November 5, 2009
Category: Art • Attention • Perception • Research • Social
Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's not that the administration didn't try to encourage its students to socialize. The library did close at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. There was not one but two film societies, so often students had to choose between, say, the Hitchcock fest at one theater and the Kurosawa marathon at the other.
Still, studying was the primary focus of campus life. There may have been five fraternities, but there were 30 coffee shops on campus. We didn't have "parties," we had "study breaks." But one thing we never managed to do while we were there was figure out what the most effective study break might be. When you're studying during nearly every free moment, what's the best way to clear up your mind and refocus yourself for the next round of studying?
One old idea that has re-emerged recently is called "attention restoration theory", or ART. William James actually discussed a similar concept in his 1892 psychology textbook. The idea that taking a walk in the woods can help you refocus your thoughts is at least as old as Immanuel Kant, and probably older. But how exactly does interacting with nature help focus attention? ART says that the natural world engages your attention in a bottom-up fashion, by features of the environment (e.g. a sunset, a beautiful tree). The artificial world demands active attention, to avoid getting hit by cars or to follow street signs. Since intellectual activities like studying or writing also demand the same kind of attention, taking a break in the artificial world doesn't really function like a rest.
Marc Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan wanted to see if they could measure the effect of ART. They paid 38 student volunteers to do a backwards digit-span task. The volunteers were given sequences of 3 to 9 numeric digits and had to repeat them in reverse, so if the experimenter said "6-1-9" then the student would say "9-1-6". After 14 tests (two of each length), the students took an hour-long walk either through an arboretum, or through downtown Ann Arbor. Then the digit-span test was repeated. Did a walk through nature improve the digit-span score? Here are the results:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:20 PM • 6 Comments
November 4, 2009
Category: In other news
My SEED column this week focuses on artificial sweeteners. Can switching to artificial sweeteners help solve the obesity problem in the U.S.? Here's a snippet:
Saunders says an August report from the American Heart Association (AHA) made it quite clear that excessive sugar consumption is dangerous, and he argues that sugar should be seen as a toxic substance. But how much is too much? The new AHA guidelines suggest limiting added sugar to no more than half of discretionary calories--calories consumed after basic nutritional needs are met. For the average male, Saunders says, this works out to about 150 calories per day: one can of Coke, or one candy bar. No free refills.
Again, the answer seems obvious: Just switch to diet drinks. They taste about the same, but with no sugar and no calories. Not so fast, says BikeMonkey, an anonymous biomedical researcher and former bike racer who blogs at DrugMonkey. BikeMonkey cites a 2008 study published in Behavioral Neuroscience where rats were given either sugar-sweetened or artificially sweetened yogurt in addition to their usual diet of rat chow. The rats who ate artificial sweeteners gained significantly more weight over five weeks than the rats who had sugar-sweetened yogurt.
There's much more to it than that, though. Click here to read the whole thing.
Also, in case you missed them, here are my picks for psychology and neuroscience posts from ResearchBlogging.org:
Posted by Dave Munger at 12:34 PM • 8 Comments
November 3, 2009
Category: Face perception • Research • Social
One of my favorite cartoons as a child was "Speed Racer." It featured an all-American boy (first name, "Speed," last name, "Racer") engaging in that most American of pastimes: driving fast cars. Except that "Speed Racer" wasn't really American; it was made in Japan, and the original Japanese voices were crudely overdubbed in English. Perhaps I can be excused for not noticing the Japanese origins of the show -- I was only 10 years old. Even now, as an adult looking back at those cartoons, the characters do seem awfully American-looking. Or perhaps that's just my Caucasian bias.
Does everyone see a little bit of themselves in animated cartoon characters? Or do the artists actually draw the characters to look more generic, less racially distinctive? There have been few studies about the perceived race and ethnicity of animated cartoon characters, and none focusing on the unique Japanese anime style.
So Amy Shirong Lu randomly selected 341 main characters out of 3,098 anime films made between 1958 and 2005. Each image was carefully edited to depict only a head-on, facial portrait-style picture. All clothing and background images were edited out, like this:
The character depicted here is Asuka Langley Soryu, from the movie Neon Genesis Evangelion, and of mixed Japanese and German descent. Lu recruited 1,046 people to view a randomly-selected set of 90 of the pictures and judge the characters' race based on the features depicted in the pictures. The animators' intended race of each character was judged based on the promotional materials for the film, or watching the movie itself. Still, in 125 of the cases, it was either impossible to determine the character's race or the character was of mixed ancestry. About half of all the characters were intended to be Asian, while only about 10 percent were Caucasian. Did the viewers responses match the actual race of the characters? Here are the results:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:34 PM • 33 Comments
October 30, 2009
Category: Casual Fridays
Political opinion polls are very tricky. Answers to questions depend on the order they're asked in, and on precisely how they are phrased. If you ask people whether they're in favor of killing unborn children, you'll get a much different response than if you ask if there's any situation where women should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy.
What's even more difficult is to assess public opinion on complex pending legislation. Most polls find that most Americans like the idea of requiring everyone to buy health insurance. But it's only a slim margin -- 56 to 41 percent. Kevin Drum cited a recent study that asked a follow up: would you change your mind if low-income families got government assistance to pay for insurance? Now 34 percent of naysayers changed their mind to support the requirement. But Kevin wondered if it's a fair question. Wouldn't some people change their minds no matter what?
So Kevin suggested that someone do a study to see if some people flip-flop no matter what question is asked. If some people will always flip-flop, then that suggests poll questions about flip-flops aren't very helpful in determining what the "true" public opinion is. We decided to take him up on the suggestion. Last week we created a set of six opinion questions about issues we felt our readers were likely to disagree on. 491 people responded. For each question, we came up with two different follow-ups. So, for example, everyone was asked "Should the United States adopt a government-run health care system based on Medicare?" But each respondent saw only one of the follow-ups:
- Suppose the plan involved a required pay-cut for doctors of 10 percent. Would your opinion change?
- Suppose the plan involved a required pay-increase for doctors of 10 percent. Would your opinion change?
Each of these groups was divided in half again. One group just answered the questions, while the other group had to keep track of the total number of flashes of a flashing square (like this) in the corner of their screen while they answered. The hope was that this task might simulate some of the distractions a typical respondent might face while answering the polling questions over the phone.
So, did the flashing square affect whether respondents flip-flopped their answers? Here are the results:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 5:05 PM • 10 Comments
October 29, 2009
Category: Development / Aging • Emotion • Face perception • Research
Take a look at this face:
Does it look more angry or fearful? It may be rather difficult to tell: About fifty percent of adults say faces like this are angry and fifty percent say it's fearful. However, for children, the story is different. Researchers have found that small children aren't as good as adults at recognizing emotions in faces. Young children would see this picture as more fearful than angry. However, most research has suggested that kids are just about as good as adults by the time they're five years old.
But neuroscientists have consistently found that the portions of the brain responsible for processing key emotions, particularly anger and fear, continue to develop all the way through adolescence. If our brains are still changing, shouldn't we see some impact in the way kids and teens perceive emotions?
A team led by Laura Thomas felt that earlier studies of children's perception of emotion were flawed because the tests were too easy. Instead of viewing subtle emotional variations like the photo above, kids saw dramatic, obvious facial expressions -- even schematic diagrams of emotions. Could it be that what's developing as kids mature into teenagers and adults is their ability to detect subtle emotional variations?
Thomas's team showed 102 children, teens, and adults pictures of 10 different actors which had been previously rated as expressing anger, fear, or a neutral emotion. But instead of showing the most obvious emotional expressions, they used morphing software to show the viewers gradations of the emotions, like this:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:53 PM • 3 Comments
October 28, 2009
Category: Attention • Film • Memory • Research • Social
Product placements in movies and TV shows are becoming so commonplace that my kids now cynically take note of them whenever they appear. It wasn't always that way. In 1982 when I first saw E.T. I had no idea that Elliott's use of Reeses' Pieces to lure E.T. into his home was part of a clever marketing ploy that had been pre-arranged with the multinational conglomerate selling the candy. Now that nearly every household has a DVR allowing viewers to fast-forward through commercials, advertisers are relying more and more heavily on product placement to show off their wares. But how effective are product placements in getting their message to customers?
There hasn't actually been a lot of published research on product placement, since marketing firms like to keep that information to themselves. And the research that has been done may not be realistic enough to draw useful conclusions: In one study, a researcher used low-production-value films created in the laboratory to test the efficacy of product placements, but that may not tell us much about how people respond to products in slick Hollywood productions. In other studies, a distinction wasn't made between products that simply appeared in a movie and ones that were important to the storyline. From these studies we know that people do tend to remember the brands they see in a movie, but we can't say much about how a particular product's placement makes a difference.
Moonhee Yang and David Roskos-Ewoldsen showed 373 students from the University of Alabama one of 15, 20-minute movie clips taken from major Hollywood films. Around the middle of each clip was a single product placement of interest. These products had been pre-selected by a preference panel to be roughly equally appealing. Another panel assessed the importance of the product in the movie's storyline by placing it in one of three categories: Background (not important to story), Used by Character, and Story Connection (meaning the product was actually related to the plot of the movie). This table lists all the products and films in the study:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 5:18 PM • 15 Comments
Category: In other news
Over at SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, my column discusses the recent flurry of blog posts and media reporting on the placebo effect. Here's a snippet:
This is the primary misconception about placebos: that the placebo itself is somehow "working" to treat a medical condition. You can see it even in the headline for an otherwise well-crafted article that appeared in Wired last August: "Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why." As internist and medical professor Peter Lipson noted on the Science-Based Medicine blog, placebos by definition have no medical effect. The "placebo effect" is due to the subject's (and sometimes, the experimenter's) expectation that a treatment will work. And, of course, a patient sometimes recovers simply due to chance or because his or her immune response handled the problem. Researchers observe an improvement, and this gets attributed to the placebo. In the case of the Wired article, the misconception in the headline is cleared up by the text of the report: The placebo effect may be getting stronger for reasons that are unclear to researchers. Placebos themselves, as ever, remain ineffective.
The anonymous blogger and UK-based neuroscientist Neuroskeptic also addresses the Wired report in a post entitled "Deconstructing the Placebo." Neuroskeptic points out that many of the issues we have with placebos are more properly directed at the medical conditions a placebo could supposedly address. If a placebo is just as effective at reducing anxiety as a drug designed for that purpose, what does that tell us about the nature of anxiety? Is participation in a research study motivating people to do other ostensibly anxiety-reducing activities? How exactly are these additional activities helping the problem? Even if placebos aren't cures, we should be able to learn more about real medical conditions by investigating how people respond to a fictional "treatment."
Also, in case you missed it, here are my picks from neuroscience and psychology posts this past week on ResearchBlogging.org:
One more thing: The Depression Bipolar Support Alliance is sponsoring a video contest, with a prize of $1,000 for the best video. How cool would it be if the winner incorporated some discussion of peer-reviewed research?
Posted by Dave Munger at 10:34 AM • 0 Comments
October 23, 2009
Category: Casual Fridays
Political opinion polls are funny things. A recent poll suggests that Americans are much less concerned about global warming than they were a couple years ago. What happened? The science hasn't changed, and the world isn't putting out any fewer greenhouse gases.
It seems that respondents must simply be distracted by other things -- the economic crisis, perhaps, seems more important now. But when a pollster calls a survey respondent, other distractions are at play as well. There might be a screaming baby in the house. Or perhaps the respondent is missing his favorite TV show and isn't really thinking about his answers.
We wondered if we could affect poll responses just by modifying the setting in which the poll is taken. We've created a couple different versions of the same poll. Some allow you to focus your attention completely on the poll responses, but others ask you to do other tasks at the same time. Will that have any impact on the results? There's only one way to find out.
Click here to participate
As usual, the study is brief, with about 15 questions. It should take only a few minutes to complete. You have until Thursday, October 29 to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don't forget to come back next week for the results!
(Just a reminder: All Casual Fridays studies are non-scientific. This doesn't mean we can't use scientific principles to assess what's going on, but we can't make general claims based on the results)
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:55 PM • 8 Comments
October 22, 2009
Category: Development / Aging • Research • Taste
When Jim and Nora were in elementary school, both Greta and I worked challenging jobs, so we did whatever we could to save time. Instead of bringing lunches made by their parents, the kids bought hot meals at school. The school was proud of its cafeteria. Kids had credit accounts, which meant they didn't have to carry lunch money to school (thus making them less of a target for bullies). The children were encouraged to make "healthy choices" instead of just getting a ladleful of mystery meat plopped on their trays.
After a few billing cycles, however, we noticed that Jim was spending more and more money. A complete lunch was supposed to cost about $3.50, but his bill was nearly $50 a week! We asked the cafeteria what he was buying and a printout was sent home. Here's a typical day's meal:
Chocolate milk (2)
Hamburger
French Fries (2)
Jello (3)
Needless to say, Greta and I soon resigned ourselves to making lunches for the kids. While "healthy choices" sounds appealing, if these were the choices our child was making, then we were going to choose for him.
Parents want their children to make good food choices -- we can't be there to decide for them all the time -- but we also want them to eat well now, even when they don't seem capable of making healthy decisions. And of course not all parents have the time or even the capacity to make good decisions for their kids, so for decades, the school lunch has been thought to be an important key to getting kids to eat better.
Unfortunately, many programs designed to get kids to eat well have failed. If children are rewarded for eating good foods, then what happens when they aren't being rewarded? Requiring them to eat a certain amount fruits and vegetables can backfire: even if kids don't mind the taste, too much of anything eventually ends up being unappealing. Comprehensive educational programs sometimes work, but require so much parent and teacher involvement that they aren't always practical.
So Helen Hendy, Keith Williams, and Thomas Camise devised a simpler approach: give kids a choice of fruits and vegetables in addition to their preferred meats, carbs, and milk, and reward them for eating even a little bit. They trained experimenters to observe 346 first-, second-, and fourth-graders for 6 days to see what fruits and vegetables they ate when given a choice of one of two fruits and one of two vegetables. Just one-eighth of a cup was considered a serving.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:15 PM • 17 Comments
October 21, 2009
Category: In other news
In case you missed them, here are my picks from ResearchBlogging.org's Psychology and Neuroscience posts from the past week.
Also, if you're a member of ResearchBlogging.org, be sure to check out our new widget (like the one on the right of this blog). Now you can place the widget on your own blog so your readers can see the latest posts in your favorite topics, like "Psychology," "Neuroscience," and "Health."
Finally, my column is up on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. This week I discuss the intriguing new findings about Saturn's moons and rings. Here's a snippet:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:13 PM • 1 Comments
Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
