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Category: Research
Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 4:20 PM • 10 Comments •
Category: Research
Product placements in movies and TV shows are becoming so commonplace that my kids now cynically take note of them whenever they appear. It wasn't always that way. In 1982 when I first saw E.T. I had no idea that...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 5:18 PM • 15 Comments •
Category: Research
Recently we took our hybrid car into the shop for its annual emissions test. In our state, the test is conducted while the car is idling. A hybrid doesn't actually idle -- it shuts the engine off completely. So our...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 4:46 PM • 15 Comments •
Category: Research
The other day, our car wouldn't start and Jim had to ask a neighbor over to help him jump-start it. There was much rushing in and out of the house looking for flashlights and other tools to help get the...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 4:20 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Research
We've talked a lot on Cognitive Daily about change blindness: the inability to spot visual differences between images and even real people and objects right before our eyes. The most dramatic demonstration might be Daniel Simons' "experiment" that took place...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 4:09 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Research
Take a look at the following picture: Your job is to look for the one line that's either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. It took me about 25 seconds to find it. Can you do better? How about now? A...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:41 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Research
We've discussed attentional blink several times on CogDaily. It's a fascinating phenomenon: if you see a series of images flashing by rapidly, you can normally pick out one of the images (for example, a banana in series of pictures of...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:50 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Research
[Originally posted in November 2006] The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 11:40 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Research
Take a look at the following pictures of U.S. dimes. As you can see, they are slightly different from one another -- the date is in the incorrect spot on one of them. Can you tell which one is "wrong"?...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:37 PM • 43 Comments •
Category: Research
I've always been amazed by people who are truly bilingual. While I've studied languages in school, I've never been able to seamlessly switch between languages, and even my best non-English language, French, is choppy at best. Compare this to the...
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:01 PM • 27 Comments •