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Dave Munger

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September 26, 2008
Last week we sought to uncover the truth behind the stereotype: Are Prius owners really just like Mac owners? In a non-scientific fashion, we quizzed our readers about several of the most common stereotypes that seem to follow these two trendy groups: They're arrogant, they think they're better…
September 25, 2008
Notwithstanding the cute pictures from yesterday's post, Jim is now nearly seventeen years old. He's taller than me, has a beard, and is much less interested in having his photo taken, so I don't have any recent pictures. He also plays a mean bass guitar, and he's in a band, which means -- you…
September 24, 2008
When Jimmy and Nora were toddlers, we bought them great little plastic scooters to ride around the house. They were the perfect size for a small child. Yet Jimmy preferred to ride around on a plastic garbage truck instead, despite the fact that there was no steering wheel and the "seat" wasn't…
September 22, 2008
You might think the zoo is an odd place for psychology bloggers to meet up. But on Saturday not only did Greta and I get a chance to connect with some of our readers and fellow bloggers, we also received some fascinating insight into the psychology of zookeeping. Our group toured the North Carolina…
September 19, 2008
A few days ago I noticed a comment on an online forum: "Prius owners are just like Mac owners." As a Mac owner and Prius owner, I felt that this comment needlessly stereotyped me. Were they implying that there was something wrong with me? That I was superficial? That I thought I was better than…
September 17, 2008
One of Jimmy's favorite toys as a toddler was a simple little bucket of blocks. There were three shapes: a rectangular prism, a triangular prism, and a cylinder. The bucket's lid had three holes: a square, a triangle, and a circle (The picture at right was the only one I could find online -- this…
September 16, 2008
Greta and I will be at the North Carolina Zoo this coming Saturday, September 20, to meet with readers and practically all of the North Carolina ScienceBloggers. We've arranged a special tour of the zoo with an expert member of the zoo staff, a party afterwards at a local watering hole, and now,…
September 15, 2008
If you're like me, your eyes might have glazed over just a bit at the fields of red and blue text generated by ScienceDebate 2008. Obviously these issues are important, but a quick cut-and-paste job into my word processor reveals that the two candidates have written over 12,000 words in response to…
September 15, 2008
It's now taken as a given that the musical score of a movie can have huge influence on our perception of the movie. From the pulsating terror achieved in films like Psycho and Jaws, to the triumphant victories in Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean, it's hard to think about a great film without…
September 12, 2008
Last week we asked readers how much sleep they lost staying up to watch the political coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions, and how that compared to the sleep they lost a few weeks earlier watching the coverage of the Beijing Olympics. Do people stay up later to watch politics, or…
September 11, 2008
One big problem with many of the studies of video game violence is that they compare different games. Sure, people might behave more aggressively after playing Carmaggeddon instead of Tetris -- they're completely different games! What would be more impressive is if we could simply remove some of…
September 8, 2008
Take a look at these pictures. Each picture depicts four shapes -- irregular vertical columns spanning the height of the picture. It's easy to tell which letter is on a column and which is not, right? If our readers are typical, over 90 percent would agree that a is on a column and b is not. But…
September 5, 2008
I've been dragging for the last few days -- I just can't seem to resist watching the latest speeches from the Republican National Convention. I was similarly distracted by the Democratic Convention last week. It's affected my sleep habits: I got 1 to 2 hours less sleep than normal each night I…
September 3, 2008
You may have heard of the idea that people can only remember seven things at a time -- a seven-digit phone number, a license-plate, etc. While the size of working memory actually varies from person to person (it usually ranges from 6 to 8 items), and while people can use strategies like "chunking"…
September 2, 2008
Over the weekend we finished transferring ResearchBlogging.org from its dependably quirky old home to sleek new digs. If you haven't visited the site in the past 72 hours, you should definitely head over to take a look -- or even if you have, you should go back again, since dozens of new posts have…
September 2, 2008
On Saturday, September 20, the action in North Carolina will be at the Asheboro zoo. All the North Carolina ScienceBloggers will be there, and you can too -- there will be a guided tour of the zoo led by one of their staffers, a get-together afterwards with tons of zoo staffers and volunteers, and…
August 29, 2008
I've always been a fan of literary studies -- I was an English major in college and I continue to blog about literature on my personal blog. But when I first learned about the concept of alliteration (I must have been in middle school), I was unimpressed. Obviously making a poem rhyme requires some…
August 27, 2008
"Impossible objects" like the etchings of M.C. Escher have fascinated adults for centuries. You can't help but stare and wonder at a drawing like this, which seems to defy the laws of nature: The drawing seems strange to us because our visual system tells us that when an object or part of an…
August 25, 2008
Take a look at this short video -- it's a list of animals. Try to remember as many animals as you can. If you're like me, you're pretty confident that you will remember the entire list, even after ten minutes or so. In my case, that's not so much because the list names animals that most of us are…
August 21, 2008
As a child (and like most children, I imagine) I used to think conducting an orchestra entailed something like what Bugs Bunny does in this video: Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than…
August 19, 2008
The current issue of WIRED reveals an interesting quirk of the human perceptual system: Can you spot what's wrong?
August 18, 2008
One of the first things I did after my 90-mile hike with Nora in the North Cascades was play some music on the car stereo. We'd been in the wilderness for seven days, and other than birdsong, we hadn't heard so much as a note for the entire time. Matching our intuitions about music, researchers…
August 14, 2008
[This article was originally published in December, 2006] As parents of a 1516-year-old, Greta and I are very interested in what causes people to behave aggressively. We know a lot about specific causes of aggression -- violent media, testosterone, guns, and personal insults can all lead to…
August 13, 2008
Over at Sciam's Mind Matters blog, Greta and I have written a guest post about tone deafness and bad singing: Although there have been many studies of perceptual tone deafness, or amusia, few have compared people's ability to hear differences between musical notes with their ability to produce good…
August 11, 2008
[This article was originally published in December, 2006] Take a look at these two images. Do they belong in the same category or different categories? You say the same? Wrong -- they're different! The one on the right is a little blurrier. What about these two? These are in the same category.…
August 7, 2008
[This article was originally published in April, 2007] There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if you consistently look at the person you speak to, you will…
August 4, 2008
[Originally posted in May, 2007] "I just didn't see him" is a claim that's repeated over and over in accident reports. Drivers earnestly claim that they simply didn't notice the bicycle/pedestrian/motorcycle they crashed into. The claim is made so frequently that certainly there must be a grain of…
July 31, 2008
[This post was originally published in March 2007] Earlier today I posted a poll [and I republished that poll yesterday] challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power you sometimes see on graphs. I was quite…
July 30, 2008
Cognitive Daily gets a lot of complaints about graphs, mostly from readers who say the graphs are useless without error bars. My response is that error bars are confusing to most readers. But perhaps I'm wrong about that. Last year I posted about this issue, and backed it up with a short quiz about…
July 28, 2008
One of the key components of "normal" child development is social competence. We expect kids to become gradually better at behaving respectfully towards peers, to comply with requests made by others, to understand the thoughts of others, to play together with kids and adults, to sustain attention,…