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We learned from Alas, a Blog that Henry Jenkins has written an essay for PBS about video games, making the case that the public doesn't understand what the games are all about. Normally articles here on Cognitive Daily only report on peer-reviewed research, but in this case, we felt it was…

We've written before about how stereotypes can impair performance on math tests: for example, when women are told they are taking a math test for a study about gender differences in math ability, they perform more poorly than men. However, if they are first taught about how stereotypes can impair…

IQ has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands of research studies. Scholars have studied the link between IQ and race, gender, socioeconomic status, even music. Discussions about the relationship between IQ and race and the heritability of IQ (perhaps most notably Steven Jay Gould's…

Last week we discussed two experiments in a report by Adam Anderson about how the phenomenon of attentional blink is modified when the task includes arousing words. Perhaps not surprisingly, we're more likely to notice arousing words like "ejaculate" or "foreplay" in a rapidly presented sequence…

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 through completely uncensored. Stewart…

Take a look at these graphs: Most bloggers and web designers will find this sort of chart familiar—it's a record of Cognitive Daily's visitor statistics for the month of November. The first graph records the amount of traffic we received each day. Notice that the pink bars are shorter—these…

Take a look at these two photographs of my son Jim taken a month or so after he was born (and, as he would be quick to point out, nearly 14 years ago). Which is more memorable? It may depend on your age. It's natural for your priorities to change as you get older, and so it seems, you may have a…

Listen to these two short music clips. Music Clip 1 Music Clip 2 Now, can you identify the musical style of each clip? If you said "Classical," you're technically only correct for the first clip. The second clip is actually in the Romantic style (bonus points for identifying the works and composers…

Do you ever wonder if your mood affects the way you think? I'm not talking about behaving more aggressively when you're angry or more passively when you're sad; I'm talking about the subtler impact on cognitive processing. Some recent research has indicated that we process things differently…

Carmageddon 2 (source: Gamespot) is a gory racing game where players control drivers with names like "Max Damage" as they tear through city streets mowing down pedestrians and forcing competitors into bloody collisions. The game settings can be adjusted so that running down innocent bystanders…

The picture below will link you to a quick animation. The blue ring will gradually get smaller until it obscures the three "8"s, then continue to shrink until the figures are visible again. While they are obscured, the 8s will be transformed into letters (S, P, E, U, or H), and a new letter will…

Attentional blink researchers Christian Olivers and Sander Nieuwenhuis noticed something curious when they conducted their experiments. When they were testing their stimuli, they felt that they could do the task better when they were distracted. Their participants also reported that they tended to…

One of the gimmicks of the 1948 film Words and Music was the question of which is more important in a song—the words or the music. Source: SoundtrackCollector The movie, a fictionalization of the lives of the legendary team of Broadway writers Richard Rogers (music) and Lorenz Hart (words),…

Take a look at the following three animations. Each will flash very rapidly through a set of words (9 words per second!). Your job is to watch carefully and see if you notice a word that describes an occupation that a human performs for money. Such a word may or may not be in each list, and you…

Eric Durbrow pointed me to this article in the Globe and Mail. Its lead sentence offers a surprising claim: Parents take note: Reading to your preschoolers before bedtime doesn't mean they are likely to learn much about letters, or even how to read words. But aren't teachers and literacy advocates…

In face to face conversation, we often look away from the person we're speaking with. Somewhat paradoxically, the closer people sit to their conversation companions, the less often they look at them. But other factors influence how often we avert our gaze, too. When we are asked personal questions…

What does it mean to have a gut feeling that you remember something? You see someone you recognize in a coffee shop. Do you remember her from high school? Or maybe you saw her on television. Could she be the manager of your local bank? Perhaps you don't know her at all ... but you've still got a…

Just listening to music, despite the hype associated with the "Mozart Effect," appears to have little influence on IQ or other abilities. It does seem to make us more aroused and put us in a better mood, which can improve performance on tests, but it doesn't actually make us any smarter. But what…

One of the most difficult things to demonstrate scientifically is cause and effect. Often a study will show that two items—say, smoking and lung cancer—are associated with one another. But it's another thing entirely to suggest that smoking causes lung cancer in humans. Only after hundreds of…

More and more human conversations are taking place online. While I don't do instant messaging the way my kids like to, I'm much more likely to contact a friend via e-mail than to pick up the phone. Here at Cognitive Daily and at other online discussion forums, I've built relationships with…

I had a friend in college who was a baseball genius. He could offer up the career stats of every player in the hall of fame; he knew which teams had won the World Series in each year since its inception—he was a great guy to have on your Trivial Pursuit team; the sports category was a gimme for him…

Psychologists have known for decades that people perceive music as happier when it's played faster, and in a major key (mode). Take a listen to the following sound clips I created using a synthesized flute. Each plays the same melody three times—first in a major mode, then a minor mode, then a "…

I'm usually disappointed when I try to take a picture of a steep precipice—it never seems as impressive in the photo as it did when I was standing right there. Take this photo, for example. It's a nice shot of my daughter Nora, taken on our hike in the Great Smoky Mountains this past summer, but…

If you're a perception teacher, a great way to show how the vision system adapts is to use prism glasses to shift a volunteer's vision. While various types of glasses are available (the most common is designed to allow a person to read a book lying on her back), the most effective for this demo is…

When asked to indicate their "deepest, closest, most intimate relationship," thirty-six percent of college students name a friend (as opposed to a family member or boyfriend/girlfriend) Friendships are clearly important, but there have been many fewer studies of friends than family or marriage.…

Dozens of studies have confirmed both psychological and physical benefits of exercise. The results seem clear enough: a regular program of cardiovascular exercise has been shown not only to promote physical well being, but also to abate depression, decrease anxiety, and improve overall quality of…

When 64-year-old teacher Robert Davis was beaten by the New Orleans police for public drunkenness despite the fact that he hadn't had a drink for 25 years, you might expect him to feel angry about it. You wouldn't be surprised if he held a grudge against the police for many years thereafter. Yet…

This weekend, robot cars competed in a challenge that most humans would find trivial: drive 132 miles in 12 hours without crashing. Yet crash, they do. The difficult part isn't so much the steering and acceleration, it's determining the difference between an obstacle you must navigate around and a…

Modern biological explanations for disease have not been around for long. Before the nineteenth century, explanations of disease transmittal would never have involved "viruses" or even "germs." Yet today, even the youngest children know that germs can make you sick—at least, in Western cultures…

The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, is a full-scale reconstruction of the rather more famous monument atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. We visited it with our daughter Nora a few years back: As you can see, it's a dramatic building, dominating the landscape of the otherwise ordinary city…