Dave Munger
dmunger
Posts by this author
July 18, 2005
Baby rats, only 5 days old and still very much reliant on their mothers for food, can be artificially dehydrated by injecting them with a saline hypertonic solution. If a source of water is placed very close to the rat's snout, it will drink. But 21-day-old rats who have just been weaned from their…
July 14, 2005
We've reported on flashbulb memory before, with the Talarico and Rubin study and the MacKay and Ahmetzanov study. First observed in 1977 by Brown and Kulik, flashbulb memories—memories about shocking events—were supposed to be more vivid and long-lasting than normal memories. Jennifer Talarico and…
July 13, 2005
Take a look at this picture I took last year when we went to Venice. Look at it fairly closely, because there will be a "test" at the end of this post.
We have posted on boundary extension before: it's a simple phenomenon where our memory for a picture is consistently different from the actual…
July 11, 2005
There's something about kids and dogs. The phrase "A boy and his dog" brings up quite a range of images: from the sweetness of Norman Rockwell to what sounds like a truly bizarre movie from 1975. Despite not being a dog-person myself (okay, not being a pet-person at all), I find the results from…
July 8, 2005
Are attractiveness and distinctiveness related? Are we more likely to remember a pretty face than an ordinary one? This data suggests not:
When people are asked to rate faces for attractiveness and deviation from an average face, there's a clear correlation: the more attractive the face, the…
July 6, 2005
Today's article is one of my all-time favorites. It was originally written by Katherine Kiechel, an undergraduate at Williams College as part of her honors thesis, and could serve as a model for others in its simplicity and ingenuity (the report I'm discussing here was revised and coauthored by her…
July 1, 2005
Take a look at the following two movies. Your job is to determine whether the yellow square is moving faster in the first movie or the second movie.
If you're like me, you're probably cynical enough to guess that they were moving at the same speed. But if you're honest and you just go with…
June 30, 2005
Most religions, from Anabaptism to Zoroastrianism, feature some version of Christianity's "Golden Rule": Do undo others, as you would have them do unto you. Aside from being a nice concept, how do we benefit from helping others? From an individual perspective, wouldn't we be better off if we just…
June 28, 2005
Though you'll never hear her tell you, Greta is an excellent musician. She's a brilliant English horn and oboe player, and she can also handle the piano keyboard. When a nonmusician hears her play, they'll often tell her how they wished their parents had made them practice when they were younger (…
June 24, 2005
I like rock music, but my father-in-law doesn't. My son Jim likes horror movies, but his mom doesn't. While some of our preferences can be explained easily—for example, we usually don't like things that cause us pain—others are more difficult to understand. When there's not an obvious reason for a…
June 22, 2005
Today's research psychologists typically don't think much of Sigmund Freud. His theories, which tended to be based on literary analysis and interviews with his patients rather than controlled experiments, have been largely discredited (though they continue to be influential in the field of—you…
June 20, 2005
Every parent wants his or her child to do well in school. They help the kids with their homework, volunteer in the classroom, do everything they can think of to help their children succeed. But what type of elementary school education actually leads to older kids who do better in school? Typically…
June 17, 2005
There's been a great deal of research on appetite and satiation, both on animals and humans. For humans, of course, the motivation is often focused on how we can lose weight. Almost everyone believes they would look better if they could just lose a few pounds. Most of the research has focused on…
June 15, 2005
It has been known for some time that cell phones can lead to driving accidents. After watching the behavior of some other drivers on the road, I'm sometimes surprised that there aren't more cell-phone-related accidents than there already are. With well over 100 million cell phone users in the U.S.…
June 13, 2005
Adults have been found cross-culturally to prefer blue to other colors. It's a nearly universal preference. But does this preference occur naturally, or do children and infants have different preferences? Prior to 2001, there wasn't a definitive answer to this question. In that year, Marcel Zentner…
June 10, 2005
When I was about twelve years old, I came up with an idea for a massive practical joke to play on an unsuspecting baby. For its entire childhood, everyone around the baby would conspire to convince it that the sky was green. Then at some point in the future, perhaps in front of the entire sixth…
June 8, 2005
When I started work on a memoir about my childhood, I thought remembering what actually happened would be the easy part. I had very specific memories of very specific events, and I wrote them down exactly as I remembered them. One memory involved my stepsister winning Glen Campbell's Rhinestone…
June 7, 2005
Learning to walk was a passion for my son Jimmy. He would sweat and struggle with it until finally he had it mastered—and then it was off to the races. My daughter Nora, by contrast, didn't seem to mind not being able to walk. After all, if you didn't walk, then some sweet grown-up would soon show…
June 3, 2005
As every high-school senior knows, many colleges and universities take "racial diversity" into account when selecting students for admission. The practice is controversial, because it could mean that qualified students are denied admission, and those who are admitted must tolerate other students…
June 1, 2005
When I was a kid, like most kids, I used to wait for my mom to be in a good mood before I asked her for something I wanted. I thought I was being pretty sophisticated—I understood that her decisions might be different if she was in a bad mood. However, I might not have been as sophisticated as I…
May 30, 2005
The allure of music has been a recurring question for psychologists. Why do we see the need for music? Is music like language, or is it something entirely different? The attempts to answer the latter question have generated mixed results. Musicians with brain damage have retained musical ability…
May 26, 2005
Heinz's green ketchup nothwithstanding, we generally like our foods to be predictable colors: milk, white; bananas, yellow; oranges—well, you get the idea. But when foods are the "right" color, do they actually taste any different? We all know that food coloring is tasteless, so what happens when…
May 25, 2005
Take a look at the following maps of brain activity:
The maps were made using ERP recordings of volunteers' brains as they were tested for memory of pictures. The ERP (event-related potential) records electrical potentials using a variety of electrodes (primarily EEGs, or electroencephalograms)…
May 20, 2005
Ivan Pavlov, the Russian psychologist and surgeon of legendary ability (his Nobel prize is for medicine), was perhaps most famous for his experiments with dogs. Performing a tricky procedure to implant a saliva-measuring device in dogs' necks, he then trained them to recognize when food was coming…
May 18, 2005
Some people—even people who really know their stuff—just don't "test well." You can talk to them face to face, and they seem perfectly well informed and intelligent, but when the money's on the line, when they've sharpened their number 2 pencils and it's time to sit down for the big exam, they just…
May 17, 2005
We know that video games can help us learn, but what exactly is it about the games that does it? Is it that fact that we're in control—for example, the way drivers in a car seem to learn the roads better than passengers? Or is it something else? Paul Wilson of the University of Leicester and…
May 13, 2005
One of the oldest questions in the study of language involves how it influences our thought. One of the most controversial answers comes from Benjamin Whorf, the student of renowned anthropologist Edward Sapir: language not only influences thought; language determines thought—thought cannot exist…
May 10, 2005
Yesterday we discussed the difference between children's and adults' beliefs in magic. Today we will continue that discussion, with two more experiments from the same article by Eugene Subbotsky.
Adults generally claim they don't believe in magic, but they seem to have a different set of rules for…
May 9, 2005
Babies love to play peek-a-boo. This simple game can entertain them for hours, even if all you do is hide your face behind your hands. Part of the reason is that for babies, it is really something of a surprise that you return. For most of their first year, babies don't understand that objects…
May 5, 2005
The Stroop effect is a well-documented phenomenon that shows how easily we can be distracted from a simple task. In the classic Stroop experiment, we are shown a word, such as GREEN, and asked to indicate the color it is printed in. When the meaning of the word itself conflicts with the word's…