dmunger | December 14, 2005IQ 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 Mismeasure of Man) often rise to a fever pitch. Yet for all the interest in the study of IQ, there has been comparatively little research on other influences on performance in school.
Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman estimate that for every ten articles on intelligence and academic achievement, there…
dmunger | December 13, 2005Last 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 than neutral words like "plane" or "clock."
But Anderson wasn't finished—he wanted to explain why this phenomenon occurs. Are we more likely to remember arousing words after the fact? Or are arousing words inherently more able to attract our attention? So, Anderson reversed the attentional blink task…
dmunger | December 9, 2005A 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 himself reveled in his new freedom, repeating the word "bullshit" dozens of times over the course of the interview. It was difficult not to notice the word every time he spoke it.
Adam K. Anderson of the University of Toronto, who specializes in studying attention, wondered if negative words like "…
dmunger | December 6, 2005Take 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 correspond to the weekends. You might think that weekend traffic is lower just because we don't post new articles on weekends. But we didn't post an article at all on November 14, a Monday, yet still saw an increase in traffic compared to the day before. The second graph charts a number of indicators of…
dmunger | December 5, 2005Take 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 different response to pictures depicting emotions. Your kids grow up and leave home, and suddenly Little League and Disney seem less significant. Perhaps fine wine and opera rise up to fill that void. Later still, you begin to think about retirement, and gradually it seems more important to reach…
dmunger | December 1, 2005Listen to these two short music clips.
Music Clip 1Music 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 in the comments!). While both are examples of the classical genre, classical music is also divided into styles corresponding roughly to historical periods: Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Post-Romantic. Traditionally, only trained musicians have been regarded as being able to easily distinguish…
dmunger | November 29, 2005Do 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 depending on whether we're in a positive or negative mood. People in good moods tend to make more connections between related items, while people in bad moods generally focus on what's in front of them.
Justin Storbeck and Gerald L. Clore realized that there may be a connection between this research on…
dmunger | November 23, 2005
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 actually increases a player's point total. Surely, if there's any video game that might raise a parent's ire, Carmageddon 2 is one of them.
Studies have shown that violent video games are more likely than non-violent games to induce aggressive behavior, even after very short playing sessions. But more…
dmunger | November 21, 2005The 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 also appear. Your job is to search for the letter U or H—it has an equal chance of appearing where any of the 8s were, or in the new spot. Click on the picture to try it out.
Attention researchers Steven Franconeri, Andrew Hollingworth, and Daniel Simons used a similar animation to answer a key…
dmunger | November 18, 2005Attentional 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 perform better when they were a little unfocused on the task.
Attentional blink, as we've reported before, is a short period when we're less able to notice an item flashed briefly in our visual field. The classic experiment involves a rapidly flashed sequence of random digits or letters—Olivers and…
dmunger | November 17, 2005One 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), only addresses its titular conflict obliquely. The implicit answer, of course, is that you can't have one without the other.
Or can you? While it's difficult or perhaps impossible to scientifically determine whether words or music is more important in a song, Isabelle Peretz, Monique Radeau, and Martin…
dmunger | November 15, 2005Take 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 only get one chance with each one. No cheating!
List 1List 2List 3
Did you see an occupation in any of the lists? Just one or two of them?
If you're like most people, you had no problem spotting "attorney" in the first list, but you missed "carpenter" in the second list. The third list was probably…
dmunger | November 10, 2005Eric 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 constantly urging parents to read to their kids? Aren't their entreaties backed by research?
The Globe and Mail article reports on research published in Psychological Science by Mary Ann Evans and Jean Saint-Aubin. I decided to look at the original article to see if it lives up to the dramatic…
dmunger | November 8, 2005In 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, or difficult questions, or possibly when we are trying to deceive, we look away more often. When we talk with someone via a remote video monitor, we look at them more often than when we engage in the same type of conversation face to face.
So what's the cause of this behavior? Do several different…
dmunger | November 7, 2005What 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 feeling you do. What's that all about?
One theory of memory proposes that what we remember depends on our expectations. We're less likely to remember our old classmate at the coffee shop than at the high school reunion. At the bank, we might greet the manager by name, but we only get a vague sense of…
dmunger | November 3, 2005Just 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 about actual long-term training in music? Clearly musical training can make us better able to perform and appreciate music, but can it also improve our performance in areas? With its mathematically based notation system, music has been shown to improve mathematical reasoning skills. But surely music…
dmunger | October 31, 2005One 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 studies have been conducted do we now accept that hypothesis as fact.
Now consider a small child, trying to make sense of her world. She might want to know what makes the lights come on in her room. She notices that the lights tend to come on whenever a grown-up walks in. But sometimes, in the middle of…
dmunger | October 28, 2005More 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 commenters who I've never seen or even e-mailed.
While the next leap in online communications—videoconferencing—is in its infancy, an intermediate form is beginning to show promise. Called a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE), it enables people to have a virtual online conference by creating digital…
dmunger | October 26, 2005I 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.
Whether it's sports, molecular biology, or quilting, everyone seems to know someone who's an expert in their field, who seems to possess an inhuman amount of knowledge about their area of expertise. What makes these individuals so special? Part of this expertise seems to be related to the…
dmunger | October 24, 2005Psychologists 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 "whole tone" middle ground. The only difference between the two clips is that the second clip is played twice as fast.
Clip 1 (slow)Clip 2 (fast)
For most people, the second clip sounds happier than the first overall, and the major mode portion sounds happiest within each clip. But what matters most—the…