Intentionality
dmunger | July 31, 2007Take a look at this movie (QuickTime Required):
The moving object is exactly the same in each picture, but the background is different. If you're like most people, you'll see one object as an ice skater, and the other as a spinning top.
This puts the objects in two different classes -- animate (something that can move by itself: a human, animal, robot, and so on) and inanimate (something that requires an external force to move). Do we perceive the two objects differently?
Arguably, it's important that we do: if an object can move by itself, it's much more likely to be a threat to us than if…
dmunger | July 19, 2007[originally posted January 26, 2006]
Kids in America grow up in a society that overwhelmingly believes in life after death. At the same time, these same kids grow up learning more and more about the nature of living organisms, and what makes something living or dead. At some point, these two belief systems inevitably collide: pure religious faith suggests that the soul lives on after death, but pure science suggests that consciousness can only exist in a living brain.
Assuming these kids don't read Pharyngula (in which case all hope of an eternal soul would likely be quickly and rudely…
dmunger | May 8, 2007Take a look at these two pictures. Who is more dangerous?
It's not hard to decide, although I wouldn't hurt a fly, and Nora, even at age three, could be brutal with her sarcasm. Now, what's the most dangerous situation?
Again, an easy decision. While Carhenge is certainly an awe-inspiring monument (and perhaps Jim could scratch himself on one of those cars), Nora's descent of this rock spire gives me shivers.
You might think that there aren't many differences in how adults judge threats in examples such as this, but there is some reason to believe that older adults may have a different…
dmunger | December 14, 2006I'm not bitter about this, honest I'm not, but it does often seem that people who know you very well end up buying really lousy gifts. What I really want to find out is this: why do they do that? It turns out, market researchers want to know, too. How can they have a prayer of selling people things they don't want when people can't even convince their loved ones to buy them things they do want?
Davy Lerouge and Luk Warlop have designed a clever study to examine this very issue. They wanted to know whether couples who've been together for at least six months were any better at predicting each…
dmunger | October 31, 2006
Any grown-up would be surprised to see SpongeBob Squarepants show up in a Batman movie. Clearly, these characters inhabit two different fantasy worlds: one lives in a fabulous mansion near bustling Gotham City, while the other inhabits an underwater pineapple. Grown-ups divide fantasy worlds into non-intersecting sets: If Batman has even heard of SpongeBob, he would believe him to be a fictional character.
But what about children? Do they have the same understanding of the distinction between separate fictional worlds? Kids do understand the difference between reality and make-believe from…
dmunger | September 29, 2006Occasionally you read a journal article so well-titled, you have to steal it for your blog post title. "Smells Like Clean Spirit" is a report by Rob Holland, Merel Hendricks, and Henk Aarts, in which they use smells to unconsciously modify their victims' participants' behavior.
In some ways, this research is nothing new. As the researchers point out, if we smell chocolate chip cookies, we may decide to eat; if we smell a garbage truck, we may walk faster down the street. We might associate pine scent with Christmas, or pheromones with sex. But most of these associations involve people being…
dmunger | June 26, 2006Developmental psychologists since Piaget have been interested in how well children are able to take the perspective of another. Piaget's laboratory had a large table with elaborate models on top; children who were able to take the perspective of a doll on the table and explain what the table looked like from her perspective instead of their own perspective were said to be at a later developmental stage.
But understanding whether a doll can "see" something doesn't always literally require taking her perspective. Take a look at this simple arrangement of objects on a table:
You don't have to…
dmunger | May 3, 2006Americans, as any ScienceBlogger will tell you, have a woefully poor understanding of math and science. For the most part, even the most ignorant among us are able to stumble through life, but what happens when we're confronted with a genuine scientific question with a real impact on our lives?
Consider the typical doctor's office scenario: the doctor asks a breast cancer patient to decide on a treatment. "There's a 30 percent chance of recurrence in five years," she tells the patient, "but with chemotherapy, the chance is reduced to 10 percent." If the patient doesn't have a basic…
dmunger | January 26, 2006Kids in America grow up in a society that overwhelmingly believes in life after death. At the same time, these same kids grow up learning more and more about the nature of living organisms, and what makes something living or dead. At some point, these two belief systems inevitably collide: pure religious faith suggests that the soul lives on after death, but pure science suggests that consciousness can only exist in a living brain.
Assuming these kids don't read Pharyngula (in which case all hope of an eternal soul would likely be quickly and rudely snuffed), which of these knowledge systems…