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.
As a child (and like most children, I imagine) I used to think conducting an orchestra entailed something like what Bugs Bunny does in this video:
Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than actually leading the musicians in any meaningful way. It wasn't until I married an amateur musician that I actually learned that the conductor could have an important influence on the way an orchestra sounds. But as Greta and I moved from place to place and she joined a variety of different ensembles, I got to hear her explain why some conductors were better than others.
One of the most basic functions of the conductor, I learned, was simply keeping the whole orchestra coordinated, so that all the different musicians started and stopped playing at the right times. One key to this was to express the beat of the music through the movement of the conductor's baton (or hands). Musicians could then count the number of beats when they were silent (which might number in the hundreds), and begin playing at the right time. Different songs have different rhythms, and so the conductor uses different movements to express the beat depending on the rhythm. This chart shows some of the simpler patterns a conductor might use:
Good conductors, Greta told me, use something pretty close to these patterns, so it's easy for musicians to follow and start playing at the right time. Bad conductors (often described in more colorful terms than this) are more like Bugs Bunny in the video -- so concerned with the "emotions" of the piece that they neglect the basics.
One of the first things I did after my 90-mile hike with Nora in the NorthCascades was play some music on the car stereo. We'd been in the wilderness for seven days, and other than birdsong, we hadn't heard so much as a note for the entire time.
Matching our intuitions about music, researchers have found that music is an important influence on our memories. We associate songs with emotions, people, and places we've experienced in the past. This isn't to say that music is the only influence on memory: the photos I took, the sights I saw, and the words I wrote about my hike will also help to preserve it in my mind for many years to come.
But it's not easy to parse out exactly how music evokes memories. If I listened to "Rock Lobster" on the drive down from Hart's Pass where we finished our hike, will "Rock Lobster" be associated with that memory, or with my birthday party in college where I danced wildly to the same song? Does music have a more powerful effect on memory than other influences, like images, words, or smells? We don't know, but a group led by Petr Janata has taken an important first step in understanding how music can affect memory.
The researchers collected over 1,500 "preview" clips from the iTunes Music Store's listing of the top 100 pop and R&B songs from each year over the past couple decades. The idea was to have a sampling of the songs college students were most likely to have heard while they were growing up. They recruited 329 students to listen to the clips. Each student heard 30 songs randomly selected from the most popular songs that came out when they were between the ages of 7 and 19 (so an 18-year-old would hear clips chosen from a different set of songs than a 29-year-old).
Each song was rated for familiarity and like/dislike, and then the students were asked if the song evoked any memories for them. They indicated what emotions they associated with the song, whether the memories were about person, place, or event, and what words they associated with the memory. Finally, for each memory, they were allowed to type in a description of what they recalled.
On average, the students recognized about half of the songs. So did the songs they were familiar with evoke stronger memories? This graph tells the story:
As parents of a 1516-year-old, Greta and I are very interested in what causes people to behave aggressively. We know a lot about specific causes of aggression -- violent media, testosterone, guns, and personal insults can all lead to aggressive behavior in certain circumstances. But kids and others exposed to one or more of these things don't necessarily become violent. Sometimes it seems that just the presence of his sister in the room can cause Jim to act more aggressively than he would otherwise.
That's one reason we were intrigued by a recent study by Jennifer Klinesmith, Tim Kasser, and Francis t. McAndrew -- it attempts to suss out the combined effects of guns and testosterone on aggression. The other reason is that it involves spiking other people's drinks with Frank's Red Hot Sauce. What could be more fun than that?
Previous studies examining the effect of the hormone testosterone and aggression have had mixed results. While other studies have shown a link between gun handling and aggression Klinesmith's team noticed that no study had explored the link between guns, testosterone, and aggression.
They told 30 male college student volunteers they'd be participating in a study on taste sensitivity and attention to detail. Each participant provided a sample of saliva prior to the study (this would later be used to determine testosterone levels), then spent fifteen minutes performing one of two tasks. Fifteen of the men worked with the game "Mouse Trap"; their task was to write a set of instructions on how to assemble and disassemble it. The other 15 men had the same task, but the object of their description was a pellet gun that was an exact size / weight replica of a Desert Eagle automatic handgun.
Take a look at these two images. Do they belong in the same category or different categories?
You say the same? Wrong -- they're different! The one on the right is a little blurrier.
What about these two?
These are in the same category. Sure, the one on the right is still blurrier, but now it's rotated a bit, so that puts the two objects back in the same category. My rule for categorizing is complex, involving both blurriness and rotation (I'll explain how it works later on).
How do you think you would do if you were tested on these categories? Do you think you'd do better or worse if you were put in a high pressure situation? Suppose you were being tested along with a partner, and if each of you could categorize 80 percent of the items correctly, then you'd both get a $10 bonus. Suppose your partner had already passed the test, so now your score would determine if you and your partner would get the bonus. Would you choke under pressure?
There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will have much more social influence over that person than you would if you averted your gaze.
The problem arises when you address a group of people. How do you pick who to engage visually? Most public speakers are encouraged to look around the room, alternating eye contact with individuals in the audience. But there's no way to look at everyone at once -- so some of your potential social influence will by necessity be lost.
Now, a team led by Jeremy Bailenson has figured out a way to get around that limitation. In a virtual reality environment, there is no need for the representations of other people to be consistent. Since each individual's virtual experience is generated separately, in a "room" full of people, each person could experience the phenomenon of everyone else looking at them. Everyone can be the center of attention, all at the same time!
In the figure, person A believes that both B and C are looking at her. But in C's virtual world, both A and B could be shown as looking at her instead.
Bailenson's team wanted to see if they could use this method to allow one person to increase his or her influence over more than one other person simultaneously, by programming her "avatar" -- the virtual representation of herself -- to be looking directly at each of the others.
"I just didn't see him" is a claim that's repeated over and over in accident reports. Drivers earnestly claim that they simply didn't notice the bicycle/pedestrian/motorcycle they crashed into. The claim is made so frequently that certainly there must be a grain of truth to it. Yet it certainly isn't the case that car drivers can't see such obstacles -- after all, they can see traffic signals that are much smaller than a bike or a motorcycle.
What they mean to say is that their attention was otherwise engaged -- perhaps by a phone conversation, perhaps by other traffic, or perhaps because they were trying to find something -- a street sign, a restaurant, a gas station. Human attention is a fickle thing, and in many cases we don't notice very obvious details changing right before our eyes.
Consider the following movie (QuickTime required): One image will be displayed for a number of seconds, followed by a white screen, and then a second picture -- the same image with one very obvious detail changed. Can you spot the change (don't cheat--just watch it once!)?
Earlier today I posted a poll [and I republished that poll yesterday] challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power you sometimes see on graphs. I was quite confident that they wouldn't succeed. Why was I so sure? Because in 2005, a team led by Sarah Belia conducted a study of hundreds of researchers who had published articles in top psychology, neuroscience, and medical journals. Only a small portion of them could demonstrate accurate knowledge of how error bars relate to significance. If published researchers can't do it, should we expect casual blog readers to?
One of the key components of "normal" child development is social competence. We expect kids to become gradually better at behaving respectfully towards peers, to comply with requests made by others, to understand the thoughts of others, to play together with kids and adults, to sustain attention, and to be motivated to learn. But what makes the difference between a child who becomes socially competent and one who doesn't? Obviously there are some risk factors, such as whether they have autism, whether both parents are present in the household, and the education and poverty level of the family. But some kids who seem to have all the advantages still have trouble getting along with others. Why?
Some studies have found that at-risk babies show some early warning signs that are associated with later poor social competence. It's possible, for example, to measure several dimensions of "joint attention." Take a look at this old picture of Jim and Nora playing with their kitchen set:
Aside from the fact that they're absolutely adorable, you can see that Jim is reaching for some utensils and Nora is following his reach and looking at the same thing. This is an example of Nora responding to joint attention. (I should add that it's not the best example because the classic case would have Jim pointing, not touching an object -- but it's the best I could find right now, flying cross-country at 30,000 feet.)
Several recent large-scale studies have confirmed a curious finding: Asians are much more likely to have "perfect pitch" than non-Asians. Perfect pitch, more properly called "Absolute pitch," is an extremely rare phenomenon, but it's several times more likely to occur in Asians than in others.
Studies have found that only 1 in 1,500 to 10,000 individuals possess absolute pitch. Part of the ability's rarity is due to the fact that it's really a combination of two abilities: pitch-memory -- the ability to remember what a pitch sounds like, and pitch-labeling -- the ability to name a pitch (A, B-flat, and so on). Pitch labeling can only come through training, but pitch memory does not require training.
So does the Asian advantage come from pitch labeling or pitch memory? Many people, even those with very little training, are able to remember the pitch of familiar songs. Daniel Levitin, for example, has found that most people can sing their favorite songs at pitches nearly identical to the popular versions played on the radio.
Glenn Shellenberg and Sandra Trehub realized that pitch memory might be the best way to uncover differences between Asians and non-Asians. They asked 70 kids, age 9 to 12, all living in the Toronto area, what their six favorite TV shows were. Half these kids were Asian and half were non-Asian. Then they played two different versions of each show's theme song: one accurate, and one shifted up or down by two semitones (so if the original melody was C - D - E , the new version might be be D - E - F-sharp). The child was asked which was the correct melody -- the one they heard on TV. Here are the results:
A number of studies have found that older adults aren't as good at certain visual tasks compared to younger adults. Mental rotation, for example, is both slower and less accurate. But other studies have found that for certain types of mental rotation, older adults do just as well as younger adults. The dividing line, these researchers argued, was based on whether the viewer was rotating or the objects themselves were rotating.
So in a classic mental rotation task like Shepard and Metzler's, older adults don't do as well, but in many other tasks, their performance isn't much different from younger adults.
But a new study by a team led by Mélanie Joanisse challenges the notion that the frame of reference -- objects rotating relative to the viewer or to themselves -- isn't the key factor. Instead, they suggest, it has to do with how that rotation is being processed.
They had 24 college students (average age 23) and 24 older adults (average age 72.1) sit on a desk chair in the center of a small round room. Seven different drawings (a cup, shoe, book, box, plate, jar, and hairbrush) were spaced at even intervals on the wall. The viewers memorized the positions of the objects, and then were blindfolded, rotated in the chair, and asked to point to one of the four nearest neighbors of the object they were facing. The key to the study was how they were rotated:
When we're in a crowded space, making visual judgments becomes more difficult. But it doesn't take much to trigger a crowding effect. Clicking on the picture below will take you to a quick movie (QuickTime required) that should demonstrate the effect. Focus on the cross to the left, then start the movie (it may start automatically, depending on your browser). In two seconds, a "T" will flash briefly on the right side of the screen. Your job is to determine whether the T is upright or inverted (upside-down). After another two seconds, three Ts will appear. This time, you must judge only the middle T, which appears in the same place as the first T you judged.
If you don't get the hang of it the first time you watch, go ahead and watch the movie one more time -- but no more! Which T was more difficult to judge? Because the second T was "crowded" by the other two, it should be more difficult for most people. The two polls below should indicate whether we found the effect -- I'll give the correct answers at the end of this post.
Imagine yourself in a room surrounded by eleven objects arranged in a circle. You memorize the position of the objects, then you close your eyes, and rotate a third of the way around (120°). Keeping your eyes closed, can you point to the object that was behind you before? Most people can do this without much difficulty, and only take an instant longer than if they'd stayed in the same position.
Now imagine the objects are rotating on a turntable as you yourself rotate, so that the same object is still in front of you -- in many respects, it's as if you've never turned and the objects never moved. Yet for most people, it actually takes longer to point to the objects than when they had changed position relative to the objects. What's going on here?
It shouldn't be especially surprising that we're quick to remember the location of objects in a room when we have rotated -- after all, this is the kind of thing we must do all the time, like when we look from left to right to decide whether it's safe to cross the road. But there are also times when an object or set of objects move along with us. If you're driving a car and turn around a corner, you still remember that the groceries are right behind you in the trunk. So why is it difficult for us to imagine objects moving along with us?
The first two scenarios I described above correspond to an experiment conducted by Weimin Mou, Xiaoou Li, and Timothy McNamara. They paid students to enter a room configured like this:
Instead of symbols, the room contained real objects, like a candle, a hat, and a ball. Standing in the center of the room, the students first memorized the position of all the objects, then were blindfolded and told to point to the objects one at a time using a joystick (e.g. "point to the candle."). Then they were told to rotate their bodies in place, imagining the objects rotating along with them. Again, still blindfolded, they were tested on the positions of each object. They were also asked to imagine the objects rotating while they remained in place, and to rotate while imagining the objects remained in place. Here are the results:
In 2005, E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche tested 48 Florida police officers and found that they were initially more likely to shoot unarmed Black "suspects" in a crime-fighting simulation than White people holding similar objects. Interestingly, however, as the test went on, the officers improved, and by the end of the session, any bias had been removed.
But in the real world, officers don't get a second chance, and accidental shootings do occur. In many communities, racial tensions are already running high, and an interracial shooting by a police officer can bring those tensions to the boiling point -- causing even more damage than the shooting itself. It's critical to understand why these accidents happen and what can be done to prevent them, not only to protect innocent suspects, but also to build community trust in police officers and increase the effectiveness of law enforcement.
Joshua Correll and five other researchers devised a test to assess racial bias shooting that was similar to Plant and Peruche's, but also more realistic. Twenty-five Black actors and twenty-five White actors were photographed holding either a gun or a benign object like a wallet or can of cola in several different poses. In the new test, random backgrounds (urban scenes, country roads, etc.) were flashed on a computer screen. At random intervals, one of the actors was inserted into the screen. Then the police officer had to decide whether to shoot or not shoot as quickly as possible, and press a button registering his or her response.
Last year we discussed a greatdeal of research about the gender disparity in math and science. Even while women are more successful overall in school than men, in certain fields there is a very large deficit in the number of women participating. We mentioned one explanation in particular:
The male math advantage in a number of different studies appears to be directly related to visuospatial skills, the most important being mental rotation. In tests on calculation or other mathematical problems that don't require visuospatial skills, females perform just as well as -- or better than -- males.
What's more, at least one study has found that it's possible to teach these visuospatial skills. Such a course has been offered at Michigan Tech for many years, and students taking the course have not only shown measurable improvement on visuospatial tests, they have gotten better grades in subsequent engineering and graphics courses.
But where did men acquire these superior skills in the first place? One possible answer is video games. While obviously video games weren't available to boys more than about 30 years ago, prior to that, boys may have acquired similar skills through male-dominated sports like baseball and hunting.
Shortly after our report, Jing Feng, Ian Spence, and Jay Pratt found that men and women who played action video games for more than four hours per week showed no disparity in one test of visuospatial ability, a Field of Vision task where they had to spot a dot flashing for 1/100 of a second in their peripheral vision. They were significantly better than men or women who didn't play action games. But male non-players were still better than females.
Have you ever seen Singin' in the Rain? One of the movie's most hilarious moments is when the beautiful silent movie star Lina Lamont is asked to start making "talking pictures." As soon as this gorgeous screen siren opens her mouth, the illusion of her beauty is shattered: her squeaky voice instantly transforms her from a glamorous leading lady into a cartoonish boor. Threatened with losing their box-office cash-cow, the studio chiefs frantically enroll her in voice and etiquette lessons, but nothing helps, and eventually they're forced to substitute the voice of the attractive and lovely-voiced Kathy Selden.
But what makes one voice attractive and another unattractive -- and how much effect does a voice have on our overall perception of attractiveness? Recent research has found that women with attractive faces also tend to have attractive voices (which may explain why Lamont's hideous voice in Singin' in the Rain is so surprising).
In general we perceive higher voices as more feminine. Faces with exaggerated feminine features are also perceived as more attractive. Can we say the same about feminine voices?
A group of researchers led by David Feinberg recorded the voices of 123 young women as they pronounced five vowel sounds: ah, ee, eh, oh, and oo. Then ten male volunteers rated each voice for attractiveness. Here are the results:
In our discussions of violence associated with video game play, we've frequently noted that there appear to be different effects depending on the type of video game. Some games are more violent than others, and some games reward violence while others discourage it. All this has an impact in terms of real-world behavior and attitudes. Some games have positive effects.
One type of game -- one of the most popular types, in fact -- hasn't been studied nearly as much as the traditional arcade-style game: massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. One of the studies of this type of game seemed to find that players weren't more aggressive because the games foster cooperation between players.
But we've also heard -- and seen, with Jim's game-play, that MMORPGs like World of Warcraft can be more engaging and distracting than other games, sucking away hours and hours in seemingly endless online quests. Even if it turns out these games don't promote violent behavior, is it possible that they have other detrimental effects?
Joshua Smyth recruited 100 college students to play one of four randomly-assigned video games free for a month. They played the games on their own time, in a campus "game laboratory" (or in an arcade for the arcade group). The only requirement was that they play the game for at least an hour a week. The arcade group could play any of the games in the arcade; one group played Gauntlet: Dark Legacy on a PlayStation 2; one group played Diablo II on a computer, and the final group played the MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot. So did the type of game had any impact on how much the games were played? You bet it did -- here are the results:
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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.
Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than actually leading the musicians in any meaningful way. It wasn't until I married an amateur musician that I actually learned that the conductor could have an important influence on the way an orchestra sounds. But as Greta and I moved from place to place and she joined a variety of different ensembles, I got to hear her explain why some conductors were better than others.
One of the first things I did after my 90-mile 
As parents of a 
Have you ever seen Singin' in the Rain? One of the movie's most hilarious moments is when the beautiful silent movie star Lina Lamont is asked to start making "talking pictures." As soon as this gorgeous screen siren opens her mouth, the illusion of her beauty is shattered: her squeaky voice instantly transforms her from a glamorous leading lady into a cartoonish boor. Threatened with losing their box-office cash-cow, the studio chiefs frantically enroll her in voice and etiquette lessons, but nothing helps, and eventually they're forced to substitute the voice of the attractive and lovely-voiced Kathy Selden.
