Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
December 15, 2006
Psychology Today has a trio of articles relating to crime and justice. The first article is possibly the most interesting. It offers some compelling data on the frequency of false confessions:
Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the number of false confessions nationwide, a…
December 14, 2006
I'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…
December 14, 2006
Clinician Dr. Louann Brizendine is quoted in the New York Times as saying that she doesn't do research because "I don't want to give patients a placebo. It's cruel." The interviewer pushes her on the issue, pointing out that in the long term, controlled studies are necessary in order to determine…
December 13, 2006
Keith Payne's work on racial stereotyping brings up an intriguing possibility. During the weapons identification task, viewers are more likely to erroneously identify a harmless object as a weapon if it was preceded by a black face compared to a white face. They are also more accurate identifying…
December 13, 2006
How often do you see a face that you know you've seen before, but you simply can't connect a name to? If you're like me, it happens nearly every day. Face recognition experts know this is because our brains are hard-wired to recall specific faces. The semantic information about those faces is…
December 12, 2006
The red oval on the right represents a known eBay fraudster. How can we use that information to locate others? Follow the interactions. Fraudulent eBay users typically build up their online "reputation" by conducting transactions with accomplices who give them phony "positive" feedback. These…
December 11, 2006
I have a vague memory of having written something about curse words on Cognitive Daily before. However, I'm almost certain I've never written about false memories in children. Maybe something about eyewitness testimony, but not false memories.
You probably know the punch line: I've written about…
December 10, 2006
I promised on Friday that I'd post an update on the half-marathon. First of all, I finished!
Here's a picture of me about 100 yards from the finish with my running partner (and co-author) Shireen Campbell:
I finished the race in 1 hour, 51 minutes, and 59 seconds. That works out to a pace of 8:…
December 9, 2006
A couple new features for this week's podcast. First, a new mic, which I think has a richer sound, but also probably needs a screen to filter out the harsh ps and ts. I'll work on getting one in time for next week's edition. As requested, we're offering the podcast in both AAC and MP3 format.…
December 8, 2006
CogDaily readers are certainly opinionated about email sign-offs. Last week's Casual Friday study on the topic generated 343 responses, and our post on the study attracted 21 comments, some of them quite impassioned:
When someone signs an email "Cheers", I assume that they are either British or…
December 8, 2006
Tomorrow I'll be running my first-ever (and possibly my last) half-marathon. I've been an amateur runner since high school, but the longest race I'd run in previously was a 10K race, less than half this distance, nearly 20 years ago. I haven't run competitively since college, but I have…
December 7, 2006
Very few of us can avoid stereotyping others. When we're actively trying to avoid racial stereotyping, we often end up looking ridiculous. But the very fact that we can try to avoid it suggests that there's something more to racial stereotypes than a "stereotype center" in the brain. If…
December 7, 2006
The Neurocritic has a fascinating report on recent research exploring memory interference. One of the primary problems with memory is deciding what to remember and what to forget. As an example of the scale of the problem, if we recorded every image we ever saw in its raw format, we'd soon exhaust…
December 6, 2006
The notion that thinking faster could make you happy may seem on the face of it absurd. But consider some of the evidence. People with mania, who complain of racing thoughts, often find the sensation exhilarating. When you meet someone who's in a manic phase, they often seem cheerier and more…
December 6, 2006
When someone gets lost in the woods -- or when a convict escapes from prison -- finding them among the vast expanse of trees and other features can be a daunting task. Often search parties literally walk in lines just a few feet apart to scour the terrain for evidence. But perhaps there's an easier…
December 5, 2006
The cafe wall illusion has the dramatic effect of making a straight line appear slanted:
That's right, the line is precisely horizontal. It was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, one of the world's foremost authorities on visual illusion, who is also a wonderful artist. In addition to the hundreds of…
December 5, 2006
Steven Pinker points out in The Language Instinct that the potential ambiguities in any sentence makes programming computers to understand language quite difficult: humans can quickly determine the appropriate interpretation through context; computers are unable to understand context, and therefore…
December 4, 2006
Over at The Quarterly Conversation, I've written a review of George Lakoff's book Whose Freedom?
In case my personal politics haven't come through in my CogDaily posts (and I do make an effort to assume a neutral perspective here), you'll get a good sense of my views in this review, where I point…
December 2, 2006
Starting today, each week's CogDaily Research articles will be available in podcast form! We're working on making them available directly from iTunes, but for now, you can download them from the CogDaily blog.
Click here to download the December 2 Cognitive Daily podcast (AAC format)
Click here to…
December 1, 2006
A recent New York Times article suggests that signing off an email message with "Best" is an indication that a relationship is cooling down. Businessman Chad Troutwine claims that using "Best" to sign off is more like a brush-off:
Mr. Troutwine is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who…
December 1, 2006
Apropos of yesterday's post about irresponsible journalism. Here's what happens when you misuse the term "inherit." In the World Science entry:
A study has led reÂsearchÂers to specÂuÂlate that career sucÂcess may be partÂly geÂneÂtic.
The supÂpoÂsiÂtion rests in partÂiÂcuÂlar on two new findÂings…
November 30, 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 they justified in shooting?
Perhaps, but an important additional question is this…
November 30, 2006
An article in ScienceDaily proclaims Success A Family Affair? Willingness To Take Risks And Trust Others Are Inherited, Study Suggests.
Actually, the study suggests the opposite: C only that children have similar risk profiles to their parents. This indicates that risk-taking behavior isn't…
November 29, 2006
One of the unanswered questions in Krista Hyde and Isabelle Peretz's research on amusia ("tone-deafness") is why amusics frequently say they are unable to clap to the rhythm of a song, or to dance well. In Hyde and Peretz's study, amusics could detect rhythm changes as well as normal individuals,…
November 29, 2006
Is it really possible for child in a destitute situation to rise above it and become not only a productive member of society, but to excel? Jonah Lehrer discusses an important New York Times article that I had skipped over the first time I saw the headline on the site. Jonah was most interested in…
November 28, 2006
Uber-geek David Pogue has completed a Casual-Friday-worthy study of the human perceptual system. He wanted to test the "megapixel myth" -- the idea that buying a higher megapixel camera doesn't necessarily mean that you will take better pictures. He made poster-size prints of the same photo at…
November 27, 2006
New research shows that Asian Americans have a very different understanding of consequences than European Americans: While European Americans say that a single pool shot has a bigger influence on the next shot, when asked about its influence several shots down the line, Asian Americans rate the…
November 22, 2006
Do you recognize the person depicted in this video?
How about this one?
The first video is actually a "chimera," formed by fusing half-images of two well-known faces together, then animated using 3D projection software. The second video shows us just the top half of another famous person's head,…
November 21, 2006
Watch this video and describe what you see (it's a Windows Media file, so if you've got a Mac, you'll need Flip4Mac):
What happened to the ball? Just watch the movie once, then give your response in the poll:
This movie is one of the stimuli for an experiment by Gustav Kuhn and Michael Land,…
November 20, 2006
The flash-lag effect is difficult to explain, but amazingly cool to see. Over at Mixing Memory, Chris has a great post where he links to two examples of the phenomenon and discusses what might be causing it. Cool, isn't it?
I can't resist linking to one more example, created by none other than…