Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
September 13, 2007
In 1999, Melissa Kamins and Carol Dweck made a striking discovery about the best way to praise children. When you are helping a child learn to read, saying "you are a smart girl" as opposed to "you did a good job reading" results in very different behavior when she has trouble reading in the future…
September 13, 2007
When people are in car crashes and other fearful situations, they tend to report that time "slows down," or that things "move in slow-motion." I remember a similar experience when I got hit by a car as a child. But can this phenomenon be measured? Here's a video of an experiment that purports to do…
September 13, 2007
We got a great response to last week's Casual Friday study on dessert preferences. However, I've realized that there's one more bit of information I need. Ideally I should have put this question in the survey itself, but it's too late for that, so this follow-up will have to do. I need to know what…
September 12, 2007
Clive Thompson's latest column in Wired has an interesting thesis: Only geeks are smart enough to give away their money in ways that will truly help others. He points to the research of psychologist Paul Slovic to make his case:
We'll usually race to help a single stranger in dire straits, while…
September 11, 2007
This is a fun little study. The instructions are embedded in the video.
Did you get it right? Have you seen this study before?
It's based on an experiment by Daniel Simons. You can find another demonstration here.
September 11, 2007
A recent report in Nature Neuroscience has gotten a lot of press. The headlines proclaim that "left-wing" brains are different from "right wing" brains. Are our brains literally hard-wired to be conservative or liberal? The article in the L.A. Times sure seems to suggest it:
Sulloway said the…
September 11, 2007
The BPR3 icon contest is now complete -- here are the entries:
One of these icons will be chosen for any blogger to use to show when a post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not just a link to a press release or media commentary. We'll be using it on…
September 10, 2007
There were so many fascinating news stories from around the web this weekend that I couldn't pick just one to tell you about this morning. Here's a sampler:
Study finds humans better at social skills than apes. Why is this news? Because the humans in question were just two and a half years old.…
September 7, 2007
Some people suck down diet soft drinks, eat diet potato chips, even put diet creamer in their coffee. Others say part of the enjoyment of these things is knowing they're not "good for you."
When it comes to eating dessert, that dividing line can seem even stronger. Some people say that if you want…
September 7, 2007
How would you like to win a subscription to Seed, the journal Nature, and a boatload of other prizes? If you've got Photoshop and a good idea, you could earn those prizes, plus the admiration of the academic blogosphere, with just a few minutes of effort.
As you may know, BPR3 is trying to create a…
September 6, 2007
What is "significant" research? In most psychology journals, "significant" results are those measuring up to a difficult-to-understand statistical standard called a null-hypothesis significance test. This test, which seems embedded and timeless, actually has its origins in theoretical arguments…
September 6, 2007
A month ago, Eric Schwitzgebel wrote a post critical of meta-analysis, suggesting that studies finding null results don't tend to get published, thus skewing meta-analysis results. I objected to some of his reasoning, my most important point being that the largest studies are going to get published…
September 5, 2007
Speed dating is one of the hottest trends in the match-up business: You go to a non-threatening restaurant or bar, then spend five minutes or so face-to-face with each of up to 30 members of your preferred gender. Everyone has a card or some other method by which they indicate whether they'd like…
September 4, 2007
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Countless change blindness studies have showed that we're extremely bad at noticing when a scene has changed. We fail to notice objects moving, disappearing, or changing color, seemingly right before our eyes. But sometimes we do notice the change. What sorts of…
September 4, 2007
A report on ABC news suggests that using fMRI brain imaging to detect lies is as simple as comparing two "pictures" of brain activity:
How do you tell which is the truthteller? It's easy, the article claims:
Who needs Pinocchio's nose to find a lie? The FMRI scan on the right detects a brain…
September 3, 2007
Note: This article was originally posted on November 14, 2006
If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child…
August 31, 2007
Last week we asked our readers about where they got their news. I haven't watched local news for years, and I was wondering if anyone else in the blogosphere did. As several respondents pointed out, our results aren't going to be exactly a cross-section of society at large, but it may be useful to…
August 31, 2007
Today is Blog Day, which means we're supposed to suggest five new blogs so our readers can expand their horizons. I think I'm going to end up linking to more than five blogs. Here goes:
The Anterior Commisure discusses the science surrounding sex and mating, in both humans and other organisms.…
August 30, 2007
When Greta and I were married, we had to go through a series of interviews with the pastor. For the most part, these were benign, but there was a bit of a moment of tension when he asked these questions:
Pastor: Who's more intelligent?
Greta and Dave: We're the same. [So far, so good]
Pastor: Who's…
August 29, 2007
Apropos of the Chess/AI discussion that's going on on the front page of ScienceBlogs today (and here at CogDaily), I noticed this little gem in a book I'm currently reading for a review (Sandra and Michael Blakeslee's The Body Has a Mind of Its Own):
Meaning is rooted in agency (the ability to act…
August 28, 2007
We can recognize the faces of our friends very quickly from just a snapshot. Within 150 milliseconds of being flashed a photo, brain signals respond differently to photos containing animals than photos with no animals. We can categorize scenes as "beach," "forest," or "city" when they are flashed…
August 28, 2007
When I was in school, teachers often implored us to not put off studying to the last minute. Sometimes they even suggested that we spread out our studying over a period of weeks. But who has time for that? Most of us just studied the night before the test -- with varying results, of course.
But…
August 27, 2007
The blogosphere is abuzz with reports about a new initiative by commercial scholarly publishers to discredit the open access movement.
Prism describes itself as an organization to "protect the quality of scientific research", which it hopes to do by opposing policies "that threaten to introduce…
August 27, 2007
It's been a decade since world chess champion Garry Kasparov was first defeated by a computer. Since then, even after humans retooled their games to match computers, computers have managed draws against the world's greatest players. It seems only a matter of time before computers will win every…
August 24, 2007
The other day I got a phone call from a marketing research firm. I'm a sucker for these things, so I agreed to answer the questions, even though the caller said it might take up to 20 minutes.
CALLER: Can you tell me which local news shows you watch on TV from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. on Monday through…
August 24, 2007
Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting has announced a contest to design an icon to identify serious blog posts discussing peer-reviewed research.
Anyone will be able to use the icon on their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed…
August 23, 2007
Memory is a curious thing, and visual memory is even more curious. In some ways, we don't remember much about the scene that's right in front of us. As countless change blindness studies have shown, we often don't notice even obvious changes taking place in a scene. Other studies have concluded…
August 23, 2007
What motivates someone to deny that a disease -- one which kills millions of people -- exists? Why would someone claim that the scientifically-established cause of that disease is actually the product of a vast conspiracy? Why would anyone believe them? This is a question for psychologists, but…
August 22, 2007
This video (QuickTime required), captured last week by fellow ScienceBlogger Tara Smith, demonstrates a rarely seen visual and auditory effect:
When you watch this video of me singing the Men Without Hats one-hit-wonder "Safety Dance," it appears as though can I neither dance nor carry a tune.
I…
August 21, 2007
When you look at a scene: a building, a park, a mountain, your visual system processes the information differently from when you look at a single object: a face, a pen, or a coffee mug. For example, this first image is from our trip to Prague this past summer:
When you look at this picture,…