A new cognitive psychology article nearly every day
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.
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March 31, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
With legendary guitarist Pete Townshend's recent public statement that studio headphones have caused deafness, there's growing concern that iPods and other portable music devices might be destroying the ears of the children of the digital era. We thought this might...
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:54 PM • 7 Comments
Category: Casual Fridays
Last week we asked readers to answer some questions about how they managed their email. The results are in, and boy are they ... confusing. We're having trouble identifying any clear patterns at all in email management. First of all,...
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:05 PM • 4 Comments
March 30, 2006
The TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a bit of a guilty pleasure for our family. I've never been quite sure why we like it: the plot of the show is always the same. We're introduced to a family...
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:01 PM • 6 Comments
March 29, 2006
Category: Attention • Research
Take a look at the QuickTime movie below. It will show a still image for 10 seconds, then a blank screen. Then it will show you the image again. Your job is to look for a detail that has been...
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:12 PM • 9 Comments
March 27, 2006
Category: Art • Perception • Research • Social
Take a look at these two shapes. Which appears more "joyful"? Which appears fearful? How about these shapes? Which is angrier? Which appears to be suffering more? If you're like most people, the shapes that appear to be less stable...
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:29 PM • 13 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
March 24, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
One of my pet peeves is when I respond carefully to someone's email and they don't notice that I've addressed several points in one message. They seem to only read the first sentence or two and then move on. This...
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:30 PM • 15 Comments
Category: Casual Fridays
We received quite a few complaints about last week's Casual Fridays study, most of them centered around our scientifically inaccurate eye exam. In our defense, the Snellen chart is only designed to be a rough measure of visual acuity. General...
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:18 PM • 5 Comments
March 23, 2006
What's it like to have all your memories erased? Well, not all your memories, because if that happened, you'd simply be like a newborn infant, and you'd have to relearn everything. The more interesting scenario is to lose only certain...
Posted by Dave Munger at 1:09 PM • 10 Comments
March 21, 2006
Category: Film • Research • Social
What's the best way to ensure that law enforcement officers don't abuse their authority and coerce innocent suspects into confessing? Yesterday we discussed research suggesting that a side-view videotape of a confession was more likely than a head-on view to...
Posted by Dave Munger at 11:16 AM • 0 Comments
March 20, 2006
Category: Film • Research • Social
College student Bradley Page dropped his girlfriend off in a park one evening, only to learn later that she had been murdered and buried in a shallow grave. Police investigating the death interviewed him about the incident, repeatedly asking him...
Posted by Dave Munger at 12:05 PM • 5 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
March 17, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
Our son Jim doesn't like wearing his glasses, so we got him contacts. Then we found out that he wasn't wearing his contacts, so about a month ago we made him start wearing his glasses again. Today at our parent-teacher-student...
Posted by Dave Munger at 6:58 PM • 11 Comments
Category: Casual Fridays
Last week's Casual Friday study attracted the most e-mails and questions we've ever received. It also attracted the largest number of responses ever: we cut it off at 400, before our Surveymonkey bill got too large (this is probably thanks...
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:02 PM • 17 Comments
March 16, 2006
Category: Color perception • Perception • Research • Social
A Witches' Bible states that "the sensitive is psychically aware of character qualities, or emotional or spiritual states, in the subject, and this awareness presents itself to him or her as visual phenomena." It's easy to dismiss such claims as...
Posted by Dave Munger at 12:46 PM • 8 Comments
March 14, 2006
Category: Music • Research • Social
If my twentieth high school reunion last year was any indication, we seem to hang on to the music we listened to as adolescents longer than any other time period. Everyone was dancing to "Purple Rain" and "Rock Lobster" like...
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:33 PM • 14 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
March 13, 2006
Category: General / Site news
In case you're reading Cognitive Daily on RSS or don't always check out the links to the (generally very good) seedmagazine.com articles in the column just to the right of this blog, I did want to point you to an...
Posted by Dave Munger at 7:03 AM • 11 Comments
March 10, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
This week's Casual Friday study requires participants to be unaware of its purpose. It's nothing insiduous, just a quick survey that should, as usual, take no more than a minute of your time. We do think it's a clever little...
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:40 PM • 8 Comments
