Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
Greta Munger is Associate Professor of Psychology at Davidson College whose works include The History of Psychology: Fundamental Questions. Dave Munger is a writer whose works include Researching Online and The Pocket Reader. And yes, he is married to Greta.
The Stroop Effect is one of the most-studied phenomena in psychology. The test is easy to administer, and works in a variety of contexts. The simplest way to see how it works is just to look the following two lists. Don't read them, instead say the color each word is displayed in, as quickly as you can:
If English is your native language, you should be much quicker at naming the colors of the first list than the second list. Why? Even though the task is to identify the colors, proficient readers can't stop themselves from reading the words, which slows color identification in cases where the color is different from the word.
But recently, Amir Raz and colleagues noticed that they could reduce and even eliminate the Stroop Effect by hypnotizing participants and suggesting to them that the words were in a foreign language, so they could focus solely on color. In a new experiment, Raz and three other researchers attempted to see if the hypnosis itself was necessary.
An old college friend and accomplished writer, John Scalzi, recently posted a list of writing tips for nonprofessionals, which I'd highly recommend for professionals and nonprofessionals alike. One of his most unusual suggestions is to "speak what you write" -- literally, to read your writing out loud before publishing, whether in a blog post or just an e-mail to friends. This, he argues, will not only help catch spelling and other errors (each of which Scalzi says decreases the writer's apparent IQ by 5 to 10 points), but also help you see whether you're conveying the meaning you intend.
So what does psychology research have to say about this notion? (No, not that typos decrease your IQ, but the larger idea that reading your words out loud will help you determine if your meaning is clear.)
A team led by Justin Kruger conducted a series of experiments on how we perceive each other's intentions in e-mail, and their findings do have some relevance to Scalzi's claims. One common problem in e-mails is deciding whether your correspondent is being serious or sarcastic. Taking Scalzi's example, most readers will realize that one of his observations was sarcastic: your IQ doesn't literally decrease when you make a spelling error. But what about the advice given by the aptly-named blogger Grumpy old Bookman, who in response to the much-hyped controversy over fabrications in James Frey's memoir, suggested that authors literally make everything up, taking no inspiration from the real world? Most commenters to that post clearly thought he was being serious, but I have little doubt that the post was intended to be sarcasm (I also think he anticipated that many readers wouldn't "get it" -- and that was part of the joke).
Clicking on the image below will take you to a short Quicktime movie. Make sure you have your sound turned up, because I've recorded a few sentences that play along with the movie. Your job is to determine, as quickly as possible, if each sentence is grammatically correct -- while you focus your vision on the animated display.
This demonstration replicates part of an experiment conducted by a group of researchers led by Michael P. Kaschak. The researchers showed similar animations to a group of volunteers and asked them to make similar judgments about spoken language. The question: does our reaction time differ when the animation corresponds to the movement described in language?
Kids love robots. I have a three-year-old friend who can identify the 1950s cult icon Robbie the Robot at 20 paces. My own son Jim could do an impressive multi-voiced impression of R2D2 by age five. Now that real robots are beginning to be everyday household items (when I was a kid, if I'd known I'd be able to buy a vacuum-cleaner robot from Sears when I was a grown-up, I'd be ashamed to learn that I never actually bought one!), one wonders how real kids will respond to them.
When, for example, might a child begin to believe that a robot has a conscious mind, and that humans might communicate with robots the same way they talk with each other? The photo above (source: IRC) depicts a child interacting with Robovie, a robot designed to make human gestures, speak natural languages, and establish eye contact, just like real people. Perhaps these interactive features are the key, but perhaps a mere humanoid shape is all that is necessary to convince a child that something is "human."
A team led by Akiko Arita developed a test to see how 10-month-old infants reacted to the Robovie. They showed these babies a movie of a person talking with the robot. Some babies saw the robot responding and interacting in a natural human way, another group saw a human talking to an unresponsive robot, and a third group saw the robot interacting with an unresponsive human. Next, They were shown movies of a human talking to someone hidden behind a curtain. The curtain was removed and either a robot or a human was revealed.
Most research with infants is conducted in a similar manner: since babies can't tell us what surprises or interests them, researchers show them a stimulus of some type, then measure how long they look at the stimulus. The longer the stimulus keeps their attention, the more surprising it's surmised to be. In this case, the researchers measured how long babies looked at the newly revealed robot. Here are the results:
When babies had seen the robot interacting with the human previously, they appeared to be equally interested in a human-human conversation and a human-robot conversation later. But when the babies initially saw the human talking with an immobile robot, they looked at the hidden robot significantly longer than the hidden human. It appears that they were surprised to see another human trying to talk with it later. Perhaps more surprisingly, when the robot had tried to interact with an unresponsive human in the movie, babies again appeared to be surprised when a human tried to talk with a robot later.
So even as early as 10 months of age—well before they are able to talk themselves—it seems that infants consider interactivity to be the key factor in deciding whether a robot is something to talk to, whether it has a human mind. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that this was my son's reaction to the scene in Star Wars when Luke and Han were awarded medals for destroying the Death Star: "Why didn't R2D2 get a medal, too?"
Arita, A., Hiraki, K., Kanda, T., & Ishiguro, H. (2005). Can we talk to robots? Ten-month-old infants expected humanoid robots to be talked to by humans. Cognition, 95, B49-B57.
What is your mind doing when you think about something? For decades, the prevailing wisdom was that when you imagine, say, the scent of a flower or your lover's perfume, your mind is doing something different from when you actually smell those things. The metaphor was a computer: The hardware for sensing things was distinct from the software for thinking about things.
More recent evidence suggests that the way we understand concepts relies on the sensorimotor system. When you think of the sound of a dripping faucet, the same parts of your brain are activated as when you are actually hearing a faucet dripping. (Computer geeks should see how the computer metaphor breaks down: it's as if searching a database of images required the server to access its video card.)
But if conceptual thinking requires the sensorimotor system, then thinking about concepts should have the same limitations as our senses. For example, in 2000, Charles Spence, Michael Nicholls, and Jon Driver found that the reaction time for signals was slower after a change of modalities (like touch and hearing) compared to when the modality stayed the same (for example, a visual signal followed by another visual signal).
Diane Pecher, René Zeelenberg, and Lawrence W. Barsalou designed an experiment to see if thinking about different modalities showed the same reaction-time differences. Volunteers were shown a series of simple statements and asked to indicate whether the statements were true or false. The statements all followed the same pattern: OBJECT can be PROPERTY. For example:
BLENDER can be LOUD
TOAST can be WARM
MARBLE can be COOL
BUTTERMILK can be SQUEAKING
Participants rated 300 statements. Pecher's team was interested specifically in cases where the modality of the property changed. In the list above, Blender-Loud is an auditory property, but Toast-Warm is a touch property—the modality changes. The next transition, to Marble-Cool would be an example where the modality does not change. Buttermilk-Squeaking is a decoy, as were most items on the test, so that participants didn't catch on to the real goal of the experiment. Here are the results:
Even though participants were engaged in a language task, reaction time was significantly longer when the properties they were considering came from different sensory modalities.
This appears to be compelling evidence that our thought process relies on the sensorimotor system, but the team conducted a second experiment to eliminate an alternate explanation. Perhaps we react faster merely because the words from a particular modality are more closely related linguistically than other words. In the second experiment, the team selected pairs that were very closely related: for example, the words spotless and clean. When used in the form "SHEET can be SPOTLESS" and "AIR can be CLEAN," these words aren't related to any specific modality—this is the "related word" condition. A pair such as "SHEET can be SPOTLESS" and "MEAL can be CHEAP" is an example of "unrelated words." This type of word pair was inserted in to a new experiment that also included same-modality and different-modality pairs. Here are the results:
There was no difference between related and unrelated words, but once again, a significant difference between same-modality and different-modality words was found. Pecher et al. argue that these experiments offer compelling evidence that the way we process concepts is not independent of other systems of the brain; it appears, by contrast, that conceptualization requires the use of the sensorimotor system. Unlike computers, whose highly specialized hardware often performs only a single task, the mind appears to make use of sensory systems not only for sensing, but also for imagining.
Pecher, D., Zeelenberg, R., & Barsalou, L.W. (2003). Verifying different-modality properties for concepts produces switching costs. Psychological Science, 14(2), 119-124.
Toddlers learn new words at an astonishing rate—an average, according to Steven Pinker, of over a word every two hours. Yet attempts to drill children to improve vocabulary are often frustrating. Kids seem to learn words better through observing the environment than they do by rote. So what exactly are they observing?
One possibility is that the child is paying attention to what others are looking at: if a grown-up looks at a construction site and says "look at the bulldozer," maybe kids learn "bulldozer" because they have learned to follow the grown-up's gaze. Another possibility is that kids assume that the object they don't have a word for is the one being referred to: if the child sees a tree, a bird, and a big noisy yellow thing, then when the adult says "look at the bulldozer," the child assumes "bulldozer" means "big noisy yellow thing" because she already knows that a tree is a tall green thing and a bird is a fluffy flying thing that eats worms.
One of the symptoms of autism is that people with autism don't perceive the intentions of others—so if we learn language only by observing the gaze of others, it would seem that kids with autism would have more difficulty learning language. Mellissa Allen Preissler and Susan Carey developed an experiment to see if toddlers with autism could use the speaker's gaze to learn the names of objects. They gave 24-month-olds (some with autism, some normal) objects they'd never seen before (a doorstop, soap dish, tire gauge, or cheese grater). The experimenter held a different new object, and gazed at that object while the toddler was playing with his or her object. Then the experimenter named the object in her hand with a nonsense word ("peri"). She placed her object and the toddler's object in a bag with two other objects. Then she asked the toddler to "find the peri." Children with autism most frequently chose the object they themselves had been holding, but normal children correctly identified the object the experimenter had been looking at 70 percent of the time.
In a second experiment, kids were presented with two objects—one familiar, and one unfamiliar (as reported by the children's parents). The experimenter asked kids to "show me a blicket," using a nonsense word to refer to the unfamiliar object. In this case, both normal children and children with autism were able to successfully identify the novel object. Here's a summary of the results of both experiments:
So though children with autism are often unable to follow the gaze of a speaker to learn what object he is referring to, they are just as able as normal children to use the process of elimination to associate a word with a new object. Though social cues such as observing the gaze of another are important in learning language, the same concepts can be learned other ways. Perhaps what's most amazing about kids' ability to learn language is how effortless it seems, even for kids with impairments at making inferences about others' intentions.
Preissler, M.A., & Carey, S. (2005). The role of inferences about referential intent in word learning: Evidence from autism. Cognition, 97, B13-B23.
Last week we discussed two experiments in a report by Adam Anderson about how the phenomenon of attentional blink is modified when the task includes arousing words. Perhaps not surprisingly, we're more likely to notice arousing words like "ejaculate" or "foreplay" in a rapidly presented sequence than neutral words like "plane" or "clock."
But Anderson wasn't finished—he wanted to explain why this phenomenon occurs. Are we more likely to remember arousing words after the fact? Or are arousing words inherently more able to attract our attention? So, Anderson reversed the attentional blink task. As before, participants were shown a rapidly flashed sequence of words, appearing randomly in different colors. The task was to identify two words displayed in different colors from the rest: a first word displayed in white, and a second green word. The white "word" was always a sequence of digits (00000000000, 55555555555), and the second word was a neutral word (mirror, surplus). However, all the other words in the sequence were randomly chosen from either a set of arousing or neutral words. Given this massive distraction, how accurate were participants at identifying the words?
Overall, compared to previous experiments, they were much less accurate—and when the distractors were arousing, performance was consistently worse than for neutral distractors. Given that in both cases, participants are not being asked to remember the arousing words, this result suggests that the diminished attentional blink associated with arousing words is not due to arousing words being more memorable, but because they are more likely to attract our attention in the first place.
But perhaps when we see an arousing word, we direct more attention to it because we exclude other objects from our attention. Seen this way, attention is a matter of different inputs competing for our mind's limited processing resources. Perhaps arousing words are simply those that are better able to use these resources. The other possibility is that attention overall is improved when we are aroused. To try to differentiate between these possibilities, Anderson designed another experiment. As in previous experiments, participants were asked to identify two words, one displayed in white and a second in green, among a rapidly presented list of distractor words in black. This time, participants were encouraged to identify the first word (actually either a sequence of Xs or Os) as rapidly as possible. The second word was either an arousing or a neutral word. The basic results were the same as in other tests: for neutral words, an attentional blink occurred for about 400 milliseconds after the first word, and for arousing words, this blink was diminished. But I want to focus in on another set of results, which compare reaction time for the first word with accuracy on the second word:
Participants who had the fastest reaction times to the first word (in quartile 1) were also the most accurate at identifying the second word. However, when viewing arousing words, accuracy remained relatively high regardless of reaction time. With neutral second words, accuracy diminished as response time increased. This result too suggests that arousing words aren't merely more memorable than neutral words—they're better at attracting our attention in the first place. Even more interesting is how quickly this effect occurs. Anderson switched between arousing and neutral words between each trial of the experiment. So the arousing words aren't simply increasing our overall attentive state, they're intrinsically more noticeable.
If these words increased our overall ability, we should see some increase in attention to non-arousing words. Instead attending to these words appears to be a spur-of-the-moment thing: we notice them when they're there; we don't notice other words under similar circumstances.
What does this suggest about the attention system overall? While it's certainly an indepent system of the mind (we still attend to new things even while doing something else), it's also linked into other systems. Emotion, as shown in Anderson's work, has a critical link to attention. Unraveling how these different systems interact with each other will become a critical part of the study of cognition in the future.
Anderson, A.K. (2005). Affective influences on the attentional dynamics supporting awareness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(2), 258-281.
A few months ago, Jon Stewart opened the eyes of his Daily Show audience when he interviewed the author of the book On Bullshit. Viewers accustomed to hearing the familiar bleep when Stewart enters foul-mouth mode were surprised to find that the word came through completely uncensored. Stewart himself reveled in his new freedom, repeating the word "bullshit" dozens of times over the course of the interview. It was difficult not to notice the word every time he spoke it.
Adam K. Anderson of the University of Toronto, who specializes in studying attention, wondered if negative words like "bullshit" were more likely to attract our notice even during times when we're normally distracted. He designed a version of the attentional blink paradigm to include three types of words: neutral (bread, branch), negative (blood, beaten), and negative-arousing (bitch, bastard). The words were rated by a panel of volunteers for negative value and arousal to ensure that the categories were accurate.
Attentional blink research has found that when people view a series of words presented rapidly and try to identify two words that are different from the rest (e.g. a different color or meaning from the other words in the series), they fail to recall the second word if it is displayed during a short span (about 200 to 500 milliseconds) after the first one. In Anderson's version of the task, participants had to recall the two green words in a list of black words, displayed slide-show fashion for a tenth of a second each. The first green word was neutral, and the second green word was either neutral, negative, or negative-arousing. Here are his results:
When the second green word was neutral, the standard result for attentional blink occured: when the second word was displayed immediately after the first, recall was relatively accurate, but if it was two to four places after the first, recall suffered, before finally increasing above 90 percent accuracy after seven or so places. Negative words showed less attentional blink, and for negative-arousing words, the effect was nearly absent. So despite the fact that we usually don't notice distinctive words when they are displayed so soon after another, we do notice taboo words in the same circumstances.
But is it the fact that these words are negative that causes us to notice them, or is it arousal? Anderson generated a new set of words in three new categories: neutral (crowbar, square), positive (champ, sweet), and positive-arousing (condom, sensual). This time, he modified the attentional blink task—instead of noticing two green words, participants had to identify a first "word" that was just a sequence of letters (LLLLLLLLL, VVVVVVVVV) colored white, along with the second green word, chosen from the neutral, positive, and positive-arousing lists. The other words in the list were displayed in different (non-green or white) colors. Here are the results:
Because the task was modified, the data follows a different pattern. When the green word immediately followed the set of white letters, accuracy was the worst. Accuracy steadily improved until the fourth position, when it topped out near 90 percent. But otherwise, the results followed a similar pattern to the negative words: less attentional blink for positive words, and almost none for positive-arousing words.
So though we do notice negative-arousing words like Jon Stewart's favorite, "bullshit," more often than neutral words, we also notice positive words. Positive or negative, arousing words are the most noticeable of all. So what causes us to notice these words? Anderson has some answers, but they'll have to wait until the next Cognitive Daily post. Come back next week and read all about it!
Anderson, A.K. (2005). Affective influences on the attentional dynamics supporting awareness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(2), 258-281.
The movie, a fictionalization of the lives of the legendary team of Broadway writers Richard Rogers (music) and Lorenz Hart (words), only addresses its titular conflict obliquely. The implicit answer, of course, is that you can't have one without the other.
Or can you? While it's difficult or perhaps impossible to scientifically determine whether words or music is more important in a song, Isabelle Peretz, Monique Radeau, and Martin Arguin may have done the next-best thing: they devised a study to try to determine whether language or music is more memorable.
In their study, Peretz et al. played recorded snippets of 48 familiar French folk songs to native French speakers. The snippets included two different recognizable parts of the songs: the beginning, and some other portion. (A corresponding example in English would be "happy birthday" and "to you.") A preliminary experiment showed that listeners had difficulty identifying the songs from the middle portions, so the order of the snippets was reversed (so, for example, they would play "to you" followed by "happy birthday.") Listeners were instructed to press a button as soon as they recognized the clip.
This experiment is an example of a priming study (we have discussed several of these before). The basic priming effect is simple: when a participant has been primed with a related word, they can complete a memory task more quickly. For example, if your task is to identify proper nouns, then you'll respond more quickly to "The Beatles" if you've seen "The Rolling Stones" first.
What Peretz's team wanted to know was whether music or language primed song recognition best. To do this, they created two versions of each snippet: one where the words of the song were spoken, and the second where the melody was sung—but instead of singing the words, the performer replaced each syllable with the sound "la". The snippets were combined in four different ways: a spoken prime followed by a spoken target (e.g. "to you happy birthday"), a spoken prime followed by a sung target ("to you la la la la"), a sung prime followed by a sung target ("la la la la la la"), and a sung prime followed by a spoken target ("la la happy birthday"). The primes and targets were differentiated by how they were played: primes were played to just one ear of the listeners' headphones, while targets were played in stereo.
Initially, Peretz et al. found that when listeners were primed in the same way they were tested (e.g. singing followed by singing, or speaking followed by speaking), they reacted more quickly. However, a vastly more significant effect was found for language targets: when the target was spoken, listeners recognized the song nearly twice as quickly as when it was sung.
While this may seem to be a clear victory for words over music, the team noted that spoken words tended to take much less time than the equivalent sung melody. Perhaps participants were merely getting their information more quickly.
So the team repeated the experiment, this time using a computer to speed up the singing to match the pace of spoken language without changing its pitch. While sung melodies were recognized more quickly than they had been previously, there was still a substantial advantage for spoken language.
But perhaps this is due to the more expressive nature of spoken language—while a sung note can only vary in pitch, each syllable of language conveys much more information. To compensate for this, the team added white noise to each spoken snippet, then compared the resulting recordings to the sped-up sung melodies until a pilot group recognized both types of recordings equally quickly. Then they repeated the original experiment again. This time, there was no significant difference between the priming effect of lyrics or melody. Words and music appear to contribute equally to the memorability of a song.
Peretz et al. suggest that this equal contribution of words and music to the priming effect may be due to the natural similarities of the rhythm of speech and song. It makes some sense—after all, lyricists select their words for their rhythmic qualities, and composers try to find music that appropriately complements the words. And try to imagine a musical written by just "Rodgers," or only "Hart." It doesn't have the same ring as "Rodgers and Hart," the team behind such unforgettable songs as "The Lady Is a Tramp," "This Can't Be Love," and "Blue Moon."
Peretz, I., Radeau, M., & Arguin, M. (2004). "Two-way interactions between music and language: Evidence from priming recognition of tune and lyrics in familiar songs." Memory & Cognition, 32(1), 142-152.
Take a look at the following three animations. Each will flash very rapidly through a set of words (9 words per second!). Your job is to watch carefully and see if you notice a word that describes an occupation that a human performs for money. Such a word may or may not be in each list, and you only get one chance with each one. No cheating!
Did you see an occupation in any of the lists? Just one or two of them?
If you're like most people, you had no problem spotting "attorney" in the first list, but you missed "carpenter" in the second list. The third list was probably more difficult, but you still likely caught "nurse."
What's going on here is a phenomenon called "attentional blink." We've covered attentional blink before, but traditionally the instructions for completing the task are more complicated, calling for people to remember the first time the letter X appears in a flashed list of letters, but only after a white letter (the distractor) appears. Here, the lists consisted entirely of geographical terms, except for the occupation word and (in two cases) a distractor. The distractor words I chose ("passenger" and "husband") are closely related, but are not occupations, and I didn't need to mention the distractor at all in order to generate the effect.
A team led by Philip Barnard developed this new way of studying attentional blink in order to shed some light on its causes. The team was able to replicate earlier findings on attentional blink: when the target word followed closely behind a distractor, (200-500 milliseconds) participants were less likely to be able to spot it. When it followed by 600 milliseconds or more, performance improved. So since "carpenter" followed "passenger" by 220 milliseconds in the demo above, you probably missed it. But "nurse" was a full second past "husband," so you probably saw it (there was no distractor in the first list).
As a control, Barnard et al. also used distractors that were unrelated to job words, like household items. In these cases, the respondents showed no attentional blink.
By using words as stimuli, Barnard et al. were able to do more than just confirm the existence of attentional blink—they could also look at which distractors were more effective. Using a technique called Latent Semantic Analysis, they generated numerical values that represent how closely related any two words are. The value ranges from -1 to 1. So, for example, when nature words are compared to job words, the value is about .14, but when jobs are compared to "human" words like "husband," the value jumps to .47. Comparing jobs to household items yields an inbetween value of about .30.
Next the team looked more closely at the "human" distractors. When participants correctly indicated that they had seen an occupation word, the human distractor words were most often more closely related to the occupation word. When they incorrectly said that they had not seen an occupation word, the distractors tended to be less closely related to the occupation word.
Barnard's team argues that this result suggests a two-stage process to attentional blink. During the first stage, people determine if the distractor is unrelated to the other words in the list (in this case, geographical terms). Once the distractor is identified, then the second stage (determining if it is an occupation) begins. During this stage, if the distractor is closely related to an occupation, it's easier to reject it, because it fits in better with the line of thought we need to use to make the decision (e.g. paid or unpaid). This allows people to return to the initial task and decide if the next word is an occupation word. If the distractor is less closely related, it takes longer to process, and so we are more likely to make a mistake in the primary task.
So it appears that we're less distracted by either closely related or unrelated items—what gives us the most trouble are distractions somewhere in the middle, because these items distract us during both stages of the recognition process.
Barnard, P.J., Scott, S., Taylor, J., May, J., & Knightley, W. (2004). Paying Attention to Meaning. Psychological Science, 15(3), 179-186.
Eric Durbrow pointed me to this article in the Globe and Mail. Its lead sentence offers a surprising claim:
Parents take note: Reading to your preschoolers before bedtime doesn't mean they are likely to learn much about letters, or even how to read words.
But aren't teachers and literacy advocates constantly urging parents to read to their kids? Aren't their entreaties backed by research?
The Globe and Mail article reports on research published in Psychological Science by Mary Ann Evans and Jean Saint-Aubin. I decided to look at the original article to see if it lives up to the dramatic claim offered in the mainstream media report.
Evans and Saint-Aubin note in the introduction to their experiments that little research has been done specifically focusing on the relationship between shared book reading and orthographic development. In other words, while there have been studies about parents reading to their kids, these studies don't specifically examine how kids learn about the shape of letters and how letters form words. So there may be some cause for concern.
The Globe and Mail article does offer a good summary of Evans and Saint-Aubin's work. They tracked the eye movements of 4-year-olds as their parents read picture books to them from a computer screen. Despite using several different types of books, including books where the text was enclosed in conversation bubbles superimposed on the illustrations comic-book style, the children rarely looked at the words on the page. They generally looked at the pictures more than 20 times as often as they looked at the words. Evans and Saint-Aubin quite reasonably ask how these children could possibly be learning anything about words or reading.
The Globe and Mail article quotes Evans as saying that parents believe that reading to their kids will help them learn to read. "That's true to an extent in that reading to your children will help them develop an understanding of storyline. But it's not necessarily helping them to learn how to decode the words on the page."
Does the research really suggest that reading to children only helps kids understand "storyline"? In their second experiment, Evans and Saint-Aubin had teachers read two different versions of the same story to a new group of children, again monitoring eye movements. In the modified story, the text was changed to refer to specific details in the pictures. On pages with references to specific picture details, children looked at the corresponding area of the picture nearly the entire time the page was being read. This suggests that the kids are paying close attention to the meaning of the text in the story. Wouldn't that at least help children develop vocabulary skills?
Indeed it would, and Evans and Saint-Aubin cite two meta-analyses and three studies showing that reading to children correlates with vocabulary knowledge. While vocabulary may be important for parents, for psychologists, language ability is a separate skill from reading ability. However, while the five articles that Evans and Saint-Aubin cite find that there is a stronger impact on vocabulary than on reading achievement, each study does show some association between shared reading to preschoolers and school-aged reading ability.
Evans and Saint-Aubin argue that this small effect may be due to the fact that parents who read to their children are also more likely to specifically coach their children in orthographic skills. Perhaps this is true—perhaps it is the coaching, and not the shared reading, which leads to improved reading ability in school-aged kids.
But is the Globe and Mail article's lead sentence warranted—does reading to children really lead to no improvement in reading ability? From a psychology research perspective, it's arguable that it does not. But for parents trying to help their children develop the skills that will help them in the future, the question may be irrelevant. Developing vocabulary skills and a love of books are important in their own right. In the long run, these skills may lead to better readers: Evans and Saint-Aubin's report doesn't address long-term development.
Finally, I would argue that children whose parents read to them to are substantially more likely to learn to read—because if no reading occurs, then there is much less opportunity for coaching. As Evans points out in her interview with the Globe and Mail, one of the simplest ways to coach children on reading skills is to point to the words while we read them.
Evans, M.A., & Saint-Aubin, J. (2005) What children are looking at during shared storybook reading: Evidence from eye movement monitoring. Psychological Science, 16(11), 913-920.
In face to face conversation, we often look away from the person we're speaking with. Somewhat paradoxically, the closer people sit to their conversation companions, the less often they look at them.
But other factors influence how often we avert our gaze, too. When we are asked personal questions, or difficult questions, or possibly when we are trying to deceive, we look away more often. When we talk with someone via a remote video monitor, we look at them more often than when we engage in the same type of conversation face to face.
So what's the cause of this behavior? Do several different causes lead to looking away, or is the root cause the same for all of them? Perhaps we look away when we are feeling socially challenged. After all, difficult questions, or social intimacy, or the heightened social awareness involved in deceiving others could all lead to the same feeling of being put on the spot.
But another explanation is possible at least some of the time. We get a great deal of information by looking at faces, and this information places a significant load on our cognitive systems. Perhaps, when we're asked a difficult question and need to concentrate, looking away from a face helps us focus on the cognitive demands of the question.
So do we look away because we're self-conscious, or because it helps us concentrate? Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon and Fiona Phelps devised an experiment to distinguish between these two possibilities. They asked 8-year olds four different types of questions: verbal, arithmetic, episodic memory, and autobiographical memory. Each question was rated by the childrens' teachers as easy, medium, or hard. Half the kids were tested face-to-face, by a questioner sitting across a table from them. The other half were tested via a real-time video link. Their questioner appeared on a video monitor. The children were videotaped as they gave oral responses to the questions. Later the tape was analyzed to determine how often they averted their gaze from the questioner.
Doherty-Sneddon and Phelps expected that the kids using the video monitor would avert their gaze less often. They were interested in a different aspect of the results: whether the kids in each condition would respond differently when more difficult questions were asked. Here are the results (click on the picture for a larger version):
The graphs show the proportion of the time the kids looked away as they responded to the questions. As expected, the kids in the face-to-face condition looked away more of the time than those in the video monitor condition. Otherwise, however, the results were essentially the same—as questions became harder, the children looked away more. Doherty-Sneddon and Phelps argue that if gaze aversion were solely due to self-consciousness, the kids in the face-to-face condition would avert their gaze proportionately longer as the questions became more difficult. Since this was not the case, the reason for looking away is probably simply to reduce the overall cognitive demand and focus on the question.
So it appears that there are at least two reasons we look away from others while we talk to them: because of our self-consciousness or embarrassment at the intimacy of the situation, and because averting our gaze enables us to focus on the ideas behind what we're saying. This is not to say there aren't additional reasons. As Doherty-Sneddon and Phelps point out, there are different expectations in different cultures for how much we should look at each other. However, their work does appear to demonstrate that there is more to gaze aversion than just social nicety.
Doherty-Sneddon, G., & Phelps, F.G. (2005). Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty? Memory & Cognition, 33(4), 727-733.
Just listening to music, despite the hype associated with the "Mozart Effect," appears to have little influence on IQ or other abilities. It does seem to make us more aroused and put us in a better mood, which can improve performance on tests, but it doesn't actually make us any smarter. But what about actual long-term training in music? Clearly musical training can make us better able to perform and appreciate music, but can it also improve our performance in areas? With its mathematically based notation system, music has been shown to improve mathematical reasoning skills. But surely music is more than just math. What other abilities does it improve?
A group led by William Thompson reasoned that since so many studies have linked music and emotion (we've discussed some of these studies here, here, and here), perhaps musical training can help us perceive emotions in others. We know music can express emotion, and obviously facial expressions can, too. More recent research has suggested that the musical aspects of speech itself—speech prosody—also express emotion. Some theoreticians have speculated that music itself originated with mothers' desire to communicate emotionally with their children through songs. So perhaps musical training itself can help us interpret speech prosody.
Thompson et al. developed a set of experiments to see if there is a relationship between musical training and recognizing speech prosody. They recorded a speaker saying ordinary sentences such as "the chairs are made of wood" while expressing four different emotions: happy, sad, angry, and fearful. Then they transformed the sentences into musical sequences by calculating the average pitch of each syllable. In their first experiment, they tested musically trained and untrained adults. The untrained group had had no formal music instruction, while the trained group had taken at least 8 years and averaged over 13 years of music lessons. Participants listened to the tone sequences and then indicated whether they thought the emotion of the corresponding sentence was angry, sad, happy, or fearful. Here are the results:
The musically trained group was significantly better at identifying the emotion from the sequences than the untrained group. While both groups were not as accurate with the fearful and angry sequences, in every case, the trained group was better at detecting emotion from speech prosody.
But this experiment on its own doesn't show that musical training causes people to be better at interpreting emotion—it might be that the people who've stuck to music lessons for all those years chose music in the first place because of their superior ability to perceive emotion.
To address these concerns, Thompson et al. turned to a group of 7-year-olds that were part of a larger study on the impact of music instruction. These kids had been randomly assigned to groups receiving a year of lessons at the age of six—either drama, keyboard, singing, or no lessons (the kids in the "no lessons" group received a free year of instruction the following year). Since they were randomly assigned, there was no chance that more emotionally sensitive kids had self-selected music lessons.
Though the children were given a simpler test than the adults (they only had to distinguish between two emotions at a time—happy/sad, or anger/fear), the results this time were less clear. There was no difference between the groups when distinguishing between happy and sad. However, in the more difficult anger/fear condition, the results were as follows:
The kids who took keyboard or drama lessons performed statistically better than those with no lessons. However, the result for singing lessons was neither statistically different from the keyboard or drama group, nor the control group. So drama lessons—as may be expected—help perception of speech prosody, as do keyboard lessons, but rather unexpectedly, one year of singing lessons did not lead to an improvement.
Thompson et al. believe that this result for singing lessons can be explained by the different methods used for teaching singing to children compared to keyboard lessons. Singers generally are asked to use pitches that do not correspond to those used in normal prosodic speech—so emotion is not conveyed the same way in song as it is in speaking. Also, singers are often not asked to generate precise pitch—a wide range of pitches around the desired note is usually tolerated, whereas with keyboards, the pitch produced by each key is always identical. Finally, it's possible that just one year of singing instruction is insufficient to affect perception of speech prosody.
Nonetheless, the results of the child study with keyboarding, combined with the adults who have had more years of instruction, suggest that music training does confer real benefits in perceiving emotion.
Thompson, W.F., Schellenberg, E.G., & Husain, G. (2004). Decoding speech prosody: Do music lessons help? Emotion, 4(1), 46-64.
Today's research psychologists typically don't think much of Sigmund Freud. His theories, which tended to be based on literary analysis and interviews with his patients rather than controlled experiments, have been largely discredited (though they continue to be influential in the field of—you guessed it—literary analysis). However, he did discover an important phenomenon which continues to be investigated today. Freud noted that adults do not remember childhood events occurring before they were as old as six. This period of childhood amnesia is now generally believed to end at about age three or four. Though current psychologists don't put much stock in Freud's explanation of the phenomenon (he believed the memories were repressed because they are too traumatic), there is still little agreement on what causes it.
Gabrielle Simcock and Harlene Hayne of the University of Otago noticed that the period of amnesia tends to end at about the time of the onset of language, so they devised an experiment to test whether language ability might be at the root of the problem ("Breaking the Barrier? Children Fail to Translate Their Preverbal Memories Into Language," Psychological Science, 2002).
They created a memorable event for toddlers of ages ranging from two to three: a magical shrinking machine. The experimenter taught the children how to use the large apparatus—a black box with impressive shiny cranks and handles—to "shrink" a set of toys. The toys were placed in a large hole in the top of the box, and after the appropriate sequence of crank-spinning and button-pushing, a smaller replica of the toy appeared in a separate part of the machine. At the same time, the toddlers were given a verbal ability test. And critically, their parents were asked which words from the magical shrinking machine demonstration their children could actually say.
Six months to a year later, the toddlers were revisited and asked about the experience. Most kids, regardless of their age, could say very little about the shrinking machine. However, when they were shown photos of the toys from the experiment along with decoys (for example, four teddy bears, only one of which was used in the game), they accurately identified the toys from the game most of the time. The identical language tests were given to the children at this point, and by this time the children knew nearly all of the words used in the original experiment. Yet none of the children interviewed used any of the words that they did not know at the time of the original demonstration to describe their memory of the event. Though they clearly could remember the experience, and even showed the experimenters how the machine worked, they didn't use the proper words for the parts of the machine ("handle," "knob") if they hadn't known them at the time of the original event. The memory existed, but the words were not associated with the memory.
Simcock and Hayne argue that these memories simply are not ever encoded in language, and for that reason, never become part of an adult's autobiographical memory.
It has been known for some time that cell phones can lead to driving accidents. After watching the behavior of some other drivers on the road, I'm sometimes surprised that there aren't more cell-phone-related accidents than there already are. With well over 100 million cell phone users in the U.S. alone, the problem isn't going to get any smaller.
Until recently, there has been some dispute about exactly why cell phones are unsafe for drivers. Two high-profile studies in the 1990s suggested that any manual manipulation of devices in a car, including not only dialing a cell phone, but also adjusting the radio and other gadgets, led to poor driving. This has led to the rise of hands-free phones, voice-activated phones, and been accompanied by even more gadgets, including GPS, DVD players, and even video games in cars.
In 2001, however, David Strayer and William Johnson of The University of Utah conducted a study which helped narrow down precisely where the danger in cell phone use lies ("Driven to Distraction: Dual-Task Studies of Simulated Driving and Conversing on a Cellular Telephone," Psychological Science, 2001).
In their first experiment, Strayer and Johnson had volunteers perform a simple simulated driving task: using a joystick to make a cursor to follow a dot moving randomly back and forth across the screen (though this reminds me of the primitive "games" I used to type into my Commodore-64 from computer magazines in the early 1980s, it's a reasonable simulation of the cognitive demands of driving a car). At random intervals, the dot would turn either green or red. On a "red light," participants were supposed to press the "brake" button on the joystick. After a practice round with no distractions, participants either had a conversation on a handheld or hands-free cell phone (what did they talk about? The issues of the day while the experiment was being conducted: the Clinton impeachment scandal or the Salt Lake City Olympics bribery scandal). A control group listened to the radio or an audiobook.
Strayer and Johnson found no difference between people who used a handheld or hands-free cell phone, and no difference between radio/audiobook listeners and the driving-only condition. However, the cell-phone talkers missed more than twice as many red lights as the other participants:
In addition to the accuracy problems, cell phone users also showed slower reaction times compared to when they were driving alone.
But does any conversation lead to driving errors? In a second experiment, Strayer and Johnson used a similar apparatus, but instead of using red and green lights, they had participants drive over "easy" and "difficult" courses. The volunteers were first asked to simply repeat words to the experimenter over the telephone. Next they were asked to generate a new word starting with the last letter of the word the experimenter gave them (for example if the experimenter said "salmon," the volunteer could respond "nicotine"). The results were as follows:
Strayer and Johnson used a statistical method to measure the number of errors the drivers made. There wasn't a significant difference in errors on the easy course, but on the difficult course, when drivers had to generate words in response, they made significantly more errors. So the key seems to be not simply that drivers are having a conversation, but that they are actively generating responses. In these conditions, drivers are more likely to make errors. If word of this result gets out to the gadget-makers, perhaps the next must-have phone will have a conversation analyzer that automatically warns you if you're talking safely!
When I was about twelve years old, I came up with an idea for a massive practical joke to play on an unsuspecting baby. For its entire childhood, everyone around the baby would conspire to convince it that the sky was green. Then at some point in the future, perhaps in front of the entire sixth grade class at Whitworth Elementary School, the truth would be revealed, and one poor kid's world would be turned upside-down.
Somehow I was never able to recruit enough people to pull this ruse off, but it does beg the question: would such a joke even be possible, or would our natural perceptual categories outweigh the influence of hundreds of tricksters? In short, do children understand the differences between colors first, or do they simply learn the names for colors without understanding what they signify? While they were probably not inspired by an idea for a practical joke, Nicola Pitchford and Kathy Mullen of McGill University were able to devise an experiment to begin to address the question ("The Development of Conceptual Colour Categories in Pre-School Children: Influence of Perceptual Categorization," Visual Cognition, 2003).
A large body of research has shown that adults categorize colors into eleven basic categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey. These categories have been tested extensively, even across cultures, and found to be readily identifiable by all adults. When asked to name colors across a wide spectrum of possibilities, most people use the basic color categories to describe even the colors that fall on the border between two categories.
Young children also learn these categories, but only gradually. A very young child might use the same name—say, blue—to describe a wide variety of colors (in fact, two of the 2-year-olds that Pitchford and Mullen studied used "blue" to describe all 11 colors in their study).
Pitchford and Mullen asked kids ranging from age 2 to 5 to name the color of the outfit a cartoon character was wearing. Not surprisingly, the older kids were more accurate, but most interesting was the type of errors the children made. Colors can be arranged in a color wheel (or more accurately, a three-dimensional solid). Some colors, such as orange and yellow, are closer neighbors on the color wheel than others, such as blue and red. The researchers analyzed the errors kids made naming colors and came up with the following result:
Children were sorted by language ability. Those with the ability of an average 2-year-old made the most color errors—but they made an equal number of errors for colors that were distant on the color wheel compared to adjacent colors. It's as if they simply randomly selected a color when they weren't sure about its name. By contrast, the 3-year-old language group, when they made errors, were more likely to pick adjacent colors—saying "yellow" when the color was orange, for example. While the 4-5 group was even more accurate, the few mistakes they made tended to be naming adjacent colors (the distinction between grey and brown is the most difficult, and errors are even made by some adults).
So it seems that toddlers, while able to learn the names of some colors, haven't yet developed an understanding of the relationship between colors. By the time they are three, kids have learned most of the basic colors, but they have also learned more about how the colors relate to each other. Older kids still make some mistakes, but nearly all of them are in related colors, so they're almost always in the ballpark of the correct color.
I suspect this means that my 6th-grade prank would have stopped working long before its victim even entered elementary school. Aspiring pranksters, be warned: better to stick with water balloons and dribble glasses than mess with the human perceptual system.
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