Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
August 30, 2006
The local newspaper here in Charlotte was aghast that SAT scores (a test used to help determine college admissions in the US) fell in North Carolina this year, even though the article goes on to point out that nationwide the scores dropped even more.
So what's up? Are schools letting the kids down…
August 29, 2006
Listen to this short audio clip:
Now listen to this one:
Notice any difference? I didn't think so. But if you were a 5-month-old infant named Caroline, the difference would be crystal clear. In the second clip, your name would be indistinguishable from background noise, but in the first clip,…
August 29, 2006
Is the Flynn Effect ending? Are kids getting dumber again? Could it be that after years of striking intelligence gains, we're now actually losing ground? We are if you read this article in the Times Online:
After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a…
August 28, 2006
A judge has ruled against a recent Louisiana law banning the sale of violent video games to children. Since we've been rather outspoken here about the influence of violent games, I did want to reiterate that we've never advocated the sort of sweeping legislation that Louisiana has attempted to…
August 28, 2006
NPR has a nice report on the motivations behind false confessions. Give it a listen--it's just over two minutes long, and reporter Andy Bowers gives an excellent explanation of why people such as JonBenet Ramsey "killer" John Mark Karr might be motivated to voluntarily confess to crimes they didn't…
August 25, 2006
Have you missed Casual Fridays? Our travel schedule over the summer made it impossible for us to keep up with Casual Fridays, but for the 2006-07 school year, we'll be back each Friday with either a new study or the results from the previous week. There's no better time than the present to get…
August 24, 2006
Last year, my dad got his pilot's license. He took me up with him a couple months later, and while the view was spectacular, the most surprising aspect of flying is how much of a pilot's time is spent avoiding other aircraft. You might think there's plenty of room up there, and you'd be right,…
August 23, 2006
Television sets and video monitors rely on tricking the visual system into believing it is seeing the full range of possible colors. In reality, they are only generating approximations of the light that would actually enter the eye if we were looking at a real object.
The problem is this: the…
August 23, 2006
The Washington Post has an article claiming that being just a few pounds overweight can lead to premature death:
The 10-year study of more than 500,000 U.S. adults found that those who were just moderately overweight in their fifties were 20 percent to 40 percent more likely to die in the next…
August 22, 2006
Learning to navigate through an unfamiliar environment can be a difficult challenge. Could you find your way through the crowded, narrow streets of the city depicted at left -- especially if the signs were in a foreign language (bonus points if you can identify the city in the comments section…
August 22, 2006
A new study finds that 3- to 5-year-olds appear to conflate their future needs with those of the present. Young children who have been fed pretzels and are thirsty are more likely to say they'll need water tomorrow than pretzels. If they haven't eaten pretzels, they'll say they will need pretzels…
August 21, 2006
Why does Greta look so happy in this photo?
Perhaps it's because she's wearing her new neurotransmitter earrings, chosen by CogDaily readers (for the results of our poll, see this post).
Seratonin and dopamine were in a dead heat, so she got one of each. A close-up of the earrings is below the…
August 21, 2006
Slashdot points to an Aljazeera (!) article about dolphin intelligence (or lack thereof). The article quotes scientist Paul Manger, who argues that since dolphins never think to jump out of enclosures such as holding tanks in aquariums, or tuna nets, they clearly aren't very smart. After all, even…
August 17, 2006
By the time a baby is 4 months old, she has begun to amass an impressive array of skills. She might be able to roll over, as Nora is demonstrating in this picture. She will almost certainly be able to follow an object with her eyes as it moves across her field of vision. But research about the…
August 15, 2006
When Jim and Nora talk about the social groups in their school, they matter-of-factly categorize almost every fellow student into stereotyped pigeonholes. There are the nerds, the rockers, the cools, the goths, and of course, the jocks.
The assumption, naturally, is that none of these groups…
August 11, 2006
What in the world is this thing?
It's called an optokinetic drum, and it's one of the many implements of torture you'll find in a spatial orientation lab. In an optokinetic drum, you sit or stand inside while the entire drum rotates around you. By changing the pattern on the inside of the drum,…
August 10, 2006
Scientific American has an article covering recent research about neighborly relations. The conclusion: people living in desert climates get along better with neighbors when they have nice, shady green lawns, as opposed to natural desert landscaping.
From the SciAm article:
The 60 or so individual…
August 9, 2006
Greta really wants some of these neurotransmitter earrings. But which ones should she get? Let's make this one a poll -- that way you can help her decide! When she gets the earrings, we'll post a picture of her wearing them.
August 9, 2006
Seed has asked all the sciencebloggers to respond to the following question:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
I talked with Greta about this last night…
August 8, 2006
Take a look at this short video clip. Can you tell which dot is blue and which is yellow?
Click here to play
Unless you have a rare vision impairment, this task should be easy for you. But read on, and we'll show you how you can become blind to this difference in as little as 40 minutes.
The human…
August 7, 2006
An emailer made me aware of a nice new resource: the Psychology Wiki. From the home page:
The Psychology Wiki started on 21st January 2006 and is now one of the largest psychology resources on the internet. We currently have 12832 pages and are working on 8,061 articles and have over 45 MB of…
August 3, 2006
[originally published March 2, 2005]
Take a look at the following movie (quicktime required). The movie will alternately flash a picture of a desk and a patterned block. Your job is to see if anything about the picture of the desk changes each time it flashes. Don't replay the movie when you get to…
August 1, 2006
One of the summer jobs I had during college was working for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center in Seattle. My job was to do data entry for a breast cancer study; it was simultaneously one of the most boring and depressing jobs I ever had. I sorted through the medical records of hundreds of…
July 31, 2006
[originally posted on March 16, 2005]
I've taken only two pictures of the Mona Lisa, and both turned out about the same: they captured the frenzied attempts of dozens of tourists trying to take a picture of the most-recognized image in the world. Here's the one I took last summer:
I hadn't…
July 27, 2006
[originally posted December 9, 2005]
A few months ago, Jon Stewart opened the eyes of his Daily Show audience when he interviewed the author of the book On Bullshit. Viewers accustomed to hearing the familiar bleep when Stewart enters foul-mouth mode were surprised to find that the word came…
July 26, 2006
I'm still on vacation, but I've got just enough time to pop in with a quick link to a nice discussion about the link between heredity and IQ. While some have argued that as much of 75 percent of the variability in IQ is hereditary, more recent research suggests a more complex interaction. The key,…
July 25, 2006
We've written a lot on Cognitive Daily about the relationship between violent video game play and real-world aggressive behavior. While we feel the evidence showing that playing violent games does cause real aggression is compelling, a frequent critique of our analysis is that other activities,…
July 24, 2006
[originally posted April 6, 2005]
Listen to these two musical excerpts and note any differences you discern:
Ave Maria, version 1
Ave Maria, version 2
(Source: courtesy of Mayumi Hamamoto and Kyota Ko)
If you're a typical nonmusician, you will probably notice some sort of difference between the two…
July 21, 2006
How is a mother "connected" to her infant? According to a recent report in Stem Cells, quite literally. The research, conducted on mice, found the stem cells of fetal mice were present in their mothers' brains. These cells persist long after birth, and even seem to assist in the process of repair…
July 20, 2006
[article originally posted September 27, 2005]
All this talk about stereotypes can get you thinking. Perhaps some stereotypes reflect actual differences. Take color vision, for example: men often refer to themselves as "color-impaired," letting the women in their lives make home design decisions…