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.
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°
# How Many People Will Select The Same Option As You?
0%
1-25%
26-50%
51-75%
76-99%
100%
I didn't think this poll would attract as much interest as it did because in one sense I was just copying a poll from Slashdot. I guess people liked the fact that I offered one twist: I attempted to shape the results by suggesting that the "obvious" answer of 1-25% wouldn't work. If everyone was choosing their responses randomly, we might expect about 16 percent of respondents to choose this option, and therefore it would be the "correct" response.
But surely some respondents would realize that if everyone was rational, then everyone would choose 1-25%, and it would no longer be "correct." I didn't spell it out in my post, but it only make sense that if everyone follows this pattern of logic to its rational conclusion, then everyone should choose 100%, and everyone will be "correct." How many of our readers took the hint? The graph below shows how our readers compare to Slashdotters:
Slashdot's poll of the moment is just fantastic, combining psychology and reasoning in a very cool way. Here's the question:
# How Many People Will Select The Same Option As You?
0%
1-25%
26-50%
51-75%
76-99%
100%
Just CowboyNeal [this is the traditional joke Slashdot poll answer]
At first pass, you might figure that there are 6 possible responses, so if people respond randomly then about 16 percent will choose each answer, so the correct response would be 1-25 percent.
But of course, if everyone used that same logic, then many more than 25 percent of respondents would choose that answer. The next logical response would be to move on to 26-50 percent.
But once again, if everyone used that logic, the correct response would be higher still. What's the logical result of this progression? Let's see if we can capture it in our own version of the poll. I've been having trouble with online polls lately so I'm going to place this one below the fold.
Yesterday's demonstration about perception of tempo simply didn't work. If we had successfully replicated Schultze'sVos et al.'s study, we would have seen a systematic bias in the results.
I'd like to give this one more shot (I promise this will be my last attempt!). There are a couple reasons why the original might not have worked. First, people might have been using the visual progress of the audio player to help determine whether the clips were slowing. I've corrected that by narrowing the width of the player so you can't see the progress of the clip as it plays. Second, because the notes were long piano notes, listeners might have heard differences in the tonal quality of the notes as they were played longer. I've corrected that by using a synthesizer voice, and now all the notes are staccato, and therefore the same length. I've also added a "held steady" option to the polls, in case you believe the excerpt has neither sped up or slowed down.
Otherwise, the instructions are the same as before. Play each clip, and listen to see if the tempo (rate the notes are played) is speeding up or slowing down. Some of them really are speeding or slowing (and they're different from yesterday), so listen carefully. After we've got some results, I'll let you know which ones actually sped up or slowed down, and we'll see if we've managed to replicate Vos et al.'s study.
Yesterday, in our post on perfect pitch (usually called absolute pitch in research reports), we offered a quick test to see if we could identify the portion of our readers with absolute pitch. At first, things were looking good for the absolute pitch crowd. Readers listened to this note:
A whopping 18.8 percent of the 165 respondents identified it correctly as E. Since random chance would predict that just 8.33 percent of responses would guess this note, it would appear that over 10 percent of our readers have absolute pitch.
But some readers pointed out that many string instruments have an E string; this is a particularly easy note to guess -- that's a good point. So we changed the note and conducted a new poll. This time readers heard this:
Only 7.2 percent of 195 respondents correctly identified the note as G-sharp -- a rate lower than the 8.33 percent random chance level. What's up with that? Are there *no* readers with absolute pitch?
There's a short interview with me at the Scranton Times-Tribune -- it's their Saturday "Five Questions" feature so it's supposed to be funny rather than serious.
When we were in Vienna this past summer, we were surprised to learn that in Mozart's time, symphonic concerts were often mish-mashes: single movements and "greatest hits" arias instead of complete works. Audiences applauded after each movement. We saw a reenactment of such a concert, in 18th-century costumes:
If only we had been studying for the LSAT, we might not have had to read the program notes. Apparently the reading comprehension items in a recent study guide focused on how music was performed at the turn of the 19th century:
A. The final movements of symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven might be played more slowly by today's orchestras if which one of the following were to occur?
orchestras were to use instruments no more advanced in design than those used by orchestras at the time Mozart and Beethoven composed their symphonies
audiences were to return to the custom of applauding at the end of each movement of a symphony
audiences were to reserve their most entusiastic applause for the most brilliantly played finales
conductors were to return to the practice of playing the chords on an orchestral piano to keep the orchestra together
conductors were to conduct the symphonies in the manner in which Beethoven and Mozart had conducted them
One cool thing about running a lab is that there aren't really many restrictions about decor. As long as the immediate area around the equipment is clear of visual distractions, anything goes. That's why we're inviting readers to send us examples of crazy lab art. Here's a great example of what can happen working too many hours in a row in a cell biology lab, courtesy of "Winnie":
Here's what the main room of Greta's lab looks like. This is where her Perception and Attention students go to participate in demo experiments, plan experiments they'll be running more formally in subject-running rooms, and analyze data:
The real magic, however, happens in the other room, where research stimuli are created, papers are written, and lab assistants have been known to crash for the night:
As you can see, things get a little weird in here. The most "interesting" specimens of lab artwork were created by Greta's first student to go on and earn a Ph.D.: Jenny Solberg, (who still stops by to comment on CogDaily articles):
We've been away from the internet for a while now, but finally have a slow connection here in rainy Prague. While in Pisa, however, we were able to avail ourselves of a unique opportunity. The favorite trick of the amateur photographers here is to create the "illusion" of their friend/family member "saving" the tower from falling down, like this, admittedly poor attempt:
I've neglected to instruct Nora on the proper angle to hold her fingers, and I should probably have held the camera lower.
But a different illusion is both easier to create and, I think, more impressive. A similar photo won Best visual illusion for 2007. All it requires is placing two identical photos of the leaning tower side by side. The tower on the right appears to be leaning further:
Here in Tuscany, the Munger family has rented a vacation house for a couple of weeks. Typically the day's biggest event is preparing dinner. Otherwise we generally just lounge around the house, admire the view, read, or converse over a glass of wine.
Today we thought we needed a project, so Nora and I decided to try and make our own Sudoku puzzle. It's actually more difficult than you might think. You can't just randomly fill in squares in a grid to make a Sudoku puzzle that works. Then it's another challenge to create a set of clues that will result in one unique solution.
After several hours' work and several sheets of scratch paper, we think we've come up with a puzzle that isn't trivially easy.
But we're rather close to the project, so perhaps the puzzle we made isn't challenging enough. Or maybe we made a mistake and our puzzle doesn't have a single solution. So we decided to put our puzzle to the readers of CogDaily. Here's what we came up with:
Unfortunately we're not smart enough to create an interactive online puzzle, so if you'd like to try it you'll have to print the puzzle out and fill it in by hand (click to open in its own window for easy printing!). Once you're done, let us know how we've done in the poll below.
We've been in Rome for a few days now, and we've seen several wonderful examples of how Renaissance and Baroque artists were beginning to re-learn the lessons of perspective, which, if 20-year-old memory of art history class serves me, had been discarded during the medieval period while artists focused on the social and religious dimensions of art.
Realistic perspective in paintings requires artists to understand a lot about the human vision system. If you can accurately portray perspective, you might just be able to build a jumbo-sized cathedral on a moderate-sized budget.
The most ambitious attempt at this I've ever seen must be the church of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola of Rome. Looking at this detail from the church's ceiling, you almost believe that it ascends to infinity:
Unfortunately, the illusion only works from one point in the church. Once you start to move around, the illusion breaks down. Take a look at this view from under the church's "dome":
Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
