Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
Greta Munger is Professor of Psychology at Davidson College whose works include The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions. Dave Munger is co-founder and president of ResearchBlogging.org and a writer whose works include Researching Online. And yes, he is married to Greta.
Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and runs his car off the road an into a tree. He's okay, but the car is totaled and his parent's surprise anniversary party is ruined.
How much is Anton to blame for the accident? If you had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, maybe you'd give him a 7. After all, he was just trying to do something special for his parents.
But what if instead of hiding an anniversary present, Anton was rushing home to hide his cocaine stash? Would you now say he's more to blame for the accident? You might not when the two alternatives are placed side-by-side, but when Mark Alicke told the two versions of this story to different groups, the cocaine group rated Anton as more blameworthy than the anniversary present group.
Alicke's study provided the foundation for an array of studies on the effects of social evaluations of individuals on apparently unrelated events, and even factual recollections about episodes.
But when a team led by David Pizarro addressed this question, no study had yet shown that unrelated details about a person could literally affect witnesses' accuracy in recalling that person's actions. The researchers presented a simple story to 283 college students. The story described a person named Frank entering a restaurant, paying with cash for a drink, then ordering a three-course meal, receiving a cell phone call, and leaving without paying the $56.43 bill.
Ask almost anyone whether willfully deceiving another person -- lying -- is wrong, and they'll say it is. But probe a little deeper and most people will say there are some instances where lying is okay: lying to prevent a crime or an injustice is acceptable, just not lying for personal gain. Parents teach their kids that lying is wrong, and punish them for telling lies.
I can still remember the shock when my parents "lied" about my sixth birthday (which was a day away) at an ice-cream parlor so I could get a free sundae. But eventually, at some point, most American kids end up telling lies to their parents, as did I -- I just can't remember any of them at the moment (honest!).
Clearly children's conceptions of "acceptable" lies change over time. There must be a time in early childhood where they don't understand what a lie is. Then they learn what a lie is, followed shortly by learning that a lying is wrong. But how do they move from this stage to the more nuanced moral assessment of lying held by most adults?
Serena Perkins and Elliot Turiel came up with six situations in which lying might be justified, then asked 64 teens aged 12 to 17 which ones were acceptable and which were not. The situations are below:
If you've had a lot of musical training, you can probably tell the difference between a major and minor key. If you haven't had much training, even after having the difference explained to you, you're still not likely to be able to make that determination. Listen the following clip. It plays the same melody in a major and a minor key. Can you tell which is which?
But if the question is phrased differently, even non-musicians can reliably tell the difference: When listeners are told that some music (which happens to be in a major key) sounds "happy" and other music (in a minor key) sounds "sad," non-musicians can pick out the difference. With that information in mind, do you want to change your answer about the two samples above? If you do, you're probably a non-musician. If you don't, you either got lucky in your answer, or you are a musician. Either way, it's clear that musicians process "major" and "minor" differently from non-musicians. So what's different about the mental processing of musicians and non-musicians?
A team led by Andrea Halpern created 35 short tunes like the clips above. Each tune was then modified to have a minor-key and major-key variant -- this involved changing just a few notes in each tune. Then three expert musicians rated each clip for musicality and how "major" or "minor" each clip sounded. The 24 best examples of tunes with readily-identifiable major and minor keys were selected for study.
Last week's post on perceptual restoration in toddlers brought a lot of speculation from commenters. To answer some of the questions, I thought I'd elaborate a bit here on the phenomenon and how I created the demo.
First, here's the original recording again, with me saying "dinosaur" three times:
In the first case, I edited out the "s" sound, and everyone with normal hearing can hear that. The last "dinosaur" is complete. Did I edit out the "s" in the middle dinosaur?
Most adults believe they hear the "s" sound in cases like this, even if the sound has been edited out: the perceptual system adds in a sound where it doesn't exist.
Indeed, more than half of the respondents to our poll said they had heard an "s" sound, even though in fact the sound was edited out in the second "dinosaur."
But some commenters speculated that an "s" sound was embedded in the sneeze sound effect I created, thus nullifying the effect. The "sneeze" was actually a composite of a fake cough and a fake sneeze (neither sounded realistic enough on its own). Do you hear an "s" in either of these sounds?
Personally I'm not hearing it, but I agree that it's closer to an "s" sound than other sounds I could have inserted. In fact the authors of the study do point out that perceptual restoration doesn't always occur; it's less likely to occur when the inserted sound is less like the sound it replaces. As a demonstration, I've redone the demo below, using a horn sound instead of a sneeze:
This week's Casual Friday is about mentors. We're curious who constitutes the most important influence on our readers, and whether we can identify any patterns in the results. So we've created a brief study that we hope will answer our questions. Simple as that.
There are just a few questions, so the survey should only take a couple minutes to complete. There is no limit on the number of respondents. You have until Thursday, May 8 to respond. Then don't forget to check back on Friday, May 9 for the results!
One of the amazing things about learning language is that children rarely hear language sounds in ideal acoustic environments. Maybe other people are talking in the background, or the dishwasher is running, or the TV is on. Yet somehow children they learn words just the same. By the time we're adults, we've become experts at filtering out irrelevant sounds and patching together meaning out of the cacophony of everyday life.
As one example, listen to this short clip of me saying the word "dinosaur" three times.
I edited the "s" sound out of the first "dinosaur," so you can clearly hear me saying "dino_aur." The last "dinosaur" is obviously complete. But what about the middle "dinosaur," where I edited in a cough/sneeze right over where the "s" sound is supposed to be? Can you still hear the "s" in the background? Let's make this a poll:
Most adults believe they hear the "s" sound in cases like this, even if the sound has been edited out: the perceptual system adds in a sound where it doesn't exist. (Did I edit the sound out here? I'll keep that a mystery for now.) The effect, known as perceptual restoration, has been observed in children as young as five years old.
But what about younger children -- kids who are just beginning to learn language? Do they also exhibit perceptual restoration? It's a difficult question to study, since children who only know a few words aren't able to tell us what they hear with the precision needed (they can't read, so how can they tell us whether they heard an "s" sound?).
The man behind the amazing Contrast Asynchrony illusion has started a blog! Arthur Shapiro tells me he has a backlog of literally thousands of illusions. He promises to offer a new illusion every week, along with an explanation of the science behind it. Here's a preview of this week's illusion:
For an explanation of how it works, you'll have to visit Shapiro's blog, Illusion Sciences. There are already three illusions posted, with plenty more to come.
Arthur Shapiro is a world-class illusion designer and psychologist whose illusions have won the most prestigious awards in the field. Two illusions from his lab are among this year's top ten illusions.
Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they've seen before. It doesn't take much study to accurately recall whether or not you've seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person who lives primarily among other whites will have more difficulty recognizing Asian faces, and vice versa.
But how engrained is this difference? How much experience with other-race faces do we need to have before we can recognize them as well as same-race faces? Is learning to recognize other races as difficult as recognizing any new category of objects -- cars, say, or birds? When we do learn to recognize other-race faces, do we really know them as well as more familiar races?
While it has been known for some time that we can learn to recognize other race faces as well as our own, this last question hasn't been studied as thoroughly. Maybe in more difficult tests of recognition, we wouldn't do as well with different-race faces.
To explore this question, a team led by Elinor McKone developed a clever set of three experiments. In the first experiment, white Australian students were exposed to 32 different faces -- some white, and some Asian -- for three seconds each. After a brief break where they were distracted with multiplication problems, they were tested on a set of 64 pictures -- 32 they had seen before, and 32 new pictures. Their job was to say which were old and which were new. As expected, the students were significantly more accurate with same-race faces compared to different-race faces. This showed that with brief exposure, different-race faces aren't recognized as well as same-race faces.
Thank you for "choosing" to read Encephalon #44 here at Cognitive Daily. Every two weeks, Encephalon "selects" the best psychology and neuroscience blog posts from around the blogosphere, giving readers the chance to "decide" which ones they'd like to investigate further.
Unfortunately for all those involved, those "decisions" very likely weren't carried out through the "deciders'" own volition, but instead were precipitated through the confluence of genetic inheritance and circumstance.
Consider this post from Neuroanthropology, for example, which dissects a forthcoming publication in Nature Neuroscience indicating that brain activity predicting a decision occurs prior to the actual decision. Do we decide, or do our brains decide for us? If your predetermined fate moves you to read this post, you will find out.
Suppose we don't have free will and in fact are controlled by our brains. Then if the Department of Defense designs brain-controlled weapons, then who's really going to war -- us or our brains? Those so fated can entertain this question at Mind Hacks.
But once we start to believe that we have no free will, won't that, too, affect our actions? If coincidence leads you to Cognitive Daily, you can find the answer.
I wasn't predestined to understand this post, but since it includes the word "determinism," I think it might also have something to do with the free-will/determinism issue. Perhaps your nature/nurture combo made you better-equipped to understand Jonathan Pratt's point. If so, I suggest you read the post.
Except to the extent that everything you do is a manifestation of your free will (or predetermined behavior), the remaining posts in this edition of Encephalon have nothing to do with the free will / determinism debate. Undaunted, I have collected them below:
CogDaily will be hosting Encephalon tomorrow. There's still time to make your submissions -- just send an email to encephalon.host -- @ -- gmail -- . -- com (remove dashes).
We should be able to include any submissions received before 9 a.m. tomorrow.
Try to spot the difference between fake smiles and real smiles! I got 17 out of 20. It helps to understand the research about authentic smiles.
Update: Now I'm curious. I wonder if our readers are really that good, or if people are only posting their scores when they do well, so -- I've added a poll, below the fold.
Last week's Casual Friday study was all about money. The basic question was simply what it means to be rich -- how much income and net worth does it take before you consider someone to be wealthy? We received over 1,000 responses. Perhaps our most interesting finding was simply the diversity of opinions about what "rich" is. Here's how the responses broke down:
While most responses fell between $100 thousand per year and $500 thousand per year, 95 people said an income of below $100 thousand was still "rich," and 75 people said it would take $1 million or more per year to be wealthy! Another way to measure wealth is net worth -- the value of assets (bank account, stocks, real estate) minus debts. Here are those results:
The most common response was the traditional $1 million. But over 100 respondents gave values of $200 thousand or less, and more than 100 thought it would take more than $5 million to make a person rich.
Although not all games are equal, there's plenty of evidence that playing some violent video games can cause aggressive real-world behavior. Sites like addictinggames.com offer popular games whose sole point is to play the role of a hit-man or even to torture animals. Over 85 percent of video games include violence.
When these statistics are combined with the results of studies showing that aggressive attitudes and even actions can be increased after playing violent games for as little as 20 minutes, it's possible that we have a major problem on our hands.
Another potential problem of video game violence is widespread activation of a phenomenon that has been observed in many other domains: desensitization. Some desensitization is undoubtedly good: for example, a surgeon who exhibited the natural disgust and revulsion at seeing human entrails probably would have a hard time doing her job. Desensitization means that after seeing the gore of an operating room many times throughout her training process, she can overcome that natural revulsion to human innards and is prepared to do her job when it counts.
But other types of desensitization are not so good. Desensitization to racism allowed slavery to persist for centuries across much of the world. Desensitization to violence might mean that individuals are less likely to assist someone who's being attacked, or more likely to actively cooperate in a violent act. Aside from some reports of military uses for preparing troops for battle, there has been little study of whether playing violent video games desensitizes people to violence. So does the cartoon violence in games affect our reaction to real-world violence?
ScienceBlogs.de, our German counterpart, is featuring an English-language interview with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel:
Pertinent to Tuesday's post, he discusses free will, and also drug treatment for behavior disorders, the unification of the sciences, and Sigmund Freud.
Do we have free will? While some may see the question as trivial, it's a challenging topic that has been actively debated for centuries. Whether or not you believe a god is involved, a case can be made that free will is simply an illusion, and that every "decision" we make is completely controlled by factors outside of an individual's control.
Yet others have argued that a belief in free will is essential to morality. If we don't actually have any control over the decisions we make, how can we be held accountable for them? Several studies have suggested that when kids believe their achievements are due to innate ability rather than their own effort, they are less likely to persist at similar tasks in the future. But until recently, no study has attempted to directly study belief in free will and how it affects behavior.
Kathleen Vohs and Johnathan Schooler have found a way to study this question (though they can't tell you whether they were predestined to do it or they came up with the idea through their own independent efforts!). They had 30 students read one of two passages by Francis Crick. The first passage argued that most scientists now recognize free will as an artifact of the way the brain works, that free will is simply an illusion and our actions are determined solely by genetics and the environment. The second passage discussed consciousness and did not bring up free will at all. Then the students were given a test to measure their belief in free will versus determinism.
I know CogDaily is supposed to be a psychology web site, but sometimes, you have a question you simply must know the answer to.
I frequently need to boil a mug of water, and I've often wondered what the most energy-efficient method is. Is it the microwave, or the good-old-fashioned teakettle on the cooktop? In these days of global warming, it's an important question. So I finally decided to do the experiment.
Method and results:
I filled a ScienceBlogs mug with 300 ml tap water at 62° Fahrenheit.
Then I heated it at 30-second intervals in a 900-watt GE microwave oven.
Results are charted below:
Time
Temp
90 seconds
150°
120 seconds
175°
150 seconds
190°
180 seconds
200°
I put an equal volume of water in a teakettle and heated over a 14,000 BTU gas burner until the kettle began to whistle. This took 189 seconds. The water was poured back into the mug and the temperature was found to be 190°
Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and runs his car off the road an into a tree. He's okay, but the car is totaled and his parent's surprise anniversary party is ruined.
