Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
March 16, 2007
The general consensus about last week's world accent test is that it was very difficult, but also quite fun. Everyone also wanted to know the answers to the quiz. I'm not going to make it that easy for you, but at the end of the post I will offer a way for you to figure out which is which.
The test…
March 16, 2007
I've found a few articles that I've got couple sentences' worth of thoughts about, but not a couple paragraphs, so I'm going to write them all up here. This is sort of halfway between a news and an in other news post.
1. Neuroscience and science writing. Jonah Lehrer argues that it's okay for…
March 15, 2007
These two pictures represent the eye motions of two viewers as they scan a work of art with the goal of remembering it later. One of them is a trained artist, and the other is a trained psychologist. Can you tell which is which?
How about for this picture?
Art teachers have noted that when…
March 15, 2007
When a suspect confesses to a crime, it's often seen as a clear victory for the prosecution. But what if the confession was coerced? Under the emotional strain of an interrogation, it happens more often than you'd think. In response to the problem of coercion, many police departments now videotape…
March 14, 2007
An interesting strategy for picking colors for charts, graphs, and so on. Be sure to check out ColorBrewer.
Another reason to study music.
A sad result that's likely to be controversial: 18 percent of women experience sexual victimization.
If robots dreamed, what would they dream about?
Inquiring…
March 14, 2007
Yesterday's "Buzz in the blogosphere" on the ScienceBlogs main page was all about medically unfit troops being sent in to battle. You should definitely check out some of those articles, including a discussion of whether the reports are accurate.
However, those reports don't cover another troubling…
March 13, 2007
Take a look at the image below. Your job is to find the T among the sea of Ls. If you're like most people it will take just a second or two.
Figure 1:
If you repeat this task several dozen times, each time with a new set of Ls and T in different colors, positions, and orientations, you'll get…
March 13, 2007
Is it better to meet your special someone by picking them up at a rock concert, or by serving on the same church committee? Actually, the rock concert might be the better bet, assuming you're both enjoying the music. Chris at Mixing Memory has a fascinating discussion of why musical tastes may be a…
March 12, 2007
Mind Hacks interviews Gretchen Rubin, who's working on a book about happiness, and blogging about it.
SCLin's Neuroscience Blog asks: How do you keep up with the literature? I cheat. I let Greta do it for me!
NY Times discusses the difference between "psychological" and physical torture. Short…
March 12, 2007
When I was a paper boy back in the 1980s, I always hated daylight-saving time. Just when the mornings were finally starting to lighten after a long, dark winter, daylight-saving time came along and ruined everything: when clocks "spring" forward, the sunrise arrives one hour later. It would be…
March 9, 2007
Do you speak with an accent? How well do you understand the accents of others? Do you think you can identify where someone came from just based on his or her accent? Now's your chance to put that knowledge to the test.
We had so much fun with the little accent quiz we did earlier this week that we…
March 9, 2007
On Thursday, March 15, HBO will premier an ambitious series of documentaries entitled Addiction. Although HBO is a premium cable service usually costing an extra $10 or more per month, they are offering their service for free to regular cable and satellite subscribers during the four-day weekend…
March 8, 2007
Two days ago, we discussed research suggesting that the emotional qualities of images affect short-term memory for those images. When you watch a movie depicting a rapid sequence of images, you're more likely to remember images that have strong emotional content -- especially images that are…
March 8, 2007
There's been a lot of news about robots lately, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to synthesize what's going on in this field and offer a bit of speculation about where robotics is headed.
First: From Neurodudes comes news of an artificial robotic limb that not only responds to nerve impulses…
March 6, 2007
What types of images are you more likely to remember over the short-term? Pleasant? Bright? Arousing? Disturbing? One method of testing short-term visual memory is to flash a rapid series of pictures, then ask viewers which ones they saw. The pictures are shown so quickly that it's impossible to…
March 6, 2007
The NPR had a wonderful report this weekend about the Speech Accent archive, including an extended interview with the archive's creator, Steven Weinberger.
It's simply fascinating to listen to the hundreds of different voices in the archive, all reading the same passage, and noting the geographical…
March 5, 2007
The Neurophilosopher has a great list of neuroscience blogs. The ones I've added to my RSS feed are listed below.
Neuroevolution.
Madame Fathom.
Channel N.
Also via Neurophilosopher: This firsthand account of having electrodes implanted in the brain to combat Parkinsons' disease.
How some brains "…
March 5, 2007
I've written a review of William Vollmann's Poor People for the spring issue of The Quarterly Conversation. Here's an excerpt:
In the U.S., the "poverty line" for 2006 was set at $9,800 per year of income for a single person, or $20,000 for a family of four. But it is misleading to judge poverty in…
March 2, 2007
How good are humans at identifying faces? Amazingly good, even with only a few sparse pixels' worth of information. Inspired by the research of Pawan Sinha, who had found that people can recognize faces using just 12 × 14 pixels' worth of information, we wondered if people can distinguish between…
March 2, 2007
If you haven't heard of the internet phenomenon Second Life, you probably will soon. It's an online world where players create virtual representations of themselves, or rather, themselves as they'd like to be. Then they go about "life" in the way they would if the tedious flaws of everyday life --…
February 28, 2007
Two new articles tackle the issue of whether most research is false... Which raises the question: how do we know whether this research is true? Or whether any of the links which follow are true? Undaunted, I'll continue...
Chris of Mixing Memory has a thoughtful article discussing research…
February 28, 2007
Brain Maps offers over 50 terabytes of high-resolution pictures of brains from several different organisms. You're probably familiar with the brain off to the right -- it's good ol' Homo sapiens.
The brain at left may be a bit less readily identifiable. It's Tyto alba, or the barn owl.
Perhaps the…
February 27, 2007
Chris Chatham explains a new two-part model of working memory.
Older adults have too much confidence in their memory.
Genetic research may neglect effects of environment.
Do you miscommunicate more with people you know better? This may explain why.
To spank or not to spank: The Chicago Tribune…
February 27, 2007
Our visual system is exceptionally good at detecting change -- as long as the change takes place while we're looking. If you glance at a scene, then look away for a moment, your ability to detect a change is substantially impaired. Changes that would be obvious when we're looking can become…
February 27, 2007
Researchers have developed a new method of creating laser beams which they believe may pave the way for practical laser X-rays:
Most of today's X-ray lasers require so much power that they rely on fusion laser facilities the size of football stadiums, making their use impractical.
"We've come up…
February 26, 2007
Did you miss the cut-off for the Casual Fridays study last week? Now's your chance to see more mystery photos. In this post, you'll find eight new versions of the photos -- ones which didn't appear in the original study. Each photo is followed by a poll so we can track responses. The idea is to see…
February 23, 2007
Remember these photos from earlier this week?
Readers were intrigued with the idea that we can tell which photo is a face, despite the fact that the photos are just 12 by 14 pixels! That brings the question: can we identify faces with even *less* information? This week's study may help answer…
February 22, 2007
Do you read Cognitive Daily via Google Reader's "Science" bundle? Then you'll also want to subscribe to the ScienceBlogs Select feed. It was formerly only available internally to ScienceBloggers and editors, but now it's been made public. I think it's the best science feed in the world -- it…
February 22, 2007
When you look out the window and then look away, how do you remember what you saw? Do you hold a picture of the window in your head, frame and all? What about a photo? Do you remember the physical photo, or do you imagine the real scene it represents? If you remember the scene, and not the photo,…
February 22, 2007
As was noted with irony a few days ago, many psychologists feel obligated to describe the abilities that make humans unique. Perhaps this trait itself is part of human nature: we're constantly seeking to justify our actions -- many of which harm other organisms.
When we learn that an animal can,…