Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
June 20, 2007
Euro-update 4: Sperm whale perception
Tuscany is about the last place you might think to go to speculate about the visual system of a whale, but when you're spending three weeks relaxing in a secluded villa, you have a lot of reading time. I've been reading Moby-Dick.
Herman Melville describes the…
June 13, 2007
We've been in Rome for a few days now, and we've seen several wonderful examples of how Renaissance and Baroque artists were beginning to re-learn the lessons of perspective, which, if 20-year-old memory of art history class serves me, had been discarded during the medieval period while artists…
June 8, 2007
We've spent an exciting week in Paris, seeing all the fabulous sites, from the Louvre to the Tour Eiffel.
Today we decided to do something different and headed for the Georges Pompidou Center, where the national galleries of modern art are housed. Some fascinating stuff there, including some works…
June 2, 2007
I'm reporting from sunny, temperate Paris. Gorgeous weather here, and we've already taken in a few sights.
However, the first psychology-related photo op actually occurred on the plane on the way over here. Why is Greta scowling in this picture?
She's holding a catalog page from the SkyMall…
June 1, 2007
This post is scheduled to appear the moment our plane takes off for a very extended vacation to Europe. We'll be gone for seven weeks, but we won't be abandoning Cognitive Daily. We've scheduled two extended research posts to appear each week, each written by one of Greta's top student writers and…
May 31, 2007
More and more studies are online these days, which means that researchers can find a whole new array of participants for their studies, and anyone who's interested can become a real part of cutting-edge research.
But how can researchers find interested research subjects -- and how can people who…
May 30, 2007
There's been lots of commentary online about Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg's article about why children (and adults) often resist learning scientific information. Deric Bownds gives the money quote from the article:
Resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash…
May 29, 2007
With the preparations for Europe going on at full steam, I find myself drawn toward psychology articles about traveling. Take, for example, this article in Scientific American. Kaushik Basu explains the "traveler's dilemma," a scenario in which identical items purchased by two travelers are both…
May 25, 2007
Last week we wondered whether sports fans and arts buffs were nonintersecting groups. I knew there were some exceptions to the idea that an arts snob wouldn't set foot inside an athletic complex. For example, a friend of mine is an art history professor, but also such a big football fan that in his…
May 24, 2007
I don't know what I expected to see when I posted yesterday's poll about people's work schedules, but I didn't expect to find this. With over 250 responses, fewer than half of our respondents said they work a standard 8-5 Monday-Friday schedule.
It's possible that Cognitive Daily's readership isn't…
May 23, 2007
The visual system is very good at noticing a new object coming into view. However, the system isn't perfect. If a second object appears near the first one, it takes a little longer to spot it. This phenomenon, known as inhibition of return, has been well-documented. We discussed it in a 2005 post:…
May 23, 2007
Jason Kottke points to an interesting article about why so many people seem to be hanging out in cafes, coffee shops, and parks in the middle of the day while "normal" people are working. Everyone seems to have a different reason:
"Jeffrey" (some names changed at owner's request), writing a poem…
May 22, 2007
When Joanne Rowling sat in an Edinburgh coffee shop, nearly broke, her baby sleeping nearby in a stroller, penning a fantastic story about a school for wizards, could anyone have predicted that she would soon be the most successful novelist in history?
Certainly not the twelve publishers who…
May 21, 2007
A fascinating study has just found that hearing one person's opinion repeated is almost as effective as hearing several different people's opinions.
Repeated exposure to one person's viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows…
May 21, 2007
Last week we reported on our site statistics after going to a full RSS feed. The results were disappointing; our numbers went down. We said we'd continue the experiment for another week to see if the trend was reversed once more people heard about the option of viewing all CogDaily content in RSS…
May 18, 2007
Are sports fans ignorant about the arts? Do opera buffs have trouble distinguishing a fastball from a slider? Greta has never been much of a sports fan, but she loves taking in the arts, cultural events, and Broadway shows. I know lots of sports fans who've never heard an opera. Are sports and…
May 18, 2007
Much research has found that there are IQ differences based on socioeconomic background of children: poorer children have lower IQs. But it's possible that these differences may be due to health problems in some groups: if poor kids are more likely to get sick, wouldn't that have some impact on…
May 17, 2007
Check this out:
As you might guess, all these bands are actually horizontal, but the stripes cause each band to be perceived as sloping up or down. But take a closer look: the top pair of bands appears to be getting closer together as you move from left to right, while the bottom pair appears to…
May 16, 2007
Lots of news outlets are buzzing about a new stand-up treadmill workstation. The idea is that you work standing up for part of the day, walking at a very slow pace, burning calories but still getting just as much done. Here's a photo from the Cleveland Leader:
My first thought is "how could I…
May 15, 2007
When Greta earned her Ph.D. 13 years ago, Jim was two and a half years old, and Nora was just 10 months old. Jim knew a few words, and Nora couldn't talk at all. You might think a baby as young as Nora wouldn't have an appreciation for music or dance. If you can't walk, what good is dancing?
But…
May 15, 2007
The emoticon for "smile" in most western cultures is this :). One of the ScienceBloggers does it backwards (: (can you guess who?), but the symbol is essentially the same. In Japan, however, the smile is depicted like this: ^_^.
You might think that's just because the traditions evolved separately…
May 14, 2007
For the past week, we've been conducting a little experiment with Cognitive Daily. In the past, we've had several readers complain that we don't include the full post in the RSS feed for CogDaily, so last week we published every post in its entirety on RSS (if you don't know what RSS is, I explain…
May 11, 2007
I'm a fast typist, but Greta types much faster than me. I've taken a few years of piano lessons, but Greta could read music before she could read, and she still plays oboe and English horn with the Davidson College Symphony Orchestra. Could her 30+ years of musical training be the reason she's a…
May 10, 2007
In education school, I was taught that the purpose of grading was to rank-order students -- to create a system whereby the highest-achieving students were ranked at the top and the lowest-achieving students were at the bottom. But recently there have been worries that grade inflation is making it…
May 9, 2007
"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…
May 9, 2007
In Star Wars, the real hero might be R2D2 -- the only character who makes it through all six episodes without falling to the "dark side" of the force. R2D2 is a robot, but everyone in the film treats "him" like a person, even commending him for "bravery." As viewers, we don't have a problem with…
May 8, 2007
Take 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…
May 8, 2007
A new blog has emerged in Terre Haute, Indiana. Its message is somewhat cryptic, including such gems as this one, from "annefernald":
For those who think of surgeons as spending their days operating on people, this would definitely not be Dr. Johnson....Not, in fact a medical doctor at all, the wit…
May 7, 2007
Many studies of the electrical activity in the brain have found consistent differences in activity when people look at faces compared to other stimuli such as cars or tools. This has led some researchers to conclude that face processing is fundamentally different from other visual processing. But a…
May 4, 2007
It used to be that everyone who needed to type took typing class in school. I was probably part of the last generation that actually learned on a typewriter rather than a computer: we clacked for 55 minutes a day in Mr. Butler's room full of IBM Selectrics. No correction keys, either: if you made a…