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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October 31, 2006
Category: Development / Aging • Intentionality • Reasoning • Research
Any grown-up would be surprised to see SpongeBob Squarepants show up in a Batman movie. Clearly, these characters inhabit two different fantasy worlds: one lives in a fabulous mansion near bustling Gotham City, while the other inhabits an underwater...
Posted by Dave Munger at 10:16 AM • 13 Comments
October 30, 2006
Category: Emotion • Face perception • Research
Face recognition is a task which humans do with little effort, even though in fact it's a tremendously difficult problem. To recognize a face, we need to be able to ignore traits that change over time, while focusing in on...
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:28 PM • 8 Comments
Yesterday I spent a delightful several hours having lunch with Chris Mooney (of Seed, Scienceblogs, and war on science fame) and attending his talk in Durham, NC. I also got to meet fellow ScienceBloggers Abel Pharmboy and Coturnix. At lunch,...
Posted by Dave Munger at 7:35 AM • 1 Comments
October 27, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
On Monday, I posted a recently-discovered visual illusion with a quick poll to see how many of our readers could spot the illusion. As it turned out, not very many of them did. This was surprising to me, because the...
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:58 PM • 6 Comments
October 26, 2006
Category: News
The New York Times has an article on the most recent stereotype threat research: Women perform worse on math tests when they are first told that men are better at math. When they are told that men and women are...
Posted by Dave Munger at 6:36 AM • 3 Comments
October 25, 2006
Category: Art • Attention • Language • Memory • Research
Everyone knows the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words." Bound by that axiom, magazines, newspapers, and most of all, TV, bombard us with pictures every day. The latest hot internet properties aren't text-based sites like Google but picture-based...
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:57 PM • 0 Comments
Category: News
The Social Science Statistics blog (new to me, but it's been around for a while) has a good writeup of a 2002 study by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch which systematically examines the effectiveness of deadlines in preventing procrastination: They...
Posted by Dave Munger at 6:22 AM • 5 Comments
October 24, 2006
Category: Ask a ScienceBlogger
This week's "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question is easy: The best science TV show is Mythbusters. Let's face it: most TV science programming is downright awful. It dumbs down the content, and tends not to explain the really interesting part of...
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:27 PM • 12 Comments
Category: Analysis
There was plenty of interest in yesterday's audio-visual illusion. In case you missed it, I'll post it again here: Play the movie with the sound turned up. If the illusion works, then you'll see a dot flash twice, accompanied by...
Posted by Dave Munger at 8:29 AM • 8 Comments
October 23, 2006
Category: Music • Perception • Research
There's nothing cooler for a perception researcher (or writer) than a new visual illusion. When I learned about this one, I spent half the day Thursday trying to recreate it, but I couldn't get it to work. Finally, in five...
Posted by Dave Munger at 2:09 PM • 16 Comments
Category: News
Winners of mid-sized lottery prizes are happier than losers -- or those winning small prizes -- even over the long term. Chris Chatham reviews a review of the research on Theory of Mind, the science of understanding how people understand...
Posted by Dave Munger at 6:39 AM • 1 Comments
October 22, 2006
Category: News
If the human eye was a digital camera, how many megapixels would it have? Clarkvision does the calculations. The answer: 576 megapixels. Impressive job -- I wish I had thought to do that. Note that their calculations require a bit...
Posted by Dave Munger at 11:17 AM • 9 Comments
October 20, 2006
Category: Casual Fridays
Last week's Casual Friday study was inspired by a recently-discovered illusion which showed that sound could influence what people percieve visually. I was planning to report on the study confirming that illusion yesterday, but my computer wasn't cooperating with me,...
Posted by Dave Munger at 1:31 PM • 2 Comments
October 19, 2006
Category: News
The idea of a distinct "internet addiction" problem separate from, say, compulsive gambling or obsession with pornography isn't especially new. It's been studied since at least 1999, and we reported on one attempt to describe it in 2004. Yet in...
Posted by Dave Munger at 6:40 AM • 4 Comments
October 18, 2006
Category: Ask a ScienceBlogger
This week's Ask a Scienceblogger: "Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you?" I'd say that's nearly impossible to answer: there are too many other factors at work. But consider...
Posted by Dave Munger at 10:54 AM • 6 Comments
Category: News
Apropos of our discussion yesterday of the pros and cons of open access publishing, I'd like to point you to a great resource: the Directory of Open Access Journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals ... covers free, full text,...
Posted by Dave Munger at 6:17 AM • 1 Comments
