dmunger | September 4, 2009Last week we asked readers how far they'd go to save a little money. Would you wash and re-use disposable plastic silverware? Get a "Doggie Bag" for your restaurant leftovers? Over 5,000 people responded to our Casual Fridays thriftfest last week -- the most popular Casual Friday ever, thanks to a link from Consumerist.com.
In fact, I was a little concerned that the large response from an external site would skew our results, but I couldn't find much indication of that -- we had over 600 responses before the link appeared on The Consumerist, and responses didn't change significantly…
dmunger | September 3, 2009How did you decide to read this post? You might have seen the headline in an RSS reader or noticed it on the ScienceBlogs home page. Maybe someone emailed or tweeted the link to you. But you still had to make the decision to actually read it. How do you know when you made that decision?
In 1965 H.H. Kornhuber and L. Deeke found that brain activity precedes a conscious choice (voluntarily pressing a button) by 500 to 1,000 milliseconds. But in 1983 a team led by B. Libet found that when people were asked when they consciously decided to press a button, they said their decision came about 200…
dmunger | September 2, 2009My column on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM today discusses recent research on acupuncture:
The science behind acupuncture is dubious. It's difficult to properly control an acupuncture study because its practitioners--and those receiving treatment--are heavily invested in the results. In a Norwegian study of acupuncture as treatment for hot flashes during menopause, 80 out of 535 volunteers dropped out because they were randomly assigned to the "no treatment" group. As Euan Lawson, a general practitioner in Cumbria, UK, explained in his analysis of the research, acupuncture is quite popular in Norway, with…
dmunger | September 1, 2009Jim and Nora each attended summer camps that they enjoyed tremendously this past summer. When we picked up Nora from her camp, she was completely exhausted. Why? She and her new friends had only gotten 30 minutes of pretend sleep the night before. This was to fool their counselors before sneaking into a pre-determined room for a vigil during their precious last few hours together. Jim, it turned out, had stayed up all night his last night too, but without the pretense of tricking the counselors, who had by that time pretty much given up on enforcing a curfew.
Despite their exhaustion, we…
dmunger | August 28, 2009Greta and I are back from a busy summer, the school year has started, and today's high temperature here in North Carolina will only be in the 70s! I can actually wear long pants again.
You know what that means: It's time to ramp up Survey Monkey for another season of Casual Fridays studies.
This week's study was inspired by a memory from my childhood. I always hated it when my mom used to mash the tiny remaining fragments of the old bar of soap into a brand-new bar, so we never got that "new soap" feeling. I realized that it was just a way of saving money, but I vowed that when I grew up and…
dmunger | August 27, 2009One of the most exciting moments of my junior-high-school career was stepping into my first-ever foreign-language classroom. While foreign language studies had a reputation for being tedious, I was nonetheless thrilled at the idea of being able to communicate with people from a different, seemingly more exotic part of the world. We were allowed to choose between French and Spanish, and I picked French because it seemed more "glamorous."
Excited as I was to learn a new language, I was still shocked to find out that every word was either "masculine" or "feminine." Livre, "book," was masculine…
dmunger | August 26, 2009In case you missed them, here are my selections from the psychology and neuroscience posts on ResearchBlogging.org for the past week:
Confronted with fake video evidence, nearly everyone confesses. In a simulated "crime," researchers were able to induce false confessions -- but fewer people were willing to rat out others.
Second language changes the way bilinguals read in their native tongue. Learning a new language makes you read differently in the old one, suggesting you don't just "switch on" a different language.
Children with autism do understand emotions. While autism does seem to…
dmunger | August 25, 2009Take a look at the following picture:
Your job is to look for the one line that's either perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical. It took me about 25 seconds to find it. Can you do better?
How about now?
A little easier, right?
But the task can be made difficult again by randomly changing the colors of all the other lines in the picture, a few at a time. Now you don't know which flash to look at and the task is just as hard as it was before.
But a team led by Erik Van der Burg found an interesting way to make the task easy again: just add a clicking sound that plays only when the…
dmunger | August 20, 2009We've discussed attentional blink several times on CogDaily. It's a fascinating phenomenon: if you see a series of images flashing by rapidly, you can normally pick out one of the images (for example, a banana in series of pictures of familiar objects). But if a second such image (another piece of fruit, like an apple) appears shortly after the first, you'll probably miss it. The one exception in many cases is faces. This video illustrates the point:
Click here to play the movie
You probably spotted both the piece of fruit and the face in the second sequence, but you may have missed the watch…
dmunger | August 19, 2009In case you missed them, these are my picks from ResearchBlogging.org's psychology and neuroscience categories. Neat stuff!
Neurological basis for desire for amputation. This post explains why some people have a seemingly rational desire for a healthy limb to be removed.
Are humans genetically predisposed to cheat on their mates? An anthropologist examines the evidence, based on the sex habits of chimps, bonobos, and gorillas.
Is this a smile :) or is this a smile ^_^ ? The Neurocritic examines a study demonstrating that facial expressions aren't universal.
Do you have to be religious to be "…
dmunger | August 18, 2009[This post was originally published in September, 2007]
Here's a task that four-year-olds can do but three-year-olds have some trouble with. Imagine Sally in the picture below is playing with a ball. She puts the ball in the box and goes to the kitchen to get a drink. While she's gone, Bill takes the ball out of the box and puts it in the bucket. When Sally returns, where does she look for the ball?
Most three-year-olds will say Sally would look in the bucket, apparently failing to realize that Sally doesn't know anything about what Bill did while she was gone. Some researchers have…
dmunger | August 13, 2009Take a look at these photos of Jim and Nora:
They've clearly been distorted (using the "spherize" filter in Photoshop), but in opposite directions. Jim's been "expanded" to make more spherical, while Nora has been "contracted" to look more concave. If you look at these photos for a while, you might have difficulty recognizing how Jim and Nora look normally.
This is an aftereffect. Aftereffects can be experienced in a number of ways, with dizziness being perhaps the most frequently observed -- spin around a few times with your eyes open and the room will appear to be spinning in the opposite…
dmunger | August 12, 2009Over at Seedmagazine.com, my new column "Research Blogging" debuted today. Every Wednesday I'll be discussing what's new in the research blogosphere, and this week I cover a fascinating post by Jeremy Yoder about lactose tolerance in adults. Here's a sample:
The researchers say the lactase gene evolved in Europe because Europeans don't get enough sun to produce Vitamin D, which in turn is needed for humans to take in calcium. Since lactose also assists in the uptake of calcium, adult milk drinking helped northern Europeans meet that deficiency.
Gerbault's team developed a computer model…
dmunger | August 11, 2009Last year Nora and I went on a hike in the remote Pasayten Wilderness in northern Washington state. Parts of the hike were extremely grueling, while other parts were quite easy and fun. I made this short video to try to capture the differences:
The music was added as an afterthought, but in the end I think it's what makes the video so charming: without it, it would just be an ordinary walk in the woods. For each section of the trail, I chose a music clip that I thought expressed our feelings as we made our way along. Most people who watch the video agree: the music is totally appropriate to…
dmunger | August 6, 2009You may have noticed that Cognitive Daily hasn't exactly been living up to its name recently. During the summer vacation season, we travel quite a bit, so it's difficult to maintain our usual pace of posting. But along the way we've collected some great photos, and we'll try to share a few of them with you when it's relevant. For example, take a look at this picture I took in Maine about a week ago:
It's a lovely section of the Maine coast, readily identifiable by anyone as "shoreline." Earlier in the summer we vacationed with our nieces on the North Carolina coast, just a few hours' drive…
dmunger | August 4, 2009Over at ResearchBlogging.org, in addition to my other duties, I'm serving as the Psychology/Neuroscience editor. Every week starting today, I'll be making "Editor's selections" -- choose the top posts in these fields. For your convenience, I'm also sharing them here. Enjoy!
Here's one for your boss: Computer Games at Work are Good For You. With a few caveats, of course. Before you schedule the conference room for a 9-5 LAN party, you might want to read the post.
Have you ever found yourself driving to the grocery store when you were actually supposed to be headed out to dinner with your in-…
dmunger | July 29, 2009Implicit attitudes and associations can tell us a lot about a person. It's a way to find out if they might have a racial or gender bias, and recently there has even been some work suggesting that an implicit association test can tell us whether someone is lying -- it's called the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT). Here's how it works:
Suppose you're an American soldier and you want to know if an Afghan you've captured is really a member of the Taliban, despite his assurances that he supports your side and only carries a Kalashnikov for self-defense. You fire up the aIAT…
dmunger | July 28, 2009Take a look at this quick movie. What you'll see is two sets of three views of the same scene (our living room). For each group of three views, your job is to decide if the third view is taken from the same angle as one of the two previous views. After the first two views flash by, the text "Same?" will appear, and that's your cue to decide if the third view is the same as EITHER of the first two. Give it a shot:
Do you think you got the correct answer? Was either of the two sequences more difficult than the other?
The movie was inspired by a recent experiment led by Monica Castelhano.…
dmunger | July 23, 2009[Originally posted in April 2007]
Cognitive decline as we age is all over the news lately. "Brain fitness" products are available for cell phones, Game Boys, and Xboxes, all designed to prevent the natural decline in cognitive ability as we age. There's even a significant body of work suggesting that this sort of product really can work.
But some of the brain games can be dull, repetitive work: memory tasks, number games, and optical illusions, while endlessly fascinating to cognitive scientists, might be less appealing to the general population.
Researchers Helga and Tony Noice believe that…
dmunger | July 21, 2009[Originally posted in November 2006]
The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't they justified in shooting?
Perhaps, but an important additional question is this: were they predisposed to believe he was armed simply because he was black? Consider this quick movie:
Click to play (QuickTime required)
It will flash two pictures. One man is armed, the other unarmed. Who do you shoot? I've primed you to think about race, so it…