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 text below will bring up an animation. Just look at it once -- no cheating! A picture will flash for about a quarter of a second, followed by a color pattern for a quarter second. Then the screen will go blank for about one second, and four objects will appear. Use the poll below to indicate which object (#1, 2, 3, or 4) appeared in the picture.
Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food. When we picture food in our minds, our desire for the food increases. So why not just distract the visual system? One research team attempted just that, tempting volunteers with pictures of chocolate, and then distracting them with either a randomly changing visual image or an auditory task. The participants who watched the visual image experienced fewer food cravings.
I've attempted to reproduce the type of display these researchers suggest may distract you from your cravings (click on the image to start the animation).
The original research, however, didn't take into account whether participants were hungry. Perhaps if you're already hungry, the visual distraction won't help.
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 (number 1 in the figures above) are also more fearful. Those that are rotated more from the vertical position (number 2 in the figures) are more suffering and less angry.
Assigning emotions to shapes is nothing new. In experiments as early as the 1940s, individuals have been found to consistently apply the same emotions to shapes in schematic cartoons: "angry" triangles and "loving" circles. But only one study had attempted to see if people consistently assigned emotions to static shapes based on the appearance of dynamic forces.
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 pseudoscientific claptrap, yet there exist humans who, when presented with nonvisual stimuli such as tastes or smells, perceive visual imagery. I'm talking about the scientifically recognized condition, synesthesia. Synesthetes are people who perceive stimuli presented in one mode (often corresponding to one of the five senses) with a different mode. For example, musical tones might also be perceived as colors, or a friend might appear to have blue lips (as rendered in the photo of my son Jim at left).
Might it also be possible for a synesthete to associate emotions with visual images? British psychologist Jamie Ward believes he has found an individual (a nineteen-year-old woman whose initials are GW) with just such a condition. GW says she perceives "auras" around the faces of certain people, and when she sees or hears some words, she perceives colors (the same color always associated with the same word), which occupy her entire field of vision.
But how does Ward know GW isn't just fabricating the entire story?
You can get a lot of information from a simple bar graph, but to what extent does the arrangement of the bars matter? You can find great commentary about good design, but what about a nice clean experiment? Martin H. Fischer led a team that asked participants to indicate if a given relationship was true or false, based on a variety of different bar graphs. For example, is A > B in this graph?
Here's a picture of our daughter Nora at about 3 months of age. She looks like she's fairly aware of the events going on around her (arguably more aware than she sometimes appears now, at age 12). However, as our knowledge of how infants begin to perceive the world around them has increased, we've learned that the world of a three-month-old literally looks different to them than the world we perceive as adults. That's because vision, which seems so obvious and instinctive, is actually an active process. When we perceive the world visually, we're not just passively "seeing" what's there, we're constantly determining where one object ends and the next one begins. We're applying logical rules to help break objects into groups and understand how the two-dimensional image on the inside of our eye corresponds to a three-dimensional physical world.
In the picture of Nora, for example, how do we know that the bonnet isn't part of her body? Because it's a different color, white? But the white buckle is part of the baby carrier. Clearly the set of rules we've learned are not simple. But when do we learn them? And in what order?
Can you tell the difference between the images below?
At first, they just look like fuzzy diagonal lines -- there doesn't appear to be a significant difference between them. But if you look at them closely, you begin to notice that the images at the top of the picture (category A) tend to have single dark bands, while the images towards the bottom have dark bands that come in pairs. The "phase angle" refers to the technique used to generate the images, and based on this angle, the images can be divided into two categories.
With a lot of work, people can be trained to quickly distinguish between these categories. The training, on a computer, involves showing the images over and over again, requiring participants to place each image in category A or B. Then, if these trained "experts" at categorizing fuzzy lines (actually called compound gratings) are tested by showing them two gratings at the same time and asking if they are the same or different, a curious result occurs. People who've been trained to categorize the gratings are much better at distinguishing between gratings in different categories than they are when the gratings are in the same category. But if the images are rotated by 90 degrees (so they are slanted to the left, instead of the right), the training advantage disappears:
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?
Disney's purchase of Pixar makes it clear that computer-generated (CGI) animation appears to be the wave of the future in movies. But one difficulty with CGI animation is conveying realistic emotions. While film animators (whether they use computers or not) can use artistic license to achieve the desired effects, when "emotions" are generated exclusively by computer, it can be difficult to identify the key factors in conveying that emotion.
We've discussed avatars, for example, as one way that computers can automate human interaction. Artificial intelligence -- lifelike simulators of human responses -- will also need to mimick emotions convincingly in order to interact effectively with real people. Harold Hill, Nikolaus Troje, and Alan Johnston have investigated two aspects of how CGI animations can effectively express emotion.
Chad Orzel has challenged the ScienceBloggers to come up with the greatest experiments in their respective fields. While Greta and I are reluctant to say this is the greatest experiment ever (there are so many great experiments!), we both independently came up with the same one: Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler's 1971 experiment on mental rotation. It's certainly our favorite, and it's difficult to overstate its importance.
The design of the experiment is simple and brilliant; yet it was not easy to execute at the time. Today researchers studying vision almost always use computers to display stimuli. In 1970, when the experiment was designed, psychologists didn't have easy access to computers capable of displaying Shepard and Metzler's complex, three-dimensional images. They wanted to show participants two objects in two different orientations, then measure how long it took for them to determine if the objects were the same. Here are a few of the 800 different pairs of images they created for the study:
The objects were created using a computer program, but the computer's output was a set of coordinates, which then had to be plotted out by hand on graph paper. These images were transferred to cards, which were displayed to viewers using a tachistoscope, a viewing box with a shutter that allowed a precise measurement of when an image was revealed. Participants pulled one handle to indicate the objects were the same, and a different handle when they were different. Though half the objects were the same and half were different, Shepard and Metzler were only interested in the results when objects were the same.
Point-light displays can tell us an amazing amount about other people. Looking only at a few glowing spots corresponding to joints and set in motion, we can tell what people are doing, whether they are over- or underweight, and even identify a friend among strangers. We can also identify animals or determine the emotional state a dancer or actor is conveying. But some emotions are more difficult than others. Take a look at the following two animations (click on the image to view a quicktime movie):
Now, which emotion does each animation convey? Your choices are Anger, Joy, Sadness, Love, Fear, or Disgust. You can post your guess in the comments section, and we'll let you know when someone gets it right.
There was a fascinating article in the Washington Post last May about Dilbert creator Scott Adams' battle with focal dystonia. Though the symptoms of this disorder are involuntary muscle contractions (in Adams' case, his right pinky finger), the root of the problem is in the brain. For Adams, it has meant suspending his cartooning career more than once. The first time, he taught himself to draw with his left hand, only to see the symptoms reappear there. He's also tried grueling physical therapy regimens. His most recent effort to battle dystonia has been drawing his cartoons using a computer graphics tablet.
So what's different about brains with focal dystonia? Neuroimaging has found that the basal ganglia is the affected area of the brain -- not surprisingly, this is the area responsible for motor control. People suffering from focal dystonia are also limited in their ability to plan and execute muscle movements. So though the most common form of focal hand dystonia is simply called "writer's cramp," clearly there's much more going on here.
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.
How do we know when we see a beautiful body? Is it some social standard such as thinness or proportion? Do we simply think that bodies that are closest to "normal" are also most beautiful? We know that to be the case with faces, where faces that closest to "average" are generally rated as more attractive than others which deviate, and faces that combine the characteristics of several races are rated as more attractive than those typical of a particular race.
We've written before on how our perception of faces can be altered. If you look at faces that have been systematically distorted to look bloated or shrunken, eventually you'll likely believe that those distorted faces are more normal and attractive than undistorted faces. But does the same hold true for body shape?
Christopher Winkler and Gillian Rhodes decided to apply the same methods that Rhodes and her colleagues had used for face perception to perception of bodies. They took 10 photos of identically-clothed women, then systematically stretched and compressed each picture in Photoshop to generate a set of 11 photos ranging from 50 percent wider to 50 percent narrower than the original:
They asked a group of 40 volunteers to rate each of these 110 pictures on a scale of 1 to 9 for attractiveness and normality. Next, the participants were divided into two groups. The first group watched a 5-minute slide show of photos of 10 new women, distorted in the same way as before, with a twist: they were adapted to wide photos, because they were showed only photos ranging from 0 percent to 50 percent wider than normal. The second group was adapted in a similar fashion to narrow photos. Neither group rated these photos. Now both groups repeated the original task of rating the first set of photos, but between each rating, an adaptation (either wide or narrow) photo was shown to maintain the original adaptation for each group.
Ratings for normality showed a similar pattern to what had been found before with faces:
The group that was adapted to wide photos rated bodies that were wider as more normal after the adaptation. The narrow group rated narrower bodies as normal. This makes sense, given the research on faces. The surprising result was for attractiveness:
Both groups rated narrow bodies as most attractive, before and after the adaptation (this is itself a different result from most studies on facial attractiveness). However, while the the narrow group rated even narrower bodies as more attractive after adaptation, the wide group's attractiveness ratings were statistically indistinguishable, even after adaptation. So after people see a lot of skinny bodies, they begin to perceive skinnier bodies are more attractive, but after viewing a lot of wide bodies, their ratings of attractiveness don't change.
Winkler and Rhodes suspected that participants might be perceiving the wide bodies as less distorted than the narrow bodies, so they conducted a second experiment. This time, they first had participants rate a much larger set of bodies, ranging from minus 80 percent to plus 80 percent, and they found that bodies 70 percent wider than normal were rated as equally distorted as those 50 percent narrower than normal. They repeated their original experiment, but adapted the "wide" group to these wider photos. Yet the results of this new experiment were the same.
So why don't perceptions of attractive bodies vary the same way that perceptions of normal bodies do? Winkler and Rhodes are reluctant to suggest that different processes are at work here. They speculate that a more basic perceptual phenomenon may be at work: When we see a lot of shapes that are taller than they are wide, we tend to think that the shapes we view later are wider than they really are. Since even the widest human bodies are still taller than their width, then narrower bodies will look more normal even after viewing wide bodies. That's why the most normal bodies for the adapted wide group are less different from the original rating than they are for the narrow group.
Regardless of the reason, it seems that our perceptual systems are biased to prefer narrower bodies more readily than wide bodies. We don't know how this bias interacts with the dominant women's form on TV--that of the hyper-thin model--but it does suggest that simply having more variety won't immediately shift an individual's perception of beauty.
Winkler, C., & Rhodes, G. (2005). Perceptual adaptation affects attractiveness of female bodies. British Journal of Psychology, 96, 141-154.
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.
Psychologists have known for decades that people perceive music as happier when it's played faster, and in a major key (mode). Take a listen to the following sound clips I created using a synthesized flute. Each plays the same melody three times—first in a major mode, then a minor mode, then a "whole tone" middle ground. The only difference between the two clips is that the second clip is played twice as fast.
For most people, the second clip sounds happier than the first overall, and the major mode portion sounds happiest within each clip. But what matters most—the speed (tempo), or the mode?
When Kate Hevner first reported on this phenomenon in the 1930s, she demonstrated the relationship between tempo and mode and happiness/sadness judgements, declaring tempo to be the more important of the two. After listening to the clips, you may agree with Hevner, but her data didn't offer a compelling reason to believe that tempo matters more.
Much more recently, Lise Gagnon and Isabelle Peretz found a way to determine which impacts our perception of emotions more—mode or tempo. They developed 8 different melodic sequences (one of which I duplicated in the clips above), and then adapted them to major, minor and whole tone modes. These sequences were then played for paid participants in four different conditions:
Mode change: All sequences were played at the same tempo, in each of the different modes—major, minor, and whole tone
Tempo change: All sequences were played in whole tone mode, at a fast, middle and slow tempo
Convergent: Fast tempo sequences were played in major mode, middle tempo sequences were played in whole tone mode, and slow tempo sequences were played in minor mode
Divergent: Fast tempo sequences were played in minor mode, middle tempo sequences were played in whole tone mode, and slow tempo sequences were played in major mode
After hearing each sequence, participants rated it on a scale of 1 (happiest) to 10 (saddest). The Mode and Tempo change conditions were included simply to replicate earlier work by Hevner and others, and as expected, the major mode and faster tempo were associated with happier ratings. Gagnon and Peretz expected to find stronger happiness and sadness ratings in the Convergent condition, because mode and tempo effects were combined. As they expected, in the Convergent condition, participants rated combined fast, major mode sequences as significantly happier than either major mode or fast tempo by themselves.
The Divergent condition was the key to the experiment—when, for example, a fast tempo was combined with a minor key, or a slow tempo was combined with a major mode, tempo always took precedence. Slow tempo, even when associated with a major mode, was rated sad, and fast tempo, even when associated with a minor mode, was rated happy.
But what if the only reason for this difference is that the tempo changes were more dramatic than the mode changes? Gagnon and Peretz had doubled the speed of the sequences, from 110 beats per minute for the slow tempo to 220 for fast tempo. What if the tempo change were made less dramatic—would the results still hold? The researchers figured out a way to generate tempo changes that were roughly equivalent to mode changes: they tested the sequences with a new group of volunteers, but this time they used many different tempos, until they found a set of three whose happiness and sadness ratings were roughly equal to those found in the Mode Change condition. This time, the fast tempo was reduced to only 160 beats per minute.
They now repeated the entire experiment using the smaller range of tempos. Even though participants had rated tempo-only and mode-only changes as the same, in the Divergent condition, tempo once again took precedence. So it appears that tempo is more important than mode in determining whether a musical selection is happy or sad.
Gagnon, L., & Peretz, I. (2003). Mode and tempo relative contributions to "happy-sad" judgements in equitone melodies. Cognition and Emotion, 17(1), 25-40.
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Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
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 pseudoscientific claptrap, yet there exist humans who, when presented with nonvisual stimuli such as tastes or smells, perceive visual imagery. I'm talking about the scientifically recognized condition, synesthesia. Synesthetes are people who perceive stimuli presented in one mode (often corresponding to one of the five senses) with a different mode. For example, musical tones might also be perceived as colors, or a friend might appear to have blue lips (as rendered in the photo of my son Jim at left).
Here's a picture of our daughter Nora at about 3 months of age. She looks like she's fairly aware of the events going on around her (arguably more aware than she sometimes appears now, at age 12). However, as our knowledge of how infants begin to perceive the world around them has increased, we've learned that the world of a three-month-old literally looks different to them than the world we perceive as adults. That's because vision, which seems so obvious and instinctive, is actually an active process. When we perceive the world visually, we're not just passively "seeing" what's there, we're constantly determining where one object ends and the next one begins. We're applying logical rules to help break objects into groups and understand how the two-dimensional image on the inside of our eye corresponds to a three-dimensional physical world.
Disney's 
