Research
dmunger | November 10, 2005Eric Durbrow pointed me to this article in the Globe and Mail. Its lead sentence offers a surprising claim:
Parents take note: Reading to your preschoolers before bedtime doesn't mean they are likely to learn much about letters, or even how to read words.
But aren't teachers and literacy advocates constantly urging parents to read to their kids? Aren't their entreaties backed by research?
The Globe and Mail article reports on research published in Psychological Science by Mary Ann Evans and Jean Saint-Aubin. I decided to look at the original article to see if it lives up to the dramatic…
dmunger | November 8, 2005In face to face conversation, we often look away from the person we're speaking with. Somewhat paradoxically, the closer people sit to their conversation companions, the less often they look at them.
But other factors influence how often we avert our gaze, too. When we are asked personal questions, or difficult questions, or possibly when we are trying to deceive, we look away more often. When we talk with someone via a remote video monitor, we look at them more often than when we engage in the same type of conversation face to face.
So what's the cause of this behavior? Do several different…
dmunger | November 7, 2005What does it mean to have a gut feeling that you remember something? You see someone you recognize in a coffee shop. Do you remember her from high school? Or maybe you saw her on television. Could she be the manager of your local bank? Perhaps you don't know her at all ... but you've still got a feeling you do. What's that all about?
One theory of memory proposes that what we remember depends on our expectations. We're less likely to remember our old classmate at the coffee shop than at the high school reunion. At the bank, we might greet the manager by name, but we only get a vague sense of…
dmunger | November 3, 2005Just listening to music, despite the hype associated with the "Mozart Effect," appears to have little influence on IQ or other abilities. It does seem to make us more aroused and put us in a better mood, which can improve performance on tests, but it doesn't actually make us any smarter. But what about actual long-term training in music? Clearly musical training can make us better able to perform and appreciate music, but can it also improve our performance in areas? With its mathematically based notation system, music has been shown to improve mathematical reasoning skills. But surely music…
dmunger | October 31, 2005One of the most difficult things to demonstrate scientifically is cause and effect. Often a study will show that two items—say, smoking and lung cancer—are associated with one another. But it's another thing entirely to suggest that smoking causes lung cancer in humans. Only after hundreds of studies have been conducted do we now accept that hypothesis as fact.
Now consider a small child, trying to make sense of her world. She might want to know what makes the lights come on in her room. She notices that the lights tend to come on whenever a grown-up walks in. But sometimes, in the middle of…
dmunger | October 28, 2005More and more human conversations are taking place online. While I don't do instant messaging the way my kids like to, I'm much more likely to contact a friend via e-mail than to pick up the phone. Here at Cognitive Daily and at other online discussion forums, I've built relationships with commenters who I've never seen or even e-mailed.
While the next leap in online communications—videoconferencing—is in its infancy, an intermediate form is beginning to show promise. Called a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE), it enables people to have a virtual online conference by creating digital…
dmunger | October 26, 2005I had a friend in college who was a baseball genius. He could offer up the career stats of every player in the hall of fame; he knew which teams had won the World Series in each year since its inception—he was a great guy to have on your Trivial Pursuit team; the sports category was a gimme for him.
Whether it's sports, molecular biology, or quilting, everyone seems to know someone who's an expert in their field, who seems to possess an inhuman amount of knowledge about their area of expertise. What makes these individuals so special? Part of this expertise seems to be related to the…
dmunger | October 24, 2005Psychologists have known for decades that people perceive music as happier when it's played faster, and in a major key (mode). Take a listen to the following sound clips I created using a synthesized flute. Each plays the same melody three times—first in a major mode, then a minor mode, then a "whole tone" middle ground. The only difference between the two clips is that the second clip is played twice as fast.
Clip 1 (slow)
Clip 2 (fast)
For most people, the second clip sounds happier than the first overall, and the major mode portion sounds happiest within each clip. But what matters most—…
dmunger | October 21, 2005I'm usually disappointed when I try to take a picture of a steep precipice—it never seems as impressive in the photo as it did when I was standing right there. Take this photo, for example. It's a nice shot of my daughter Nora, taken on our hike in the Great Smoky Mountains this past summer, but you just don't get much sense of the dizzying precipice she's standing on the edge of.
Later that summer, on Lake Powell, Utah, I finally managed to get a shot that conveyed some drama:
But even this shot doesn't really show the paralyzing terror Nora felt as she peered over the 100-foot drop-…
dmunger | October 20, 2005If you're a perception teacher, a great way to show how the vision system adapts is to use prism glasses to shift a volunteer's vision. While various types of glasses are available (the most common is designed to allow a person to read a book lying on her back), the most effective for this demo is a pair that makes the world appear shifted about ten degrees to one side—so what was directly in front of your victim now appears ten degrees to the left (or right, depending on the particular pair of glasses). The best volunteers are athletes—quarterbacks or pitchers. Suppose the starting softball…
dmunger | October 18, 2005When asked to indicate their "deepest, closest, most intimate relationship," thirty-six percent of college students name a friend (as opposed to a family member or boyfriend/girlfriend) Friendships are clearly important, but there have been many fewer studies of friends than family or marriage. Consider "locus of control" research (whether individuals blame problems or positive aspects of their relationships on chance/the actions of others, or on their own attitudes and actions). There have been dozens of studies on locus of control and marriage, but only two focusing on friendships, both…
dmunger | October 13, 2005Dozens of studies have confirmed both psychological and physical benefits of exercise. The results seem clear enough: a regular program of cardiovascular exercise has been shown not only to promote physical well being, but also to abate depression, decrease anxiety, and improve overall quality of life. But James Annesi noted that most of these studies were implemented the same way: participants agree to a preset program of exercise, carefully controlled and monitored by experimenters. Might the psychological benefits only be an artifact of all the attention they were getting? It's possible,…
dmunger | October 12, 2005When 64-year-old teacher Robert Davis was beaten by the New Orleans police for public drunkenness despite the fact that he hadn't had a drink for 25 years, you might expect him to feel angry about it. You wouldn't be surprised if he held a grudge against the police for many years thereafter. Yet instead, he said he didn't blame the police for their actions. He could understand why they might have suspected he was a threat.
According to a study by Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet, Thomas Ludwig, and Kelly Vander Laan, what he did wasn't just a nice thing to do, it may also have been good for his…
dmunger | October 10, 2005This weekend, robot cars competed in a challenge that most humans would find trivial: drive 132 miles in 12 hours without crashing. Yet crash, they do. The difficult part isn't so much the steering and acceleration, it's determining the difference between an obstacle you must navigate around and a benign shadow on the road; it's deciding whether that dark patch ahead is open roadway or deep water. These things are so easy for humans that we take them for granted, yet for a machine it's a task literally in its infancy.
By the time a child is 2, it can easily tell the difference between a…
dmunger | October 6, 2005Modern biological explanations for disease have not been around for long. Before the nineteenth century, explanations of disease transmittal would never have involved "viruses" or even "germs." Yet today, even the youngest children know that germs can make you sick—at least, in Western cultures they do. But what about other cultures? The folk tradition in Vietnam attributes disease to evil spirits and magic spells. As modern medicine now permeates nearly all cultures, do cultures such as Vietnam's similarly modify their understanding of the relationship between magic and medicine?
Simone…
dmunger | October 5, 2005The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, is a full-scale reconstruction of the rather more famous monument atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. We visited it with our daughter Nora a few years back:
As you can see, it's a dramatic building, dominating the landscape of the otherwise ordinary city park in which it sits. So, when we're confronted with such a massive landmark, do we use it to organize the surrounding area as well? Several studies have shown that we do pay attention to the surroundings of objects in order to remember their location. If we memorize the locations of a number of…
dmunger | October 3, 2005It often doesn't take much to make an eyewitness to a crime change her or his story. While Mafia hardball tactics for intimidating witnesses make the headlines, just seeing or hearing a different version of the "facts" can be enough. One key (as we've discussed before) is remembering the context for an event. If we can successfully recall that we personally witnessed one version of the story as it occurred last Thursday, then we're more likely to realize that it's different from the article we read in the newspaper the next day. If we don't recall the context of either the original version…
dmunger | September 30, 2005As early as 2002, 60 percent of the total Japanese population (this includes infants, the elderly, and the infirm) subscribed to a cell phone service. Though the phones are banned in public schools, parents were buying them for their kids anyway—mainly, they said, to control their behavior and build closer bonds. Naturally, the kids soon figured out that they were best used to call and send text messages to their friends. As kids became more attached to their cell phones, parents became concerned that the kids were substituting them for face-to-face relationships.
With these concerns in mind…
dmunger | September 28, 2005There are two different ways we might navigate from place to place: we either remember landmarks along the way, or we note how far we go in each direction, and what turns we've made along the way. The landmark system doesn't work very well in nondescript landscapes or in the dark, and the second system—which mariners term "dead reckoning," is susceptible to increasing errors as the distance we travel increases. So in day-to-day life, walking or driving around town, which method do we use?
A team led by Florence Gaunet explored this issue using a driving simulator. The participants in the…
dmunger | September 27, 2005All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions and even asking them to match clothing for them. Maybe they're just behaving in accordance with traditional stereotypes ... but maybe there's something more to it.
In the 1980s, vision researchers began to find some real physical differences between the eyes of many women and those of most men. "Normal" color vision is possible because we have…