April 30, 2005
Category: Perception
We often think of music as expressing emotions, and research has backed this notion up. But typically the research has focused on melodic instruments: sweet, sorrowful violins; bright, happy guitars; melancholy, wailing oboes. So what about percussion instruments: drums, cymbals,...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:04 PM • 4 Comments •
April 29, 2005
Category: Learning and testing
I used to be a high school biology teacher, and I noticed that students often found it easier to learn irrelevant information than the information I was trying to teach. When learning the steps involved in the process of cell...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 5:04 AM • 1 Comments •
April 26, 2005
Category: Memory
Humans readily establish false memories. If you give adults a study list of words like hot, snow, warm, winter, ice, wet, chilly, weather, heat, freeze, shiver, frost, and then test them later, they will "remember" related words like cold that...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 1:04 PM • 1 Comments •
April 25, 2005
Category: Perception
It's impossible to pay attention to everything in the visual field at once. If we could, magicians would be out of business: most "magic" tricks work by distracting the viewers' attention while the real trick is being done in plain...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:04 PM • 5 Comments •
April 22, 2005
Category: Language
How is language acquired? We don't have to teach our children to speak; instead they just seem to pick it up on their own. Because language is acquired so readily, the study of language acquisition can be a messy business....
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:04 PM • •
April 20, 2005
Category: Learning and testing
There has been a great deal of reporting about the harmful impact of video games, including here at Cognitive Daily. Yet the simple act of playing a video game can require learning a great deal of information. We have discussed...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 1:04 PM • 18 Comments •
April 18, 2005
Category: Memory
September 11. The Challenger disaster. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. If we were over the age of 10 when these events occurred, we all remember them vividly: where we were when we heard the news, the weather that...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:04 PM • 8 Comments •
April 13, 2005
Category: Social
Yesterday we reported on the results of studies on the impact of media violence. Today we'll discuss theoretical implications and responses to those studies, as reported by Craig Anderson et al. in their report "The Influence of Media Violence on...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 1:04 PM • 7 Comments •
April 12, 2005
Category: Social
Yesterday we reported on the general reactions to studies on the impact of media violence. Today we'll get into the specifics of those studies, as reported by Craig Anderson et al. in their report "The Influence of Media Violence on...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 7:04 PM • 10 Comments •
April 11, 2005
Category: Social
In the summer of 2000, a committee of scholars was commissioned to write a chapter on the effects of media violence on youth for the Surgeon General's Report on Youth Violence, published in January 2001. But their chapter was not...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 4:04 PM • 12 Comments •