Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
October 23, 2006
There's nothing cooler for a perception researcher (or writer) than a new visual illusion. When I learned about this one, I spent half the day Thursday trying to recreate it, but I couldn't get it to work. Finally, in five minutes on Friday morning, I think I figured it out. (Update: Actually, as…
October 23, 2006
Winners of mid-sized lottery prizes are happier than losers -- or those winning small prizes -- even over the long term.
Chris Chatham reviews a review of the research on Theory of Mind, the science of understanding how people understand the minds of others.
Tom Keane argues that bridges should…
October 22, 2006
If the human eye was a digital camera, how many megapixels would it have?
Clarkvision does the calculations.
The answer: 576 megapixels.
Impressive job -- I wish I had thought to do that. Note that their calculations require a bit of fudging: the fovea actually covers just a tiny bit of the visual…
October 20, 2006
Last week's Casual Friday study was inspired by a recently-discovered illusion which showed that sound could influence what people percieve visually. I was planning to report on the study confirming that illusion yesterday, but my computer wasn't cooperating with me, and I couldn't generate a demo…
October 19, 2006
The idea of a distinct "internet addiction" problem separate from, say, compulsive gambling or obsession with pornography isn't especially new. It's been studied since at least 1999, and we reported on one attempt to describe it in 2004.
Yet in the U.S., there has been no serious effort to quantify…
October 18, 2006
This week's Ask a Scienceblogger: "Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you?"
I'd say that's nearly impossible to answer: there are too many other factors at work. But consider this:
Kuwait's average life expectancy is 76.9
Portugal's is 77.…
October 18, 2006
Apropos of our discussion yesterday of the pros and cons of open access publishing, I'd like to point you to a great resource: the Directory of Open Access Journals.
The Directory of Open Access Journals ... covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to…
October 17, 2006
Click on the "Video Games / Technology" category over to the left and you'll see that we've covered many, many studies on the subject of video game violence, almost all of them demonstrating a link between playing violent games and real-world aggressive behavior. Nearly every time we do, we receive…
October 17, 2006
Jake Young has written an excellent summary of a panel discussion he attended at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, as it presents a fascinating interplay of the forces at work in academic publishing. But if Jake's synopsis is too much for you, here's a…
October 16, 2006
The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget developed several tasks to show how very young children were different from older kids. One of the most surprising is the "conservation" task: a 5-year-old, who talks clearly and appears quite bright, will watch water being poured from a short, wide glass…
October 16, 2006
The BPS Research Digest is reporting on a new article by Satoshi Kanozawa, who claims that the poor economic conditions and short life expectancy in many developing countries can be explained by low IQ.
The economic historian Richard Wilkinson has argued that economic inequality leads to shorter…
October 13, 2006
Today's Casual Fridays study involves visual illusions. We're exploring when and how you see illusions. You'll need QuickTime and a computer with the volume turned up to participate. These illusions are great fun, and we're excited to see if there are any differences in how they are perceived. We…
October 12, 2006
Yahoo! reports on a new study sponsored by Apple to help sell 30-inch monitors:
The study, which evaluated Apple's 30-inch Apple Cinema Display, concluded that large screens can offer gains of up to 50 percent to 65 percent in productivity on a variety of specific office tasks and can earn back…
October 12, 2006
Since I mentioned here that I took a backpacking trip to the Great Smoky Mountains last weekend, I might also mention that I'm writing a tongue-and-cheek description of the trip, with some pretty good photos, over at Word Munger. The first installment is up now. (Language may be NSFW)
October 11, 2006
Cognitive Daily would not exist without chocolate. Every week, I buy a bag of chocolate covered raisins, and I portion them out precisely each day so that I've finished them by all by (casual) Friday. I try to time my consumption to coincide with the most difficult part of the job: reporting on…
October 11, 2006
Janet Stemwedel and Chad Orzel have each written excellent posts on the necessity of improving science journalism. Janet argues that what's needed is to improve science education:
If there were an actual clamor for science reporting that was detailed, informative, and grounded in fact -- a clamor…
October 9, 2006
Greetings, prospective students and parents!
I'll be your tour guide today as we explore the mind-opening campus of Encephalon U, one of the most esteemed liberal arts colleges in the nation. As you know, Encephalon U's admission requirements are extremely strict, so I certainly hope you've…
October 6, 2006
I'm headed to the Smoky Mountains tomorrow at noon, so if you'd like to see your blog post included in Monday's Encephalon neuroscience carnival, you'll need to submit it by tomorrow at 8:00 a.m. EDT!
So, send me your astounding, astonishing, or astute neuroscience posts and I'll collect them into…
October 6, 2006
Today's analysis of the Blogger SAT Challenge results is the one I've been looking forward to the most. After subjecting 109 people to a sample question from the SAT writing test, we've learned that bloggers are dumber than high school kids (though there's some reason to question that analysis).…
October 6, 2006
So psychologists got shut out of the Nobels this year ... so what! This year the peace prize at the Ig-Nobels went to a discovery of a psychological phenomenon: how to get rid of teenagers. That's right, the "teen repellent" is this year's winner of the Ig-Nobels' biggest prize.
As we have reported…
October 5, 2006
As of yesterday, readers had made an astonishing 3,878 individual ratings of the essays in the Blogger SAT Challenge. The average rating was 2.76, compared to 2.9 from the expert judges. Averaging the most popular rating for each essay comes up with an even lower number, 2.51. Anyone who thought…
October 5, 2006
From CNN: Apparently scientists have actually teleported a relatively large object.
The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended…
October 5, 2006
Chris Chatham on the relationship between psychology and neuroscience
Why healthy people call in sick for work
Excellent long analysis of Isabel Peretz's "The Nature of Music from a biological perspective"
For the attention-impaired: Excellent, shorter analysis of the above analysis
Hey, we've got…
October 4, 2006
The Encephalon, a collection of the week's best neuroscience and psychology posts, will be arriving at CogDaily on Monday, October 9. Since I'll be hiking in the Smoky Mountains on that day, I'd like to request that you send in your posts a day early. I'll try to include everything I receive by 8:…
October 3, 2006
Tired of all the hoopla about the Blogger SAT Challenge? Do you not want to hear another word about Booker T. Washington and why he is or is not like George W. Bush? Then have I got a study for you: Yolanda Martins and Patricia Pliner have conducted a fascinating experiment about food preferences…
October 3, 2006
Remember yesterday when I said that only one essay scored a six on the Blogger SAT Challenge? I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I wrote it.
I think it's a pretty good essay, but it is a bit suspicious that the person who designed the study just happened to get the highest score (by the way, it…
October 2, 2006
BPS Research Digest is running an interesting series this week: they've enlisted an impressive list of psychology bloggers to write about their favorite psychology journal article from the past three years. First up is our entry. Here's an excerpt:
Helene Intraub's 2004 Cognition paper "…
October 2, 2006
Two weeks ago, after reading the New York Times Article which judged the best high school writers harshly, Chad Orzel came up with an idea that was so good it just had to be tried:
Somebody ought to get a bunch of bloggers together, and give them the writing SAT under timed conditions, and see what…
October 2, 2006
Today's Zeitgeist points to a cute editorial cartoon.
The cartoon's joke is that all the studies that have been done connecting violent media to real youth violence, or soda consumption to childhood obesity, are just a big waste of money because it's obvious these things are connected. Now I…
September 29, 2006
We are nearly finished grading the 109 entries for the Blogger SAT Challenge. Chad Orzel has designed a way for our readers to view and rate the essays themselves, but it's not quite ready yet. We're going to take the weekend to make everything perfect (well, nearly perfect), and then we'll unveil…