through observing the environment than they do by rote. So what exactly are they observing?
One possibility is that the child is paying attention to what others are looking at: if a grown-up looks at a construction site and says "look at the bulldozer," maybe kids learn "bulldozer" because they have learned to follow the grown-up's gaze. Another possibility is that…
dmunger | December 26, 2005How do we know when we see a beautiful body? Is it some social standard such as thinness or proportion? Do we simply think that bodies that are closest to "normal" are also most beautiful? We know that to be the case with faces, where faces that closest to "average" are generally rated as more attractive than others which deviate, and faces that combine the characteristics of several races are rated as more attractive than those typical of a particular race.
We've written before on how our perception of faces can be altered. If you look at faces that have been systematically distorted to look…
dmunger | December 21, 2005There is little doubt that the cognitive demands of conversation can affect our awareness of the world around us. Everyone has a story of a near-miss collision with some clueless airhead driving who was jabbering away on the cell phone. A co-worker once tearfully told me of the time she was in an argument with her boyfriend while parked in his car at the side of the road. Furious, he got out of the car and slammed the door. He never noticed the passing car that hit him and instantly killed him. Was this a freak accident, or does conversation—and not just cell phone conversation—impair our…
dmunger | December 16, 2005We've written before about how stereotypes can impair performance on math tests: for example, when women are told they are taking a math test for a study about gender differences in math ability, they perform more poorly than men. However, if they are first taught about how stereotypes can impair performance, their scores rise to equality with men.
But what about the other side of the stereotype spectrum? When people are expected to perform better due to a stereotype, how do those expectations affect performance? One possible answer is that they will perform even better. Another possibility…
dmunger | December 14, 2005IQ has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands of research studies. Scholars have studied the link between IQ and race, gender, socioeconomic status, even music. Discussions about the relationship between IQ and race and the heritability of IQ (perhaps most notably Steven Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man) often rise to a fever pitch. Yet for all the interest in the study of IQ, there has been comparatively little research on other influences on performance in school.
Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman estimate that for every ten articles on intelligence and academic achievement, there…
dmunger | December 13, 2005Last week we discussed two experiments in a report by Adam Anderson about how the phenomenon of attentional blink is modified when the task includes arousing words. Perhaps not surprisingly, we're more likely to notice arousing words like "ejaculate" or "foreplay" in a rapidly presented sequence than neutral words like "plane" or "clock."
But Anderson wasn't finished—he wanted to explain why this phenomenon occurs. Are we more likely to remember arousing words after the fact? Or are arousing words inherently more able to attract our attention? So, Anderson reversed the attentional blink task…
dmunger | December 9, 2005A few months ago, Jon Stewart opened the eyes of his Daily Show audience when he interviewed the author of the book On Bullshit. Viewers accustomed to hearing the familiar bleep when Stewart enters foul-mouth mode were surprised to find that the word came through completely uncensored. Stewart himself reveled in his new freedom, repeating the word "bullshit" dozens of times over the course of the interview. It was difficult not to notice the word every time he spoke it.
Adam K. Anderson of the University of Toronto, who specializes in studying attention, wondered if negative words like "…
dmunger | December 6, 2005Take a look at these graphs:
Most bloggers and web designers will find this sort of chart familiar—it's a record of Cognitive Daily's visitor statistics for the month of November. The first graph records the amount of traffic we received each day. Notice that the pink bars are shorter—these correspond to the weekends. You might think that weekend traffic is lower just because we don't post new articles on weekends. But we didn't post an article at all on November 14, a Monday, yet still saw an increase in traffic compared to the day before. The second graph charts a number of indicators of…
dmunger | December 5, 2005Take a look at these two photographs of my son Jim taken a month or so after he was born (and, as he would be quick to point out, nearly 14 years ago). Which is more memorable?
It may depend on your age. It's natural for your priorities to change as you get older, and so it seems, you may have a different response to pictures depicting emotions. Your kids grow up and leave home, and suddenly Little League and Disney seem less significant. Perhaps fine wine and opera rise up to fill that void. Later still, you begin to think about retirement, and gradually it seems more important to reach…
dmunger | December 1, 2005Listen to these two short music clips.
Music Clip 1
Music Clip 2
Now, can you identify the musical style of each clip?
If you said "Classical," you're technically only correct for the first clip. The second clip is actually in the Romantic style (bonus points for identifying the works and composers in the comments!). While both are examples of the classical genre, classical music is also divided into styles corresponding roughly to historical periods: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Post-Romantic. Traditionally, only trained musicians have been regarded as being able to easily distinguish…
dmunger | November 29, 2005Do you ever wonder if your mood affects the way you think? I'm not talking about behaving more aggressively when you're angry or more passively when you're sad; I'm talking about the subtler impact on cognitive processing. Some recent research has indicated that we process things differently depending on whether we're in a positive or negative mood. People in good moods tend to make more connections between related items, while people in bad moods generally focus on what's in front of them.
Justin Storbeck and Gerald L. Clore realized that there may be a connection between this research on…
dmunger | November 23, 2005
Carmageddon 2 (source: Gamespot) is a gory racing game where players control drivers with names like "Max Damage" as they tear through city streets mowing down pedestrians and forcing competitors into bloody collisions. The game settings can be adjusted so that running down innocent bystanders actually increases a player's point total. Surely, if there's any video game that might raise a parent's ire, Carmageddon 2 is one of them.
Studies have shown that violent video games are more likely than non-violent games to induce aggressive behavior, even after very short playing sessions. But more…
dmunger | November 21, 2005The picture below will link you to a quick animation. The blue ring will gradually get smaller until it obscures the three "8"s, then continue to shrink until the figures are visible again. While they are obscured, the 8s will be transformed into letters (S, P, E, U, or H), and a new letter will also appear. Your job is to search for the letter U or H—it has an equal chance of appearing where any of the 8s were, or in the new spot. Click on the picture to try it out.
Attention researchers Steven Franconeri, Andrew Hollingworth, and Daniel Simons used a similar animation to answer a key…
dmunger | November 18, 2005Attentional blink researchers Christian Olivers and Sander Nieuwenhuis noticed something curious when they conducted their experiments. When they were testing their stimuli, they felt that they could do the task better when they were distracted. Their participants also reported that they tended to perform better when they were a little unfocused on the task.
Attentional blink, as we've reported before, is a short period when we're less able to notice an item flashed briefly in our visual field. The classic experiment involves a rapidly flashed sequence of random digits or letters—Olivers and…
dmunger | November 17, 2005One of the gimmicks of the 1948 film Words and Music was the question of which is more important in a song—the words or the music.
Source: SoundtrackCollector
The movie, a fictionalization of the lives of the legendary team of Broadway writers Richard Rogers (music) and Lorenz Hart (words), only addresses its titular conflict obliquely. The implicit answer, of course, is that you can't have one without the other.
Or can you? While it's difficult or perhaps impossible to scientifically determine whether words or music is more important in a song, Isabelle Peretz, Monique Radeau, and…
dmunger | November 15, 2005Take a look at the following three animations. Each will flash very rapidly through a set of words (9 words per second!). Your job is to watch carefully and see if you notice a word that describes an occupation that a human performs for money. Such a word may or may not be in each list, and you only get one chance with each one. No cheating!
List 1
List 2
List 3
Did you see an occupation in any of the lists? Just one or two of them?
If you're like most people, you had no problem spotting "attorney" in the first list, but you missed "carpenter" in the second list. The third list was probably…